Responding to an announcement that UC Berkeley will be hosting a conference tittled “Deconstructing Islamaphobia,” the Counterterrorism Blog’s Jeffrey Breinholt works in a reference to the Brady Bunch to illustrate how the academic process of deconstruction works and why it might not be an effective tool for conference attendees:

What the conference organizers might not have realized is that the goal of deconstruction is to demolish texts and render them worthless. What if the texts are put forward as examples of Islamaphobia?

Presumably, deconstruction would show that Islamaphobia does not really exist. This would leave some very disappointed Muslim-American activists.

Here’s my attempt at deconstruction, to show how it is done. Remember the Brady Bunch? What did we know about them? It was a story about a man named Brady, who was busy with three boys of his own. They were four men, living altogether, yet they were all alone.

Let’s look at the text. How can one be living with three other people, yet be all alone? That makes the Brady Bunch theme song internally inconsistent. There are two possibilities: either the Brady Bunch does not exist, since its theme song yields a philiosophical inconsistency, or, in the Brady men’s narrative, they would never to considered whole unless there were females (woMen) in the house to clean up after them. If the latter, than the Brady Bunch creators believed that men must be entitled to enslave females (woMen). Thank Heavenly Mother we have moved well beyond the paternalistic, sexist construct in postmodern America.

Either possibility renders the Brady Bunch worthless as an art form. In fact, it might as well not exist as a phenomenon. Those reruns you still see? The television screen might as well be a test pattern.