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Monday, May 23, 2005
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IN OTHER GRADUATION CEREMONY NEWS… …it was tough going there for awhile, but Rudolph Giuliani managed to climb the speaker’s platform at Middlebury College yesterday and give a commencement speech to the graduating seniors. Quotation-mark mad Albert “Ben” Gore***, a graduating senior, came at Giuliani hard last March in a campus newspaper opinion piece denouncing the “white elites of the Northeast,” the “people that call the shots here, the Trustees,” the “white billionaire New Yorkers” who forced upon students their choice of “an authoritarian, a racist and shill for a president that many, if not most, students here find morally reprehensible.” He called for Giuliani to be disinvited. The Middlebury College student newspaper editors accompanied Gore’s comment that “Before Sept. 11 Rudolph Giuliani was a controversial politician, and to many outside the elite class, he was coming to be considered a fascist” with a photograph showing Giuliani as Hitler. Although this choice of photo was editorially appropriate given the views expressed in the piece, the newspaper editor came to regret having chosen it, and resigned. Then the committee which had decided upon Giuliani noted that Giuliani’s name was submitted not by a billionaire junta but “by members of this year’s graduating class. …It was students who submitted his name to the committee.” And a Middlebury student named Andrew Carnabuci, a Democrat, pointed out that “Giuliani’s homeless policy,” singled out by Gore as a cornerstone of his tyranny, “”implemented the suggestions of a 1990 report by Democrat Andrew Cuomo, who at that point was working for a homeless advocacy group.” But so what? Gore points out that much of the drop in crime for which Giuliani is credited was really about “the overall drop in the use of crack cocaine during the 1990’s.” Ah, but why did that happen? Wasn’t it in part because of certain high-profile drug arrests in the late ‘eighties, like that of cocaine dealer John Zaccaro, Jr., son of Geraldine Ferraro and Middlebury College student? As reported by the popular comedy show Weekend Update with Dennis Miller: ‘ Geraldine Ferraro's son, John Zacarro, Jr., was busted for cocaine possession yesterday at Vermont's Middlebury College. [scattered applause - Dennis looks up in surprise and ad libs:] I think the Board of Regents is here. ... School psychiatrists said young John had a deep-seated need to compete with his father, John Zacarro, Sr. who ... last year pleaded guilty to real estate fraud. ... [scattered applause] Geraldine Ferraro, reached for a comment, said, "I can't explain any of this but, you know, I'm sure glad I kept my own last name." …’ (And speaking of white elites, why isn’t Gore protesting the injustice whereby, in the words of another inmate, “John Zaccaro, Jr., the son of 1984 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, received four months in jail for selling $25 worth of cocaine to an undercover agent in 1986. For a conviction for selling the same dollar amount of drugs, I got 72 times Zaccaro's sentence--24 years.”? The struggle against injustice begins at home.) When it came to it, the “uproar” and “firestorm” the local and national media had hoped for failed to ignite. When Giuliani finished his speech, people rose and applauded. A dozen students put red cloths around their mouths to indicate that fascists had muzzled them. A woman handed out leaflets explaining how Giuliani directed that the planes fly into the towers. *** Gore puts his own name in quotation marks and scatters quotation marks about with abandon in his writing. At times they are meant to be sarcastic, as in his reference to Giuliani’s “achievements,” and to a newspaper article by someone whose views he doesn’t like as an “article.” At other times they seem to mark an epistemological confusion, as when he says that Bush “has done more violence to the concepts of ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ than any other person in recent memory.” If those concepts have actuality for Gore, why does he put them in quotation marks? UD presumes he has learned to do it from his humanities professors. But if, as the quotation marks mean to suggest, these words refer to empty concepts, then why does the president’s or anyone else’s violence against them matter? |
