Wednesday, April 9, 2003

NAVELGAZING ACROSS MASSACHUSETTS: Today, the Harvard Crimson wonders: why did so many people crash our website to look at a picture of a giant snow phallus?

Do you know it took them 5400+ words to write this story?

I'll sum it up in five words:
Giant Snow Penises Are Funny.

Moreover, people like seeing pictures of humping snowmen. Yeah, go ahead, click on this picture of a "snowjob" while you're at it. You know you want to.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Bay State (well, not the ass end beyond the edge of civilization, but far enough west), my alma mater seems to be all in a tizzy because of a front page piece in Saturday's New York Times that reported on the divide between faculty and students on The War. In short, wrote Karen Zernike, while faculty members are actively protesting, Amherst students are mostly apathetic, and many support the war.

Well, gosh, golly, gee, you'd have thought that they had decided to put on the play Caligula in a campus religious space again or something, because the NYT piece has prompted a flood of responses in this week's student newspaper: one news article, three letters to the editor and a staff editorial quibbling about the coverage -- all this in a week when the College named a new President.

Yes, instead of welcoming Tony Marx, here's what an editorial board on which I once sat has to say:
Finally, Zernike doesn’t understand the source of the perceived silence of students. This war is only a few weeks old and we are a generation of students who are unfamiliar with a protest culture. We have been taught to think through our views before proclaiming them loudly to the world, and thinking about the war is what many of us are still doing.

Yeah, because when hundreds of us were organizing and marching against Gulf War I back in January 1991 (yes, even before it started), or taking over campus buildings in protest of the College's lack of progress on affirmative action issues, or mobilizing to block the use of student funds to support anti-Semitic speakers both on- and off-campus, well, those were the 1990s, and this is a whole new generation.

(Which doesn't explain the thousands of college students organized and protesting at other campuses, but like the viewbook says, This Is Amherst.)

By the time these students are done thinking about the war, it'll be over.

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