Kanye dejà vu

Last semester I submitted an opinion piece bashing Kanye West and all others who deemed the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina race-related. If you don’t recall, West was speaking during the telethon (philanthropy for hurricane victims) and then abruptly deviated from the teleprompter to classify Bush and the media as racists. I noted that with the power of free speech comes great responsibility, and there’s undoubtedly a fine line between “the freedom of speech” and “the freedom of [idiotic] speech” that one shouldn’t dare cross while standing on an imperative platform.

After I read Tuesday’s article regarding George Henson’s experience with homophobic vandalism, I had to immediately grab a glass of water to avoid passing out. Apparently an overload of dejà vu makes one woozy in the head. Like West, Henson had an opportunity to fully and positively capitalize on an influential moment in time, and like Kanye himself- he blew it.

Nearly the entire article in Tuesday’s paper had me bothered by what was written on Henson’s door. Most people with a pulse can see that such a derogatory slur is entirely uncalled for, unless you’re a Bush supporter, right?

The sympathy many others and I had for the gentleman depreciated tenfold after his unwarranted political comments that were nothing better than three swings and three misses. Wrong time, wrong place and, well, just wrong.

I considered cutting the guy a break, perhaps giving him the benefit of the doubt and dismissing his ridiculous comments as mere “heated, in-the-moment slip-up’s,” until I read his one 1,000-word qualification essay in yesterday’s print.

In Tuesday’s edition, Henson was quoted saying that if the vandalism “was the work of a Bush supporter who was upset” by his criticism of the administration, it wouldn’t surprise him “that this would be their response.” The writing on his door is “a perfect example of the tactics that Bush and his supporters have always used against their critics.”

Yesterday’s opinion piece “slightly modifies” his assertion by inserting two words: “some of” — between “and” and “his.” Gee whiz, thanks, you shouldn’t have! His modification fails to address the previous comment pertaining to the possibility of the vandalizing person actually being a Bush supporter. What if he or she actually is an evangelical Nazi-of-a-Republican? Well, God only knows it couldn’t have been a Democrat!

 How about when Democrats slashed the tires of the Bush-Cheney 2004 “Get-Out-the-Vote” vans in Wisconsin to try and suppress the Republican vote in that dangerously (for Democrats) close swing state?

 Or when a staffer on Sen. Chuck Schumer’s Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee was charged with illegally obtaining private information about the credit history of an African-American Republican Senate candidate from Maryland? This was, of course, after Democratic activists had crashed a campaign event and thrown Oreos at him — how’s that for racial tolerance?

 Or that time when Bill Clinton’s White House obtained the confidential personnel files of at least 400 White House staffers from prior Republican administrations without their permission or consent so they could be distributed throughout the Democratic National Committee and used as ammunition in future elections.

 Or that pesky little episode when an outspoken college Republican leader was suspended without any prior notification or any right to defend herself, three weeks before her graduation.

 Or how about that episode when conservative commentator Pat Buchanan was doused with salad dressing by supposedly “free-speech” liberal activists at Western Michigan University?

 While it certainly is terrible that anyone would put something so offensive on a professor’s door, I think it is also fairly offensive that a professor would automatically jump to the conclusion of determining who the perpetrator was.  Aren’t liberals supposed to be all about “due process” and “innocent until proven guilty?”  They sure seem to stick to that mantra with Clinton, even after he was proven guilty.  But, I guess when it comes to “Bush supporters,” no such similar treatment is extended.  Maybe that is some liberals’ “tactics” at work.

 Who, exactly, is the more closed-minded in this situation?  The intellectually insignificant and prejudiced individual who would write a slur like that on another person’s door, or the person who decides that he has the investigative clairvoyance and moral fortitude to act as judge, jury and executioner and determine, with seemingly no actual evidence beyond his own bias and prejudice, that the perpetrator must be “a Bush supporter?”

This is all seemingly irrelevant when Henson entirely abuses his platform upon which he stood in Tuesday’s The Daily Campus. No matter how much of a hunch he had, no matter if he was absolutely and positively sure that the vandalizing person was indeed a warmonger Republican, one’s political philosophy is neither here nor there when it comes to such public degradations of vandalism.

The news story could have been a lesson, but instead, I believe it just pissed some people off. Call it: “Kanye dejà vu.”

Brian Wellman is a first-year marketing and journalism major. He may be reached at [email protected].