Michael Eric Dyson brings the stupid . . . --Guest Blogger

. . . every single time. The man’s idiocy is truly a monument to the modern liberal arts education; no greater exemplar of a man educated beyond his means ever strode this vast planet. A self-styled “hip-hop professor” and professor of sociology at Georgetown, Dyson is the perfect embodiment of this maxim I just made up: There is no inanity, no matter how nonsensical, that can’t be successfully peddled if spoken quickly, fluently and with the veneer of wisdom gained from being so frequently wrong.

Today brings two examples from Dyson’s ever-growing archive of fatuous utterances — though, I’m willing to cut him a little slack on the first one, if only because I’ve been known to trip over my words from time to time, myself. But, in this case, the faux pas is fairly egregious and seems (to me, at least) to reflect the aloofness toward, and detachment from average, everyday Americans that so often afflicts academics like Dyson.

DYSON: Look, you got a phone call from your mother on Friday morning telling you about the shooting. Tell us what was going through your head when you first heard that news.

GHAWI: I immediately flipped into the mode that I’ve been trained for and remained calm and try to obtain more information and see what I could do for my mother and check on the status of my sister.

DYSON: Well, how are your mother and sister, by the way?

GHAWI: My mother and father are devastated, as am I, but this is about her right now.

Ghawi’s sister, of course, was actually one of James Holmes’s murder victims in the theater that night. As I said above, having asked my share of accidentally awkward questions in my life, I can’t say such a slip is indicative of rank stupidity; we all say things to utterly embarrass ourselves from time to time. Also, there’s the fact that in doing shows like the one Dyson is doing here, there’s usually a segment producer talking into the host’s earpiece, guiding him through interviews — though, I don’t know that to be a fact. Still, it would seem to be a contributing factor in on-air slips of the tongue, and that’s at least a plausible explanation for his question.

The second example of Michael Eric Dyson’s profound feeble-mindedness, however, would be almost comical were it not for the corrosive, insidious nature of the rationale behind it. In this clip, Dyson asks a question that no one else had either the courage to ask, or the piercing insight to ponder. You see, it takes a special kind of obtuseness to figure out a way to steer a discussion of something completely foreign to your own experience into a subject on which you are still a braying jackass, but are seen as something approaching an authority on by other braying jackasses: Racism.

MICHAEL ERIC DYSON: You know, what strikes me here of course, is that when you hear the epithets being hurled on either side about politicization of this issue, we know at the end of the day if that kind of amassing and stockpiling of that kind of, you know, potential to hurt people through that, you know, those bullets and those guns and the gasses and the bombs and the like, if this had been stockpiled by a person who was more likely to look reasonably offensive: a Muslim or another minority, do you think that the red flag would have gone up sooner than with this seemingly innocent young white man, who under cover and protection of appearing normal, was out to do some heinous deeds.

So, in essence, what we have here is a man who is stridently and vocally opposed to the practice of racial profiling trying to make the case that profiling is wrong because it might have worked, but for the fact that James Holmes resides firmly at the Perry Como end of the chromatic temperature scale. You see, in Michael Eric Dyson’s world, racial profiling is wrong because different races have different profiles, and what might seem like suspicious activity from a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan may not necessarily grab the attention of the authorities when engaged in by a college student in Colorado named James Holmes.

But, ironically enough, the effect of Dyson’s argument is to essentially concede the notion that if James Holmes’s name had instead been Ali Muhammad or Mad Gunman, and his profile had landed him on a watch list somewhere, the midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora could have been just another enjoyable experience for all the patrons in the theater that night, and the lives of hundreds of people, their friends and families would be going on as normal in a world that Michael Eric Dyson and his cohort show absolutely no interest in until there are bloody shirts to wave.

UPDATE: Added link to second instance of Michael Eric Dyson's campaign of ineptitude from today.

posted by Damn Dirty RINO at 07:14 PM

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