As a general rule, being an op-ed columnist shields you from criticism.
You're not a real journalist, so you don't have to concern yourself with "facts" or "sources." Unlike TV commentators, you can't get cut off in the middle of your argument. And even if someone does disagree with you, you find out about it a day later, and only if your editor decides to print their angry letter. Next to JuicyCampus posts, op-ed columns are the world's safest soapboxes.
So it probably came as a bit of a shock to Thomas Friedman, the New York Times' Pulitzer-Prize-winning golden boy, when scant seconds into his Salomon 101 address on Tuesday evening, two Brown students (Margaree Little '08.5 among them) hopped up from the front row, green-dyed cream pies in hand, and giddily walloped him, turning a highly-anticipated Earth Day speech into an episode of "What Would You Do?"
The media pounced on the pie incident immediately. A University statement released by spokesman Michael Chapman promised to "review this incident through its non-academic disciplinary system" to arrive at a fair punishment. (I'd suggest making Little and her co-conspirator read The World is Flat, but maybe that's cruel and unusual.)
The Providence Journal picked the story up, noting Friedman's "bewilderment and mild disgust." By midday Thursday, Piegate was among the lead stories on The Huffington Post, under the headline "Thomas Friedman Gets A Pie In The Face During Speech At Brown."
When I heard that my lefty classmates had interrupted a lecture by yet another pro-war moderate - juniors and seniors will remember L'Affaire Hillary in 2006 - I shook my head at the lack of originality. Heckling war-hawks? Come on, guys. Throwing a pie at Thomas Friedman could only have confirmed more stereotypes about Brown students if the pie had been stuffed with spliffs and back issues of Pravda.
The Friedman fiasco bothered me on several levels, the first of which was the choice of target. I'm no Thomas Friedman apologist, and I'm as wary of his rah-rah neo-liberalism and penchant for twee reductionism as the next guy. But Friedman hardly seems worthy of public ridicule, especially when compared to some of the neanderthals who hobble their way up College Hill.
Consider former Sen. Rick Santorum, R-Pa, an arch-conservative who famously equated gay sex with "man on child, man on dog" relations. By all accounts, his lecture in Salomon 101 last spring was supposed to be a disaster. He was a pro-life, pro-gun, anti-gay Daniel in a den full of clove-smoking, sweatshop-protesting lions. The Herald even printed a pre-emptive editorial called "Let's not shout at Santorum."
And yet, Santorum described the Brown students who attended his lecture as "overwhelmingly respectful and thoughtful." Wait a minute. "Respectful and thoughtful" for a guy who makes Mike Huckabee look like William F. Buckley? And Thomas Friedman gets meringued for not being the right kind of environmentalist?
My second bone to pick with Little et. al. concerns the method they chose. "Pieing," as it's called, has a storied history in American politics. The Keystone Cops movies of the early 20th century pioneered the pie-throw as a slapstick gag, but it wasn't until 1977, when a Yippie activist named Aron Kay chucked a pie at anti-gay-rights activist Anita Bryant, that the act acquired its current political currency, as a way to deflate egocentric public figures. Soon the practice spread, and pieing was enough of a phenomenon to be the subject of a Chumbawamba song called "Just Desserts." (In other news, Chumbawamba had more songs than "Tubthumping.")
Pieing is purposefully rude, of course, and it may even constitute assault. But the biggest problem with pieing is that it's just not a very good form of protest. It's neither real disruption nor real engagement. Real disruption at the Friedman lecture would have meant assembling a group of protestors to stage a mass walkout. That would have been impressive, frankly, and might have served as a potent rejoinder to Friedman's less savory views.
Real engagement, on the other hand, would have meant waiting until the Q&A to address Friedman's arguments. But what the two students actually did - threw a pair of green pies semi-successfully at Friedman's torso and then sprinted out the door, sprinkling explanatory tracts in their wake - seemed immature and self-aggrandizing.
Listen, pie-throwers, I know it's hard out there for a socialist. I've got ex-revolutionaries in my family. Certain aunts and uncles still play "Class Struggle," the socialist alternative to Monopoly. (If you're curious, the object of the game is to "win the Revolution!" and the box features a drawing of Karl Marx arm-wrestling Nelson Rockefeller.)
So I see where you're coming from, and I certainly support your First Amendment right to protest Friedman's pro-capitalist cheerleading. But please, think a little more next time. When you take what could have been a robust dialogue and reduce it to a cutesy attention-grab, you're committing the same sin as the mustachioed man whose shoulder bore your pie cream. And moreover, you're giving us all a bad name.
Kevin Roose '09.5 is throwing off his chains
