"[M]any on the left are blaming the media. 'The media lynched Jason Arday,' declared Ibram X. Kendi...."

"Important British progressives... signed an open letter demanding some sort of official oversight of journalistic decision-making. 'Self-regulation of the press has comprehensively failed,' it said. The writer Will Self called, in an open letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham, for the police to begin 'impounding computers,' presumably belonging to people involved in covering the scandal... Some who once championed Arday seem to be trying to deflect from their own embarrassing credulity, and it is unlikely to work...."

Writes Michelle Goldberg, in "After a Scholar’s Awful Death, Mistaken Calls for Censorship" (NYT gift link).

"Many of the people who didn’t bother questioning Arday’s back story should have known better; today their oversight looks less like respect than condescension, as if no one took him seriously enough to think hard about what he was saying. 'Arday was treated not as a scholar but as a mascot,' Jason Okundaye wrote in the left-leaning Guardian.... For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives."

What she's politely calling "condescension" and "the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives" is racism. The way they treated him reflected a belief in his inferiority.

"Lionel sought to 'peer not just into the soul of his son but into his own'..."

"... the British author Will Self wrote in [a review of the 1994 memoir, 'A Father’s Story']. 'Throughout, the sense of someone constitutionally ill-equipped for introspection of any kind groping toward a vile realization is gripping.'... [H]e wrote vividly about the uncanniness of seeing Jeffrey’s face, which looked so much like his own, staring at him from the front page of a newspaper, and about revisiting old memories. 'As I recall him in his infancy, I feel overwhelmed by a sense of helpless dread,' Mr. Dahmer wrote. 'I dwell on the small, pink hands, and in my mind I watch them grow larger and darker as I think about all that they will later do, of how stained they will become with the blood of others.'"

From "Lionel Dahmer, Who Agonized About Raising a Serial Killer, Dies at 87/The father of Jeffrey Dahmer, he wrote a memoir that one reviewer said sought to 'peer not just into the soul of his son but into his own'" (NYT).

From the Will Self review of the memoir:

1-minute workout in difficult reading.

I was a bit skeptical of Will Self's pitch for difficult reading — "some texts are clearly going to be a better jungle gym for the mind than others—and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown" — but he was talking about slogging through whole books, preferably books written by him. Nevertheless, his pitch came back to me just now when I noticed a sentence I'd highlighted in my current reading ("Oblivion"). No need to spend hours in the intellectual jungle gym of an entire novel. I've got a perfect 1-minute — 1-sentence — workout for you. Seriously, time yourself (yourwillself) and get back to me about whether you've augmented your mental musculature (and had any fun along the way):

Atwater, however, was, since the end of a serious involvement some years prior, also all but celibate, and tended to be extremely keyed up and ambivalent in any type of sexually charged situation, which unless he was off base this increasingly was—which in retrospect was partly why, in the stormy enclosure of the rental car with the pulverizingly attractive Amber Moltke, he had committed one of the fundamental errors in soft news journalism: asking a centrally important question before he was certain just what answer would advance the interests of the piece.

"Nowadays, millions of people—at least notionally—are educated to graduate levels, and one would’ve expected this to inculcate them with a positive zest for challenging prose..."

"... but this doesn’t seem to be the case. When I get going in this vein, my 16-year-old son says: 'Face it, Dad, you’re just an old man shaking your fist at the cloud.'* Yet I don’t regard myself as opposed to the new media technologies in any way at all—nor do I view them as 'bad,' let alone as cultural panopathogens.** I’ve no doubt that human intelligence will continue to be pretty much the same as it has heretofore—but the particular form of intelligence associated with book-learning (and all that this entails) is undoubtedly on the wane, with the 'extended mind' of the smart phone increasingly replacing our own memories, and the hive-mindedness of the web usurping our notions of the canonical.... [T]he most salient features of the contemporary world are its relentlessness and its atemporality—the web bundles up everything into a permanent Now... Modish neuroscientists do such things as put people in brain-scanners while they’re actually reading—then marvel (as we should too), at how many areas of the cortex are involved in turning those enigmatic black marks into the stuff of our imagination and experience. But some texts are clearly going to be a better jungle gym for the mind than others—and just as you never put on much muscle mass with a limp-wristed workout, so no one ever got smart by reading… Dan Brown."

Writes the novelist Will Self at Literary Hub.

_________________________

* The boy knows his memes. See Know Your Meme. Requisite image:



** New word alert.

"No 11-year-old child should have to see his parent treated like a criminal for no reason whatsoever."

"And no Englishman enjoying a ramble with his son should face examination by police at the roadside on suspicion of being a sexual predator. Astonishingly – and I find it difficult, some days after the event, to comprehend that I am writing this now – this is what has just  happened to my son and me."

Writes the well-known author Will Self.

"I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods."

Said Will Self, who has a new novel, "Umbrella," the title of which is based on the Joyce quote "A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella."

By the way, the first appearance of the word "umbrella" in English, according to the OED (not linkable), came in 1611:

T. Coryate Crudities sig. Lv,   Many of them doe carry other fine things.., which they commonly call in the Italian tongue vmbrellaes... These are made of leather something answerable to the forme of a little cannopy & hooped in the inside with diuers little wooden hoopes that extend the vmbrella in a prety large compasse.

That predates the first use of "vagina," which was in 1682:

T. Gibson Anat. Humane Bodies 20   It has passages..for the neck of the Bladder, and in Women for the vagina of the Womb.

The etymology of "vagina" is: "Latin vāgīna sheath, scabbard." The etymology of "umbrella" is: "Italian ombrella and ombrello, < ombra < Latin umbra shade."

Here's Perry Como singing "Let a Smile Be Your Umbrella."

Fill in the blank: Let a smile be your umbrella. Let a _________ be your vagina.