Inanity

The version of the New Oxford American Dictionary built into my Macintosh computer’s operating system reveals that the origin of the word “inane” lies in the Latin inanis, meaning “empty, vain.” I like that definition better than the more modern “stupid,” though that also works.

As you might imagine, I read a bunch of stuff about race, especially affirmative action, every day. Much of it is bad; some of it is good; most of it is eminently forgettable. But I don’t believe I have ever read two pieces, one pretty much right after the other, that are as utterly inane as this one and this one. In the first one Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado who writes a regular column (some of them not bad) for the Rocky Mountain News, assures us (through a friend whom he quotes approvingly) that he’s not saying Notre Dame’s president and athletic director are racist, but the explanation for their otherwise inexplicable coaching decisions is that “there’s plenty of institutional racism, and this is a good case.”

In the second, Ralph Carmona, a former member of the University of California Board of Regents, complains that we don’t talk forthrightly about race, substituting for frank and honest talk the use of “nebulous catch words like ‘diversity.’” Then he proceeds to talk even less than nebulously about race, saying nothing except that Crash was a good movie because it “forces us to think about what racial reality is – we’re segregated.”

Actually, both of these pieces say a good deal less than what my comments about them may suggest.

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  1. leo cruz September 20, 2007 at 12:44 am | | Reply

    want an inane example of the double speak of these leftist liberals JOhn? Let me talk about the case of Miguel Contreras ,a so called labor leader here in Southern California. He is the husband of Maria Elena Durazo, another spokeswoman of the left. He was found dead in a brothel.

    A leftist light by the name of Harold Myers of the LA

    Weekly pleaded to his fellow media cronies not to

    mention the incident in their newspapers for the “sake of humanity ” in his own words.Now UCLA has the hypocrisy to name its labor studies center after this man.

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