The inimitable Erin Manning has written a poem about fellatio-commanding Georgetown philosophy perfesser Rebecca Kukla and her allies, and the contretemps over their potty-mouthed condemnation of an eminent Christian philosopher and his defenders. In an earlier post, I referred to that lot as the “Kukla Clan”. For readers who slept in that day in lit class, Erin’s verse is a riff on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”:

Kukla Clan

In Georgetown U did Kukla Clan
A state of hissy-fit decree:
Where Angst, its sacred lifeblood, ran
Through screenshots shared from man to man
Down to a Twitter feed.
So vice now blooms in fertile ground
Where scat-tongued scholars gathered round;
And there were fearful Facebook messages
With whispers of right-winged conspiracy;
And here the f-word tossed to shock: it fails,
Revealing minds in second infancy.

“But oh! Our foes are not aware they’re slanted
“Down through the ages giving privilege cover!
“Those savage haters! Depressing yet defended
“As always with anonymous donors vaunted
“By chortling alt-right gremlin Limbaugh-lovers!”
So from this chasm, with ceaseless leftist seething,
As if philosophers, with vomit heaving,
A mighty fount of profane speech burst forth:
Amid whose childish spittle-flecked weird curse
Strange rudeness pelted like pinging email
Or bouncing pop-up ads for psychic kale:
And mid these belching tweets captured forever
It threw up Angst, the hissy-fit’s fair river.
Five hours on Facebook, then with pixeled motion
Through blog and site the messy river ran,
Then reached the screenshots shared from man to man,
And sank in shame, and rose to cause commotion;
And ‘mid this tumult Kukla heard from far
Some right-wing voices promising a war!
The murmur of the fit of hissiness
Echoed faintly on the screens;
Where was seen the dawn of prissiness
From the font of cursing adult-teens.
It was a spectacle of weird advice,
The hissy-fitters saying, “Now, be nice!”

A writer with a Macbook Air
In a vision once I saw:
He was a crunchy sort of chap
And on his Macbook Air he tapped
Wearing the keys quite bare.
Could I recall completely
His blog posts short and long
I would relate concretely,
And with outrage right or wrong
I would those screenshots share:
Forward: Forward! Screeds of vice!
And all who clicked would see them there,
And some would laugh, and some would glare
To see professors rudely swear!
Shrug your shoulders once or twice,
And roll your eyes or shake your head
For they on tenure-teats have fed,
And raised the fools’ tuition price.

Erin Manning is a genius. Here’s a link to her blog.