OPINION & EDITORIAL
Letters to the Editor - Dec. 13
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Wednesday, December 12, 2001
David Horowitz’s attacks Tuesday night were so personal because his loyalty is not to truth-finding but to his conservative leadership. Attacks on Tshaka Barrows were similar to those fired at Jesse Jackson (a “malignant cancer cell” guilty of the death-penalty crime of “sedition.”)
The purpose is ridiculing non-conservatives, which is why he does not attack conservative schools refusing to teach sexuality or run abortion ads in their newspapers.
Horowitz skips over reparations’ fairness (the many precedents) and need (the enormous wealth gap) to exaggerate administrative difficulties to argue it cannot work. He ignores ways like free college for the poor and development projects in black communities. He ignores how the free labor enriched corporations that exist today, how cotton plantations’ taxes fed the United States and how the United States used slaves for everything from serving food to White House guests to building monuments before selling them off to die.
Horowitz, like Rush Limbaugh, argues that Africans also engaged in slavery, ignoring that Africans did not bind your descendants or allow your rape and murder as America sanctioned for over 200 years. They argue “the past is the past,” but enjoy our honoring of slave-masters with holidays and statues. They ignore the hundred years of lynching and discrimination completely.
The Horowitz flap demonstrates what Horowitz, professor Donald Downs and The Badger Herald have in common: exploiting free-speech idealism to mask intense loyalties to a right-wing agenda. Downs emphasizes free speech while advancing agendas of think- tanks like the Bradley Foundation. And the Herald applauds “intellectual pursuits” but pursues vendettas against The Daily Cardinal and the Associated Students of Madison instead of finer points of issues. It’s easy to see why Horowitz and Downs get so much Herald press.
Reparations advocate Randall Robinson’s research led him to question why only black Americans are denied proper reparations. But Robinson says research the financial history of your institutions and heroes for yourself. Horowitz just calls you names. Robinson, not Horowitz, is sifting and winnowing for the truth.
Vance Gathing
UW alumnus
I admit it, I border on the fanatical for “The Lord of the Rings.” I’ve watched the trailers, commercials and interviews online. I watched both of the “making of” specials on Fox and Sci-Fi. I even have my ticket for Wednesday night already. My two-year wait for the opening of the first installment of “LOTR” just makes a review by someone who obviously knows nothing about the book itself, nor the long road it has traveled to production, a little hard to swallow.
First, it is not a trilogy. I don’t blame this misconception on ArtsEtc editor Anna Roberts, as it is a very common one. “LOTR” is one story. There is no possible way to read the second or third books before you’ve read the first.
The story is just too long and complex to be told in one movie. If anyone has any doubt of this, and wants to waste a few bucks and an hour or so, rent the Bakshi cartoon version. I couldn’t even watch the whole thing in one sitting, that’s how bad it is.
Furthermore, there is a promise of imminent sequels. They’ve already been made. We know they will be released during Christmas next year and the year after. There won’t be any production waiting period and no worries about renewing the actors’ contracts.
Now, if you’re going to bring in the Star Wars example, I won’t say Episode 1 had no conclusion, but I’m sure everyone in the theater was trying to figure out what was going to happen to make the little kid turn evil. I didn’t feel that that issue was resolved at all. I knew when I saw it that there were more films coming, so I could wait.
Lillian Cheesman
UW junior
