Spring Break
Noonan, Ashcroft offer unsatisfactory speech content
Steve Markley
Issue date: 4/4/06 Section: OpEd Page
I was going to stay away from politics for the rest of my time here at The Student so I could get out of here without getting gang-beaten at a bar by a pride of drunken College Republicans (the technical term for more than one).
However, now I have to come out of my self-imposed retirement to complain about a certain line of speakers who are coming to campus to spread their "wisdom" and "facts" and "seed." (That last one refers to the activities of John Ashcroft in his hotel room while watching Bible-themed pornography).
It's bad enough that the commencement speaker is Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. I don't think Miami could have found a less relevant or interesting political figure short of exhuming Gerald Ford's undersecretary of labor and propping him up on stage with a two-by-four and a pine scented car deodorizer stuffed in his breast pocket to stifle the smell of decomposition. Noonan's books about Reagan and the pope have all the fascination of reading a tax form, only in this case the author of the form has decided to gush shamelessly over the tax code to the point where it makes you nauseously certain that the author thinks the tax code's urine tastes like lemonade.
Honestly, at least Miami could have gone with a psycho-hoe beast like Ann Coulter, who at least has the power of her utterly cruel and idiotic opinions. Noonan's unashamed fawning over her subjects coupled with her complete historical ignorance of the most troubling questions of their legacies is so unbearably vapid it's like listening to a seventh grade girl telling her friends why her boyfriend is so great.
Of course, this week we have that power tool of the Christian right, John Ashcroft. Now, I can't be completely down on Ashcroft because I did name my drug paraphernalia after him, but I can't help but question the logic of the College Neoconservatives in bringing to campus this relic of the first Bush term. Basically, this man is already little more than a smudge below a footnote in history - an aggressively ineffective ideologue whose humble, grandfatherly demeanor could just barely disguise the raging, foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue beneath.
However, now I have to come out of my self-imposed retirement to complain about a certain line of speakers who are coming to campus to spread their "wisdom" and "facts" and "seed." (That last one refers to the activities of John Ashcroft in his hotel room while watching Bible-themed pornography).
It's bad enough that the commencement speaker is Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. I don't think Miami could have found a less relevant or interesting political figure short of exhuming Gerald Ford's undersecretary of labor and propping him up on stage with a two-by-four and a pine scented car deodorizer stuffed in his breast pocket to stifle the smell of decomposition. Noonan's books about Reagan and the pope have all the fascination of reading a tax form, only in this case the author of the form has decided to gush shamelessly over the tax code to the point where it makes you nauseously certain that the author thinks the tax code's urine tastes like lemonade.
Honestly, at least Miami could have gone with a psycho-hoe beast like Ann Coulter, who at least has the power of her utterly cruel and idiotic opinions. Noonan's unashamed fawning over her subjects coupled with her complete historical ignorance of the most troubling questions of their legacies is so unbearably vapid it's like listening to a seventh grade girl telling her friends why her boyfriend is so great.
Of course, this week we have that power tool of the Christian right, John Ashcroft. Now, I can't be completely down on Ashcroft because I did name my drug paraphernalia after him, but I can't help but question the logic of the College Neoconservatives in bringing to campus this relic of the first Bush term. Basically, this man is already little more than a smudge below a footnote in history - an aggressively ineffective ideologue whose humble, grandfatherly demeanor could just barely disguise the raging, foaming-at-the-mouth ideologue beneath.
