4 - The Michigan Daily - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 OPINION 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 opinion. michigandaily.com tothedaily@michigandaily.com EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other articles, letters and cartoons do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE This guy would be better off if he did settle a few scores. He's too easy on people." - Former Clinton advisor Douglas Sosnik, commenting on the former president's demeanor, as reported yesterday by The New York Times. r .t .,,,.. a ! ; 4 1 ; ,. ' i ' l I , ,!. . ,, ; ; . ! I , Ix u , { , ,I, SAM BUTLER THE SOAPBOX The pervasive 3 'I I popularity of Chappelle's idiosyncratic verbal paroxysms testifies to the show's potent influence on our popular culture. It works in a postmodern discourse that simultaneously reflects and defies our society's cosmopolitan conventions. Bitch! 9 4.,j BN Atlanta boy ARI PAUL I FOUGHT THE LAW "It's been emotional." - Vinnie Jones, "Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels" he other day, my friend Paul beck- oned me over as he was standing on the Diag, arguing politics with a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. Paul needed backup to take on the ideologue. It was use- less. The kid had been brainwashed. Paul and I walked away. Leftist ideologues make me sad because I know that people's dogmatic beliefs stem from them dealing with their own personal issues, thus compromising the virtues of their cause and stifling their personal growth. How do I know? I've been there. It all started with a roller-coaster ride of ele- mentary education, from an all-white suburban school, to an all-black under-funded school, to a progressive school (where I would graduate from high school) housed in the old Coca-Cola mansions along Atlanta's Ponce de Leon Avenue. With an intellectual, left-leaning Jew- ish family upbringing, this sense of an enlight- ened, almost religious duty to seek social justice fused with my own association with the under- dog (I was never very popular in school) led me to revolt. It all started in eighth grade, where I, along with a band of others like me, rebelled against speech codes. We wore black arm bands and the teachers hated us. That made me happy. Then along came high school. Geeky, awk- ward and angry, I didn't really know how to handle myself. I detested my suburban home life, but I felt intimidated by my urban and sophisticated educational surroundings. I was mediocre at sports, I wasn't an A student and I was no good at music. In a class of only 90 kids, I needed to make a name for myself. So I became the angry communist kid. Rid- ing in my car, blasting Minor Threat, wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt and screaming at every available moment about NAFTA and class conflict. Ah-ha, now people knew who I was. They knew I was the angry kid, alienated by the world they created. My headmaster recalled an old adage to me on my graduation, saying, "If a man was not a socialist by 20, he didn't have a heart, and if he was still a socialist by 40, he didn't have a head." I've abandoned the simplicity of ideolo- gy, understanding that a finite answer isn't a solution to anything. So after high school and years of causing trouble in Ann Arbor, do I just leave it all behind? I've seen AIDS patients kicked out of their homes. I've seen a girl pepper-sprayed by cops for doing nothing and I've seen a man beaten by cops for simply wearing a dress, both during nonviolent protests in New York. I've over- heard American soldiers talk about how eager they were to take on some "Arab motherfuck- ers." I've heard accounts by nuns doing mis- sion work in South America of terrorism meted out by the School of the Americas, located less than two hours from my parent's home. I've seen Israeli war veterans decried as enemies of the Jews by college Zionists because they disagreed with Israel's current aggressive foreign policy. I've been called a "dirty Jew" by a right-wing Christian extremist and a "self-hating" Jew by a right-wing Jewish extremist. I've met a journalist who received a rifle butt to the head for exposing U.S.-spon- sored war crimes in East Timor. I've seen mothers outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, demanding to know what the government has done with the bodies of their "disappeared" sons. How on Earth can I forget about these things? People want easy, solid answers. Ideology gives one a sense of false comfort, and that is what destroys people and weakens movements. While fighting for justice, one must always be personally invested, but using social justice as a cure-all for one's own purposes hurts us all. I've seen it all over this campus, and elsewhere, and it is what creates factionalism and infight- ing. So what I hope for the next generation of do-gooders is to grow beyond this. My headmaster also added that the adage, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, was a mis- take. If you use your head and your heart, he said, you can be whatever you want at 40. Thus I keep fighting for justice, and struggle to learn more about how to do so. So that's the Ari Paul story, and that's my last public dispatch to the good people of this university. A big thanks to the Family Paul, the Edgewood Avenue punks and skins, everyone who has-sent me hate mail, SOLE, Daily scrib- blers past and present and the Lassiterian milieu for my stint as a public agitator. Your contributions to me have been invaluable, and I probably wouldn't have survived high school and college without them. Paul can be reached at aspaul@umich.edu. 0 The sky is falling DANIEL ADAMS SP1HTTNG INTO THE' WIND *I From the start, the anti-war crowd has questioned the valid- ity of the evidence that was used to rally support for fighting a war in Iraq. They questioned the nature of the Iraqi threat. They were skeptical of the existence of Iraqi WMDs. And they were reluctant to believe, as the Bush adminis- tration did, that the Iraqi people would welcome coalition troops with open arms. And history has vindicated them: Iraq's WMD programs have yet to be found, and, as evidenced by the recent spat of anti-U.S. vio- lence, a number of Iraqis strongly oppose a con- tinued U.S. presence in the region. With the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq, and mounting criticism at home, the Bush Adminis- tration is now facing a two-front war: a war abroad against the Iraqi intifada and a war at home against a growing number of those opposed to the war. Against the former, the pres- ident has at his disposal the finest army in the world. Against the latter, the president has a weapon no less formidable: intimidation. The hawks have shifted their approach from one of smug self-righteousness to thuggish name-calling. In a column published on April 7, William Safire of The New York Times threw everything but the kitchen sink at Bush's critics, calling them "the apostles of retreat," "coulda- woulda-shoulda crowd" and the "quaking quag- mirists." David Brooks, in another Times col- umn April 10, labeled prominent war critics Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd "Chicken Littles." Sure, the sky isn't falling, but people are dying - in numbers not seen since the end of hostilities last May. So maybe the "quaking quagmirists" really aren't too far off the mark? Surely we can all admit, if only to ourselves, that things aren't going exactly as planned. At the cost of hun- dreds of coalition lives, thousands of civilian casualties and billions of badly needed dollars, we're still miles away from self-governance in Iraq. Our timetable is in jeopardy. We still have no WMDs. And with Spain's withdrawal, its clear that the glue that is holding together our "coalition of the willing" isn't quite as strong as we had hoped. To top it off, we've actually managed to get two opposing religious factions, the Sunnis and Shiites, to hate us slightly more than they hate each other. In a supreme act of idiocy, two weeks ago acting U.S. administrator Paul Bre- mer closed down the Al-Hawza al-Natiqa news- paper, citing the paper's role in "encouraging violence against the Coalition Forces and the Coalition Provisional Authority." By all accounts, he had not prepared for the response that followed, which was, ironically: Anti-American violence. Give this man a fruit cup. U.S. Commander Gen. John Abizaid acknowledged yesterday that he'd need another two combat brigades to quell the violence in Iraqi cities. He also admitted that the U.S.- trained Iraqi security forces - which are desig- nated to take over most civil defense functions when coalition forces leave in June - have been a "great disappointment." Searching for answers, I went ahead and looked up the definition - quag-mire: a dif- ficult, precarious or entrapping position. Funny, that doesn't sound all that dissimilar from our current situation. Difficult? Check. Precarious? Check. Entrapping? Double check. Sure, Safire and Brooks would proba- bly disagree. For them, the renewed fighting in Iraq is a bump in the road - a test of wills. But for coalition forces, 70 of whom died in last week's fighting, parts of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities have erupted into full- scale insurgency. This is an age-old argument: Either you are with us, and are a person of conviction, or you are against us, and are something only slightly better than a terrorist - a coward. This is an argument, made by the old elites, to get the young and impressionable to fight and support their war. This is an argument made by a hawk, after all the other justifications for war have melted away. It is as disingenuous as it is dan- gerous, and I'm just not buying. Adams can be reached at dnadams@umich.edu. LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Syed goes too far in his criticism of Bush, America TO THE DAILY: For almost four semesters now, I have been constantly bombarded with left-wing propaganda from local residents, students and even teachers. As a strong advocate of freedom of speech, I have chosen to not let the often-unproven attacks get to me. How- ever, the upcoming election has turned healthy protests into full-fledged destruction and radicalism. It has now become a chal- lenge for me to walk to class without seeing sidewalks vandalized with anti-Bush graffiti or windows displaying mug shots of Osama bin Laden with Bush's face superimposed over the terrorist's head. With the inappropri- cisms in order to make an argument. Living in a country so wonderfully diverse, I am very offended when I see people like Syed proudly welcomed into this country with open arms who then have the audacity to address our president by his first name out of disrespect, falsely accuse him of having "cocaine-use problems" and ridicule a large portion of the country's citizens with belit- tling criticisms. I think Syed owes the readers, as well as the country, an apology. BRETT LYON LSA sophomore Argument in support of the RIAA flawed America are by no means unanimously in favor of the RIAA's legal posturing. 3) In attacking its target market (music lovers) so aggressively, it is alienating poten- tial customers while failing to stop the file- sharing. Sutphen does not dispute any of this, instead reiterating the tired industry claim that sales are down 20 percent over the past few years and implying that file-sharing is to blame for this. It seems amazing that the RIAA could still not get it. If you had put the time, money and effort into developing attractive legal alternatives to Nap- ster and the other early sharing networks, you could have cashed in on the boom instead of making headlines for suing 71-year-old grandfa- thers or 12-year-old children. The quick success of Apple's iTunes could have happened years ago if the industry had had any interest in creat- ing an online offering that was easy to use, rea- *.... w r .r.n A n aPranne,.,nrc r.-nl atP ad F 34 4y, 4 + r , t , 34 + R ar vim.. ..... .. ...