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Letters to the Editor
By Our Readers
A&E Editor’s columns too oversimplified
Beginning in December, Diego Costa has published a trio of columns in the UWM Post that describe "a generation," our generation, as a socially ineffectual scattering of narcissists.
Costa, arts and entertainment editor, writes provocative, liberal columns addressing the American news media, homosexuality, popular culture and world affairs. At February's Wisconsin Newspaper Association convention, he won a first-place in column writing for “That is so ‘gay.’ ”
The trio, from the Dec. 14, Feb. 8 and Feb. 15 editions, addresses blogs, Facebook.com and the growing impersonality of sex. It has elicited little response from readers of UWM's most widely-consumed publication.
An uproar followed Sara DeKeuster's November photo essay in the Post depicting rape as a sexual fantasy and earlier last fall, many students expressed outrage at a collection of articles concerning lesbianism.
Perhaps students find echoes of their own suspicions in Costa's harsh judgments.
He sees our generation as submersed in cell phones, laptops, iPods and Xboxes, disconnected by hyper connection that provides quick fixes for loneliness and boredom. What lounges unchallenged, he argues, is character: perseverance, resilience and spirituality, meaning not religion but the faculty for loving people instead of things.
He sees Facebook.com, the "perpetual yearbook" phenomenon, as "a blatant symptom of a youth so needy of the gaze and affection the real world doesn't so readily offer, and worse, so delusional that its needs are being satisfied virtually."
Blogs, he says, are "a way of projecting our need for dialogue and debate without actually having to really do it (in front of people)."
The latest column recoils from an impersonal and awkward group sex encounter to conclude, "we have learned to accept and promptly enjoy our capability to sedate our humanity," our capability to fill voids in our young lives with gadgets.
Costa is wise to give UWM a good shake. But our generation lacks universal access to the Internet, video games and cable television.
Even he must realize the articles oversimplify a generation not universally affluent, loveless and spiritually bankrupt. I know numerous poor and affluent young adults who lead socially fulfilling and intellectually challenging lives.
Technologies like Facebook.com can provide gateways to meaningful relationships. Many students praise Facebook.com for introducing them to new friends.
Costa's opinions, however, resonate strongly with me.
The weaknesses that Costa passionately describes, the affectations, the anxiety and the misguided relationships — hallmarks of youth — are further atrophied by an obsession with fantasy, the very crutch their pain invites.
Gadgets do not command, but they can seduce.
I imagine that as not all college partiers graduate to lifelong alcoholism, an unhealthy preoccupation with technological stimulation will fade from our peers as we gather experience. While drink kills some before 40, many of us will be left behind, entwined in MP3 wishes and PS2 dreams.
Matthew Hrodey
Pizza Man review doesn’t show full picture
My name is Curtis Strohl, and I am the general manager of Pizza Man at 1800 E. North Ave., the restaurant so ignominiously featured in the Feb. 15 edition of the Post (“Pizza Man doesn’t deliver,” by Bradley Wooten).
The article was a real disappointment for me. As a longtime member of Milwaukee's East Side business community, it was a real slap in the face to see that a local publication felt the need to a painstakingly detailed slam on our business.
Frankly, I am curious as to how this article serves the UWM student community's need to know the news.
Please don't misunderstand me. I am not shirking responsibility for Wooten's fantastically bad dining experience that evening.
That is why I appeared tableside when I found out (I do not make it a habit of talking with each and every table) and why I offered additional compensation (a practice that we rarely employ at Pizza Man). Wooten and his friends struck me as amazingly calm and understanding, given the severity of their complaints. Then, I read the article.
Typically, when a restaurant is reviewed by the media, it will be visited, incognito, at least twice. During those dining visits, the reviewer and his or her companions will order a wide variety of items off of the menu.
Then, before publication, the management of the restaurant will be notified by the reviewing publication that a review is going to be printed on such-and-such a date in the near future. At that time, the publication will fact-check menu prices, hours of operation and usually get the name of the owner or manager to include with maybe some history or background information.
The point, even in a less-than-stellar review, is to provide a well-rounded and somewhat objectified picture of what and how the restaurant is doing.
This was lacking in Wooten's article. He visited once. Two of the four in his party ordered the same dish. They ordered only one appetizer. And he got the name of our house dressing wrong.
He never got my name, although I was prominently featured. Wooten quoted his server directly on four occasions but never got her name either. He even went so far as to directly quote her slandering the Pizza Man kitchen staff. I question the veracity of this quote. I wasn't there for that portion and have only Wooten's printed word against the server's spoken word.
Pizza Man has been in continuous operation on the corner of Oakland and North for over 35 years. We have served quite a few East Siders and quite a few UWM students. We have employed quite a few UWM students. We are proud of our success and are committed to continual improvement.
That said, we blew it with Wooten's party. I hope that they will have the good graces to visit us again and to give us the opportunity to serve them better.
I, myself, would like to see more cooperation between community members as closely tied together as Pizza Man and UWM.
Curtis Strohl
General Manager, Pizza Man
Assumptions skewer singer’s background
John Figlesthaler, a truly disappointing display of journalism was spewed in your story "The Fabrication of Glory" (Feb. 1).
Had you any true insight or investigative basis for a single word of your tale, you would shudder (I pray) at the thought that such an easy copout for "reporting" was born of your hands.
You are clearly a gifted writer with the unfortunate pseudo-intellectual curse that plagues many a burgeoning talent in schools that mandates a critic, even cynic mentality. The platform you are given is not a vehicle for pretty insult and writer/critic histrionics at the expense of truth.
It is incumbent upon you as user of this platform to, at the very least, know something factual about whom you are commenting. This is lazy reporting. Almost every account in the story, not witnessed firsthand that day, was based on a cliched perspective that defies exactly that which is the basis for Cheyenne's opportunity.
A negative reaction to the performance and subsequent negative review is reasonable, given personal taste, the environment and her relative unknown status. But the rest was a snapshot-view based story, every blank filled with assumption, cliche and stereotype.
This is not a manufactured star, stage parent product created with the label and network.
Indeed, it's more the opposite, hence the opportunities that followed. She has actually played and performed for about as long as most performers do by the time they are young adults and get their first opportunities at success in this business.
She has never had a lesson. She started playing at 8 and booked her first gig without her parents’ consent at age 10. She wrote every song on her album (150 of them by age 11). She won America's Most Talented Kid at 12.
Yes, she is pretty, smart and at ease in front of the camera or a large crowd, but she prefers to play acoustically in a small venue. All of this, the recording contract, TV show etc., is a vehicle for her to perform her music in front of an audience. That is her singular goal.
You haven't a clue how wrong your characterizations were.
Eddie Head
Manager, Cheyenne Kimball
Column right about ‘genocide,’ shortsighted regarding Iraq
In regards to “Abuse of Language,” column by Zak Mazur (Feb. 22), I am a critic of the Iraq war and an American of Armenian descent whose grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s side fled Ottoman Turkey to escape genocide at the hands of the Turkish government in 1915.
I would like to state that the author makes several excellent points to illustrate recent misuse of the word “genocide” to characterize the United States’ policy in Iraq.
I get the impression that Mazur feels as if this war is justified in terms of its benefits outweighing its costs, despite mass Iraqi civilian casualties and over 2,000 U.S. troop deaths since the U.S. chose to invade Iraq in March 2003.
I use the word “chose” deliberately because while removing Saddam Hussein from power was a positive outcome of this invasion, choosing to carry it out from a unilateral, lone-cowboy approach under the guise of liberating a people from its tyrannical dictator in the name of human rights was disingenuous and has proven tactically a poor choice.
What concerns me is the tone with which the author seems to accept or otherwise normalize the degree of collateral damage resulting from this war.
How many innocent civilian deaths are acceptable? How many U.S. troops — if they come back — have to come back physically maimed and emotionally destroyed?
Had the real reason for going to war with Iraq truly been to bring a known perpetrator of ethnic cleansing and violator of human rights in Hussein to justice, as the author suggests, then why wouldn’t the rest of the world want to support such a mission?
If the U.S. came right out and proclaimed this as the reason for going into Iraq, it would have set a long overdue global example of acting vigilantly to stop and punish genocide.
The truth is, preserving human rights and punishing genocide wasn’t the real reason for going to war with Iraq and our allies knew it. The majority of American people are now starting to realize it too.
Had it been President George W. Bush’s mission to bring perpetrators of genocide to justice in Iraq, why would he still be so reticent today about the Turkish government’s role in the 1915 massacres, which claimed nearly 10 times that of Hussein’s “Anfal” operation of 1987-’88, during which over 100,000 Kurds were murdered in northern Iraq?
The words “never again,” come to mind when I think about the shameful indifference with which the U.S. and the rest of the world now treat ongoing atrocities in Darfur. The state-sanctioned extermination and terrorizing of indigenous African peoples of western Sudan have recently spread into neighboring Chad, where refugees of the genocide have since fled.
As a child, learning that the rest of the world stood idly by while a government regime attempted to wipe my people permanently off the face of the earth has sensitized me to the word genocide and I too do not appreciate it being tossed around so carelessly, especially on a college campus.
I agree that a history lesson is definitely in order. But given what we’ve learned from the fates of targeted groups of the 20th century, failure to recognize and punish genocide today makes bystander nations complicit in such crimes we as human beings should never again tolerate.
Rachel Dodakian
8th Note story misrepresents smoking petition
The officers of the 8th Note Coffeehouse wish to express their disappointment toward the lack of journalistic integrity show by Scott Able in his March 1 article titled “8th Note staff fights smoking ban.”
To clarify, we are not disputing the validity of the students’ opinion, only Able’s representation of those student opinions as official statements made by the 8th Note.
Specifically, my corrections are as follows:
First, Cory Taylor was wrongly quoted as being an 8th Note staff member. Further, his statement regarding a special event on the last day of smoking is neither supported nor known of by the 8th Note.
Second, student and volunteer Mat Seppanen was misquoted as stating that the 8th Note would support a referendum as opposed to an executive decision. Seppanen’s statement originated from conversations with the volunteer staff and patrons who would support such a referendum. The volunteer staff does not represent an official voice for the organization, and none of our six officers were contacted for an official statement.
Able’s portrayal of the 8th Note led readers to believe that we are actively fighting this ban, which is false. Our purpose as an organization is to maintain a balance of activities that satisfy the variety of interests in the university community and to initiate new programs in response to expressed needs and interest. Our purpose for hosting the petition was to gain an accurate perception of students’ opinion and share it with the Union Policy Board.
The six officers of the 8th Note believe this article misrepresents the nature and purpose of our organization.
Vlad M. Nicolae
8th Note Public Relations
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