I said I stood with Israel and my world crumbled: The Savage Machine: A Kafkaesque Nightmare of Betrayal and Institutional Cruelty, A World Gone Mad. A Primal Scream.
To the Jewish grandmother, to those who showed such kindness at the synagogue book launch.
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I am still trapped in a Kafkaesque dream, where Dung beetles speak and walk by me, tripping me and laughing in a strange insect way that sounds like Schadenfreude, the scraping snickering of Dung beetles.
Decency left some time ago; only silence remains. The university of reason, critical thinking and hope for the future have been abandoned; now, all that is left is an ugly credentialism, the hum of keyboards - no more uplifting than the roaring metallic din of the cotton gin in the workhouses of lore.
Only with Kafka could calling Hamas Nazis metastasize to this, where I am now called a criminal, where children angry about grades think it a game to destroy lives, where adults are children, and where there is a distinct whiff of the 1930s German universities where no one said a word when they expelled Jews, and where reality turns into a cancerous, libellous cellular march, a ugly blob, emanating from the offices of power, those who care not a whit for learning.
My existence is ruled by faceless and feckless bureaucrats, bloodless administrators who wield words like weapons, stripping me of my dignity with a hollow smile and smirks that I do not see but are like what the kids today would call a vibe.
Such administrators begin every meeting with land acknowledgements, performing empty rituals and virtue-signalling with a false passion, nothing more than a quest for attention.
Yet, they exist in a vacuum—the Vice Provost brags about the new Aboriginal art. Still, there are no Indigenous students in the school or perhaps one, and to my knowledge, she has never spoken to an Indigenous person.
She puts her head down and reads from a script she did not write. It is a vacuous, cliché-ridden, IQ-lowering hum, an neckless of emptiness strung together from a basket of empty words, each syllable like a pale bead, drained of its colour by insincerity.
And yet, this same institution—a place so eager to cry bitter tears for people thousands of miles away—exhibits cruelty on a level I have never seen to those who work just thirty feet away from them.
Some years ago, Fanshawe College refused to allow me to attend the birth of my dear daughter Sophia because I had not banked enough time off. No matter what, I was going to go, and they capitulated in a way, hoping I would give them some performative gratitude. I refused, offering them only the clunk of a closing door.
Of course, I went, and I was fired shortly after. I thought such academic cruelty could not be surpassed, but I was wrong.
But the cruelty is now purely digital. Everyone “works” from home, the hallways are empty, entire floors seem abandoned, and there is the unspoken assumption that only the professor and students ever enter the office.
It is a ghosthouse where administrators hide behind email signatures and automated replies. No one posts phone numbers, and no one answers calls.
What kind of organisation now intentionally structures itself to avoid human contact?
And yet, these savages—these people who hide behind remote work, bureaucratic silence, and endless deflection—have no hesitation when they are offered the chance to spread wild, reputation-destroying lies. They tell anyone who will listen that I assaulted a student, ripped off his shirt, and was led away in handcuffs.
It is whispered through hallways, passed through email chains, and amplified in classrooms. Or I should say, “It was,” students graduate, the news gets old, reputations get ruined, and legacies become ramshackle frames that the quietest north wind can topple.
