According to this Newsweek account: “Steve Martin’s seminal “King Tut” sketch is being blasted as cultural appropriation by a group of students at a prestigious liberal arts college in Oregon after the classic “Saturday Night Live” parody was played in a humanities course.
“The sketch, created by Martin in 1978 to parody the hysteria and commercialization surrounding a traveling Tutankhamen exhibit, has outraged students who say the sketch is the cultural equivalent of blackface because one of the side actors emerged from a sarcophagus with his face painted gold.
“That’s like somebody … making a song just littered with the n-word everywhere,” a member of the group, Reedies Against Racism, told The Atlantic. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface.”
“Students first took issue with the video when it was played during a humanities course, which is designed for students to “to engage in original, open-ended, critical inquiry.” Students said they should not be forced to take the course until different coursework is given because the sketch is racist.”
The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day. Whatever the merits of other civilizations in other respects, no civilization is like that of the West in this respect. No other civilization can claim that its defining characteristic is a dialogue of this sort. No dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West in the number of great works of the mind that have contributed to this Dialogue. The Spirit of Western Civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everyone is to speak his mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined.
Robert Maynard Hutchins, The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education.
Logos is an ancient Greek term. It means reason as expressed in human speech. The Greeks believed reason to be the controlling principle in an orderly, harmonious universe (cosmos).
The faculties of reason (conceptual thought) and language (propositional speech) are what once distinguished human beings from other creatures.
But no longer. With the malodorous stench of fascism prevalent on college campuses coast-to-coast, destroying free inquiry and open intellectual discussion, what Robert Maynard Hutchins’ defined above as the signature characteristic of Western Civilization, why would any sane student (or students’ parents) pay exorbitant inflationary tuition to attend one of these abhorrent institutions of barbarism and cultural degeneracy?
9:36 pm on November 24, 2017
