Unpublished Letters

This is my letter to the college republicans referenced below. Game over.

To the Editor:

If I may be published in my own words, without any convenient omissions or clever editing?

Thanks for the exposure. I had no idea anyone would ever take the time to read anything I wrote--I suppose all academics have a confidence problem to some degree--but you have convinced me that I am, in fact, a provocative and effective writer. Look how much time and effort has gone into the attempt by your magazine to somehow make me look bad (though I must tell you, the picture of me in the March issue is one of the best I've seen. What was the thinking there? Oh but I am a handsome devil--isn't evil always seductive?).

You seem, to put it mildly, a bit confused about how to hurt a person. Obviously, you have not been studying the right-wing playbook as closely as you ought, or you would know the first rule of conservative "thought": attack, attack, attack, and never, ever admit to a mistake. Or two. Or thousands, in the case of Mr. Bush's desert adventure.

But in your case, you had me dead to rights. Not only did you publish a rant of mine under the heading of a "letter to the editor," but you caught me using your masthead to cleverly question your motives (I do not, however, have control over Blogger, so when site content mysteriously disappears, it's usually our good friends who run the internets). But then, inexplicably, you admitted (in print!) in last month's issue that you stole my writing off my blog and that I have never contacted the Centurion. D'oh! You suggest by this behavior that you are willing to scour the internets in search of any usable material, then chop it up and present it in a false light.

Very serious problem of ethics, that. To borrow from my own blog (and why not? everyone else is), www.dumbocracy.blogspot.com: "Isn't ethics the sort of thing the Right lectures US about?!?"

And while we're on the subject, it seems a bit disingenuous of the Centurion and its editors to decry the one institution that gives them a place to voice their incredibly shallow complaints: the modern, liberal university. As I have said before, in much more stark terms, if you are such an enemy of the state, of taxation, and of government oversight, then begin registering your opposition by getting the hell out of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Now of course, you'll call me an elitist and claim that I am trying to oppress you and so on, and so on.

You're absolutely right. I am a smug guy, mostly because I know more than you. But I wasn't born that way--I had to work pretty damn hard at it. Anybody could do what I do, but most don't try. It's easier, in the final accounting, to flip on Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and just accept that stupidity is a convenient condition with which to live. I do want to oppress such behavior, and I will employ very harsh means to do so. Nothing along the lines of conservative darling and self-hater Michelle Malkin's bizarre pleas for new internment camps, but certainly a serious verbal thrashing is in order for anyone who cannot be bothered to think.

Do we really want to live the Rovian nightmare, where those who have mastered politics but not philosophy are allowed to run things? Do we really want to sell Americans as short as the Republicans would like, along that new/old false dichotomy of "red state-bad, blue state-good"? I think not. And I, for one, therefore have no further use for the Rutgers Centurion.

--Josh Fennell