Great new Rosa Brooks column on the Ahmadinejad speech
Imagine the scene: As angry protesters march outside, a nation's unpopular president prepares to address students and faculty at a prestigious university. Introducing the president, the head of the university is bluntly critical of his guest speaker: "You, quite simply, [are] ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer [our] questions . . . I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . led to your party's defeat in the [last] elections."
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Wouldn't it be wonderful if something like that could happen in our country?No, no, I mean really happen in our country. [Monday]'s farce in New York at Columbia University, starring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Unpopular Presidential Guest and Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger as The Man Who Spoke Truth to Power, doesn't count because it was just that: a farce.
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But so what? Here in the land of free speech, elites -- including those at universities -- too often collude to keep our own president in his safe little bubble. (Those who forget to pretend that the emperor is fully dressed, such as Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Assn. dinner or Jimmy Carter at Coretta Scott King's funeral, are instantly chastised for being "inappropriate.")This week, a global audience saw Iran's "petty and cruel dictator," as Bollinger called him, courteously parrying questions from hostile students -- something viewers won't see our democratically elected president doing.
Dead on. I'm okay with what Bollinger did. It wasn't particularly brave and clever and to the world press probably made Ahmadinejad look better. That said Bollinger was in need of some political cover and Ahmadinejad is a part of a regime that does a fair number of misdeeds. However, it wasn't courageous no clever, it was easy.
Colbert's speech at the White House Correspondents dinner was courageous and the target certainly had it coming. That said, I think Gene Weingarten's take on that speach (do a find on Colbert) was right: "This stuff was truly great. It was an almost great performance. But, sadly, it wasn't a home run. It was a solid triple to deep left center, but Colbert got thrown out at home trying to stretch it to a homer." Effectively insulting is good, but really funny and effectively insulting is far better.
This also suggests that Bollinger would have been more effective had he been funny. Dean John H. Coatsworth used humor to some effect and I think it underlined why he and not Bollinger was the most effective critical figure: "I'm sorry that President Ahmadinejad's schedule makes it necessary for him to leave before he's been able to answer many of the questions that we have, or even answer some of the ones that we posed to him."
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