Who's on First (Amendment)?

Posted by: spacecog on Buzznet

I'm still recovering from the 4th of July, when Americans of all stripes celebrate their right to set off illegal explosives just outside my window all the damn night. Hey, they’re just expressing themselves, much the way my cat expresses her desire to be fed, again and again in the course of the day, by biting me on the foot. Or the way we at The Reader Sucks express ourselves by saying things like:

Michael Miner is a poopiehead!

Alas, not everyone in the world loves unfettered freedom of expression. This week "Poopiehead" Miner reports, if that’s the word for it, on a first amendment case involving a student newspaper at Governors State University that got shut down by a school administrator who’d demanded to read each issue of the paper before it was printed to make sure it was all okey-dokey with her.

Miner, of course, does a terrible job explaining the messy case, and I ain’t gonna do it myself, so take a look herefor all the gory details. In the meantime, here are the top three stupid things about Miner’s column:

1) Miner thinks – or thinks that we think – that superannuated grad students deserve more free speech than sophomores. "I guess a First Amendment squabble started by student journalists is easy to shrug off," he grouses, before even getting into the details of the case. "Yet Jeni Porche was 28 and Margaret Hosty 33 back in May 2000, when the two graduate students became editors of the Innovator."

2) Free Speech martyrs Porche and Hosty are total passive-aggressive drama queens. The photo that graces Miner’s turd of a column shows the two of them looking forlorn and hapless and put-upon. Hosty – poor thing! -- is wearing carpal tunnel wrist splints, and poses carefully so that both of them are visible. Behind them there’s an AMERICAN FLAG pinned to the wall.

3) Miner is convinced that the young people of today don’t read grown-up newspapers because … their high school newspapers were "trivial [and] vacuous." Yeah, that’s right. It’s not because, say, most grown-up newspapers these days are themselves trivial and vacuous and just plain terrible. Nope. That’s not it. Miner is so convinced of his absurd opinion that he graciously attributes it to unnamed and unquoted "champions of the student press. … Talk to these critics today and they’ll [say] that the failure of high schools to expose students to serious newspapers is one reason they don’t read them."

Of course Miner’s prose is so clotted here that it’s possible he’s complaining only that high school students don’t read high school papers (there’s a shock), but, ah, who the fuck cares. He’s a poopiehead.

Keywords: Michael Miner, Poopiehead, Wrist Splint, Drama Queen, Man Boobs, Penis.