An old friend weighs in.

So it is not unexpected that Commentator staff members would turn to the First Amendment instead of taking responsibility for their privilege. And as the microcosmic vanguard for white, patriarchal America on campus, the law fully supports the publication’s position. Of course, “feelings” aren’t considered within a system of law that prides itself on supposed “rationality” and “objectivity.”

No, they “aren’t”. And “microcosmic vanguard for white, patriarchal America”? If this is how people are reading the mission statement, no wonder there’s been all this confusion.

After all, if we were to consider feelings in our decision-making process, how it feels to have your privacy invaded might count.

I detect a note of petulance in this piece: nobody cared when we said mean things (or, as he would put it, engaged in “white, heterosexist journalism”) about Shakra, because he’s white, heterosexual, and obvious comedy gold. He also apparently considers his newspaper column to be some kind of personal territorial bubble, within which he is protected from criticism; I see no other way of interpreting his claims of privacy invasion. Also, when he exhorts us to

look beyond this [conservative/liberal] spectrum, and even the rules themselves, to take responsibility for creating a safer campus and a more tolerant community

the irony is so thick you can float pennies on top of it.

Either way, it’s good to see he’s still rolling along. For what it’s worth, I stand by what I said here:

I am still convinced that Shakra is the quintessential student columnist. His writing is a closed system upon which the outside world barely impinges – and when it does, it does so in unpredictable ways, as when he discovers that he has a literature paper overdue. He represents the very worst tendencies in all of our writing – towards grandiloquence, obfuscation, melodrama, narcissism, and cant – to such an extent that it would not surprise me to learn that the whole thing has been a spoof. But even if it is, it has been a valuable one. Believe me, folks, there’s a little Aaron Shakra in all of us.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 11th, 2005 at 11:43 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.