No solitary splendour, this. I write in a solitary stupor. It is Friday night, late, and Jason Arday is, as our black friends say, late. Or as some whites say, he has passed.
First time, the brutes among them would say, he ever truly passed. He never passed muster save in his fevered imagination and never passed his exams save in the devilish minds of his manipulators. All was pretext and pretence until that terrible moment no living soul can cheat: death.
Universities are built on the supposition that research and teaching will be conducted by the people best able to discharge the task. Merit will be métier, hard work the driver, wisdom the outcome.
The supposition is not gone. It remains in place, indeed is trumpeted to the rooftops, to those celebrated dreaming spires. But it is now suppositious. Under the rubric of equality, people are elevated by reference to the colour of their skin.
Oh, and the little matter of the ideology of their ideas: it must be left-wing. We want no Sowells or McWhorters here. No Sir, No Madam, No Whatevers!
The cynicism is all but complete. Mediocrities hire incompetents, they hire fools, and they hire fantasists to staff faculties to which they are tenured but for which they are scarcely accountable.
The object is not the pursuit of truth, but the injection of socialist theory and anti-capitalist cant into minds too callow to resist the onslaught or too circumspect to oppose it.
The dross they hire serves well enough for the purpose: indeed better than well, because those who are selected provide little competition up the greasy pole of academic success. The parblind, hooded and gowned, lead in the lame, who should have been halted.
It is not as macabre as poor Arday’s plight, but it is a right gloomy spectacle nevertheless.
By now you will see that I am upset and angry. I am used to the Left simulating reality to gain its ends. I know that Stalin, no Socialist butterfly he, said that the death of thousands was but a statistic. But I also know that, in the same breath, he said the death of an individual was a tragedy, and the death of this sad young man is truly so. The system invited him to game it, and when, all but unsupported, he couldn’t play it properly, they chewed him up, spat him out, and threw him on the dung-heap of history.
But for the death, the Daily Friend would today have carried my earlier piece on Arday. In it I danced a few witty pirouettes at his expense and fulminated against the institutions that foster such aberrations. But in the process I said he looked beautiful and, were it not for his fantasising, a nice enough man.
Aside, I wondered what fate awaited him now that he had resigned. Now I know. I sincerely hope there is a corner in heaven for him. There should be. If a king needs a court jester, I imagine the deity needs one too.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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