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Friday, January 07, 2005
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SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME
[for background, see UD, 10/30/04] When you walk into the bright soaring lobby of GW University’s just-redesigned student center, you encounter huge posters of the four Crossfire heavies (um, Tucker Carlson? … that Clinton operative … two others guys … UD doesn’t really know any of their names because she doesn’t watch television). Their heads and bodies are immense, and they are posed in a tight semi-circle, and they are glaring down right at you … their big dark eyes are drilling into you with contempt and omniscience…. Directly, menacingly, condescendingly they glare as you tiptoe by on your way to the Starbucks for your little latte …. And you try not to look, but the posters are enormous and compelling, and when you do look - because you have to, because they draw you in! - you feel so small, so … inoperative, and you hate that feeling… This self-hatred feels even worse when you realize that you are supposed to greet these Pharaonic lobby monuments with excitement and gratitude. Of all the venues their tv show could have chosen, it chose GW; of all of the audiences it could have chosen, it chose GW students… UD’s commitment to this weblog is such that she has even vaguely, intermittently, without much conviction, thought about going to one of the Crossfire shows and blogging about it. But now she learns that this is not to be, for the show is over, as the new boss at whatever channel (CNN?) transmits it explains: The high-volume negativity of Fox-style journalism is out the window; the theme for 2005 is "respecting the audience," as Klein makes clear later in the same interview: ''I doubt when the president sits down with his advisers they scream at him to bring him up-to-date on all of the issues." Zut alors. It turns out that, all this time, the show has not been respecting its audience, ie., UD’s students. What a double standard. Every semester GW’s faculty distributes multiple course evaluation forms on which students are repeatedly asked to certify that we have respected them … even as the same university glorifies as gods a quadrumvirate which has been wiping its collective ass with our undergraduates! Good riddance. |