THE WEATHER CYNIC

I admit it, I dislike student newspapers. What's my problem with them? It has to do with their tone. Sure, when endorsement time comes around, they consistently end up on my side of the issues (and by "they", I mean the two college papers I regularly read, the Daily Cal and the UCSB Daily Nexus). But there's a certain elitist mock-centrist cynicism to be found in such outlets.

Case in point: today's Weather Human. The first few sentences:

This past weekend the AS President at Berkeley got busted for public drunkenness and fleed from the cops, and our AS President played the hero by convincing a killa-to-be to drop her knife.

Just another victory for us over those snooty kids up north who think just because their school is the oldest that they get to represent "Cal." We've got a more upstanding president, better weather, and more kids with enough sense to realize that printing fliers can't save the fucking planet.

Sure, a mock rivalry is all in good fun. But that last line... I understand the joke and all, but isn't there a hint of anti-activist snobbishness to it? After all, for whatever activist population we have here -- and there is one -- UCSB is a notoriously isolated school, halfway between everything and everything else in California, and located in an isolated portion of its own city, with a small, isolated, essentially by/for-student satellite community next to it (Isla Vista). The anonymous Weather Human and the Nexus mock activism (a component of which is printing and posting fliers) from a platform of very, very thin ice.

Think I'm being touchy? Well, that's fine. I also remember the Op-Ed Editor from the Daily Cal looking me in the face last summer and spreading the lie about Hillary's use of a ghostwriter for It Takes A Village (truth: though another writer had been paid in advance, hillary finished the book on her own). Why would someone be so eager to drink the wingnut Kool Aid on such a matter? Perhaps it fits the "snobbish cynical centrism" model. Boy, those MW's start early...

PS . . . Though I would note, the Nexus' weekly sex column, "The Wednesday Hump", is far inferior to the DC's column.