Declaration of War on Nuance
by Rebecca Schuman
If there’s one thing the Bush reign has taught us, it’s that only the wicked bellyache all day long about “complicated” crap like how many abortions is too many to have before lunch (twelve, incidentally). The righteous, however, are smart enough to reduce the entire universe to good or bad. Don’t ask me for details because I don’t have any — this is because I, unlike David Hume or Socrates, am not a fer’ner, and thus don’t believe in “thinking about crap” since that particular activity is a one-way ticket to death (if you don’t believe me, ask David Hume, who’s dead.
I spend all day surrounded by nuance here in the liberal academic conspiracy, where I hold Bible-believing Christians hostage and make them watch R-rated foreign movies with boobies and Turkish people in them. And you all know that exposure to boobies and Turkish people breeds a curious appreciation for literary device (such as right here, where I am using boobies and Turkish people as a “synecdoche” for “the world outside Kirk Cameron and the Apocalypse movies, which is vast and full of gray areas.”) You spend one perilous hour theorizing about violence and you might as well be Jacques Derrida — and guess where that guy is? Dead.
You might think I’m overblowing the threat of “nuance,” or even that a war on an abstract concept is physically impossible — but any argument you made would have to take into account the multivalence inherent in the word “overblowing,” and since I don’t know what the word “multivalence” means, you’d be yammering on deaf ears. All I know is that the other day I had to read an article where some feminist-materialist broad claimed that all men hate their children because they are “alienated from their sperm,” and to make this point she cited a person who is ostensibly a “philosopher and a midwife.” That’s like claiming to be “a Reiki healer and fairy princess,” thus giving everyone else a strong hint not to listen to anything else you might have to say about the patriarchy. And the only reason “philosopher-midwives” are allowed to mix in with the normal people is that some jackoff claimed their arguments were “complex.”
Recognizing the complexities in things leads to unfortunate amounts of rumination on human nature — for example, if you read the Kleist story The Marquise of O, you will learn that if a woman is raped, her rapist will be forgiven and deified if he agrees to marry her and rescue her family from the eternal shame of her sullied womb. If you’re a pantywaisted philosopher-midwife-racecar driver-secret agent, you’ll ruin my day pontificating about the social order. But if you’re smart, and have just been confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court because apparently the Democrats in this country are too busy whacking off about “nuance” to stop you, then you’ll take this lesson and apply it directly to the Women as Chattel Alito Act of 2006, soon to take the place of Roe v. Wade in uteri everywhere. And you won’t stop there — you’ll plumb all the other plots of great literature for legislation as well (The Scarlet Letter; Jane Eyre; In the Penal Colony). Because after all, what’s literature for if not to be taken literally? Anything else would require nuance, and the Alito court will make sure the President has unchecked executive power to stick anyone who even says the word “nuance” on the telephone in Gitmo forever. So watch out, or you’ll be sharing a filthy cell with some philosopher-midwife-pirate-astronaut until the end of time, mulling over the nuance of handcuffs and pooping your pants.
Nuance is for pussies. First of all, any word jacked from the French is stupid (crepe, guillotine, Foucault). Second of all, the concept “nuance” is useless, and I just demonstrated its very uselessness by being able to proclaim said uselessness with such a fantastic degree of certainty (again, see “Foucault”).
I spend all day surrounded by nuance here in the liberal academic conspiracy, where I hold Bible-believing Christians hostage and make them watch R-rated foreign movies with boobies and Turkish people in them. And you all know that exposure to boobies and Turkish people breeds a curious appreciation for literary device (such as right here, where I am using boobies and Turkish people as a “synecdoche” for “the world outside Kirk Cameron and the Apocalypse movies, which is vast and full of gray areas.”) You spend one perilous hour theorizing about violence and you might as well be Jacques Derrida — and guess where that guy is? Dead.
You might think I’m overblowing the threat of “nuance,” or even that a war on an abstract concept is physically impossible — but any argument you made would have to take into account the multivalence inherent in the word “overblowing,” and since I don’t know what the word “multivalence” means, you’d be yammering on deaf ears. All I know is that the other day I had to read an article where some feminist-materialist broad claimed that all men hate their children because they are “alienated from their sperm,” and to make this point she cited a person who is ostensibly a “philosopher and a midwife.” That’s like claiming to be “a Reiki healer and fairy princess,” thus giving everyone else a strong hint not to listen to anything else you might have to say about the patriarchy. And the only reason “philosopher-midwives” are allowed to mix in with the normal people is that some jackoff claimed their arguments were “complex.”
Recognizing the complexities in things leads to unfortunate amounts of rumination on human nature — for example, if you read the Kleist story The Marquise of O, you will learn that if a woman is raped, her rapist will be forgiven and deified if he agrees to marry her and rescue her family from the eternal shame of her sullied womb. If you’re a pantywaisted philosopher-midwife-racecar driver-secret agent, you’ll ruin my day pontificating about the social order. But if you’re smart, and have just been confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court because apparently the Democrats in this country are too busy whacking off about “nuance” to stop you, then you’ll take this lesson and apply it directly to the Women as Chattel Alito Act of 2006, soon to take the place of Roe v. Wade in uteri everywhere. And you won’t stop there — you’ll plumb all the other plots of great literature for legislation as well (The Scarlet Letter; Jane Eyre; In the Penal Colony). Because after all, what’s literature for if not to be taken literally? Anything else would require nuance, and the Alito court will make sure the President has unchecked executive power to stick anyone who even says the word “nuance” on the telephone in Gitmo forever. So watch out, or you’ll be sharing a filthy cell with some philosopher-midwife-pirate-astronaut until the end of time, mulling over the nuance of handcuffs and pooping your pants.
