A gruesome and cynical irony in the Heartland

America’s heartland, the Great Plains, sometimes called “flyover country,” often lags behind the rest of the country when it comes to fashion trends. So it was news to me and, I surmise, to many in the Kansas City area to learn, Thursday morning, that the University of Kansas (“KU”), a mere 40 miles or so West of the KC Metro, had experienced on Wednesday the same sort of “protests” and “encampment” of pro-terrorist demonstrators that had been so very in vogue at Ivy League and other prominent universities over much of the previous week.

It was news, but not really a surprise. Lawrence, Kansas, has long been a hotbed of progressive Democrat policies, prompting some to refer to it as “The People’s Republic of Lawrence.”

Over the many years I’ve lived in this area, I’ve interacted with quite a few persons who have attended KU. I’ve found precious few of them to be what I would deem highly educated. Most of them seem to have majored in Power Drinking and worshipping a mythical creature called a Jayhawk.

I learned of the events in Lawrence via a local radio morning talk show. Via telephone, the host interviewed a young woman who attended KU and who, although not part of the demonstration, described the encampment and its denizens. One aspect of her remarks dealt with how well-organized and well-prepared these anti-Israel, anti-American, pro-terrorism “protestors” appeared to be.

The part that leaped out at me was when she spoke of the demonstrators having “numbers on their arms, apparently drawn with a Sharpie.” These numbers were, ostensibly, the phone numbers of lawyers and/or bondsmen for the demonstrators to call in the event of arrest.

Now, I already knew that progressives in general and wokesters in particular tend to be irony-challenged. I’ve even written about the phenomenon in these very pages (e.g., here). But the notion of the very people chanting “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel” sporting numbers on their arms seemed like an irony that was too hard—and far too obvious—to ignore. If more proof were needed that Leftists are blind to irony, this was certainly it.

Do I need to let that sink in for a few more moments? That the very people chanting “Death to the Jews” and “Death to Israel” had numbers on their arms?

But that irony seemed to have been lost not only by the pro-terror demonstrators but also by the young woman reporting on it and the local radio morning talk show host; I found it hard to believe that neither mentioned it.

And this almost 79 years to the day (early May of 1945) that the last persons liberated from the Nazi death camps walked free! And those people—like many of the six million who perished at the Nazis’ hands before the camps were liberated—had numbers on their arms also, but they weren’t the numbers of lawyers or bondsmen, and they weren’t drawn on with a Sharpie, and they certainly weren’t worn voluntarily.

Image: Holocaust survivor’s arm by Frankie Fouganthin. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Stu Tarlowe is a raconteur, pundit and social critic who lives in the Kansas City area and, since 2010, has contributed over 150 articles to American Thinker. His personal pantheon of heroes and role models includes Barry Farber, Jean Shepherd, Long John Nebel, Rush Limbaugh, Aristide Bruant, Yaphet Kotto, Col. Jeff Cooper, Rabbi Meir Kahane, Col. Allen West, and G. Gordon Liddy. His Substack newsletter is currently still semi-dormant, but may be viewed at Stu’s Stack o’ Stuff.