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In This Issue

• The Spec Almost Led Me Into White Slavery
• Where Have All the Strippers Gone?
• Abused by Geriatrics Without Prozac
• Letters to the Editor(s)
• Marauding Interviewer
• Free to Speak? Shut Up!
• Where It's Safe to Sodomize
• Unionized Columbians Become Denizens of Primal Gangland
• CAVA Shifts Focus from Medicine to Profitability
• Garment Grabber Liberates Clothes From Floor
• Legless Pigeon Recounts Tales of Early Abuse
• Geek has +9 Indifference Cloak Against Discrimination
• Columbia Hits Me Where the Bruises Will Never Show
• We Have a Film Critic?
• The Future Is Now, and It's Pointing and Laughing
• Juice Review - A Mango Juice Odyssey
• Fed Favorites
• I Hate You Damn Happy People
• Your Pets Will Be Waiting for You in Hell
• Fruitloop and Dandy
• Wacky Fun Abuse!
• My AIM is True
• A Word from Our Advertisers
• THEY Watch
• The Staff of 17.7

Sadly, the political climate of our fair university has grown so solipsistic that we can no longer consider it a safe place for open discussion or free expression. Sure, foul-mouthed Spartacus youths freely distribute their hate literature on College Walk and angry feminists fiercely challenge the phallus fascination that dominates popular culture. Various homosexual organizations and minority groups rally proudly against the marginalization they encounter here in this billion-dollar center of oppression that affords us all grants and scholarships. Indeed, the Columbia community is rich with dialogue. So rich in fact, we've lost complete touch with the self-absorbed myopia we've immersed ourselves in. A recent visit by Dinesh D'Souza sparked more interest and visible advertising for its protest than for the keynote address itself. That's exactly how it should be in a place that echoes with the free exchange of ideas and tolerance toward everyone.

It's been a long time since any real political forum took place on this campus, unless you count the collusion of the Marxists and the Socialists who gathered together in harmony last weekend for an anti-war conference. Isn't it nice the way all sides get along at this school (we play both kinds, Country and Western)? Once the champions of freedom of expression and tolerance, the lefties have gotten a tiny little taste of power and have grown into worse demagogues than the so-called establishment that they were rebelling against.

Don't race baiters like Cornel West and Edward Said comprehend the inherent hypocrisy of their fascist rhetoric? Rather than enlighten the bigoted ignorant masses, the New Left simply imposes the forced absorption (followed by regurgitation) of their philosophies much like the Christian Right they so openly despise. Anything but strict adherence to the party line brands one as non-progressive, reactionary, or simply racist. A model of tolerance indeed. At least the Religious Right doesn't pretend to be enlightened. They advertise that their attitude rests on purely theoretical grounds and typically hold their reverence for spiritual matters. The self-satisfied political thinkers (pinko sheep) on this campus evangelize with militant fervor the vindictive tirades of their icons like Dworkin, Chomsky, and the aforementioned Said and West (a recent column in the Spectator lionizing West can attest to this). Somehow these "progressives" are unaware that they engage in the same divisive logic and "otherness marginalization" they presume to stand against with their "inclusive thinking." Apparently, one is included only when one agrees. And one can never be guilty of the crimes of one's enemies.

It would be easy to go ahead and label these lazy insular thinkers as "Nazis." However, we must try to rise above their tactic, lest we be guilty of wearing the same self-important blinders as our progressive professors. While most informed individuals preserve a special place and meaning for said term, today's academic liberals bandy it about, applying it to all who take a contrary stance to their own views. This is not only offensive, it is counter-intuitive. Surely branding people as "Nazis" is tantamount to putting similarly derogatory slurs upon others with the same mentality. Funny, there were some people in Germany whose philosophy it was to do that sort of intellectual branding, but their name escapes me at the moment. Of course, the irony here is lost upon the leftists. Anything before 1974 was simply a product of male-dominated super-enslavement culture and has no relevance to the liberated society demanded by the "enlightened resistance" and "progressive thinkers."

But the saddest piece of the puzzle remains our acceptance of the ideological tanks rolling through our beloved school. In 1996, the Republican students held a barbeque twenty feet in front of the hunger striking ethnic studies advocates. While perhaps a bit juvenile (or extreme in the ethnic studies students' case) in its delivery, at least the community permitted opposing sides an opportunity to make a political statement. Today, no one on this campus dares stand up to the infallible authority of facile liberal analysis for fear of being branded closed-minded, ignorant or biased. We care too much about our grades in Major Cultures or Contemporary Civilizations to stand up to the prejudicial logic of the new establishment. But again this is no longer a campus of intellectual rebels, but rather a litter of career and marriage-track panty waists without the courage of their convictions, unless they are in total concordance with our esteemed faculty or militant student organizations. Take a good look at yourselves, and how blind you have become.