They're usually a harmless bunch over at The Declaration, and it's generally understood that anything that appears on the pages of their publication is written in good fun, not to be taken too seriously. So when Denis Ferhatovic's Sept. 19 column, "Encounter With A. Prick" appeared mocking one of my columns, I laughed it off and went about my business. I was going to let it slide, until a Sept. 26 letter to the editor appeared in The Cavalier Daily from Ray Szwabowski III, Executive Editor of The Declaration, in which he describes Ferhatovic's piece as "an intelligent and well-written satire." Intelligent? Well-written? If ever there was a lie that could make Pinocchio blush with shame, this man certainly has found it.
It's hard to decide which of Szwabowski's claims is more ridiculous: that Ferhatovic's column is intelligent or that it's well-written. It's like a blindly proud mother announcing one of her toddler's finger-paintings as "a Picasso!" All right, all right. I guess it is kind of cute on some level.
But at best, Ferhatovic's composition can be described as "Recognizably completed by a human being -- probably not missing a chromosome." And that's pushing it. His words reveal him as a wannabe intellectual elitist who lacks the intellect to string together a coherent argument, and instead resorts to composing homoerotic pseudo-Freudian drivel, the lewdness of which he hopes will detract attention from the unsubstantive and confused nature of his writing. So determined to fight to the bitter end against whatever it is he has identified as "the Establishment," Ferhatovic seems willing to take any position, no matter how ludicrous, so long as it contravenes the status quo. It's a beautiful thing when one feels that his a priori commitment to "social change" relieves him of the responsibility of providing reasons for his arguments. Such is the case with Ferhatovic, for whom condescension replaces reason, sexual gratuity displaces eloquence, and polysyllabism usurps substance.
My original column laid out why America must take military action against Saddam Hussein's dictatorial regime if he does not allow weapons inspectors unfettered access to any and all locations within Iraq. Simply put, because Iraq is stockpiling and developing weapons of mass destruction with which to supply terrorists who want to kill as many innocent American civilians as possible.
There are reasonable arguments against my position. They're ultimately wrong, though reasonable nonetheless. But they entirely elude Ferhatovic, whose piece begins by introducing a brilliant satirical stand-in, "A. Prick," whose last name rhymes beautifully with my last name, Dick. Come to think of it, the similarity extends further -- both names actually describe a penis in the vernacular. Tee-hee.
The real genius of Ferhatovic's masterpiece, however, comes not from his linguistic adventures in male genitalia but from his skillful misrepresentation of my original argument. He assigns to me a whole host of positions and opinions that I do not hold, and sprinkles vague, wink-and-nod references to them among graphic descriptions of a fictional sexual encounter between him and Prick. A straw man is easier to build than a real argument.
Either Ferhatovic blatantly made up the opinions that his writing assigns to me or he just assumed them from his own preconceived notion of what someone who favors military action against Hussein would believe. Among the assertions implicit in his intelligent and well-written satire are the claims that I scorn "learnedness," am a social conservative, think all French are "poseurs and pussies" and always prefer military action to diplomacy. All convenient inventions of fact -- perhaps I should have been writing for The Declaration all along. It would have made researching column topics oh so much easier.
In the little area left over between inventing facts, making unwarranted assumptions and simply filling up page space with impressive insults regarding my "libidinous tormenting of Gallicisms," Ferhatovic occasionally pokes his head out of his mealy-mouthed satirical shell and gathers the courage to assert an opinion or two based on something that might resemble reality.
He uses an interesting sexual metaphor to point out that military action inevitably results in accidental civilian casualties, and quotes Khar-Eddine to suggest that this somehow makes the American government more evil than a hired murderer. Aside from this, though, Ferhatovic raises only one concrete claim that warrants scrutiny. He makes a snide reference to my alleged misuse of the word "anti-Semitic," which I used to describe many of the terrorists who want to destroy America. Arabs are Semites too, he quips.
It's a shame that he doesn't own a dictionary, or he could have learned that although both Arabs and Jews are Semites, anti-Semitism specifically denotes anti-Jewish sentiment. Now I'm not normally one to quibble over such details; but for an English major to wrongly criticize me for improper word usage is just beyond the pale -- it reflects poorly upon our fine University.
To be fair to Ferhatovic, his column actually isn't all that bad. It's surely useful for a good laugh and possibly as a gleaming addition to the "how did this guy ever slip through the Admissions Office" file. As long as his writing remains quarantined among its fellow intellectual marvels on the amusingly benign pages of The Declaration, it's only harmless fun in the form of literary masturbation. So keep raging against that machine, Denis; don't let mere facts suppress your revolutionary brilliance. With all of your sexual witticisms and shining satire, you're bound to bring that Establishment (whatever it is) crashing to the ground sooner or later. Or at least it'll be fun watching you try.
(Anthony Dick is a Cavalier Daily associate editor. He can be reached at adick@cavalierdaily.com.)
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