"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Wednesday, April 28, 2004 Dispatch from the Amherst fringe
Your Massachusetts tax dollars at work: Supporting the graduate education of one Rene Gonzalez, who writes in today's UMass Daily Collegian: "Pat Tillman is not a hero; he got what he deserved."
[I]n my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a "pendejo," an idiot. Tillman, in the absurd belief that he was defending or serving his all-powerful country from a seventh-rate, Third World nation devastated by the previous conflicts it had endured, decided to give up a comfortable life to place himself in a combat situation that cost him his life. This was not "Ramon or Tyrone," who joined the military out of financial necessity, or to have a chance at education. This was a "G.I. Joe" guy who got what was coming to him. That was not heroism, it was prophetic idiocy.
Tillman, probably acting out his nationalist-patriotic fantasies forged in years of exposure to Clint Eastwood and Rambo movies, decided to insert himself into a conflict he didn't need to insert himself into. It wasn't like he was defending the East coast from an invasion of a foreign power. THAT would have been heroic and laudable. What he did was make himself useful to a foreign invading army, and he paid for it. It's hard to say I have any sympathy for his death because I don't feel like his "service" was necessary. He wasn't defending me, nor was he defending the Afghani people. He was acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a bigger gun did him in.
Writer Gonzalez, an activist in the minority student caucus at UMass, has previously decried the US government as fascist:
Gonzalez compared the type of government in the United States to fascism. He also said that the little opposition of U.S. citizens to the policies of President Bush is not dissimilar to the rise of Adolf Hitler in the years prior to World War II.
"In Germany, the [support of Hitler] happened first with little things. Then they had a politician with the unquestioning support of his people," he said. "That's what fear in a conformist nation does. That's what's happening [in the United States] today."
You know, a true Brownshirt would say it's a scurvy fascist conformist nation that allows a pampered graduate student the freedom to spout treason from soapboxes and in the campus print and doesn't even lock him up, but instead continues to underwrite his college loans and allows him to play Affirmative Action Latino/a Victim of the Month.
Vile jackbooted capitalist Yanqui pigdogs smothering the People into conformity with education benefits and Rambo movies! Rene Gonzalez in his dorm room is not fooled!
Best of the Web comments: Cheers to UMass president Jack Wilson, who, the Boston Globe reports, issued a statement calling Gonzalez's remarks "a disgusting, arrogant and intellectually immature attack on a human being who died in service to his country."
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