"I'm Pretty Sure Even Emma Goldman Would Eat Oysters Rockefeller If She Didn't Have To Pay For Them."

Northeastern University has decided to ban a Chick-fil-A restaurant from its campus because the company's foundation has supposedly contributed to anti-gay organizations. This move has created an entertaining ripple of interest on the part of the blogosphere. Nick Gillespie, writing at Reason, provides us with an interesting, humorous post - and a Seinfeld clip, to boot - addressing this development.

OTR interprets this decision as another step toward the understanding that everything rots. We've all heard about the concept of six degrees of separation whereby any person is only six introductions away from any other person on the planet. The principle that everything rots is similar: explore anything deep enough or give it enough time and it will rot. The blogosphere has made it very easy to observe a similar phenomenon OTR calls the Nazification Principle. It reads: any message thread discussing a controversial subject moves to a point where one messenger introduces the term 'Nazi,' thereby rendering the subsequent thread as meaningless.

The Chick-fil-A ban at Northeastern is a nice illustration of nazification in that the donations have been "peeled" many times until the objectors found the rot, no matter how small, that they could interpret as "anti-gay." When we apply this thinking and the idea of six degrees of separation, we find that everyone eventually rots. We are all murdering, slave holding, child molesting, meat eaters! If we were to carry this reasoning into our everyday decision-making, our lives would be paralyzed.

Have we reached absurdity yet? OTR thinks so. He doesn't care what goes on in your bedroom, but he does care that Chick-fil-A makes a damned good sandwich even if they are closed on Sunday.


H/T to Instapundit


N.B. The anarchist and intellectual troublemaker, Emma Goldman (1869-1940),  is one of OTR's favorite characters in the American experience. She was an extraordinary writer and orator with an indomitable personality and spirited independence. She loved to seek out the rot and likely would have made a most interesting contribution as a "founding mother" during our colonial times. Though her political thought was the antithesis of order and stability, and anathema to OTR's center-right thinking, he greatly admires her celebration of the concept of individualism lived to the fullest. For further reading, see her Anarchism and Other Essays (1910), and her autobiography, Living My Life (1931).

OTR also holds the English anarchist, poet and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827), in similar esteem.