Post by RS Davis on May 5, 2004 2:07:47 GMT -5
[glow=red,2,300]Cathy Young Wrote:[/glow]
Not being a football fan, I had never heard of Pat Tillman until the news that the former National Football League player-turned-Army Ranger had been killed in Afghanistan on April 22. That was when I learned that two years ago Tillman turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army. While his death was no more (or less) tragic than any other soldier's, Tillman surely deserved the title of hero that is so often wantonly applied to professional athletes. I wasn't planning to write about Tillman—until I clicked on a link from a popular weblog to a column whose title says it all: "Pat Tillman is not a hero: He got what was coming to him."
The April 28 column in The Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reads like a twisted parody of an antiwar harangue. "You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the `real' thick of things," scoffs author Rene Gonzalez, a University of Massachusetts graduate student and occasional contributor to the Collegian. "I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures. Well, he got his wish."
It goes downhill from there: "In my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a 'pendejo,' an idiot...He was acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a bigger gun did him in...Tillman got himself killed in a country other than his own without having been forced to go over to that country to kill its people...he should be used as a poster boy for the dangerous consequences of too much `America is #1,' frat boy, propaganda bull."
Evidently, it never occurred to Gonzalez that if you're arguing for a fairly unpopular opinion, heaping insults on your country's war dead is not a promising tactic of persuasion.
Not being a football fan, I had never heard of Pat Tillman until the news that the former National Football League player-turned-Army Ranger had been killed in Afghanistan on April 22. That was when I learned that two years ago Tillman turned down a three-year, $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army. While his death was no more (or less) tragic than any other soldier's, Tillman surely deserved the title of hero that is so often wantonly applied to professional athletes. I wasn't planning to write about Tillman—until I clicked on a link from a popular weblog to a column whose title says it all: "Pat Tillman is not a hero: He got what was coming to him."
The April 28 column in The Daily Collegian, the student newspaper at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, reads like a twisted parody of an antiwar harangue. "You know he was a real Rambo, who wanted to be in the `real' thick of things," scoffs author Rene Gonzalez, a University of Massachusetts graduate student and occasional contributor to the Collegian. "I could tell he was that type of macho guy, from his scowling, beefy face on the CNN pictures. Well, he got his wish."
It goes downhill from there: "In my neighborhood in Puerto Rico, Tillman would have been called a 'pendejo,' an idiot...He was acting out his macho, patriotic crap and I guess someone with a bigger gun did him in...Tillman got himself killed in a country other than his own without having been forced to go over to that country to kill its people...he should be used as a poster boy for the dangerous consequences of too much `America is #1,' frat boy, propaganda bull."
Evidently, it never occurred to Gonzalez that if you're arguing for a fairly unpopular opinion, heaping insults on your country's war dead is not a promising tactic of persuasion.
