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Op-Ed

Kahns on Pez

June 15, 2018

I don’t want to disturb your slumber. In fact, you can go back to sleep unless you remember Pez. If you remember Pez, read on. You will also find information about glass-blowing.

Robert Kahn

By Robert Kahn

Deputy editor emeritus, Courthouse News

I don’t want to disturb your slumber. In fact, you can go back to sleep unless you remember Pez. If you remember Pez, read on. You will also find information about glass-blowing.

My nephew is a talented glass-blower. (Insert sophomoric jokes here.) So when he went to a big glass-blowing blowout in Venice, my little sister snuck in to see him.

Glass-blowers can do just about anything. What an art that is. But that is not our subject today. Our subject is a lightly edited chain of Kahn emails.

Sister Deb said it rained all the time in Florence. She emailed us late one day to say she would see the Duomo and the Michelangelo Piazza tomorrow.

To which Brother Dave replied: “What’s a Michelangelo Pizza? Cheese and marble?”

Brother Rick: Please tell me you are kidding. Pizza vs Piazza?”

Dave: Nah. Piazza was a catcher for the Dodgers. He took peds, you know. Denied it all the way, but he did.”

Brother Bob: “peds? You mean performance-enhancing drugs? You mean PEDS? You mean you believe that an acronym can substitute for real words?”

Dave: And anyway, the word you want is Pez, candies dispensed from the head of a Superhero or Disney Character.”

Bob: “Are you out of your mind?”

So there you have it.

We report: You decide.

I don’t like to brag about my siblings — mostly I try to embarrass them — but after nearly 50 years of college between us at top-flight institutions, is this the best we can do?

Marble and cheese pizzas?

Piazza was a catcher for the Dodgers?

 I bring this up because there is a bit of unrest today, not on college campuses, but about college campuses. The marching morons who control all three branches of our federal government, and the engineers of human souls who put them there, have been yammering that U.S. colleges and universities should do away with the liberal arts major, to concentrate on “preparing” students for a real job in the real world.

These are the same morons who complain that our major universities discriminate against right-wingers, citing the number of liberal professors versus right-wingers teaching, for instance, Renaissance Literature, Nineteenth Century British Poetry, or Jazz Studies.

Well, my capitalist brethren, music, painting, poetry, literature, architecture and the sculptural arts were all open to you, but you chose another path. If y’all had wanted to go into Women’s Studies, or Mesoamerican archaeology, or political science, I suppose y’all would have done it. But you didn’t. You went for the money.

How did that work out for you?

Now, two of my siblings chose hard science, which, let me assure you, is no guarantee of a real job in the real world. Adenosine ribosylation factor? Who you trying to kid, brother Rick?

Two of us chose to follow the liberal arts. Perhaps we have not “added value” to our country by accelerating the production of widgets, but I submit that music, literature, painting and all the other arts are an essential part of being human. They are what separates us from the beasts. And that people who live without the ability, or the understanding, or the time or very little money it takes to enjoy the arts live an impoverished existence, no matter how much money they have.

I submit that just about every human child who learns to speak and write tries to write a poem at some time in his childhood. And whether that poem be good or bad, writing it was an important part of becoming human.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it, my liberal arts-hating overlords. Instead of whatever it is you’ve been smoking.

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