Pun Salad

I griped last week about the unbroken string of lefties that UNH invites to keynote its hagiographical celebration of Martin Luther King Day. But it turns out that Other Side of the State University has outdone us by inviting none other than Mr. Harry Belafonte.

People commenting negatively include Dartmouth student Joe Malchow and Dartmouth trustee Todd Zywicki. Todd's position:

Let me be clear--Harry Belafonte has the same right to express his bizarre, ignorant, and hateful opinions as any other showbiz crackpot. And student organizations or political groups should be permitted to invite him to speak on campus if they so desire. But there is a vast gulf between that and providing him with the honor of the Keynote speaker of Dartmouth's MLK celebration and a major platform to spew his opinions. Is he really the best person, and are these the best sentiments, to honor King's memory?

Dishonest and bigoted as he is, Mr. Belafonte's right to speak merits not a whit of protestation. Free speech exists to protect unpopular speech. But here's something curious. Dartmouth's activists and perennial offendees recently held a "rally for civil discourse," at which they decried as unacceptable speech that offends. Mr. Belafonte, with his trashing of the United States — so full of verve and excitement is it — and his support for an economic system that has shattered millions of lives during its bleak reign, offends me. I don't expect a soul to care. Those activists at Dartmouth have, however, attempted to set a new standard for what is appropriate speech at Dartmouth: civility. Harry Belafonte, the man who called Colin Powell a slave, is flatly incivil. Let us see what happens.

A wise man asks: "Who would have thought the English language would ever have need for those words assembled in that order?" I wonder at that myself. Here are examples, unattributed and hat-tipless; click for context.

• I was a teenage angle trisector.

• Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds.

• The inspection process may require that the handler take off the monkey's diaper as part of the visual inspection.

• She needs a deputy chief of staff from the 'It's Not About You' department.

• Applies standards to discrete subjects rather than to larger goals such as insightful children, vibrant communities, and a healthy democracy.

• Every conceivable -- and inconceivable -- belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; a cacaphonous miasma of perfunctory langorous bellicosity; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; cascading, tremulous arpeggios of useless prosaicity; complexity and complication are eschewed; directivity and candor and perspicacity belied; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence, which, when one thinks about it, is in itself ironic, creating an infinite, unintended laff-riot loop of ironic non-irony; arguments are totally solipsistic; their obviously drunk and/or crack-addled writers traffic only in pronouncement, and are loathe to employ professional-grade opinion tools like Roget's Thesaurus, or the dramatic sentence-ending ellipsis …