[Norm Lenhart]

Some people really do deserve the things that happen to them. And his perch has nada to do with it. The birdbrain on it does.

[spokeshave]

...well I guess he is game for a re-mugging.

[spokeshave]

Some people really do deserve the things that happen to them. And his perch has nada to do with it. The birdbrain on it does.

Here is a parrot on a Gruber.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

'Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege,surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as "thugs?"' he argued. 'It’s precisely this kind of "otherization" that fuels the problem.'

Oliver Friedfeld is a senior in the School of Foreign Service.

The Perils of Designer Tribalism "...........Whatever the current object of adulation— the wisdom of the East, tribal Africa, Aboriginal Australia, pre-Columbian America —the message is the same: the absolute superiority of Otherness. The Third Worldist looks to the orient, to the tribal, to the primitive not for what they really are but for their evocative distance from the reality of modern European society and values.

It is all part of what Bruckner calls “the enchanting music of departure.” Its siren call is seductive but also supremely mendacious. Indeed, the messy reality of the primitive world—its squalor and poverty, its penchant for cannibalism, slavery, gratuitous cruelty, and superstition—are carefully edited out of the picture. In their place we find a species of Rousseauvian sentimentality. Rousseau is the patron saint of Third Worldism. “Ignoring the real human race entirely,” Rousseau wrote in a passage Bruckner quotes from the Confessions, “I imagined perfect beings, with heavenly virtue and beauty, so sure in their friendship, so tender and faithful, that I could never find anyone like them in the real world.” The beings with whom Rousseau populated his fantasy life are exported to exotic lands by the Third Worldist. As Rousseau discovered, the unreality of the scenario, far from being an impediment to moral smugness, was an invaluable asset. Reality, after all, has a way of impinging upon fantasy, clipping its wings, limiting its exuberance. So much the worse, then, for reality. As Bruckner notes, in this romance adepts “were not looking for a real world but the negation of their own. . . . An eternal vision is projected on these nations that has nothing to do with their real history.”....................

[Nailbiter]

The author is a post turtle.