Rutgers Closes On Saturday Night, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #271 | @MDWorld

April 16, 2012 Mike Gold 3 Comments

I presume Rutgers University has a program that instructs students in the Vulcan Mind Meld.

The New Jersey school of higher education publishes a weekly satirical newspaper called The Daily Medium, sort of like The Onion but even more amateurish. Two weeks ago they ran an editorial titled “What about the good things Hitler did?” Whether the piece was funny is, of course, in the mind of the beholder; such is the nature of humor. “Bad taste” is also in the mind of the beholder and we, as humans, have no right to protection from what we consider to be in bad taste. That’s how free speech works. You might get offended, but free speech isn’t there to protect anybody’s point of view, so get over it.

As is often the case with many of these types of publications, these jibes usually carry a bullshit by-line attributed to a known individual – sort of like Steve Allen’s ancient letters to the editor routine on the original Tonight Show. That would date the bit at least back to the 1950s.

This Hitler satire was by-lined to Aaron Marcus, a Jewish student and columnist for the independent student paper The Daily Targum. Mr. Marcus says he was highly offended by the piece because he lost family in the Holocaust. Well, so did I, Mr. Marcus, so we both own condos on that moral high ground. But we don’t own the same opinion.

The operative phrase here is “satirical.” The Daily Medium is well-known to be a satirical publication. That means what’s in it is not factual and, if you’re the one with the petard sticking out of your gut, you just might be offended. Get over it.

He believes the choice to use his name is an example of Anti-Semitism. Mr. Marcus, look up the word “irony.” If you think that is Anti-Semitism, you haven’t gotten out much. It’s a satirical newspaper, and as a by-lined columnist, you are a celebrity in your community. Give me a call when they burn a cross on your front lawn, as the Klan did to my grandfather.

So now the President of Rutgers University has condemned the publication and the school is conducting an investigation. I don’t understand what they’re investigating, but of course the phrase “hate crime” has been bandied about quite a bit. It would take a Vulcan Mind Meld to make this claim work, but I postulate that if hatred were in the hearts of the editors and advisors of The Daily Medium they would have chosen a medium different from satire.

Mr. Marcus told a local paper “Rutgers has perpetually done nothing to protect Jewish students … If these types of things happened to other students on campus they would be taken care of immediately, but when they happen to Jewish students and particularly pro-Israeli students, they are ignored.”

Aaron, I would not challenge your statement. Odds are strong that there’s at least some degree of accuracy therein. I went to school in the southwestern portion of the Ohio River Valley, a region that at the time was particularly hostile towards Jews. And to blacks. And particularly to Jews who thought shooting blacks was a bad idea, and there was a lot of that going on in nearby Cairo Illinois at the time. So I’ve had more than just a taste of this sort of behavior in the halls of academe, and I sympathize.

But attacking a satirical piece in a defined satirical publication, even if your celebrity was taken in vain, belittles the true horror of bigotry. You are only showing off your own pettiness and lack of perspective. Anti-Semitism is not about what is or is not funny, and it’s certainly not about you.

Get over it.

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Cult-Leader-For-Hire Mike Gold performs the Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind rock’n’blues show, which streams four times a week on www.getthepointradio.com and is also available at that same venue On Demand. He also joins Martha Thomases and Michael Davis as a weekly columnist at www.comicmix.com.