I’ve always done fairly well with the philosophy of, “Ignore it; it’ll go away.” It works for that crazy Jesus guy when he comes to campus and calls me a whore for having a hole in my jeans. It works for unwanted attentions on the Indigo District dance floor. It works for the mysterious bruises that appear on my knees after said fun-filled nights at Indigo. But it’s not working for the Oregon Commentator, the illustrious campus “Conservative Journal of Opinion”.
After their attack on the Oregon Voice in their issue late last year for not having come out with an issue of our own yet (to which I’ll just point out, since we’re on the subject, that we’re a 32-page, quarterly magazine, which means we come out four times a year) I chose to pretend the whole slip-up on their part never happened. But now, we’ve got a whole page and a half in the new OC issue (pdf here) dedicated us, so here I am.

First of all, let me just say the comic was cute. I liked the peeved-looking bird in the middle particularly. Nice play on the cover we used last year for a story on the Cascades Raptor Center.
Oh, wait, that wasn’t a clever spin on something that happened recently, was it, OC? Yes, now I see, the date on the bottom of that comic says 2004. As in, before anybody on our active editorial staff even thought about coming to school here (we would have been juniors in high school then, and the comic’s portrayal of us as academically casual semi-slackers wasn’t that far off).

It’s ok, as a fellow slave to an independent student magazine, I know how difficult it is to come up with fresh, interesting material. Which is why I also understand how easy it is to slip into petty criticisms of other students and people who are trying to do constructive things, rather than to do something positive yourselves. Writing humorously can be difficult; writing humorously for the higher purpose of encouraging other people to think or to facilitate a change in behavior is damned near impossible sometimes.

Luckily for us here at Voice, there are fine people like Janae Schiller on staff to strike that difficult balance between silly and thought-provoking. She managed to poke a little fun at Uncle Phil (Knight – see our issue with the gay flag on front to read the whole essay) while pointing out the fact that his racially profiling shoes are unacceptable to a good segment of Nike’s targeted market. The Oregon Commentator, on the other hand, seems to choose the subjects they rant about from a giant beachball with the words “ASUO”, “liberals”, “how we’d rather be drunk”, “ASUO”, “popular culture”, “something else (limit once per issue)” inscribed on the sides, which they toss up into the air with hateful glee to see which topic their fingers will land on.

Well, OC, sorry you chose us for your token non-ASUO, non-liberal, booze-sodden rant. In the next one, let’s see a little punctuation and something resembling a point. Cheers!

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