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Apr 24, 2006

Gramps 2.0 

So it happened over two weeks ago and I just heard about it, but so what.

U-Dub Students Vote For Medal of Honor Memorial

Pappy Boyington, and four other Washington grads who won the Medal of Honor, will be getting the campus memorial (if the real 'powers that be' at the school approve it as well) that they were at first denied by a portion of the student government that thinks they're actually in charge of something.

Slightly off topic, but just what does the student government/council at any college really do? They don't control the purse strings, so aside from being an extra layer of bureaucracy that supposedly speaks for the student body, to steal a quote from Office Space, "What would ya say… ya DO here?" I never once voted for the student government in college because, even then, it seemed to me that they were a body of people who were de facto in charge of nothing and had no bearing on whether or not the food got better in the student union building or the price of tickets to the football games went down. I never really knew anything about the people who were running, and maybe that's bad on me, but…

The most brilliant thing I remember anyone doing when I went to college was the group of people who ran for office solely on the platform that, if elected, they would immediately resign. If I recall correctly, at least at UW at the time, there was no provision to fill that seat until the next scheduled election the following year. So by quitting, these guys were trying to prove the point that the student government was pure window dressing. Some of them even won and then, true to their word, resigned. And wouldn't ya know it: the world kept right on spinnin'. But, back to the real point…

The five Medal of Honor alumni are one step closer to being recognized for their sacrifice and commitment to the nation that would later produce some of the fine, upstanding students who would wonder if a United States Marine was "really the type of person we want to be honoring." These are also the type of people who word-smith the official documents to make them more warm and fuzzy than the actual words that were used. Example? Comparison of the Fox News video of the meeting of the UW student council and the minutes of that same meeting find a few words highly noticeable by their absence.

Council member Deidre Lockman of the ASUW Women's Action Commission has this to say on the video:
"This has served as leverage for the conservative right-wing movement, which can also be characterized as quasi-fascist according to the backlash we've all received for speaking out against it."
To view the video you must first go to foxnews.com and then paste the following into your address bar:
javascript:videoPlayer('040506/040506_springer_memorial','Medal of Honor Memorial','FNL','acc','Only on FOX','-1');
Of course, the official minutes delete all mention of the fascist accusation and simply say that students were "harassed for expressing their opinions." html/PDF

True, meeting minutes usually convey the general idea and are not word for word transcriptions, but I don't think I'm the only one who finds that omission interesting… and having gone to UW, not the least bit surprising. The fact that fascist accusations were leveled against people who support honoring men who actually fought against fascism is so common at this point that I almost have to laugh and marvel at the unfathomable black hole density vortex of ignorance and stupidity that Deidre and her like possess. How a person with so little grey matter between the ears continues to operate even basic life support functions on a daily basis baffles me. The further fact that the remark doesn't appear in the single official document of the proceedings? Not shocked in the least.

Am I making too much of this? Eh… maybe… Like I said before - a university student council doesn't carry much import to begin with. But isn't it nice to know that when people are just flat WRONG they get called on it?
Posted by: Mike the Marine / 17:26
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