After reading your April 19, 2001 article, “Taking Everyone Into Account,” I was appalled by the Vanguard’s obviously low opinion of their audience’s maturity level. First of all Andrew Cattel’s article about certain individuals’ total disregard for other people’s sanity levels when using their cell phones, was an article about cell phone manners. The phrase equating cell phone bills with the “gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa,” was used to indicate that some people’s cell phone bills were astronomically large, as the “gross domestic product of the entire continent of Africa,” would have to be (if there was one).
Do you understand that? Let me put it more simply. The phrase was meant to indicate that the bill was large not small. If the bill is supposedly large and it is being compared to the GNP of Africa, then the GNP of Africa would have to be large as well. It was a vague joke, a very bad joke, but nowhere in that article did Mr. Cattel make any statement that can be definitely interpreted as “all African nations are poor.”
Even at that, who cares? I am disgusted that you considered not running the image accompanying the preview on the documentary of Warner Brothers’ racial stereotypes in their cartoons, for the reason that some people would be offended. Those images are a part of this country’s sad history of racism, and they need to be shown. Do you think that PSU students are a bunch of big babies who can’t face the facts of their own country’s undignified media history.
So you have lost the respect of one PSU student. If you think that student discourse should be limited to that which is undeniably PC, you are sadly mistaken. It does “matter what the message is,” even if it is, “marred by offensive language.” Everyone’s message “matters,” even if your paper is too steeped in newspeak and political melodramatics to realize that.
Students should not be forced to constantly walk the dangerous line between truth and what is politically correct and universally acceptable.
Angela Dimmick
junior/English