By Channey Williams–
Yep, I’m doing it. I know, I know, you aren’t supposed to write an article about another articles. It’s like using the toilet and then looking down and going “Hay, good job buddy!”. But it’s happening here.
I was originally thinking of writing an article in response to the recent “Crime Issue” to criticize the newspaper’s detachment from traditional Hemingway-style journalism to a more sensationalized stylization of the 50s, until I saw the name printed on the bottom: Simon Isham. Crap, crap, crap! I can’t write a diss about his article; he’s the Editor-in-Chief!
In movies, he’d be the dude in suspenders looking pissed off that his newspaper is running completely smoothly, and when one of us comes up to hand him his coffee and he takes a gulp past his big smoldering cigar, he spits it out and he’s all like, “I ordered an almond milk mocha latte, not a cup of hot piss!” Funny I’m describing it this way to you, seeing as that’s exactly what went down the day of the writing of the infamous “Porn” article.
Editor’s note: not really.
But in all seriousness, let me say that I was glad to read a response to the “Porn” article, and that’s what I’m writing about today. That being said, I must criticize said response.
Firstly don’t shoot the messenger. The job of the newspaper is not to feed into your own comfortable ideologies. If you want that, read the “The New Yorker.”
Editor’s note: I happen to love “The New Yorker.”
Nor is it intended to battle them. Journalism is simply to inform; if anything, the article did more to talk about the society on and around campus than it did to take about the professor.
Your argument essentially boils down to: I am good, I do not mind porn, therefore porn is good. That is a logical argument, and it is a sophisticated argument. In fact, your whole piece reads that way. You have a thesis, your three points, summarize your three points, have a counter argument, and summarize your thesis. It is how we’ve been taught to write since high school.
But it isn’t knowledgeable writing. You say that we, the staff, did nothing more to feed into the fears of the masses, but you don’t go on to criticize the roots of those fears nor the people with those fears.
Are you willing to discourse? Then let’s discourse.
Are you willing to admit that everything you have been taught by society by your mother and your father is wrong? That as a man you are privileged; thus, you are part of the problem. That society, and you, are not as progressive as you thought you were. That even people that agree with you still think that the issues may have been that the professor had the porn on campus and that he was wrong for that and that there is a third side to everything?
Are you willing to say that there are things that you will want to do that people will not be okay with and you will suffer for that and there will be no righteousness? Will you admit your hubris, your ignorance, in search of true knowledge?
Then I implore you to come and write for the newspaper. But be ready to run for coffee; down here, it’s a game of Simon says.
Photo courtesy of mappingwords.com
