DARTBOARD

NO MAGAZINE IS AN ISLAND

This week Peninsula was back in the news, but for a peculiar reason: that is the very fact that it has been absent from the news for so long now. We at Dartboard know the pain of trying to stir up controversy but being met only with apathy, so we have decided to help out our partners in provocation. We propose to provide Peninsula with recrimination welfare; no publication should be denied at least a subsistence level of rhetorical counterattacks.

In their latest issue, Peninsula staffers took issue, not merely with abortion (the old stand-by), but contraception. In ideological terms, that's like a person wearing a sign that says, "Will Work For Food."

And since Peninsula's fortune seems to be the result of a Great Depression in campus tensions, we'll engage in a little Keynesianism (anathema, we realize, as it is to Peninsula's spirit) and prime the pump of vituperation, with some social service attack poetry:

Peninsula's truculent writing

Has caused to elicit debate;

The liberal press has stopped biting

So Dartboard will dangle some bait

Your grammer school Latin pretension

And pitiful polyglot pose

Can't disguise the lack of invention

In your bland and unreadable prose

From the reams of your paper spent squealing

How "homos in Hell will combust,"

It's clear that you're merely concealing

Your own pederastical lust.

As the Vatican's underage pharisees

You decree that the Earth doesn't turn,

And that for their Copernican heresies

Your physics professors will burn.

These foibles were once quite amusing

But our interest has started to flag

And with all the readers you're losing

You'll soon go the way of "the rag."

INSTITUTIONALIZED RACISM

Our generation and that of our parents may cope with some of the same problems, but we certainly go about solving them differently. Thirty years ago, those idealists who wanted to do something about racism might have spontaneously gone down South to join the Freedom Riders.

Students of our generation, ever eager to get some consulting experience on their resumes, sedulously apply for the privilege of anointing themselves "Race Relations Mediators."

The vapid language of technocracy has even co-opted the issues that formerly appealed to idealism, so that these days one can unironically speak of Harvard's "race relations infrastructure." One assumes that the Freedom Riders might have received some informal training (about how not to get beat up or killed) before setting out; how they might have benefitted from technical instruction from "Conflict Management, Inc.!"

Never mind that this "Mediation Service" will make Safety Walk look overtaxed by comparison. It just seems that if the solution to race relations were so simple that one could learn it through two weekends of touchy-feely motivational speakers and "role-playing" workshops. Harvard wouldn't need a gaggle of Deans and committees to deal with it.

The popular pharase "institutionalized racism" seems to describe nothing better than the formidable institutional machinery of race of which the "Mediation Service" is only the latest product.

It's a shame we didn't have these "Race Relations Mediators" 30 years ago:

"Governor Faubus, why don't you talk about your anxieties?" the mediators might have asked in the soft tones prescribed by the experts at "Conflict Management, Inc."

After some tearful confessions, therapeutic hugging and constructive role-playing exercises, Central High would have been happily integrated in no time flat. NEWSPEAK

"Does Harvard deliver"

--ABC News "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel, after he was presented with a Harvard chair Thursday night at the kennedy School's Arco Forum. Koppel was named the winner of the 1994 Goldsmith Career Award for Execellence in Journalism by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center for Press, Politics and Public Policy.