Inside the Liberal Mind, Part 4

Below is the fourth and final part of my interview with leftist academic, Dr. Leon Marlensky.

JK: Getting back to my original question: If women and---

LM: At the risk of sounding rude, may I interject just one more time? 

JK: I doubt that I could stop you even if I wanted to. What is it?

LM: Even I have been using the word “women” to describe the estrogen-endowed members of the human species.  But “women” and “woman” both reflect and further Western patriarchy. Both terms are parasitic upon, or derivative of, “man.” There is no surer way to guarantee the preservation of the systemic misogyny to which women have forever been subjected in the West than by continuing to use this awful word: woman. 

JK: Then why have you been using it? 

LM: This is the thing about structural injustices. The injustices, like sexism, are embedded in our very concepts, in our very language.  “Woman” is a term of convenience. But you are correct--- 

JK: I am?! 

LM: Yes. For now on, I will use, and will urge others to use, “estrogen-endowed” in place of “woman.”  

JK: Wonderful. You can probably detect the sarcasm in my voice when I say that I’m glad that I finally got through to you on this score.

LM: Understood loudly and clearly. 

JK: Now that that’s established, maybe I can finally return to my question.

LM: I know where you were going Jack. It is true that I think that people of African descent, other racial minorities, and the estrogen-endowed living in what European men chose to call “America” are indeed just as guilty as white men for White, Male, and Christian Supremacy.  Regardless of the place that they occupy in our social hierarchy or the rhetoric to which they resort, everyone and anyone who continues to reap the benefits of the injustices that had been done to minorities and women, anyone and everyone who eagerly avails her or himself of the blood money on which America and the West were built, has blood on her or his hands.  

JK: Wow. So whether it is Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell, or Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright---

LM: They are sellouts all of them. Ditto with whether it is Gloria Steinberg or Phyllis Schlafly of whom we speak. Farrakhan, Wright, Obama, Beyonce, Oprah Winfrey—they decry racism out of one side of their necks while basking in the fame and fortunes that whites make possible.  The “black” writer George Schuyler once said of Malcolm X that Malcolm should’ve “loved the white folks,” for without them, no one ever would’ve known his name. I am saying something similar here. 

Yet, of course, it isn’t just famous and rich people of African descent, other non-European lineages, and the estrogen-endowed who legitimize the oppression and exploitation of minorities and the estrogen-endowed. It is every single such person who enjoys the higher standard of living in what men of European stock insist upon calling “America” who are also guilty of this crime.  

JK: So even those who style themselves radicals, progressives, or revolutionaries are actually nothing of the sort. Is this what you are getting at? 

LM: Progressive?! Who is progressive?! Barack Obama?!?! Hillary Clinton?!?! It makes about as much sense to say of Obama and Hillary that they are progressive as it would make sense to say of a Jew who became one of Hitler’s Brown Shirts that he or she—uh, she or he—was progressive, or a person of African descent living in what whites call “America” who enslaved other people of African descent that she or he was progressive. 

If the Obamas and Hillaries of the world can be called “progressives,” it is only because they advance the progress of White Male Supremacy. Our radicals are a la carte radicals. They are cafeteria revolutionaries. They arbitrarily select some features of the West to condemn as racist, sexist, etc. while relying upon—clinging to—others that are no less racist and sexist. 

JK: I must admit, Leon, you are nothing if not consistent.

LM: Hold it. Logical consistency is an intellectual virtue only in the West. It assumes a rigorous dichotomy between being and non-being. It assumes that the world consists of individual, distinct “substances.” These, however, are assumptions that Eastern peoples reject. For Hindus, Confucianists, Taoists, and other philosophical traditions of the East, the world is a single harmony, each part being inseparably linked to every other. 

The so-called “law of contradiction,” then, far from being the most fundamental principle of all thought, is but another Eurocentric construct that has been imposed upon all peoples everywhere. 

JK: So, you are not consistent?

LM: I refuse to play this game. Whether you commend me for my consistency or criticize me for my inconsistency, you still approach me through an incorrigibly Western frame of reference. You continue to elevate a culturally-specific conception of Reason above all others.  

JK: Ok, ok. We are about out of time, Leon. So that my readers can know a little more about you, would you care to briefly share with us your research interests?

LM: It would be my pleasure. My interests lie in two areas.  

The first is the treatment—the theologization—of erectile dysfunction in texts of the Medieval and early Modern eras. 

JK: I didn’t know that this issue was addressed at all in the literature from these periods.

LM: Oh, it’s addressed all right, just not explicitly. But once these texts are deconstructed, however, it becomes plain that the surface discourse, the dominant voice, suppresses other discourses, discourses regarding the sterility, the impotence, and the delayed ejaculation of their authors’ contemporaries—and maybe even the authors themselves. 

JK: Uh…ok.  And your other interest?

LM: The specieism involved in fighting bacterial infections.  

JK: What?!

LM: A bacteria is a living species, correct? Like all living things, it is has an interest in preserving itself. This interest should be respected, even if it may at times be necessary to kill bacteria. But to eliminate it without batting an eye, as human beings routinely do, is to elevate our own species above that of bacteria.  

There is another problem. When species prey upon another, their numbers are controlled and the world is safe. But inasmuch as humans spare not a moment to destroy bacteria before it destroys them, the human species threatens the planet with overpopulation.  

JK: Not that I wanted to get into this now, but I am curious: what, in your judgment, Leon, should be done about this?

LM: I think that, eventually, in order to spare Earth from the ravages of the sort of virulent specieism that humans—white humans especially, via the Father of all instruments of domination, science—unleashed upon all other species, and bacteria particularly, the federal government needs to launch a massive program by which it determines when it is permissible to combat bacteria and when it is not permissible to combat it. 

JK: Well, thank you Leon, but, by now, I have definitely heard enough. 

LM: Has it dawned on you that the word “heard,” like the words “seen” and “saw,” are ableist?  Not everyone can hear, after all.  And not everyone can---

JK: Thank you Leon!