Until the next unreasonable demand.
Is it just me? Is Blaska the outlier? Is your irascible bloggeur the only one in high dudgeon today? (Wouldn’t be the first time.) Anyone else think the removal of a glacial erratic boulder from the campus of the University of Wisconsin is the most stupid, egregious display of Woke virtue signaling ever? (Need more adjectives and adverbs, STAT!) Please tell me I’m not going crazy.
Neither the Babylon Bee nor the Onion can make this stuff up. It is its own parody. A 42-ton boulder — not fashioned into a likeness of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest or Donald Trump — tumbled up on the Madison isthmus by the same impersonal glacier that formed Madison’s chain of lakes 12,000 years ago. Somehow, THIS is your symbol of white oppression?
Why? Because someone 100 years ago used a racial pejorative to refer, generically, to big rocks like the Chamberlin Rock. A term that, guaranteed, not one of the campus’ 40,000 cosseted students has ever heard in their young lives. That was only discovered in a mouldering issue of a 1925 newspaper. “University historians have not found any other time that the slur was used,” that newspaper helpfully informs today.
Through some bizarre progressive alchemy, the rock, named after a long-ago university president, has become a “painful symbol of the university’s racist past.” Notice the absence of the qualifying adverb “allegedly.” For it is given that the University of Wisconsin-Madison was racist and today, with its removal, likely is only a little bit less so. Because a noisy claque of social justice warriors is on the prowl. On a campus where young men once mustered out of Camp Randall on these very grounds to fight slavery and secession in the South. Now THAT is skin in the game, unlike the grievance studies majors playing little Miss Snowflake.
No baseball bat and bullhorn needed when playing the race card in Madison WI. Over-educated college deans, salaries well into six figures, will bow and scrape like reverse Stepin Fetchits. No history, either.
Loud and stupid is no way to go through life, kids.
‘Further harm’?
Campus chancellor Rebecca Blank couldn’t muster the spine to say, “Hey Kids, we’ll get back to you on that. If you want to stomp and shout over a big blank stone instead of making a difference in the world, I’ll sell the popcorn.” No, instead, we get this mealy mouthed subservience to stupidity:
“Removing the rock as a monument in a prominent location prevents further harm to our community while preserving the rock’s educational research value for our current and future students.”
That is the WI State Journal quoting the university’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture, who appears to be as white as a loaf of Wonder Bread. And as clueless.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: The Werkes hopes that some future generation will look at the rock in its new, undisclosed location and ask “What were they thinking back in 2021?” Now THERE would be some educational research value.
53 responses to “Removing the rock of faux outrages”
Congratulations to the black student union for resurrecting a word that had been dead for God knows how long.
[Blaska edit:] XXXXX
Rumor is they’re going after Brazil nuts next.
There’s an Abbot and Costello routine in here somewhere.
Can’t say it
What?
The word
What word?
The word everyone now knows
If everyone knows it why can’t you say it
it’s not allowed
not allowed by who?
the people that pointed us all to the word
why did they do that?
… third base!
You raised the Brazil Nut flag…standby for the fallout. Maybe I can stock up before they relocate them to a yet to be determined location.
I recommend Farm and Fleet – huge selection of nuts.
Just one more thing, maybe you really old people can tell me. If there’s objects for the heads and the toes … what about all the other body parts in between?
I trust the SJWs are scouring microfiche to find the answer.
Brazil nuts? LOL Next some marketing geniuses will be changing the name of my favorite brand of frozen pizza, namely SCREAMIN’ SICILIAN. Give it time.
What will be the next Madison artifact to go?
Ought to be Lincoln. That should about do it, huh?
Not Lincoln. The answer is in your question.
They’ve had their eye on Lincoln for some time, and my bet is they’ll take him down eventually–either by ‘persuading’ the spineless administrators at UW-Madison to do it, or more likely they’ll simply pull it down themselves while the brave heroes on the UW police department stand by scratching their asses. They’re also agitating to change several names of campus buildings–i.e., any of them named after a white male.
The photos accompanying the article speak volumes.
White males literally doing the heavy lifting under the watchful eyes of miserable-looking woke SJW’s.
A boulder that was called by an offensive term by people a century ago and today weak individuals feel oppressed by a term not used since the last millennium.
At least those white males doing that heavy lifting got paid, unlike the miserable SJW’s watching.
The entire Sociology department at the University would probably be unable to move that rock plus none of them wants to do any actual work amnesty anyway.
They would rather order others to do hard dangerous work while watching. Gee…. what does THAT sound like?
“…literally doing the heavy lifting under the watchful eyes of miserable-looking woke SJW’s.”
That’s what SJWs do. They whine, riot, take, earn useless degrees, and repeat inane theories while the rest of us actually do the work .
And the right whines, riots, takes, never goes to school and repeats inane theories about how trump won.
“never goes to school”
I’m a STEM major. What’s your degree in, Richard?
From the WSJ article: “The rock will be placed on publicly accessible university-owned land southeast of Madison near Lake Kegonsa, where it will continue to be used for educational purposes by the geoscience department.”
So we’re supposed to believe that transporting the “racist monument” (!) to a different public setting somehow removes its — what? penumbral racist taint? You have to have a heart of pre-Cambrian stone not to laugh.
Also from the article, a sage observation from, one can only assume, a typical bien pensant Madisonian: “It’s not the rock’s fault that it got that terrible and unfortunate nickname[.]” No, it’s not Racist Rock’s fault — it’s the Wisconsin State Journal’s fault! So why isn’t the WSJ being made to pay a price?
Backstory: Earlier this week “The Werkes” ran the story of Mayor Dave and his interactions with the uber woke “Max”. Comments on “The Werkes” digressed to Mayor Dave’s moderation policies on posts running contrary to Liberal thought. I wanted to find out for myself, and the smarmy “Max” was due a smack-down, “woke” toes stepped on, and a few oxen gored. While “sharing” with “Max”, a bubble of consciousness that had been rising for years popped in my mind.
Wokeness REVOLVES around forcing the “other” to do something, no matter how insane it might be. Create a problem, ignore the obvious actions that YOU could take to solve it, and force the “other” to do the unexplainable. (Then, I guess everybody meets back at the clubhouse for group massages.)
If they decided that elderly P.O.C. couldn’t get to the drugstore they would propose some elaborate tax funded plan. Posters would be made. Hundreds would show up to protest for hours a day, weeks on end, racking up Hundreds of Thousands of man/hours. And still, “Grandmaw” isn’t getting her meds. I think, with Hundreds of Thousands of Hours of “free time”, SOMEBODY could offer her a ride.
RE the “Rock”–
The so-called “N____-head” was a real thing. They are ironstone concretions, very common in the shale and mudstone overburden above coal seams, (I’ve seen hundreds of them). I don’t doubt some Madison residents were familiar with them, as they occur in the Mazon Formation of No. Illinois, and the Illinois Coal Basin of Ill, Ind, and Ky. They are almost always spherical, often perfectly round, and totally black. (nothing, even remotely, resembling your “Rock”) I would have hoped that a UNIVERSITY would have had someone who knew this.
This entire “Rock” thing should have been laughed off from the very beginning, and the snowflakes told to just ignore the rock and find safe space. It would make MUCH more sense to ban all WOODPILES, as THEY were the mythological hiding places for racial epithets, — and a much more common phrase.
What’s that racist rock going to get up to in some obscure corner of the University plantation? Before you could keep an eye on it now it’s unsupervised. A very large ankle bracelet might be in order.
Wonder how Tommy T. came to decide the rock had to be moved. He is running that place ‘ya know.
No he isn’t. That’s the chancellor’s decision.
From the WSJ Article: “David Meyer, a UW-Madison alumnus and Madison resident since 1976, said he used to walk by the rock all the time while on campus in the ‘70s, but never knew its complicated past.”
Neither did anyone else, until the recent wave of mass insanity swept the land….. This should now stand in its new resting place, symbolic of the petrified brains of those who now control our institutions of higher learning….. On Wisconsin….
Bingo.
I over-used the “like” key today B/C all comments, sans one, were relevant and insightful.
My contribution is only a back-drop:
At that time, the KKK was huge, a resurgence even in CA, etc.. Tho more of a social group than race oriented. Membership prior & post to that era shows almost a decade of KKK infatuation. Leave it to the race-baitin’ virtue signalers in MDSN to find but a single well-buried slur -but keyword searches have made it easy now. Embarrassing that any one is NOW embarrassed 10 decades later.
Yoiks….
how many decades have passed since the Confederate flag first appeared? Are you embarrassed yet?
“Rebecca Blank couldn’t muster the spine to say, “Hey Kids, we’ll get back to you on that. If you want to stomp and shout over a big blank stone instead of making a difference in the world, I’ll sell the popcorn.”
No, this is the face of most leadership today, whether in academia, corporate America, politics, and even policing. We’re surrounded by weak people who know better but run for cover at the first sign of pushback.
Make a real difference? Ha. This is about looking and playing the part, not about actually doing things that better people’s lives.
Stoned, these people are really stoned..
That is all I can say.
I can’t wait until all of the news stories start when the students go back to high schools and those threatening police officers are no where to be found while the same thugs that are joy riding and smashing stolen autos will terrorize the others. If the locals have the guts to tell it like it will happen.
See our new eBook, “Excavating and Archiving Orwellian Memory Holes”, in which MadTown’s characteristic clinical insanity and institutional spinelessness figures bigly…
https://cultivateunderstanding.com/pdfjs-2.3.200-dist/web/viewer.html?file=../..//Digital_Media/Excavating_Orwellian/Excavating_and_Archiving_Orwellian_Memory_Holes.pdf
I’ve already emailed some friends and relatives about this lunacy. One thing perplexes me. It was not the rock that uttered the dread word, it was the newspaper in 1925 writing about the rock. Why has the focus of faux outrage not centered on the newspaper? No political payoff in that, I suppose. But truly, it seems so unfair to the vast forces of nature that deposited the rock among us. I thought the lefties all love nature. I suppose it, too, must now be purified. But think of what it will cost to remove ALL the offending rocks anywhere. Talk about infrastructure spending, this wil cost a lot.
I suggest you and other readers e-mail Gary Brown, Director of Campus Planning & Landscape Architecture (gary.brown@wisc.edu) as I did and give him an earful. One question you might ask him is how he justifies spending $50,000 of taxpayers’ money on this ludicrous exercise in virtue signaling.