"There's a sort of a liberal call for reparations that..." *thud*

I'm sitting in a bagel place eavesdropping on two humanities/cultural studies grad students discuss absolutely nothing. There are several words being used and a torrential surfeit of space-fillers, but I have yet to hear any useful thought or specific idea expressed. Here are some of my treasured words and expressions:

collective
Freud
cultural
slavery
genocide
"no one CALLS it genocide"
Holocaust
literature
racialized
violence
cliche (rawk!)

More:

"Did you hear that it's illegal in, um, Europe, um, in the European Union, to, um, deny that the holocaust ever happened?" (No. I've never heard of such laws. I live on Io.)

"Katrina has become a trendy subject"

"melancholia in the morning in the context of the Iraqi insurgency"

"Do you think that what happened, um, in the wake of, uh, Katrina was more a result of, uh, institutionalized racism or, um, generalized incompetence, um, on the part of the power structure?"

They're not even talking in circles. This is a random walk of less structure and predictability than Brownian motion.

Oh sweet lord Jesus, now they're making tepid fun of Noam Chomsky! *gasp* What bravery!

*scrambles for play button on CD player*