Letter: Reveling in Swat Political Controversy How often is it that insult and injury are passed over, not because abuse of power is a concern for the party so abused, but rather because apathy or timidity hold sway? And I thought today, (after reading the superabundance of material concerning "Holocaust Revisionism") of how a person with fire (or perhaps just intellectual brawn) can so seldom express her outrage without making it an abuse of power. I don't know what lies in the hearts of political people, I can only guess at it myself, but I do know that they inevitably become embroiled in scandal, and that the root of all their alleged evils is abuse of power. It leads me to think that power itself, in any noticeable concentration, is abuse of power. And the ambivalence, the sleaziness and at the same time the necessity that are associated with "networking" and other such ideas of political behavior, are themselves indications of the cold hole in which the norms of political morality make their home. Such concepts lie in waiting as material for the talented to use in fashioning any kind of weapon, liberal or conservative, defensive or indignant, puckish or outraged. They are endlessly adaptive, relying only on the inventiveness of their craftsmen to determine their limits. And the caricatures, the evil bull-necks and scrawny pawns, the late-night plotters and self-important apostates which people the political scene on this campus, who emerge from out of these temperamental forges of thought, are themselves the essential exaggerations which make life delicious. I have always thrived on the display of strong thought, and the wickedly insupportable attacks which often times accompany such thought. If there were a Mount Olympus hovering vividly above this campus, I would put Wilson Kello on top and cheer with ill-informed delight at every rose thrown at his feet, and every tomato in his face. |
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