Poison Ivy League Redux
An update on an old classic.
Yesterday I asked the good people charged with public relations at the Harvard Art Museums, whom I like and admire, not to contact me again with museum news until Dr. Claudine Gay resigns or is otherwise removed from the presidency of the university. Gay humiliated herself along with the presidents of Penn and MIT, Elizabeth Magill and Sally Kornbluth respectively, in front of a congressional committee who called them in to testify on December 5 regarding the rampant Jew-hatred at their institutions. There they claimed, under oath, that calls for the genocide of the Jews, and violence against them in service of revolutionary liberation of Palestine—that is, the delivery of Israel into the control of Islamofascists who are hostile to most forms of liberation—might not merit disciplinary action by the school, depending on context.
Mind you, Harvard is still running workshops on “Addressing Microaggressions at Work.” While the school labors mightily to assure that no one should suffer the crushing indignity of being asked where he’s from, Gay told Congress that calls for genocide would only become honor code violations if they spilled over into action, obliging an apoplectic Elise Stefanik (R-NY) to clarify whether there would have to be actual genocide going on before the school regarded the situation as a problem.
There are some enormously sinister forces at work. American Jews are in the position they’re in because throughout history they have been made to exemplify supposed societal enemies, and right now the worst supposed societal enemy is whiteness. That has already been thoroughly explored by Bari Weiss, Jonah Goldberg, Seth Baron, and others whose thoughts you should read in their entirety.
I have something else to offer. In 1964, Elvis appeared in a movie titled Roustabout in which he’s obliged at one point to perform for an audience of privileged dudebros. He goes onstage and sings “Poison Ivy League,” as some jock types scowl and their girlfriends swoon:1
The ra-ra boys are sitting round the table tonight The ra-ra boys have lots of plans in view They're gonna have panty raids And make their own lemonade They'll live it up just like the big boys do Poison ivy league, boys in that ivy league Give me an itch, those sons of the rich That poison ivy league
The scene has aged surprisingly well, but it’s clear that we need an update for the smarmy administrators and student activists wrapped in appropriated keffiyehs who have taken the place of the sporty white men in the Ivy League hierarchy.
I am your servant. (clears throat)
Hail to thee new ivy league Poison ivy league The woke professors sit round the table tonight The woke professors have big plans in view They're gonna shout out their rah-rahs For rapists in Hamas They'll stick it hard to all those goddamn Jews Poison ivy league, oh boy that ivy league Give me a cough, those radical profs That poison ivy league The woke professors go to bed so early tonight To testify they need to sleep a lot They gotta justify the pride Of queers who want genocide Screaming as they cosplay Arafat Poison ivy league, soy in that ivy league What's not to like - who cares about those kikes That poison ivy league The activists are being groomed for business some day Carry protest signs for four years and get hired And you can bet they'll be Sure as the river meets the sea 'Til they post on X all crazy and get fired Poison ivy league, destroy that ivy league So loaded with rage, they belong in a cage That poison ivy league So let me tell you the truth Those clowns you're rooting for would throw you off a roof That poison ivy league
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We are (I promise) in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
Franklin, you're too kind. Of course all three presidents should resign or be otherwise removed (which shouldn't be too hard with the ones from Penn and MIT, who are conspicuously white), but Gay was exemplary, so to speak. She looked as if she could scarcely believe she was being questioned, not about antisemitism but about anything whatsoever. I mean, the nerve. It was sort of reminiscent of Wife of Bill at the Benghazi hearings, albeit more tony and less truculent. Still, these women aren't in their jobs for nothing, and they're basically symptoms, not the disease.
The perception from Dallas, a blue city where money is all that keeps the usual attendant blue woes from undoing everything, is that the three ladies' gleefully smug answers to Stefanik's questions are just more evidence of the left's having again allowed that customary arrogance, one of the left's array of historic Achilles heels, to overplay its hand. The stench of wokeness is now even in the nostrils of the blue vote, and that vote is now torn, such that the question around here is whether the blue vote will California things by continuing to vote blue just because blue isn't red.
Some good news resulting from the woke "white man bad, Jew white, thus Jew bad" theme: philanthropist Bill Ackman's letter to Harvard: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/11/05/bill-ackmans-letter-to-harvard-re-widespread-antisemitism-on-campus/