Last night’s report about Ward Churchill's court “victory” has yielded a string of comments here on Dissent the Blog that are making me blue.First, Anon suggested that Churchill is the paradigm of a “putz.” That’s a Yiddish word.
Next time, Anon, at least try to be clever. Calling a guy a “penis” just doesn’t make it.
Then "Lynn" wrote in to suggest that Churchill oughta go to Supercuts to trim his “mop.”
Lynn gets points for using “mop.” But then, rhetorically speaking, she dives into ugly muck, ending with: “When he was a kid I know Ward's daddy didn't beat his ass enough.”
Next, Anon 2.0 judges the Ward Churchill matter to be “complex and interesting,” which is promising. The poverty of Lynn’s comment inspires 2.0 to say: “Those folks can really think, can't they?”
I don't know whether to admire or condemn such indirectness.
Next comes “Mackmarine,” who asserts that Churchill is “a rigid, unyielding, unsightly, and worthless piece of coprolite.”
He had me until the last word. Coprolite?
Insult rule #1: if you diss a guy by calling him a coprolite, be sure that people know what a coprolite is. For all that any of us knows, coprolite is some kind of copper cookware.
Then somebody—Anon 2.1—writes in simply: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I guess Anon 2.1 doesn’t own a dictionary.
That’s when I felt the need to step in. I said, “Could we raise the level of discourse here folks?” It won’t do, I said, simply to call somebody, even Mr. Churchill, “a piece of fossilized excrement” (i.e., a coprolite, which isn't cookware after all).
I put on my Educator Hat. I suggested that there are two distinct issues here:
(1) Did Churchill's dismissal occur ultimately because of his not-ready-for-prime-time views? (Probably--and appallingly)
(2) Is Churchill a good/reliable scholar/thinker? (It would seem not.)
OK, I said. Feel free to opine about these issues. But please offer opinions that go like this:
REASON => POSITION
Not,
SNEER, WHOOP, RASPBERRY then EXCLAMATION POINT
Have you noticed? Right-wingers aren’t nearly as fun as they used to be. They don’t even know that their raspberries and sneerings are only funny among the loutery. What do they hope to gain by depositing their rude bleatings here?
Tell me that!
