4 - The Michigan Daily - Friday, February 3, 2006 OPINION c~1g S ~tbigtuu ailg GEOFF SILVERSTEIN MITR MAt' -'AND FRIENDs DONN M. FRESARD Editor in Chief EMILY BEAM CHRISTOPHER ZBROZEK Editorial Page Editors ASHLEY DINGES Managing Editor EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily. com Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily's editorial board. All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their author. A day in the life of a Daily columnist JESSE SINGAL ,TEM TIHI TIDE don't want to write about the State ofthe Union. I'm giving myself a few days off from thinking about our president, lest I find myself with high blood pressure at 22. Instead, I'm going to take a turn toward the personal. Most people have probably wondered at one point or another: "What's it like to be a Daily columnist?" (Actu- ally, they haven't.) Well, as coincidence would have it, I'm the perfect person to offer an unso- licited answer to this unasked question. And my response may be darker than you'd expect. For we are a strange breed, we columnists. Misunderstood and hated by most of the student population, we work at night, typing feverishly into the wee hours with little hope of our voices ever making an impact. We try, though - God do we try. I'd like to break down the heavy steel barrier between you, the reader, and me, the writer. I'd like to take you into my world. Here's a typical day for me, a Friday on which I have a column coming out. 10:45 a.m. - Wake up with a start. Realize I dropped $30 at Ashley's last night. Why don't they have any beers under $5? Remember that my column is running today; sprint to computer, turn it on and check e-mail to see if anyone's written me a praise-filed e-mail yet. No. Not yet. Back to bed. 11:56 a.m - Wake up again. Check e-mail. Still no comments about my column. Maybe the server's down or something. Back to bed. 12:45 p.m. - Wake up for real this time. E- mail: Still nothing. Strange. Walk to Bruegger's for a morning coffee and bagel. Some people in there are reading The Michigan Daily. Gaze intently at their faces to see if they're reading my column and liking it. Can't tell. Go in for a closer look with one girl who seems to be on the edito- rial page. She looks at me weird. Abort. 1:25p.m. - Walk around the Diag and the two libraries for awhile, checking to see if anyone's reading my column. Can't really tell without get- ting too close. This one girl in the Grad is read- ing the paper and talking on her cell phone at the same time. She laughs! But I can't tell if she's laughing at me or a humorous comment by the person she's talking to. 1:45 p.m. - Check e-mail from Fishbowl. Still nothing other than penis enlarging opportunities. 2:16p.m. - Return home. Check e-mail. No e- mails about my column yet. Google my name to see if the column's been picked up anywhere else. Doesn't look like it, but maybe it takes Google a while to register things like that. 2:49 p.m. - Read latest Maureen Dowd col- umn. Starting to get the hunch that she doesn't like Bush. 3:32 p.m. - Call mom. Tell her about girl laughing at my column or cell phone. She says she has to go to clean the pool. Weird - we don't have a pool, plus it's February. Still good to talk to her, though. 4:00 p.m. - Turn on "The Situation Room." I wish I had a situation room. Wolf Blitzer is so regal. 4:16 p.m. - God, I wish I was Wolf Blitzer. 4:45p.m. - Retreat to basement to put finishing touches on Wolf Blitzer human skin sculpture. 5:12 p.m. - Google my name again. Still no hits. 6:13 p.m. - Begin work on next column. The first step is to come up with the headline, which should be a clever play on a well-known phrase. Can't decide between "Every Child Left Behind" and "UnClear Skies Act." Both are really good. 6:19 p.m. - Settle on "UnPatriot Act." Make mental note to send the finished product to The Daily Show. Maybe they need a new writer or something. 7:54 p.m. - Federal agent arrives to ask me some questions about Blitzer's restraining order against me. I play dumb, hoping he doesn't check the basement. How was I supposed to know restraining orders apply to erotic fan fiction? 8:07p.m. - O'Reilly time! Bill O'Reilly thor- oughly dresses down some jerk from the Ameri- can Civil Liberties Union who thinks Bush shouldn't wiretap without a warrant. American Civil Liberties Union? More like, UnAmerican Civil Liberties Union! 8:14 p.m. - Realize I'm now set for my next two columns. Crack a Fanta to celebrate. Head to bed early; my roommates haven't mentioned any parties to me, so I'm going to assume there aren't any in Ann Arbor tonight. Either way, a successful day. Tomorrow: back to the library to see who's reading the Daily and whether they like me. It's a busy life. Singal can be reached atjsingal@umich.edu. Live from Detroit IMRAN SYED DEMAGO(.1U ES DEBUNKED ou can pick them out from across the room more often than not. They tend to be loud, self-assured - or at least seem- ingly so - and used to being in the right. Their intelligence knows no bounds and neither does their arrogance. Overwhelm- ingly rich and overwhelmingly insolent, they make up a larger proportion of the University and social discourse at large than we'd like to believe. They are the Detroit bashers: normally too busy shop- ping at Bloomingdale's, servicing the Benz or managing the ole portfolio to care, but horribly overworked come February 2006. They say, "Detroit's too cold; we can't have the Super Bowl there" - the frozen tundra of southeast Michigan being all the more deadly inside heated Ford Field. "Detroit's too dirty; no one wants to walk those streets" - never mind the stench of milled paper that report- edly enveloped last year's host, Jacksonville. "Detroit's too run-down; who wants to see gutted buildings and burnt relics" - even if the downtown is now immaculate, and busi- nesses sparkle with the aura of yuppiedom, if you're not too busy scrutinizing. I admit, Detroit is not a world-class city, not even close. Much more needs to be done than building a few expensive lofts down- town or erecting a gaudy welcome arch for visitors coming from the airport. There are many reasons to decry Detroit but, unfor- tunately, few people who criticize the city know what they're talking about. Most have spent little time here - chief among them late-night hack, never-was "comedi- an" Jimmy Kimmel - and others are all too happy to just venture in for a night of gambling or a Red Wings game, praying profusely at the sight of a single boarded building. I don't claim street-cred - I only lived in the city for a few years and, admittedly, in unusually well-kept areas. I do, howev- er, claim to know the city well enough to say that it's the subject mostly of baseless and unwitting bouts of defamation. The saddest part is that these things come up only at the city's brightest moments, like the Pistons championship runs, the Major League Baseball All-Star game and now the Super Bowl. There's really no point in me sitting here and writing about all the reasons why the bashers are wrong. (Every city has a dark side, decay is an unavoidable consequence of industry, Detroit's actually not any worse than parts of Philadelphia, Los Angeles or Boston, there have been noticeable improve- ments over the past decade, etc.) Everyone knows these things to be true. Indeed, the bashing is more a form of entertainment than a display of genuine concern. It's not the outsiders - New Yorkers, Chicagoans etc. - that warrant the great- est ire, because it's not their business to know this city anyway. But the good subur- banites should know better. Be their opu- lence from Troy, Grosse Pointe or Novi, metro Detroiters bear the brunt of this wrath because of their impossibly naive superiority complex. True, Detroit was the fourth-poorest big city in America in 2004, and Oak- land County consistently ranks among the nation's richest, but where did all that wealth come from? The cold, hard truth, my affluent northern neighbors, is that all the wealth this area has built grew out of Detroit. Be it Motown, the sports teams or the auto industry, Detroit made every one of its rich suburbs. But enough down that road. Let's get back to the Super Bowl. The whole nation seems to be holding its collective breath, waiting for good old Detroit to screw something up. But for once, city and state officials are working feverishly to make sure everything goes according to plan. Despise him though I do, I support Kwame 100 percent at the moment. Hate to disap- point all you critics out there, but Detroit won't screw this up. It can't. Detroit is not neutral ground for this game either, and the reason is one Jerome Bet- tis. Born and raised on the west side, "The Bus" is the city's hero at the moment. This is Steeler town for the week, officially declared so by the mayor. Black and yellow jerseys flash everywhere, while the ugly teal ones, strangely enough, are only seen at Starbucks. The Bus has rolled in for what could be his final stop; how fitting that it'll be the Super Bowl in his hometown. Jerome, you carry more than just your 255 lbs. of fat on your sore, aging feet - you also carry the hopes of a harassed city, not to mention its deprived football fans. Like it or not, Detroit is ready. After weeks of warm temperatures, there's enough of a dip to make "Winterfest" a Super Bowl attraction no other city could match. The NFL Experience is under way 4 0 6 VIEWPOINT An open letter to the Daily BY THE STUDENT RELATIONS ADVISORY COMMITTEE The Student Relations Advisory Committee is made up of representative University student organizations, administrative staff and faculty of diverse backgrounds and viewpoints from across campus. The SRAC's mandate is to offer consultation to offices and individuals that provide services to University students, to see that policies affecting students are drafted and administered fairly and to ensure that students' emotional and social wellbeing and academic performance are being safe-guarded within the campus environment. It is in this capacity that we express our disap- pointment and objection to The Michigan Daily's publication of two cartoons on its editorial page last semester (The Bean Archives, 11/28/2006; Fetid Chumbucket, 12/08/2006) that were dis- turbing to a significant number of students, fac- ulty and staff at the University. Our objection, conveyed as constructive criticism, is focused on editorial principle, professional modeling and editorial responsibility for the actual impact of the cartoons' publication. While respecting the editorial freedom of the Michigan Daily staff, we see the Daily, given its status as the student news- paper and its accessibility to the broader public, as bearing a special responsibility. We write in the hope that your editorial policy will be care- fully rethought and improved so as to more effec- tively fulfill your goals. The substance of our objections is as follows: 1) We strongly disagree with your editorial judgment and actual practice, based on what is customary for the mainstream press. While the First Amendment does protect free speech, that does not mean that newspaper editors are obli- teenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Yet the cartoons you chose to publish can be con- strued as targeting specific groups for ridicule, thereby encouraging a social atmosphere that translates for many into a "racially hostile" learn- ing environment, as defined by the U.S. Depart- ment of Education Office for Civil Rights. In our view, the targeted caricature of specific student "types" and of an institutional policy favor- ing diversity constitutes a potential violation of Title VI of the Federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, inspired by the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects individuals from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion and sex. It is to be expected that the Daily, the main student newspaper at a major public university, would uphold the tenets of federal and state law and recommended precepts. 3) After witnessing the campus reaction to the publication of the first cartoon on Nov. 28, you chose to publish an equally inflammatory car- toon on Dec. 8th, which carried the controversy beyond the parameters of the campus to the local WDIV-TV Channel 4 evening and late-evening news on that same day, implying to those watch- ing within the broadcast area that this sort of message is tacitly endorsed and disseminated by our most widely read campus newspaper. While we appreciate the Daily's commitment to upholding the First Amendment, that does not mean it should not develop editorial standards of publication. On the contrary, we would hope that the Daily, which has expressed open support for the University's proactive efforts to attract, retain and build a diverse campus community, would attempt to cast its editorial net as broadly as pos- sible so that a wide range of viewpoints on pre- cisely the issue of diversity could be expressed. It is easy to hide behind the First Amendment, Editorial Board Members: Amy Anspach, Andrew Bielak, Reggie Brown, Kevin Bunkley, Gabrielle D'Angelo, Whitney Dibo, Milly Dick, Sara Eber, Jesse Forester, Mara Gay, Jared Goldberg, Ashwin Jagannathan, Mark Kuehn, Will Kerridge, Frank Manley, Kirsty McNa- mara, Rajiv Prabhakar, Matt Rose, Katherine Seid, Brian Slade, Ben Taylor, Jessica Teng. I