Beavis Is No Bill Safire

This winter, a skater was attacked and clubbed in the knee by a rival's body guard. Within a month, Nancy Kerrigan appeared on the cover of almost every news magazine and Tonya Harding became the most hated woman in the world of winter sports.

This past summer, a frustrated housewife cut off her abusive husband's penis and tossed it in a nearby field. Within a few weeks, Lorena Bobbit became the feminist heroine of our time, and castration became a real concern for American males.

For some reason, America is obsessed with stories of the outre. Consumers of the news media have developed a "Beavis and Butthead" mentality. They watch from their living room sofas as the world marches by on their television screens. They love to ridicule the things they see and mutter asinine commentary to one another. (Hunh hunh....Tonya Harding sucks....hunh hunh hunh....He said penis....hunh hunh hunh....)

I used to believe that "Beavisization" was entirely restricted to the shallow, ignorant world of popular television. I've always viewed the written word with a sort of awe; anything that appeared in a newspaper or magazine was necessarily well-argued and well-written, automatically deserving of the highest respect and entirely severed from the world of 90210 and the made-for-TV Amy Fisher movies.

So my first year at college, I read every student journal of opinion and took them all absolutely seriously. Peninsula enraged me; Perspective enlightened me; the Salient amused me. I was fascinated by the fact that students could make such sophisticated arguments. I started writing editorials because I wanted to emulate the campus's outspoken opinion-makers.

I still read every student journal of opinion, but the awe I felt as a freshman has been replaced by contempt and irritation at the deterioration of editorial debate. Campus opinion has been brought down to the level of name-calling and ridicule. In short, Beavis is invading the written word.

You might expect this sort of thing from Peninsula, with its history of offensive writing. After all, their patron muse is the undisputed king of the obnoxious, Rush Limbaugh. A former Peninsula staff member quoted anonymously in The Crimson said he thought the magazine was often intentionally inflammatory.

Yet even The Crimson sometimes slips into Beavisism. A recent staff editorial on teaching fellows opened with an imitation of a math teacher with an East Asian accent (Carcurus....hunh hunh.....that's cool). A piece about the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for Choice compared the organization's officers to characters from "Beverly Hills 90210" and spent a quarter of its length parodying typographical errors in the group's newsletter (hunh hunh.... 90210 is cool....).

It's not all the fault of the publications. The Peninsula council recognizer that the only way it can get any attention whatsoever from the liberal campus is by offending it. As an editorialist, I know that people don't read and remember the things you write unless you say something shocking or insulting. For instance, if this editorial were about NAFTA or Bosnia, you would probably glance over the first column, maybe skim the first lines of the remaining paragraphs, and then turn to Dilbert.

If, however, this space were occupied instead by a guest commentary written by a Peninsula staff member (hunh hunh hunh...liberals such....), you would be talking about it with your friends over lunch, and a few of you would be outraged enough to write scathing letters to the editors.

Usually, these letters are the only way a publication knows that its opinions are being read. Unfortunately, rational, well-argued editorials typically generate little mail and even less interest. When publications change their tone to the more inflammatory and controversial, they do so because it seems that's what the readers want to see.

The root of the problem is that readers can be Beavises, too. Many Harvard students, desiring to appear thoughtful and informed, peruse the editorial pages specifically looking for things with which to disagree.

Those people who write impassioned letters to the editor seldom read with an open mind and are usually unwilling to consider the other side's arguments. Instead, they use those arguments as a reason to be annoyed. So, in a sense, offensive writers provide exactly what their readers want--something to be insulted about.

The Beavis mentality is incompatible with the purpose of the opinion page, which is to persuade, not to ridicule. Even when reading Peninsula, you shouldn't be looking for the childish and asinine. Instead, you should be reading for reasonable arguments that make you think about substantive issues.

In the end, the student body can decide what the intellectual level of campus opinion writing should be by changing its attitude towards debate. Fatuous scorn has no place in editorial writing. After all, hunh hunh....Beavis sucks....hunh hunh hunh hunh....