Errata

As the term comes to an end, I’ve pared down three of the columns I would have written had time and space permitted.

• A Banal Undertaking

Eager to see if the literary arts “magazine about sex” stacked up to anything more than smut, I had a copy picked up from H Bomb’s release party on Monday night. I shouldn’t say I was pleasantly surprised—I found the feature articles dull, the poetry overwrought and the interviews middling. But the co-founders’ glib pronouncement on the editor’s note that the magazine “Isn’t quite what you expected, is it?” holds true enough.

The semi-nude pictures it does contain are self-parodying, pointless or nothing edgy. A few articles and interviews address the ambiguous divide between art and porn, making the editors’ pronouncement “[H Bomb] isn’t porn, that’s for sure” seem painfully ironic and, by their own standards, simple-minded. Of course, it’s all part of the game—a full-page advertisement for Playboy (page 28) might signal something. And if Playboy is porn encased within misfit cerebral articles, then H Bomb is merely just an even more smug rendition of Playboy.

All in all, the publication is a masturbatory affair—and not in the sense of the article on page 43.

So, perhaps we can strike a middle ground—it’s not porn, and it’s not art. Rather, it’s a $9,000 excursion into the pump-priming of professional photographers, printers and legal counsel.

What continues to be puzzling is why the Undergraduate Council would award $2,000 to a publication so titillating that it could clearly garner enough advertisers to make do, while requests for community service projects and rape prevention events received only a marginal amount of their requests. Indeed, H Bomb may well make a profit if the magazine sells to enough outsiders for the $5 apiece cover price—which will surely happen if the founders can stress the magazine’s provocative allure (a porn mag for Harvard students?!) over the mundane and self-absorbed reality.

• Kofi, How Could You?

The recent refrain of Democrats and the 9/11 Commission has been one of anger that the Bush administration did not do enough to stop terrorist attacks before they happened on American soil. And if they can make a specifics-filled case that shows where and when Bush failed, then they will make a strong point. Yet, whatever ferocity has come down upon the Bush administration for not doing enough before 9/11 to stop terrorist attacks should come down tenfold on U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who will be this year’s Commencement speaker.

During his time in the Secretariat, he has hardly proved a competent official willing to take political chances to save innocents’ lives. As head of the U.N.’s peacekeeping operations, his intentionally muddled directives made for confusion amidst blue helmets in Bosnia, leaving them unable to militarily defend towns that were designated as “safe zones.” His failure to clarify this language, even after he was asked to by several commanders, led Dutch peacekeepers in Srebrenica to simply stay inside their barracks, rather than stop the Bosnian Serb military from massacring 7,000 Muslim refugees. Ultimately, the event forced the Dutch prime minister to resign his position in 2002 when a report was released assigning blame to the peacekeepers and the U.N. So why the impunity for Annan?

Even if Annan isn’t directly held responsible for the failures of this department, he’s certainly an unexceptional administrator. To boot, a scandal to rival liberals’ favorite refrains about Bush’s oil ties is in the works currently at Rockefeller Center. Instead of alleged conflict of interests with Halliburton, however, the recent scandal from the Oil-for-Food program is quite real. In this instance, while Saddam was skimming money off his side of the budget to pay sympathizers in other countries that kept his regime afloat diplomatically, Kofi made sure a Swiss company where his son, Kojo, was a top consultant won a large contract for the program.

Yet, whereas those upset with Dick Cheney’s secret energy powwows have taken him to court, Annan is in the comfortable position of having the authority (since the U.N. hardly has the types of checks and balances legitimate governmental organizations do) to suppress whatever reports he want. And, in this case, 50 Oil-for-Food audit reports have underwent this same fate—even as Annan declares he knows nothing about the whole situation.

An exemplar of world peace and global ethics for Harvard’s Commencement ceremonies? Hardly.

• A Truly Liberal Education

Even “progressives” have to realize there is a lot to legitimately complain about in Harvard’s curriculum at a time when a class that focuses around uniformly left-wing celebrity interviews and culminates in a take-home exam enjoys the second-highest enrollment in the College.

But, to give credit where credit is due, only the margins of Harvard—the Committee on Degrees in the Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and those courses taught by departing Lecturer on the Study of Religion Brian C.W. Palmer ’86—are totally closed off to dissenting voices. The recent appointment of Niall Ferguson, who will enjoy a dual appointment to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Harvard Business School, proves this well enough. His apologia for the British empire and his recent argument that America is and should be an empire are hardly popular ones to make in these post-colonial days. Yet, his voice is not merely being tolerated, but embraced—he’s been invited to give a number of lectures in Cambridge since the announcement, and most of his future colleagues seem elated to work with Ferguson.

Even if George W. Bush may never enjoy a debate that is anything more than a shouting match at Harvard, the Huntingtons, Mansfields and, soon, Fergusons of the academy might keep a more subtle discourse going.

Travis R. Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears regularly.