To All The Credentialed Assholes In The World And Especially Mine!

With apologies to Charles Bukowski

 “Short Is My Date, But Deathless My Renown.” – Homer

            If you’ve ever spent any time in the halls of academia then you know laughs are very often in short supply. Dip into any treatise by any of the greatest philosophical minds in recorded history and the thing you notice first is that there are no jokes! There is nary a simile or metaphor with the ultimate goal of a punchline in sight, lest these mavens risk being labeled a second banana by the hooded poobahs in their own particular fields. Laughs or lightness of being is verboten, these slingers of syllogistic Silly Putty prefer instead to plow an arid field of obtuseness that is only accessible to homosexual geniuses and consumptive Danes. The work is brilliant by any standard, but often badly written allowing the reader to ultimately query, why doesn’t somebody punch this shit up?

            I have spent some time with a few academics and to a man blunted affect would be a step up so desperate are their personalities for a 3^rd dimension. Forget about regaling them with a joke like The Aristocrats. Academics don’t like jokes and wouldn’t get it even if the part where the whole family closes its audition by sucking each other off in a tumbling daisy chain was performed by the stock company of the Old Vic.

            Humor is to academia what oil is to a brick. Academia never gets near the deep end of dark humorous perversity unless we are talking about an assortment of Danish offered by a Richard von Krafft-Ebbing. Academics like to keep it tight and lofty. For all of their pronouncements of wanting to change the world with their theorems and postulations deep down it is the elitist posture they truly enjoy, as for the masses, let them revolt.

            It is the sheepskin that separates the intellectually divine from the mere intellectually omnivorous in the minds of the state and ivory towers. However, there are few academics I would hasten to go toe to toe with so confident am I in the depth and breadth of what I have been studying and contemplating the past 20 years. I know this sounds like some cockamamie bullshit, but I assure you professor with the pipe, serious goatee and tweed jacket it is not.

            Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman by trade and philosopher by avocation, miraculously axed out a place for himself in the pantheon with a book in 1951 titled The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements. Today, the non-credentialed thinker fights a Sisyphean battle for recognition in the academic world because of the way the tentacles of capitalism have kept a chokehold on university accreditation. You are not saleable without a degree.

            Add a little matter of basic transference to the equation and its no wonder that some of the best and brightest minds do their work in badly paneled basements, ululating brilliant observations into the soundproof void of indifference, either by circumstance or choice, will never be anointed by corporate academia.

            It’s not academia, the university as universe, all-inclusive, open to experience, champion of the common good, it is in corporate academia where the stars shine, tenured academes with multiple degrees who strut there stuff like they are on a intellectual catwalk. Other great minds, wherever they are, must stay wherever they are because in a capitalist system it is the corporation that defines and maintains the paradigm of any industry including higher education.

            Academics are the ones who concern themselves most with Homer’s epigram. The rest of us ponder the imponderable like poets, laying on the grass on a warm summer day, hands behind our heads, gazing up into the cosmos where the real show is and not nose deep in some ancient dusty tome, alone in a dark, marbled, echo-ey hall peering over a pair of half glasses thinking that you and only you have got the secret to the sauce.

            As for my own non-credentialed academic life, but eminently credentialed asshole, I’ll take my asshole any old day because it produces pure 100% grade A shit with no filler and no bi-products.