From: rcallen at stanfordalumni.org Date: 18 Apr 2001 10:22:19 -0700
Justin wrote:
Hentoff is cranky about lots of things, but I like his First Amendment absolutism. Not that the Horowitz debate implicates the 1A.--jks
me:
I agree with Justin that the Horowitz debate doesn't necly implicate the 1A. More, I thought the First Amendment was the real bait, from Horowitz. It's what turns this nasty ad campaign into a forest/ trees thing (Forest=Horowitz's larger campaign; tree = 1A issues, per school) where most of the non-right and their armchair quarterbacks are left hugging trees. If it weren't for the 1A issues, I wonder if more people would be engaging with Charles Ogletree and Randall Robinson about reparations--an issue that Horowitz himself admits is catching on this year. (This year there are at least five conferences organized around the US to discuss reparations, incl meetings at UCLA, Harvard, and Princeton.)
I agree with Gordon Fitch, onlist, and Charles Gordon at Brown U: make folks respond to the bigger pictures--be they reparations or the brilliant shape of the rhetorical campaigns against them.
Raphael Allen