-Ralph Wiggim

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Dearest Ralph Wiggim,

Animosity between the Patriot and Press dates back thousands of centuries. It all began in the Before Time, an epoch of molten rock, dino-fuck, and curdling cheese. The twin founders of the Press and Patriot, Bob and Mitch, split from the herpetic sore of the great titan Chronos in the cosmos. Bob, the patron saint of the Press, was a stock broker who in his spare time hunted sea elephants. Mitch enjoyed frying turds. One fine Sunday morning in 1986, the twins gathered to build a tree fort. Mitch, an ardent supporter of William Howard Taft, believed only in the Muslim doctrine of cardboard tree forts. Bob’s Scientology background prevented such use of cardboard. A disagreement broke out. In the ensuing “tongue kissing” war, Bob and Mitch suffered lacerated livers. Both were sure they would die. However, a miracle occurred, a miracle that members of Stony Brook University still refer to today as “The Great Rape of ’88.”

Though it occurred in 1994 and not 1988, the assonance was too temping to pass up. A great comet fell from the broiling ether. In it came a black man named Barry Sanders, not to be confused with NFL great Barry Sanders. He was a surgeon, famed throughout Jupiter as a liver repairman/rapist. Rape is actually legal on gaseous planets. Barry Sanders came with a message. He boomed over the land:

Young Bob, Young Mitch, you both are ugly and stupid. Do something useful with your time. And I don’t mean masturbating. Write….

“Write what?” Bob ejaculated.

“Yes, please tell us,” Mitch ejaculated.

STOP EJACULATING AND LISTEN! You, Bob, are an anti-social fetus-head. You look like a fetus. You will never get laid. And you, Mitch, are an uptight, cock-gobbling, sociopath. No one likes you or the pogs you play with. Each of you must found a newspaper. In it you will write many scribble-scrabbles. Some people will read them. Eventually you will both make newspapers that will hate each other because you are both insecure, lazy, fuck-ups. I hate you all and I hope your deaths are painful. Good night.

Bob and Mitch sat beneath a tree and understood their destinies. Bob ran to a gas station to print the first issue of the Press on beaver hide. Mitch ran to the nearest toxic waste dump to turn a glowing blue shard of feces into the first issue of the Patriot. Both newspapers were commercial failures. In time, as the newspapers became legible, tensions grew. Bob and Mitch liked different hamburger condiments. They tried to sepukku each other. The twins finally succumbed to colon cancer in early 2004. Since then, their remains have rotted beneath the great Math Tower.

So you see, the answer to your question is simple. The Press and Patriot hate each other because of history. We’re glad to have helped you.

-The Press

Showing its support for the growing craze of paranoia and absurd conspiracy theories being touted by the right-wing, The Patriot has gone straight off the deep end in a section entitled “The One Party Classrooms” in which the author, (mysteriously named “the Patriot”) took it upon him/herself to root out nefarious left-wing propaganda in our school.

That's funny, I don't remember Mother Nature endorsing anyone in the 2008 electons.

In what can only be described as a strange fusion of McCarthyism and Michelle Bachman’s political ideology, the article attempts to find all the classes available this semester that “advance some sort of left-wing oriented agenda” by searching through the course catalogue and apparently picking any class that talks about racism, homosexuality, environmental science, multiculturalism, and history that happens to deal with Karl Marx (a historical figure) or Communism (a historical political system).

Besides the massive amount of Straw Man defeating going on at the Patriot on a regular basis, one has to wonder why The Patriot is so afraid of classes like “Weather and Climate,” and “U.S. Class Structure” being taught on campus.Apparently they are threatening enough to warrant an urgent warning to all the good conservatives on campus to avoid classes about scary things like “researched opinions” or “facts” or “undeniable scientific consensusthat human beings pollute the environment, poison water, and are speeding up global warming.”

The most telling (and generally humorous) bits of information come from The Patriot’s little editorial paragraphs about how apparently even talking about inequality means that the teacher is a Marxist “stuck in the Bolshevik revolution” or that Stony Brook University is saying that “Capitalism BADD!! Money is the root of all evil!!”

Also, mentioning homosexuality gives a course a spot on the list, as “Intro to Queer Studies” is on here, but with no explanation as to why.Apparently learning about gay people is something only liberals would ever do.Conservatives learn all they need to know about gays from Glenn Beck.

Even more hilarious is how the Patriot summarily dismisses the class “Politics and Religion in Israel and the Middle East” with the great little one-liner “We can only imagine what goes on in here…” Then, to PROVE that the right wing is being downtrodden and defeated, they point out the “History of the American West” is cancelled, with the witty retort of “I wonder why…” I’m not entirely sure why this is a right-wing class, apparently information about Manifest destiny and guns is a good old fashioned “Real American” class, but alas! It was cancelled! Meaning that the cruel Liberal/Socialist/Fascist/Marxist establishment must have seen its support for real America and canceled it while laughing maniacally and taking away all our money to give to gay black crack addicts.

Of course, The Patriot never mentions why it was cancelled, and I couldn’t find out why either, but I would hazard a guess that it didn’t have enough enrollment, and not because of a vast Left-Wing conspiracy.

Finally I need to point out something that struck me. Every course on their scare list had a few things in common: one, they were bound to upset anti-science people, as evident in their labeling nearly all classes about the environment as anti-Capitalist, anti-Human propaganda.And second, any class encouraging diversity was immediately placed under suspicion.If a class even mentioned that race has had an impact on society in any way, it earned a spot on the list.If a class deals with homosexuality, it’s on the list.Any class that talks about multilingualism as a good thing earns a place as well. Care about “Sustainability of the Long Island Pine Barrens?” Congratulations, you tree hugging commie, you’re on the list too.

I am amused by this, but equally worried. When people are this terrified of opposing viewpoints, or in some cases any viewpoints at all about certain topics, its hard to imagine them being able to make informed decisions about anything.If The Patriot proved one thing to me, it’s that its biggest fear is information that it may disagree with, or information that dares to discuss issues like class or race in an inquisitive light.

The Patriot, Stony Brook University’s conservative publication, hosted a lecture given by right-wing, British-born author and blogger John Derbyshire on September 25 to elucidate the true nature of American Conservatism.  His nationality aside, Derbyshire is a “true” American conservative and apart from his proud homophobia and racism, he is “mild and tolerant” in his bigotry.  His claim to “see humanity plain” umbrellas his belief that homophobia and racism are “core to humanity” in the tribal/hunter-gatherer sense of what it is to be human.

It is this “plain” view, this primal, “Quest for Fire” mentality that was applied to each issue addressed.  The pre-Neolithic conservatism of keeping all the nuts and berries in one pile without anyone putting their dirty, foreign hands on them is, essentially, the conservative economic policy from the dawn of time, and has since been lost to a world where even cavemen have car insurance.

What a charming looking chap!

This olde type of conservatism or, paleo-con, is rather infrequent now as the Republican party fluxes between “cons”—from neo-cons to theo-cons to bio-cons—and now, as The Patriot’s Alaxander Chamessian said, “I don’t know what it exactly means to be conservative.”  John Derbyshire’s incarnation of conservatism, the type that apparently lies somewhere between sedimentary layers of rock, is the first and most American of them all.

The economy was the bleed-American soft spot Mr. Derbyshire began to analyze first. The prevailing economic apocalypse echoes of the ancient death of Coolidge conservatism in the 1930’s, when FDR took his big gun, took aim and shot the “last dodo bird of conservatism,” and laid it as a pagan sacrifice to save the country from death. Wall Street is, as the prophets foretold, the new Sodom with sulfur clouds on the way. The government’s big, meaty paws have never left the American purse (rather pocket, ‘cause “purse” might be too gay). Another part of the problem is the illegal immigrant population, which only takes and takes and never gives back (and of whom Mr. Derbyshire was a member from the early 1970s until 2002).  America is an “assimilationist” country according to Derbyshire, who cites diversity and the public “cherishing of identity” as the chief force destroying the American social fabric. Thank you, Stony Brook Cultural Associations! You’re breaking America!

Derbyshire does believe that most Americans view the Iraq War as a mistake. He learned the hard way that the British, imperialist “blow up the Sultan’s palace” approach does not pan out as well as it did in the days of Lawrence of Arabia, old boy.  This basic foreign policy, which “doesn’t take Muslims seriously,” is encouraging a worldview that brushes off Russia as a place that Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin “can see from her house.”

“I need to leave…now…” said a student who identified herself as a “gay, hippie liberal” as the lecture ended. She had come to the lecture with two friends who identified themselves as moderate Republicans and expressed concern that The Patriot, would have such an “extremist” speak to students so close to an election of “change.”   Of change, Mr. Derbyshire was not supportive, for how can humans change fundamental human nature, or at least resurrect Calvin Coolidge’s petrified corpse to save the day?  “Liberals, they pretend [these fundamental prejudices] don’t exist, and I don’t like them.”