Could a law professor lose his job for making fun of Hmong people? That’s the question UW-Madison officials will tackle soon, as the case of what a professor named Kaplan said about the Hmong during a lecture recently. The question isn’t whether or not his remarks were accurate, but whether or not he has the right to say them. Let’s put it right out there: he is accused of saying that Hmong men only know how to kill things and that their sons tend to be in gangs, or to be more accurate, we’ll quote the quote of an email quote: “’ Hmong men have no talent other than to kill,’" "’all-second generation Hmong end up in gangs and other criminal activity’" and "’all men purchase their wives, so if he wants to have sex with his wife and she doesn't consent, you and I call it rape, but the Hmong guy is thinking, 'Man, I paid too much for her!' ‘" (Please, any representatives of MLA or APA, help us out here.)
While on the surface, these remarks seem insensitive, especially for a professor from Madison, but what Dr. K was doing was really quoting what other people tend to say about the Hmong, which sort of makes the quote we printed a quote of a quote of a quote in an email quote. Or, as lawyers might say, hearsay. Haven’t we all watched enough re-runs of Perry Mason at our grandmas’ to know that hearsay is not admissible in court? We would need actual evidence, like OJ’s team got on that Mark Fuhrman guy, that Kaplan is in fact racist and not just another Jewish lawyer who stuck his leathern footgear in his mouth before making a sacrifice of burnt offerings. Just because Marty (I’ll just assume his name’s Marty) was ribbing on the Hmong does not mean he’s a bigot at all. In fact, because he’s Jewish, he cannot be a bigot—it’s against his religion. He also probably hates himself, which might explain why he called himself a schmuck after the lecture in question. Wait, his name could be Saul or Ira. Is Ira short for something? I bet Jews name their kids Saul as sort of a jab against Christians like Mel Gibson because that was Paul’s name when he was busy killing Christians, wasn’t it? How about that Mel Gibson, though! What did you really expect from a country full of criminals? He got his first acting job as Mad Max because he was hung over and that’s what the Australian film industry was looking for in their one and only hit movie. Did you know that there are only about six million Jews in the United States? That’s the whole freakin country, and I’ve had three Jewish doctors and a Jewish lawyer, and every single film in Hollywood is Kosher. You know we’ve got 50,000 Hmong in Wisconsin and we’re second only to California? Same thing with milk production. Probably no correlation, but interesting, no? Milwaukee was second to San Francisco for per capita homosexuals for a while, and the Milwaukee County Zoo was once ranked second after the San Diego Zoo. Actually, that’s probably why no one else in the country even cares about this story—they’re like, what in tarnation is a Hmong? I guess they’re kinda like the Kurds in Iraq because they did some work to help America out and then were left to deal with it after we pulled out, and then we’re like, “Come to Wisconsin and California, the lands of milk and honey, and that will make up for your efforts.”
The problem with digressing, as a professor or a journalist, is that you don’t exactly stick to the point. By the way, there are only 28,000 Jews in Wisconsin, so if we get some sort of Jew versus Hmong war going on, my money’s on the Hmong, especially since so many of them are hunters, fishers, or boobie-trap makers. And when you don’t stick to the point, you make all kinds of points that might not be relevant, you might even offend, and you’ll look like a shlemil. Actually, we could fit all the state’s Hmong in Wauwatosa and all the Jews in South Milwaukee and let them hurl insults at each other. And since gay people make up between one an ten percent of our state’s population, they could all be sent to Green Bay (heretofore known as Green Gay) to cheer on the Packers (there’s a joke for you, junior), or sent to Madison to cheer on the communist professors.
The problem with professors in general is that none of them know how to teach, so they tend to make outlines of what they know, and then proceed to either stick those up on an overhead or just talk about their outlines and tell a megillah to fill the rest of the time. And professors keep their jobs by writing crap no one besides other professors reads, so they really don’t have a grasp of reality, or their own profession for which they profess. Which leads back to Kaplan, who is supposed to teach the students in Madison to become lawyers… people who lie in order to win, and who should know at all times to consider the audience. The fact that this teacher looked out at a crowd of twenty with at least three Asian faces in it, and still went of on some sort of tirade about Hmongs (even if it was satire) means that he clearly could use a little help in the act of being a lawyer, which might explain why he’s teaching in college and not winning big cases in the courtroom. Anyway, I say we give the shlep another chance. I just saw his name, and it’s Lenny, so any one of us could be wrong…just keep that in mind the next time you want to cast the first stone. Ah, the khutspe of some people!
While on the surface, these remarks seem insensitive, especially for a professor from Madison, but what Dr. K was doing was really quoting what other people tend to say about the Hmong, which sort of makes the quote we printed a quote of a quote of a quote in an email quote. Or, as lawyers might say, hearsay. Haven’t we all watched enough re-runs of Perry Mason at our grandmas’ to know that hearsay is not admissible in court? We would need actual evidence, like OJ’s team got on that Mark Fuhrman guy, that Kaplan is in fact racist and not just another Jewish lawyer who stuck his leathern footgear in his mouth before making a sacrifice of burnt offerings. Just because Marty (I’ll just assume his name’s Marty) was ribbing on the Hmong does not mean he’s a bigot at all. In fact, because he’s Jewish, he cannot be a bigot—it’s against his religion. He also probably hates himself, which might explain why he called himself a schmuck after the lecture in question. Wait, his name could be Saul or Ira. Is Ira short for something? I bet Jews name their kids Saul as sort of a jab against Christians like Mel Gibson because that was Paul’s name when he was busy killing Christians, wasn’t it? How about that Mel Gibson, though! What did you really expect from a country full of criminals? He got his first acting job as Mad Max because he was hung over and that’s what the Australian film industry was looking for in their one and only hit movie. Did you know that there are only about six million Jews in the United States? That’s the whole freakin country, and I’ve had three Jewish doctors and a Jewish lawyer, and every single film in Hollywood is Kosher. You know we’ve got 50,000 Hmong in Wisconsin and we’re second only to California? Same thing with milk production. Probably no correlation, but interesting, no? Milwaukee was second to San Francisco for per capita homosexuals for a while, and the Milwaukee County Zoo was once ranked second after the San Diego Zoo. Actually, that’s probably why no one else in the country even cares about this story—they’re like, what in tarnation is a Hmong? I guess they’re kinda like the Kurds in Iraq because they did some work to help America out and then were left to deal with it after we pulled out, and then we’re like, “Come to Wisconsin and California, the lands of milk and honey, and that will make up for your efforts.”
The problem with digressing, as a professor or a journalist, is that you don’t exactly stick to the point. By the way, there are only 28,000 Jews in Wisconsin, so if we get some sort of Jew versus Hmong war going on, my money’s on the Hmong, especially since so many of them are hunters, fishers, or boobie-trap makers. And when you don’t stick to the point, you make all kinds of points that might not be relevant, you might even offend, and you’ll look like a shlemil. Actually, we could fit all the state’s Hmong in Wauwatosa and all the Jews in South Milwaukee and let them hurl insults at each other. And since gay people make up between one an ten percent of our state’s population, they could all be sent to Green Bay (heretofore known as Green Gay) to cheer on the Packers (there’s a joke for you, junior), or sent to Madison to cheer on the communist professors.
The problem with professors in general is that none of them know how to teach, so they tend to make outlines of what they know, and then proceed to either stick those up on an overhead or just talk about their outlines and tell a megillah to fill the rest of the time. And professors keep their jobs by writing crap no one besides other professors reads, so they really don’t have a grasp of reality, or their own profession for which they profess. Which leads back to Kaplan, who is supposed to teach the students in Madison to become lawyers… people who lie in order to win, and who should know at all times to consider the audience. The fact that this teacher looked out at a crowd of twenty with at least three Asian faces in it, and still went of on some sort of tirade about Hmongs (even if it was satire) means that he clearly could use a little help in the act of being a lawyer, which might explain why he’s teaching in college and not winning big cases in the courtroom. Anyway, I say we give the shlep another chance. I just saw his name, and it’s Lenny, so any one of us could be wrong…just keep that in mind the next time you want to cast the first stone. Ah, the khutspe of some people!
