I was going to stay away from politics for the rest of my time here at The Student so I could get out of here without getting gang-beaten at a bar by a pride of drunken College Republicans (the technical term for more than one).
However, now I have to come out of my self-imposed retirement to complain about a certain line of speakers who are coming to campus to spread their "wisdom" and "facts" and "seed." (That last one refers to the activities of John Ashcroft in his hotel room while watching Bible-themed pornography).
It's bad enough that the commencement speaker is Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. I don't think Miami could have found a less relevant or interesting political figure short of exhuming Gerald Ford's undersecretary of labor and propping him up on stage with a two-by-four and a pine scented car deodorizer stuffed in his breast pocket to stifle the smell of decomposition. Noonan's books about Reagan and the pope have all the fascination of reading a tax form, only in this case the author of the form has decided to gush shamelessly over the tax code to the point where it makes you nauseously certain that the author thinks the tax code's urine tastes like lemonade.
Honestly, at least Miami could have gone with a psycho-hoe beast like Ann Coulter, who at least has the power of her utterly cruel and idiotic opinions. Noonan's unashamed fawning over her subjects coupled with her complete historical ignorance of the most troubling questions of their legacies is so unbearably vapid it's like listening to a seventh grade girl telling her friends why her boyfriend is so great.
Of course, this week we have that power tool of the Christian right, John Ashcroft. Now, I can't be completely down on Ashcroft because I did name my drug paraphernalia after him, but I can't help but question the logic of the College Neoconservatives in bringing to campus this relic of the first Bush term. Basically, this man is already little more than a smudge below a footnote in history - an aggressively ineffective ideologue whose humble, grandfatherly demeanor could just barely disguise the raging, foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue beneath.
We're talking about an attorney general who presided over the greatest set of infringements on the civil rights of Americans since the FBI undertook the task of wire-tapping such dangerous radicals as Martin Luther King Jr. We're talking about a man who had no problem with trampling the rights of Arabs and Arab-Americans in the "war on terror" yet strongly opposed a law that would have made it harder for suspected terrorists to buy firearms because it clashed with his unabashed worship of the Second Amendment.
When he speaks in Hall Auditorium Tuesday about "leadership," I'm assuming he'll be talking in-depth about how to successfully run a hegemonic world power into the ground while still impressing the ladies at the rotary club with his singing talents.
As for Noonan, the only thing I can think to do in protest of her sure-to-have-the-intellectual-heft-of-the-graffiti-at-Mac-n-Joes commencement speech (there's a remark above the urinal that says "Steve Markley performs oral sex on men," only not stated that elegantly) is to write on my cap, her own prophetic words of George W. Bush in a column from 2000. Bush, she wrote, "seems transparently a good person, a genuine fellow who isn't hidden or crafty or sneaky or mean, a person of appropriate modesty."
Most of us can't get insight into a person like that without a high-powered telescope embedded firmly in his or her colon.
