To Whom it May Concern: I must object to your savage parody of self-absorbed feminists, appearing in the March 7 edition and titled “These Are Our Demands.” Granted, it was hilarious at times, and pitch-perfect throughout. Still, it does damage to the legitimacy of serious issues, like guns and domestic violence, by grouping them in…
Category: Letter to the Editor
The Bitter Pill #8: Deconstructing the EW’s Response to Recent Criticism of their Workplace Culture
They said it couldn’t be done! Wait… no, they said it shouldn’t be done. Anyway, I did it. What follows is a line-by-line exegesis of the Eugene Weekly’s official response to scathing public criticisms of the behavior of management from several former employees. The text may have been edited since I copied it for this…
You Say You Want A Revolution
A letter written to the Eugene Weekly in response to their report titled Setting Terms After Charlottesville What does Naomi Strawser suggest we do with the “known neo-Nazis [living] comfortably within our boundaries”? Seize their property by eminent domain? Criminalize their thought and speech so we can lock them up? Hound them into fleeing? Form…
Candid thoughts between you, me, and the world’s intelligence services #1
The Bitter Pill #6 Hard-headed woman/Ghost in the Shell You may know me as that guy who writes bitchy letters to editors of Eugene’s Weekly and Register Guard. From this, you may have gathered that I’m a frustrated artist. If so, I commend you on your perceptiveness, and thank you for taking the time to…
The Purpose of Players
I confess that Rick Levin’s feature article on the OSF prompted me to look up lumpenproletariat. Having done so, I’m pretty sure he misapplied the term. While Wikipedia is hardly an infallible source, the definition given there seems well-founded: “a term … originally coined by Marx to describe the layer of the working class that…
A Sort of Blueprint
Megan Burbank’s note to readers suggests to me a sort of blueprint, though I’m having trouble quite summing up what for. This mysterious something is more than a meme but less than a manifesto. Perhaps I can awkwardly describe it as a Platform for Political Action, though that’s not really quite it. Anyway, maybe I…
Don Kahle, Man of the Future
Whenever the stresses of the real world start to get me down, I feel comforted by the certain knowledge that Friday’s RG will provide another of Don Kahle’s inspiring flights outside the box of common sense. Whether he’s sucking up to a local official, implicitly identifying himself with the cultural elite, or just drawing an…
Say No to Kangaroo Courts
UO professor Michael Hames-Garcia is against official censure of unpopular speech and actions, solely because such censure has historically fallen disproportionately on “women, people of color and queer people.” In his mind, there is nothing intrinsically “chilling” about censuring controversial speech. Rather, he’s concerned that censure in the hands of an institution, like the University,…
The Best Idea Whose Time Has Come
I appreciate all the Weekly has done this year to render its annual Best of issue as a farce. Opening with a profusion of randomly conceived Staff Picks goes a long way to exploding whatever illusions anyone might have that EW is in contact with some means of objectively, or essentially, determining what is “best”. However, in an age where an…
Don Kahle’s Pompous Idiocy Must End
An as yet unsuccessful proposal to Eugene’s Register Guard I might feel more forgiving toward Don Kahle’s failings as a writer if he weren’t such a pompous ass to boot. Every time I come across his work in Friday’s RG he is dropping some name or other, in the course of criticizing Eugene for being…