It’s a nice holiday, I’m full of turkey and feeling benevolent enough to toss out a straight line like “I’m full of turkey.”

Mark Crispin Miller (I bet he loves using his middle name) has the usual academic contempt for those who are not academics (my own personal experience is that a large portion of academia is comprised of blithering gasbrains, especially as you get out of the tech departments). A professor of Media Ecology (Haw!), his main claim to fame is a book on George Bush’s verbal typos. I’m too lazy to dissect this particular pantload right now, but references to a couple of other of his articles may be informative:

Linked to the above article is another article in which Miller realizes that a large part of adademia is too gasbrained even for him, and tries to convince us that this is not the “left” talking, but “the bourgeois university.” This, of course, fails to explain why “the bourgeois university” contains almost exclusively people of the “leftist” persuasion.

The first part of this article is quite revealing, showing the terror and confusion of the typical academic, and the reluctance they have to admitting that the emperor has no clothes, which at least Miller, to his credit, does in this case.

It is difficult for me, in my current contentment, to feel anything other than pity for these people. Given Bush’s success, the military’s success, and the wave of patriotism in this country, these poor academics must be in a living hell.

An extra holiday bonus: a
treatise Miller has written on a soap commercial. Do we have a lot of free time, or what?

And a last quick bit, a telephone question from an interview:

New York: Why is there no left-wing talk radio?



Mark Crispin Miller: That has everything to do with the domination of the press by business interests. People like Jim Hightower, Mike Moore, and Molly Ivens could easily command audiences yet they share an ideological position that is not acceptable to the media organizations and the major advertisers. In order to make room for such shows we would have to have the kind of large non-commercial system that does exist in Canada and other countries. It is a very serious problem because it has prevented our news media from having intellectual diversity.



Of course the real answer to this, as Rush Limbaugh has pointed out when answering this same question, is that Americans are just not interested in hearing what leftists have to say. The media is a complete whore, and will put anyone and anything on, left or right, that they can sell lots of advertising for. Politics, or even taste, has damn little to do with it. Howard Stern stands as a classic example of this. If the radio industry finds a left-wing talk show host who doesn’t bore his audience into smashing the radio with a wrench, that person will get his own show.

Of course, Miller’s answer is to have the government take over the media. Like other cases where the social engineers have trouble selling dog crap to the public, the leftist’s answer is to force it on them.