Some things you can’t make up, unless you are a writer for the Babylon Bee. The real world is just too absurd to satirize these days.
A case in point is the entitled twit at Columbia who demanded “humanitarian aid” from the administration is a PhD student at the school, and she is as bizarre as you would expect. She is also employed by the school, although she is very fond of striking because as a Marxist she wants higher pay and benefits.
So the press conference jihadist is a PhD student named Johannah King-Slutzky (really) and this is what she’s working on. Dying. Absolutely dying. Beyond parody. @TheBabylonBee couldn’t top this if they tried. https://t.co/xMhbmez881 pic.twitter.com/2mI5orclZx
— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) April 30, 2024
Columbia has removed her webpage, but some clever folks on the internet screenshot it. It is also on the Wayback Machine.
It’s a hoot.
If you can’t read that, here is the text:
My dissertation is on fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860. My goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. I am particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.
Prior to joining Columbia, I worked as a political strategist for leftist and progressive causes and remain active in the higher education labor movement.
She’s quite the political strategist, I must say.
As you can see from her biography, she is so hypereducated that she doesn’t speak English. She speaks a dialect of gibberish, in this case Marxist gibberish.
Johannah was quite the prize for Columbia. One of her hobbies is bitching to the administration about how badly she is treated.
Here’s Johannah King-Slutzky from 2021 giving a talk about why her union was on strike for the SECOND time that year… this lady has never actually worked a day in her life, has she?
Literally any excuse to knock off work “for a cause” will do pic.twitter.com/1ZcsDudWeA
— Enguerrand VII de Coucy (@ingelramdecoucy) April 30, 2024
Having been a graduate student myself, I can tell you that graduate programs are mostly a scam used by universities to hire cheap labor and bilk students out of tuition, but the solution isn’t really higher pay but many fewer graduate students, who become enormous drags on the economy and, as you can see, proto-terrorists. We probably need about 5%-10% the number of grad students we have.
Maybe. If that.
Ms. King-Slutzky is quite the scholar, and I imagine that this paper she wrote is one of the reasons she was admitted to Columbia graduate school.
In 2013, Johannah King-Slutzky wrote 3,000 words on “How Did Pumpkin Become Beloved? Labor, Nostalgia, Refreshment And White Women”https://t.co/LVBmxtIU3D https://t.co/P4kv5tRQDt
— Jeryl Bier (@JerylBier) April 30, 2024
Let’s have some samples:
This story begins, like so many before it, with a marathon session of “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.” Specifically, the show’s 1999 Halloween episode, “Episode LXXXI: The Phantom Menace.” (STTW has a real gift for prophecy.) Sabrina, played by Melissa Joan Hart, is a faux black sheep with a heart of gold; her manager (cum boyfriend cum soon-to-be-war-photographer) is as auspicious as he is handsome—which is a lot—but is also a bit dunderheaded. The setting: a Central Perk knockoff:
JOSH: Y’know, I’m really surprised our special pumpkin flavored coffee hasn’t been more popular.
SABRINA: Do you think it has anything to do with the fact that it’s a hideous shade of orange and tastes like pumpkin?
It’s 1999, four full years before Starbucks will introduce the Pumpkin Spice Latte. The scene is played for easy laughs. But two years later (in “Making The Grade,” aired 2 Feb, 2001)…
JOSH: A pumpkin bagel comin’ up. [Walks to counter.] Hey, where are the pumpkin bagels?
HILDA: In the pumpkin bagel patch?
JOSH: Huh?
HILDA: In the interest of lowering overhead we are no longer in the exotic carbohydrate business. […]
JOSH: Hilda, we have an eclectic, sophisticated clientele, all right?
It’s still two years before the advent of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. But pumpkin’s transformation from rube holiday fare to the “exotic carb” of sophisticates was centuries in the making. Probably without realizing it, the sitcom savants at “Sabrina” had tapped into a set of particularly American themes (the celebration and denigration of farm life, anxiety over work ethic, a sturdy fetish for the authentic) that have been playing through the scrim of pumpkin iconography since Pilgrim hit rock in 1620.
Long haul historical materialism suits our favorite gourd (squash, if you’re feeling sober), but pumpkin’s story isn’t over, either: when I checked Google Ngrams it showed a substantial uptick in pumpkin buzz beginning around 1960:
It goes on, with a long critique of the societal import of Pumpkin Spice Lattes from Starbucks, which, I admit, to have never tried. Not my thing, but I am not a chick.
It was comforting to see that at least one reporter pushed back on her during her press conference, although I don’t know if it was an MSM reporter or somebody less irrational.
Still, it annoys me to no end that my tax dollars are subsidizing her “studies,” her antisemitic posturing, and her food and housing.
And, if Biden has his way, we will be paying off her student loans sometime soon.