The Ark and The Dove

Humbling Thought

So it occurs to me that, as a literary scholar, the best I can ever hope to do in my career is just explain what somebody else has already said.

If I'm really lucky, I'll get to explain it in an obscure lexicon that can only be understood by a handful of people, and thus I'll have explained it by making it even harder to understand and even less accessible to the typical reader.

If, by some stroke of misfortune, I find a way of making some text easier to understand by using plain speech and therefore lead non-academics to actually read and appreciate my work, I will be labeled a sell-out and therefore a failure in the scholarly community...although I'll probably make more money as a result.

And here's some other paradoxes constructed out of hasty generalizations for you...
Universities hire professors to teach students.
The most sought after professors are the ones who are better researchers than teachers.
The professors that are well respected at their own university are rewarded with promotions.
If you continue to get promoted, you eventually end up getting tapped for an administrative position.
If you are an administrator, not only do you no longer teach, you end up not really even having time to do research.
Thus, the best professors end up not doing anything at all academic...and often get paid twice as much for managing rather than teaching or researching.

Quick Biblio-Political Allegory

So I was thinking about the story of the slavery of the Jews in Exodus, and how that might be reinterpreted in a modern context.

The first thing that came to mind (and this might be why we should usually disregard the first things that come to mind) was the issue of illegal immigrants in America.
Here we are, building our vast American enterprise with what is essentially slave labor.
But then I gave it a second thought.

There are some problems with the analogy: illegal immigrants choose to stay with the Egyptian fleshpots rather than leave. The Egyptians don't get a bad rap in the Bible for trying to escort the Hebrews back to their homeland: they get in trouble for exterminating the Jewish infants and then denying the survivors free exit.

The modern problem is that we in America have a population of people that are actually sneaking into the country, begging to be enslaved because they can evidently make more money as a modern slaves in America than they can as free persons in the desert of Mexico.
It actually reminds me of another major text in Western Lit: More's Utopia, where the Utopians' neighbors would rather be slaves in Utopia than live in their homelands.

It's funny how half the world seems to want to blow us up because they think we treat them unfairly, and the other half of the world is clamoring to get in the U.S. because they think that our brand of unfair treatment is better than anything they would get in their native country.

Reductio ad absurdum

Dr. Adams has posted a pretty clever dismantling of abortion logic over at Townhall.com.
He takes to task another professor who argues for "the constitutional right to be loved," and then shows how abortion logic (quite absurdly) suggests that people should be killed whenever their rights are violated.
That is, there is an entire branch of abortion-rights advocacy that believes that abortion is what's best for the baby, which I imagine makes it seem much more attractive and sympathetic to some people than saying abortion is what's most convenient for the parents' careers or most profitable for the clinic.