Do As We Say, Not As We Do

“You, quite simply, [are] ridiculous. You are either brazenly provocative or astonishingly uneducated. . . . I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer [our] questions . . . I do expect you to exhibit the fanatical mind-set that characterizes so much of what you say and do. . . . Your preposterous and belligerent statements . . . led to your party’s defeat in the [last] elections.”

So said Columia president Lee Bollinger to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I'd be hard-pressed to choose which of these men's worldviews is more absurd, but in terms of being a spineless and self-absorbed prick, Bollinger wins it hands down.

Bollinger is the man who invited Ahmadinejad to speak at Columbia. He is also the man who keeps ROTC off of the Columbia campus on the grounds that the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy is discriminatory towards gays. So the American military is discriminatory towards gays, but Mahmoud Ahmadinejad isn't? The American military is not allowed on Bollinger's campus because of its attitude towards gays, but a man who a) denies that gays exist in Iran and b) hangs the gays that do manage to exist, is given an invitation to speak.

So, aside from some rather dubious standards about what people and institutions live up to Columbia's professed standards of decency, what's the problem? The problem is that, after inviting Ahmadinejad, Bollinger then buckled to the people who protested. He did not, of course, cancel the invitation; he simply used it as a forum to look "tough on terror", which, in the modern American parlance, means "treating foreign leaders like petulant children and judging their responses as ignorant and evasive before they are even given."

Lee Bollinger is a coward. What kind of man stands at a podium and levels ad hominem assaults at an invited guest who doesn't speak English? A solipsistic and petty brat. A douchebag, if you will.

Much has been made of the fact that "nobody in Iran could have said such things to Ahmadinejad" and that "no American leader would be allowed to adress such an audience in Iran". These points are hard to refute, but they also crystallize the current American zeitgeist; we do brutal, petty, criminal, and disgraceful things in all matter of fora, with words and with weapons, and then we assure ourselves that we are better than whoever we did those things to.

This is the wrong metric. Ready for the right metric? What we should have asked ourselves is this: "Forget the state of free speech in Iran. Forget President Ahmadinejad. If President Bush had been invited to an American university to field unscreened questions from an unscreened audience of college students, would he even have showed up?"

We all know the answer of course. Not a chance. Firstly, we know that no host would dare utter the words quoted above to President Bush. And, if you study the quote closely, it is rather relevant to the president.

"Preposterous and belligerent statements?" Ahmadinejad says the jury's out on the Holocaust. Bush says we found the WMD in Iraq. Ahmadinejad says there are no gays in Iran. Bush says there are no uninsured in America ("folks can just go to the emergency room" is how our compassionate Christian squared this circle. That's just Bush's version of Ahmadinejad's "there are no gays in Iran", although there are apparently plenty of men in Iran who have sex with other men).

Not only would nobody confront our president the way Bollinger confronted Ahmadinejad, the president would never show up at an unscripted event with a question and answer session. Ever notice how Mr. Bush's audiences consist overwhelmingly of soldiers and children? Ever notice how people with signs protesting the president are routinely arrested? Arrested. For a sign. In the United States. Well, we have free speech, but free writing? That's anarchy.

So while we pat ourselves on the back over how much we value free speech, (by which we mean insulting guests and refusing to confront our own government) we may want to consider what would happen if President Bush was invited to attend a celebration of this right that we so self-righteously use to flagellate others.