For those of you playing along at home, The Free-Lance Star was the hometown newspaper of my college town, Fredericksburg, VA. It could almost always be relied on to publish the most absurd and generally terrible articles found in newspapers. I’ll never forget one of the first articles I read in it flipping through on my first weekend as a student. On a story about the growing population and the influx of out of towners making Spotsylvania County their home, it said something along the lines of “…like so many northern locusts…”
After I saw that I knew this newspaper was something special.
So, when glancing through the University of Mary Washington page when I was bored (I get quite bored at work, you see) I noticed that one of my very favorite professors, Dr. Crawley, was retiring and the link was to an article in the Free-Lance Star. The first two paragraphs are gems.
“THE PAST,” William Faulkner famously said, “isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” With all due respect to Faulkner, one wonders at times about the imperishability of his declaration. George Orwell in “1984” wrote of memory holes, and later in Cambodia, Pol Pot rode that collectivist nightmare into a lather, killing millions and declaring Year Zero of the New Socialist Man.
Yet capitalism may prove its superiority once again, producing not the better mousetrap but the better mindtrap, confining man’s consciousness in a cell block called The New, relegating the trophies of yesterday to outmoded clutter and the glories of yesteryear to analog irrelevance. And if there is any hope of freedom from this prison of fat, happy, and nihilistic ignorance, it is a file inside a cake baked by the likes of Bill Crawley.
What the fuck?
There’s some good other stuff in there, but really to make the leap from Faulkner to Pol Pot in a paragraph and then skip to the victories of the underdog capitalism in the next, all without mentioning the subject until the last line of that second is a real victory. Also, I shouldn’t neglect the wonderful metaphor of Crawley as a cake.
If you read the whole article— and its not very long—- you get the idea that the journalist had written a piece about this professor who he didn’t really know very much about, and then saw that it was a paragraph long. Since he’s distinguished and well respected in the area, he bullshitted it up into a full length article.
The ironic thing is, I totally did that to a paper in one of his classes and got a C.
