Ask Me Your Questions and I’ll Tell You No Lies--

“ GO U NORTHWESTERN!” IS THE FIGHT SONG. AND SCHOOL’S HYMN IS “QUAECUMQUE  SUNT VERA”TAKEN FROM PHILLIPIANS 4:8—“WHATSOEVER THINGS ARE TRUE.”
       Q. What was your reaction to yesterday’s news that Northwestern University put on a live sex demonstration for 100 students featuring an engaged couple which involved a motorized sex toy to stimulate female orgasm…orchestrated by Kenneth Melvoin-Berg,  co-owner of Weird Chicago Tours?
       A.  I was tickled.  Double entendre intended. 
      Q.  In the name of God why?
      A.  It was a magnificent demonstration of the vapidity of contemporary Higher Education [sic] which has so debased  learning which began solemnly with (a) the love of wisdom and beauty learned from the Greeks…to (b) the pronouncement of tradition and patriarchy derived from the Romans…past (c) the finding of the One God of Abraham (replacing many gods) by the Jews…beyond (d) early Christianity and the Greatest One of all ages, Jesus  Christ, from Whom charity and toleration were learned …into (e) the Middle Ages where Aquinas parsed Aristotelian thought into Christian form and Dante’s sublime poetry beckons to lead us as Beatrice led him to heaven and the vision of God….into the so-called Uplands of the Renaissance  where the arts—Shakespeare, painting and sculpture bloomed--but also where decadence began with the severing of philosophy and faith.
      Q.  Ah, there it began, did it?
     A. There it did but did not transform right away, but was alloyed with much good. The bad—the Inquisition demanded by Ferdinand of Spain from the Church and run not by the state not the Church.  The Renaissance was not what we think but was where much philosophy veered from its Aristotelian moorings.   It was here that much fallaciousness was born intermingled with the good that blinds us yet.
     Q.  Such as…?
     A.  That Galileo originated modern science by junking the deductive method and substituting it with the empirical.   Einstein later wrote of the claim in a preface to Galileo’s works, “I believe this….does not stand scrutiny”—Einstein claiming truly that Galileo had no proof the earth revolved around the sun since a “theory of mechanics was lacking” to originate later with Newton, concluding by maintaining that Galileo’s “temperament” misled him into formulating his error about the tides—stating repeatedly that it was an error he should not have entertained but that “his temperament…got the better of him.”   We can easily go on through the various periods…here no double entendre intended…to today—the Enlightenment and relativism, the debasement of Natural Law by Locke who saw it not in any absolute form but as a mere polltaker’s finding of what people believe…into the growth of nihilism that engulfs much of education today. Aha! We have just short-handed the trip the Old Benedictines had embarked on with me so many years ago!    We do not have to talk about it now—it’s completed!
          Q.  No-no. We will not let you off so easily.   But we have come full-circle on why you are tickled—because the Sex Ed thing precipitated a kind of crisis in secular education?
        A.  Well, that’s a big part of it—that so-called “sex education” is part of the curricula….that the lab experiment so completely ridicules the University which so richly deserves ridicule….that the University full of secular…godless….relativism first issued a press release defending the “class”only to  be contradicted by the president.  That the whole thing was conducted in the…get this…Ryan Auditorium which was named for the AON chairman as a device to get his money together with its refurbished  football field by stripping away the old name Dyche from which the original money ran out.  It tells such a wonderful story of educational and cultural debasement that is the modern factory that shouldn’t even be confused with a citadel of learning. But then there came the illiterate denouement—yesterday’s Tribune editorial which more fully illustrates know-nothingism in education than has yet been written.
         Q.  The editorial?  I read it but it didn’t…
         A.  …didn’t stay with you?  Of course it didn’t. Do any Tribune editorials these days ever do?   Well read it again.  It is so typical of what that paper is….trying to be insouciant but—pardon me but the late Everett Dirksen had a wonderful condemnatory expression of pure ignorance—he said “it’s as dumb as dog shit.” I apologize for the vulgarism.
        Q.  You’re forgiven.  You mean of course that the paper’s editorial on the matter and on education is…
        A.  “…as dumb as dog shit.”  Take a look at either how Bruce Dold or his people conclude:   “So we’re not going to get outraged.  College is about stretching boundaries, about preparing for adult life, about learning from bad decisions. Sometimes the bad decisions are made by the professors.”   Yep that’s what the  higher education is for.  What Northwestern is charging....up to $50,000 a year for:  stretch boundaries, prepares  you for adult life.  Adult life. As you watch a many nasal-ringed multi-tattooed idiot explore the body of his girlfriend with an artificial phallus attached to a rotating spindle as she emit shrieks of joy!    Adult life. Adult life. That “editorial” makes it all the funnier.  Together what they have done to the paper…through this awful little piece and Sam Zell’s Three Stooges marketing team (which topped this one in pornography)…is the icing on the cake.  Bankruptcy judges—please mercifully pull the plug!
      They don’t even know enough to understand what the tawdry little event produced—nor at what variance it is from demonstrably liberal education.
        Adult life!    Dirksen…oh Dirksen…thou shouldst be living at this hour!