5 Feet of Fury

A Tough Week For White Professors: My NEW Taki’s column

Honestly? I can’t judge this week’s “JOOOOOOO!!!!!”-yness. Maybe I need another coffee.

(Since all my hyperlinks have been mysteriously “disappeared” FIXED )

As Barry Goldwater wisely and courageously pointed out, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would begin the erosion of two foundational concepts – private property and freedom of association—which has, fifty years later, left America a shabby red, white and blue shell of its former self.

As an outsider, I find Block’s iconoclastic approach to your nation’s tedious racial obsession particularly refreshing, and familiar.

(I’ll admit to always, heretically, wondering, even as a child:

(If all these folks eventually managed to walk to work instead of riding the bus, why didn’t they just do that in the first place and save ten cents a day?

(And are you telling me that there wasn’t a better burger to be had at the black-run equivalent of a “lunch counter” on the other side of town?)

But then Block marred an otherwise sensible article by sticking in that one unfunny, tone-deaf bit. Humor, more so than Keats’ “Beauty,” is Truth. Lest I become the thing I hate – and, more importantly, use up the remainder of my declining word count—I’ll refrain from performing an autopsy on Block’s “…wasn’t so bad” gag.

Let’s just put it this way: a natural humorist he ain’t. I’d suggest Block not quit his day job, except I suspect he’ll be fired first anyhow.