Friday, September 21, 2007

The Delusion of 'Dialogue'   [Travis Kavulla]

Other than his hypocrisy over Columbia's embrace of Ahmadinejad and simultaneous rejection of ROTC, the problem with Lee Bollinger's talking points about the First Amendment and dialogue and openness is that Ahmadinejad will have remarkably little dialogue on offer. 

When Mohammad Khatami (granted, a less noxious person than Ahmadinejad by ten-fold) spoke at Harvard last year, the only mildly interesting thing he did was to answer a pesky question about the hangings of teenagers found guilty of sodomy with the forthrightness you'd expect of an official of the Islamic Republic. But altogether, I wonder what people actually learned from the forum—there just wasn't any meat to it.

In my freshman year, I (a young Montana bumpkin) was very keen on seeing every notable speak to Harvard's John F. Kennedy, Jr., forum, where many big names come: On the second day of school, I listened to Pervez Musharraf; and more world leaders followed: the presidents of Serbia and Rwanda; the prime ministers of an untold number of banana republics; a couple Nobel laureates; the list goes on and on.

Only towards the end of that first year of college did it strike me how little these people had actually said in their appearances. The purpose of a visit to an Ivy League school is a perfunctory duty in a tin-pot leader's visit to the States: He wants to say, I'm good enough to be given the podium at a "respected" American institution, just as the WSJ argues. The last thing these leaders want to do is have a heavy-hitting, profound discussion.

Now I know that betting for Ahmadinejad's reticence is probably a fool's errand; but I would be surprised if Ahmadinejad gave something other than a bland, platitudinous, and perhaps mildly demented address. 

09/21 01:46 PMShare