Hippie Wisdom

LONDON, Ontario. Here at the world renowned progressive Western University, I had the opportunity to talk to Professor Rainbow Smith at his retirement dinner. The Professor is leaving the Department of Gay Negro Biochemistry and there is no one to replace him. It is a bittersweet day.

Professor Smith came to the faculty of Science back in the wonderful Hippie decade. Back then you got your position based on political correctness, and not ability. The department was new, an attempt by the struggling political correctness movement to raise consciousness by offering science credits that did not humiliate students with ability based expectations. Students of color, of diverse gender identities, with personality disorders, learning disabilities, or incarcerated felons, were encouraged to take credits at progressive departments like Gay Negro Biochemistry. This would level the playing field and right past wrongs. Sadly, government funding was never adequate for the minimum demands of the department and it could never show the results demanded by The Man. Rainbow recalls that, at a bare minimum, he needed a teaching assistant, a research librarian, a personal assistant, two tutors, a peer counsellor, and a social worker to meet the needs of his diversity friendly utopia that celebrated all voices. The professor had to make do with only a personal assistant, usually a first year co-ed.

Tragedy has added to the burden of Professor Smith. His first wife, Star Child, died of a Heroin overdose on their two year sabbatical to northern Burma. Five years ago, his fiance, Earthmoon, died of a heroin overdose after a peace march protesting outrageous Liberal Party defence spending. Last year, his teaching assistant died of a heroin overdose while marking term papers. She was only eighteen years old. M'bongo M'binga M'bunga, his star pupil since the early seventies, was brutally arrested by police on a trumped up charge of living off the avails of prostitution based on unconstitutional video, telephone, financial and eyewitness evidence. M'bongo M'binga M'bunga was just about to complete his undergraduate degree after years of patient tutoring and private one on one sessions with the professor.

Patron of the Arts, Professor Smith contributed several winning essays in the Canada is a Racist Shithole category for the Canada Day celebrations on campus. Students always remember how he always carried a lighter and a can of lighter fluid for impromptu Canada Flag burnings, especially when he was drunk or stoned. Always thinking of those less fortunate, the Professor would let Art students look at his collection of European Masters, including several Picasso and Renoir sketches, and of course, his popular slide shows of his yearly Fall pilgramages to the museums of Europe as well as his annual spring time trips to Africa. Smith was a man of the people! He always told others about poverty, famine, corruption, and oppression in the third world and asked: what were they doing about it?

Champion of Free Speech, Rainbow quietly spearheaded the closing of the school newspaper and its replacement with a news release collective under control of the Radical Student Socialists Collective. He championed the exclusive hiring of diversity and multi-cultural candidates in research positions in Biochemistry until the big laboratory fire and subsequent biological contamination of the Bob Rae Laboratory Building. The big building is sealed to this day, a fitting tribute to the heroism of Professor Rainbow Smith, who, at great risk to his own life, pushed the one surviving wheelchair bound mongoloid diversity opportunities student from out of the reaches of the slimy tentacles of the mutant foot fungus in Room 113.

Politcally Impartial The Professor never interfered in the democratic process. He gave money to the Socialists every year and encouraged his students to do the same. During elections, he gave two hours for one lecture time credit for political volunteers with the Socialists, even though this was not in any way related to Biochemistry. Popular with students, who could rack up the requisite 36 hours of lecture time in only two days of leafleting or political telemarketing. Astute students could acquire full time status after two weeks of picketing, and then live well on the student loans and grants gravy train, all thanks to the progressive Professor Smith.

All politically correct village peoples are going to miss Professor Rainbow Smith. It is a sad sunset as I watch the Red Flag of the International Socialists lowered on the Campus Square by the Diversity Cadre with only the flickering flames of the burning Canadian Flags to light up the tears on their multi-cultural faces.

I, Fenris Badwulf, wrote this.