Seventy-four times

The Chronicle featured the three letter combination “PSM” 74 times Sept. 13. In her front page story, Kelly Rohrs defines those three letters as “Palestine Solitary Movement” while the staff editorial claims they stand for “Palestine Solidarity Movement.” Well guys, what is it? Of course it’s the latter. PSM is an acronym for “Palestine Solidarity Movement,” and Rohrs’ mistake was probably caused by little more than poor editing.

Still, I’ll start by mentioning that when the same acronym is published over and over again it loses meaning. And when you lose the meaning of the topics you are debating, you lose context. Then, when you lose context, the world becomes a beautifully stupid place.

I am now going to tell you something that you probably do not know unless you write an op-ed column or you work for The Chronicle. As columnists, we submit our work two days before it’s printed. Since this is running on a Thursday, it will have been completed by Tuesday night. It’s currently 4:46 p.m. Tuesday afternoon and yet your mind must believe that I am here giving my opinion to you directly in the present time. What I’m saying is that there’s a lag both in terms of perception and content.

I was going to open by talking about the flaws I found in Shadee Malaklou’s Sept. 10, which dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; but sure enough Ben Rubinfeld ruined it for me by saying basically everything I wanted to in his letter to the editor published Sept. 14. Oh well and what the hell, you know?

Anyway, some strange stuff has been happening to me lately. A few weeks ago I was sitting in an airport waiting for a flight when I decided to go get a candy bar and something to drink. I like Snickers, but they only had those “KING SIZE” bars, so I shelled out some more change and got one. Since I’m not a king and honestly have no desire to live as one, what the hell do I need such a big candy bar for? I also didn’t need to pay like $2.25 for a bottle of water, either. So here I am looking down at my absolutely huge candy bar and my bottled water, and I realize that this is normal now. It’s not strange to eat a half pound of chocolate, peanuts and whatever else is in a Snickers or to drink expensive water out of a bottle while waiting for a metal flying machine to come out of the sky and into a thing called an airport, which is really just a big parking lot in the middle of a thing called a state in a country called the USA. But it’s 2004 and these things inexplicably make sense.

We go through and accomplish our mundane tasks like urinating, defecating and salting our food without thinking about context. You just do it and forget the circumstances surrounding it. You’ve got to in order to stay sane. But when it comes to intellect, you can’t discount context. It just doesn’t work. Complex thought requires consideration outside of the immediate present.

So President Richard Brodhead says that “the deepest principle involved [in regards to the PSM conference] is not even the principle of free speech. It’s the principle of education through dialogue.” In response to that, I say “Earth to Brodhead. Come in, Brodhead.”

People getting blown to pieces on either side of the wall they have in the Middle East should not be a learning experience for us. Fostering debate is the excuse that you make when you hold no stake in an issue but want to make it seem like you care. This conference and these issues are not academic subjects in the present time; rather, they are politically and culturally motivated events existing within both a past and a future.