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if you take seriously what the writer or the edito said about the piece, it was a simple act of agitprop.
the piece was 4 words long.
the idea of it was to challenge complacency about freedom of speech.
that's all fine--you play the agitprop game, you accept what follows from is, ESPECIALLY if what follows is an exact demonstration of the extent of the problem the agitprop is designed to point out.
so i do think there are idiots involved here, but those idiots are not the editorial staff of the paper: the trail of idiocy begins with the (conservative? coors?) advertiser(s) who "pulled adverts", moves through the public statements of the paper's business manager and then percolates outward to include the whole of conservative "harumph harumph" responses and extends to a number of posts within this thread.
so there are idiots involved here, yes. i just think people are mistaken in who the idiots are.
to wit:
1. the argument that there is some "right" not to hear the word fuck would seem more coherently directed at the major-media shitstorm than at the edito in the csu student newspaper. so blame the conservative set for this one, jazz: the conservative reaction, the taking of the bait. if there is a structuring moment of stupidity in this sea of it, that moment is the conservative responses. *they* are the asshats here. and in terms of getting this lint national exposure, *they*--and not the student who wrote all 4 of those words--are the problem.
so your "right" no to hear the word fuck has been violated by the people who are all "MY GOD! THOSE KIDS USED THE WORD FUCK."
if they had not reacted, you wouldn't know about this trivial story.
so your "right" would not have been violated.
2. crompsin keeps posting stuff that trivialize the notion of freedom of speech and then proceed to claim that referencing freedom of speech in this case is accidental--but that's ridiculous--the point of each of the 4 words was freedom of speech. this is about freedom of speech. that you think the relation strange has to do with you, not the situation.
3. so i dont agree with baraka guru: satire isnt dead. it turns out that satire is not only alive and well, even in kinda disappointingly crude form--but the american right has once again demonstrated that it is a sitting duck for satire because even when you say "THIS IS SATIRE" or "THIS IS A POLITICAL ACTION DIRECTED AT COMPLACENCY REGARDING FREEDOM OF SPEECH" they dont get it. or maybe conservatives only understand satire when it is directed at populations which are marginal, powerless or nearly so--you know, the pj o'rourke school of smug travel writing "i go around the world and all i see are wogs"...or the fine, sophisticated ouevre of ann coulter.....that kinda thing.
what would killl satire is indifference.
with a population of hyper-sensitive control-freak reactionaries out there, satire is alive and well.
if there's a problem with it, that problem is that satire is too easy.
4. to make separations: seaver's positions here seem to me much more thought out than the retro-sponses to the edito itself.
but basically, i am saying the same thing as mojo and shakran, but with a turn insofar as the arguments over where the vacantness lay.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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