When P.C. misses the point.

Okay, so I admit that I read a disproportionate number of NYT articles just because they have the word “Yale” in the title (or, more and more, the names of people I know. WTF?). That said, here’s another that makes me cringe.

So at the end of this month the Yale Law School will hold a symposium on executive power. The presidential kind, not the CEO kind (are they different?) One of the people who is going to speak is John Yoo, the dude who wrote the memo for the current administration that justifies torture (in the legal sense) and who thinks wire tapping, any war-time, any place, is just dandy. I actually think anyone with something to say should (if invited) be able to say their piece without censure in an academic setting, but at a liberal law school, what is there to do if not protest.

But what are our dear Yalies protesting? Some 21-year-old who took notes when he was a law student (oh, and apparently he’s a genius) and used the n-word to mean African American. Then prudently posted the notes on the internet (not because of his stellar vocabulary, but because this is normal in law school land). Now, I’m not saying it’s a good idea to use racial (or any other kind of) slurs, in note-taking or otherwise, but SERIOUSLY? This is what's being protested? And the kid already apologized. Several times.

I’d like to think that the YL folk are letting Mr. Yoo come just so they can throw rocks at him, and that this silliness with language is just a diversion, but somehow I doubt it. Not that it bears comparison, but if you looked at any of my class notes from when I was 18, you wouldn’t find racial slurs, but you would definitely find some inappropriate comments. (Actually, I think I spent most of that year counting the number of times a certain professor used the word “concatenate” in a class. An average of more than once is all you need to know. But I digress.) What's the right analogy-cliche here? The elephant in the room? Throwing the baby out with the bath water? Fixating on the minutia of one person's past word choices while ignoring his peer's anti-Geneva Convention sentiments?

There’s, like, a war and shit right now, and our best and brightest legal minds are getting huffy and (more importantly) spending their scholarly time protesting a word that, for many factions of our culture (including much of the faction that the word is a slur towards), is just part of the vernacular? If a guy who thinks that German shepherds are a reasonable interrogation device is allowed to speak and debate, shouldn’t the guy who made a poor short-hand decision have that same privilege?