Weeping analysts finally quit Goff!

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2020

Bafflegab, foofaw meet hokum: For several years, we've been advising you to view our failed public discourse through an anthropological lens.

We've urged you to drop the silly old claim that man [sic] is the rational animal. Based upon our consultations with despondent yet top major anthropologists, we've urged you to see the species as it truly is, in a new, different way:

We humans are the tribal, script-reading, war-inclined animal! Or so these highly-credentialed experts have told us, again and again.

Are we really the tribal, script-reading animal? On a purely emotional basis, it's hard to accept that idea.

Weren't we initially made in God's image? When did that family line change?

It's hard to accept these new ideas. Today, though, our analysts quit Professor Goff! This is the way it went down:

As the youngsters scanned the site of the Washington Post, their eyes fell upon this capsule:

Few want to abolish police, poll finds

Secretly fearing what they might find, they clicked ahead to a news report about a new Gallup survey. Ben Guarino started like this:

GUARINO (7/23/20): Most Americans agree that police should undergo major changes but do not support abolishing police departments nationwide, according to a Gallup poll released Wednesday morning, which found that just 15 percent of Americans support getting rid of the police.

"Defund the police” has become a popular slogan at protests against police brutality after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In late June, most of the Minneapolis City Council voted to dismantle the city’s police department. Council members said that reform attempts had failed and that the Minneapolis police had lost the public’s trust after Floyd’s death.

The concept of eliminating police departments does not enjoy wide support across the United States, according to the survey. Abolishing the police was not a majority opinion held by any group in the poll, including when examined by race, age or political affiliation.

That same report, with that same headline, is bannered across the top of page A5 in today's hard-copy Post. We now see that our copy is wet with the analysts' tears—and it's opened to that very page.

Good lord! Just 15 percent of Americans support "getting rid of the police?" Only 15 percent?

That's easy for Guarino to say, one youngster angrily cried.

Guarino was plainly suggesting that the number in question is small. The disconsolate youngsters couldn't believe that the number could be that large!

As they continued, they came upon this. The worst was yet to come:

GUARINO (continuing directly): The Gallup survey included more than 36,000 people over the age of 18 who were polled from late June to early July. Abolishing the police had the most—though still not much—support among people younger than 35 (33 percent in favor), Democrats (27 percent) and black Americans (22 percent). White Americans and Republicans were likely to oppose the idea, at 12 and 1 percent in favor, respectively.

By now, the youngsters were rending their garments. Several tore at their hair.

A full one-third of people younger than 35 favor abolishing the police? The keening and wailing were hard to endure—but just like that, the shell-shocked, under-age interns-for-life found themselves staring at this:

GUARINO (continuing directly): If presented as total elimination of police departments, the survey might have missed support for more nuanced calls to dismantle police, said Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder of the Center for Policing Equity. “One notion of abolition is the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement,” he said.

With that, we were able to redirect the youngsters' dismay.

"You see?" we skillfully said. "It's exactly the way Future Anthropologists Huddled in Caves have always said!"

The youngsters stared in disbelief at the words of Professor Goff. On cable, he's presented as one of the good, genial, bright ones. But look at what he said!

According to the former UCLA professor, his group's notion of "abolition" is "the need for discontinuity from the violent and racist past of law enforcement.”

That's no one else's "notion" of what that familiar word means. But these days, so the heck what?

Why would anyone think that "abolition" means "elimination?" So the professor had said!

The professor was trafficking bafflegab, with foofaw and hokum thrown in. But so it quite remarkably goes Over Here on the tribal tale left.

Do we currently "live in interesting times," as the Chinese warned? Only in the way we're currently able to see human functioning breaking down.

By that we mean human intellectual functioning. That functioning continues to crash and burn as tribal lore gains control of our minds.

In fairness, the anthropologists have been telling us this all along. No matter how many times they're right, it's hard to accept the important new framework which has these scholars weeping and groaning inside their gloomy, dark caves.

He too went to the finest schools: First Harvard; after that, Stanford, for his PhD