Regarding Brian Chaitoff’s Nov. 12 letter, ‘Stop the Liberal Bias’ (pg. 6):
In the process, I will attempt to bring to light a bit of what is wrong with American politics, media and academia in these frightful times.
Having not been privy to any of Mr. Chaitoff’s prior letters, I can only hope that their criticism was more substantive and grounded than that of his latest diatribe. And yet, many readers, myself included, had a sort of Pavlovian response after reading these six paragraphs of uncritical muck that included nodding one’s head in agreement or guffawing something like ‘darn that Free Press!’ This is because Mr. Chaitoff, perhaps unwittingly, has become a master of the Grand Keywords of Idiocy.
These turds of the American lexicon ‘Liberal,’ ‘Terrorist,’ ‘Clinton-ist,’ among others are lobbed about like fragmentation grenades, destroying good names, free thought and political campaigns in the name of popular sentiment. Let Ol’ Dubya label a group, be they Chechens or Choctaw Indians, supporters of terrorism, and our immediate response is to fire up the tanks and ‘Give ‘Em Hell!’ If Aristotle himself dared to be a guest on the O’Reilly Factor, he no doubt would be dismissed as a sniveling liberal and terrorist sympathizer and, like the good McCarthyists we have become, we’d spear him to death with American flags and move on to Saddam. Without consideration, debate, or sufficient criticism, Americans as a culture are quick to take these ‘fighting words’ at face-value, using them as justification for actions and inactions that might otherwise be condemned as brutal, repressive or just plain stupid. See our tacit approval of the slaughter of Muslim ‘terrorists’ in Southern China, the extent to which civil liberties have been restricted post-9/11 or the utter lack of backbone on the part of congressional Democrats on the Iraq question for fear of being labeled ‘soft on terrorism,’ as examples of the persuasive power of these often vacuous and highly misunderstood words.
Chaitoff not so skillfully employs the same linguistic tactics as the Bush-Cheney junta and good Mr. O’Reilly: 1. very little, if any, reason or substantiated criticism, 2. lots of emotion and 3. at least six charges of ‘Liberal!’ and one ‘Socialist!’ per 400 words.
He calls the Free Press ‘a frivolous volition that lures the homosexuals, feminists and other left-wing crowds.’ Pardon me if you could not hear my shocked and appalled gasp at these truly heinous charges. Further, can a college newspaper really ‘lure’ anyone? Who are they, NAMBLA? And since Mr. Chaitoff, a conservative, seems to be a more-than-avid reader, either he was enticed by this same Daily Jezebel or, more reasonably, the Free Press is attracting a wider variety of readers and commentators than Chaitoff gives them credit for.
He goes on to call the Free Press ‘anti-American’ without even a modicum of evidence. I’m not buying it. It is simply too hard for me to make the discursive leap that would connect a paper that regularly reports on Student Union elections and guest policy changes to al-Qaeda and bin Laden.
Chaitoff, Bush and the rest of the gang are doing their best to reduce the American public to Cro-Magnon lemmings who perform the same sort of knee-jerk word associations that they do: terrorism = bad, liberal = bad, war = good. Folks, don’t buy it. Terrorism is bad when we consider 9/11, but are all the groups we have labeled terrorists truly so, or could they be unfortunate victims of someone’s (cough, Israel, China) political agenda? Think for yourselves. Don’t let these pusillanimous pundits do it for you. Perhaps you will find that the United States should force regime change in Iraq. Maybe, after a detailed examination of the evidence, you’ll determine that the Free Press really is a part of a secret Sandinista plot to take over the word. But don’t be like Chaitoff, swallowing propaganda and swallowing words whole before you chew and then spewing them back out. The future of our country depends on it. However, don’t fault him either, because someone had to influence his simplicity … blame the School of Management.
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