Harvard University is not the only place where the “Arts and Sciences” faculty has a love affair with reactionary liberalism. Where I teach (Frostburg State University in Maryland), an inter-faculty discussion about the minimum wage and other things was waged, and I suspect most readers would know what kind of commentary came from people in liberal arts.

One of the professors posted the following “poem,” which I think pretty much sums of the mentality of people whose commentary has no connection with reality:

Tony Hoagland (from A HARD RAIN, 2005, pp, 15-16)

Allegory of the Temp Agency

In the painting titled,
The Allegory of the Temp Agency,
the employers are depicted as wolves

with bloodred mouths and yellow greedy eyes,
pursuing the small-business employees through the dark forest
of capitalism. It is night and

by the light of the minimum-wage moon we can see
the long pink tongues of the bosses hanging out
and the dilated white eyeballs of the employees as they flee

through woods, lacking any sense of
solidarity or collective organizing power.

Upon closer inspection the leaves beneath their feet
are shredded dollar bills which bear the distressed expressions
of ex-presidents and the wind in the trees is making a long

howl of no health insurance or job security
and No, it is not really a very good painting,
heavy handed in concept, and comic unintentionally in a way that

invites us to laugh at the desire for justice —
Rather, the painting shows that the artist was untalented,
and is an allegory of how difficult it is

to be both skillful and sincere
which in turn explains why the art
that hangs in the lobbies of banks

and in the boardrooms of corporate office buildings
is often made of black and white slashes
against a background of melted orange crayon

or glowing lavender rectangles floating in grey haze,
works in which no human figures appear,
in which the Haves

do not appear to be chatting and laughing
as they eat their sushi
carved from the lives of the Have-Nots.