It is not often that I find myself enjoying the writing in The Argus. With no offense intended for the less inspired journalists of our lovely school newspaper (at one point, myself included), I have found myself quite drawn to Mytheos Holt’s clever, cynical writing which inspires in me laughter (who else has dared to call Roth a “Choo Choo train?”) and provoked some deep thought (unlike my usual haze on Sunday mornings). Yet, it bereaves me to admit how disappointed I am in this budding journalist of ours. The February 26 publication of The Argus, which happened to be sitting on my kitchen table this Easter Sunday, offered two wonderful examples of Holt’s inspired writing that evoke not inspiration in its readers, but rather, sedation.
Holt writes in his Wespeak, “The immoral war on dissent,” (Feb. 26, vol. CXLIII, no. 32) that, “Stavis might fancy herself capable of shoving all dissent under the showerhead of scorn, but not all of us will inhale her rhetorical Zyklon B without a fight.” He was referring to her support of SEWI’s divestment advocacy, Holt feeling that it is wrong to blame the “salesmen” of war and impossible to end “the causes of war.” Certainly, it is hard to avoid feeling disillusionment about the cycles of war when I too was born into the generation who had their emerging of political awareness coincide with 9/11. Holt writes, “War and weapons existed prior to the existence of Raytheon and General Dynamics, and people will always find some way to hurt and kill each other.” Can anyone deny this fact?
This past weekend, I attended a measly protest outside of the General Dynamics outpost in Burlington, VT. I was visiting a friend who enjoys pounding on makeshift drums at 6:30 in the morning, in the cold rain of springtime Vermont, and shouting not-quite-clever rhymes about cluster bombs. I approached the protest, three hours late, and stopped to chat with the three policemen monitoring the situation.
“How’s the protest going?” I asked.
“It’s going,” one answered.
“Have you been here the whole time?”
“Well, since seven,” he answered.
Feeling a sort of camaraderie emerging, I asked, “Well, why aren’t you pounding a drum and singing?”
“They haven’t convinced me yet,” he said.
By the time I left an hour later, he still seemed unimpressed. I suppose this is where “radicals” fall short; to have the gumption to change the world one must see in black and white, or as Holt said, like a “Disney film.” This loss of complexity, though, ultimately isolates them from the rest of us who get lost in the grays of the world; who, like the policeman, just do a job to pay the rent.
Does this radical tunnel vision warrant Holt’s berating Wespeak against Stavis and her “Stalinist rhetoric?” Is it so wrong to attempt change and improvement? Holt further supports his argument against SEWI by reverting to a commonly used argument. He writes: “Raytheon and General Dynamics do not shoot off the cluster bombs themselves. They sell them to people who retain those weapons in case they need to use them.” Holt would have us believe that the salesman (never mind the saleswoman) is a simple man caught in the net of capitalism, exempt from all social responsibility. Yet, weren’t the words of Nazi propagandists more powerful than the gas chambers themselves? Kurt Vonnegut (in “Mother Night”) seemed to believe so — and his diction is beautiful.
In my lowly opinion, salesmen of words and/or cluster bombs are more responsible than the camouflage-clad individuals launching said weapons. My “rhetorical Zyklon B” should, ethically, be aimed at those salesmen who use their slippery syntax to provoke inaction. As an ex-Argus journalist, I beg of you, Mytheos Holt, please use your specialty of criticism for something nobler than a SEWI member with poor writing skills and a science hall you have probably failed to enter. Stop making “extraordinary claims” for the student body. I am that “certain budding scientist” you refer to in your Feb. 26th column (“Mytheology: Don’t tear down these walls!” Feb. 26, vol. CXLIII, no. 32), but I don’t care about the “venerable history” (i.e. white male Methodists killing rats) aspect of Shanklin. I beg of you, write about something truly “immoral” or at least something we could have a proper debate about.
As for divestment, you were right in suggesting that causes of war are forever replenished, no matter how many we engage. Beating drums outside of General Dynamics only disrupts morning cups of coffee, but divesting, even with such a small investor as Wesleyan, may actually provoke notice.
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