Friday December 02, 2005
FORWARD, KVETCH! Meet Keiran Michael Lalor, shown here posing with right-wing celebs and yelling at protestors. Lalor has served his country in Iraq, a fact which all his published work announces. As you can see from the photos, he is a fine specimen of a lad with a shaved head and a "I have killed many men and I will kill you" look omnipresent in his tiny eyes. You do not want to fuck with this Marine.
We do not hear much specific about Lalor's military service, but we do know that he has been held prisoner and tortured -- not by the Iraqis, but by the professors of the Pace Law School. Hear his woeful tale in today's New York Post, as he describes his student days as a series of psychological torments that would not be out of place at the Hanoi Hilton:
I started law school just days after returning from a tour of duty in Iraq. Orientation centered on a case of determining the rightful owner of a painting stolen by a soldier in World War II.
It struck me as odd that with countless legal decisions in Anglo-American jurisprudence, the school chose — as an introduction to the study of law, during a time of war — to focus on a case where the bad guy was an American soldier.
The professor leading the class used examples from his practice to illustrate legal concepts. And he had cut his legal teeth defending draft dodgers, so his lessons typically involved a bumbling and heartless U.S. military persecuting a saint-like draft evader.
Yes, Good Soldier Lalor is forced to listen to this filth and worse: "a guest speaker compare[d] U.S. soldiers to Nazis... one question on the final exam of her legal ethics class incorporated an anti-military theme mocking operations in Iraq..."
There is more, but I can see my readers are overcome, so I will spare you the details.
I have to ask: why is Lalor attending this Stalinist indoctrination center? For one thing, there are plenty of fundamentalist Christian law schools -- Jerry Falwell has one! -- which I'm sure would welcome a mean, lean, logic-killing machine like Lalor.
For another, it's not like Lalor didn't know what he was getting into. According to an earlier column, this is his second stint at Pace! Highlights from his 2001 tenure:
I was then in my first few weeks at Pace Law School with a front-row seat to the left's post-September 11 reaction...
[My professor] mentioned the "My Lai massacre" in Vietnam, slavery and the treatment of American Indians as examples of American terrorism. Twenty-five miles from Ground Zero, where rescuers struggled in hopes of finding survivors still alive, this law professor chose to focus on the blemishes in our history as an introduction to our first post-September 11 class. I have to give him credit for being on the cutting edge of liberalism because at this point the now notorious International Freedom Center slated to occupy Ground Zero was just a twinkle in the left's eye...
A few months later, I left law school when my Marine Corps Reserve Unit was called to active service. We prepared for the war that had been brought to our shores on September 11 and resolved to defeat the enemy. At school, some students and the bulk of the faculty seemed markedly unconcerned about U.S. victory or defeat. There was a reflexive, leftist preoccupation with trying to understand, defend, and excuse al Qaeda. The rhetorical energies of my teachers and some classmates were focused not upon responding or defending the country but on proving the U.S was somehow to blame...
...and so he came back a took a seat in the same school, where, chained to a desk and withstanding horrific assaults to his patriotism, he bravely blinked out a New York Post column in morse code.
One might ask why, but, for that matter, why do I bother to read and write about this crap? I guess we both just like to complain!