I started writing Pinata Diplomacy three and a half years ago in the McGill Daily. I had included in my columnist application a few clips from high school, where I used my position as opinion editor of the student paper to complain about the many hypocrisies of my suburban New Jersey town. The Daily apparently saw some promise in me, overlooked the terrible writing, and figured I’d follow the party line.
Of course, that didn’t happen. Eventually, I realized that those whose ranks I’d come to McGill wanting to join—the politically radical, the stylistically hip, the caustic and coolly subversive—were even more given to cliquishness, herd mentality, and what Marx called “commodity fetishism” than everything I’d left behind in New Jersey. It became difficult to overlook the fact that anyone who claims to object to the current power structure seems to write, speak, live, buy, and dress in a very particular way—a whole way of comporting oneself according to vague principles handed down from on high. The politics are ultimately of secondary concern, and I’ve never much liked the idea of uniforms.
Kurt Vonnegut, my first literary love, once wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” But I think he had it wrong. We’re never exactly what we pretend to be. We always slightly miss the mark. We’re always perceived differently than we want to be perceived, and we become something else. All pretensions to be anything are immediately frustrated.
What have I pretended to be? How have I fallen short?
In second year I was invited to move to the Tribune, which for obvious reasons made more sense for me. One week I picked up the paper and saw that all three columnists, myself included, had written about something that was just really pissing him or her off. It was apparently the default way to write an opinion piece, a lazy tool that often says more about the writer than the target of the attack. I realized that was a serious problem with my own writing in particular, a crutch I’d been relying on all too often.
It wasn’t so easy to stop.
Another thing I learned from Kurt Vonnegut is that there’s no excuse for trying to be a writer unless you’re going to be useful to society. That’s the fundamental goal and burden—being useful.
No matter how many times I tried to tone down my pieces about campus issues, I could never see much use in expressing something like the following—something like the truth: “I have a few problems with these energetic, pretentious activist-types, but on the whole I agree with them: their principles are right; the administration does seem pretty distant and evil; the YouTube videos of police crackdowns at McGill (and around the world) are seriously disturbing; the only reason I’m not out there occupying the principal’s office myself is because all my life I’ve been pretty fortunate and by now I have a lot to lose.” Even if that’s closer to the truth of my own opinions than anything else, on this campus it’s just not useful stuff.
The young Karl Marx once wrote a letter calling “for a ruthless criticism of everything existing,” in order to increase awareness and to extinguish all reliance on dogmas, including those with whose ends he agreed. The result would be a “self-purification,” without which no progress could be made at all.
It’s easy to hold a certain worldview, and it’s just as easy to object to another worldview. The more challenging, and rewarding, exercise is to critique one way of looking at things from inside itself.
Following that model, I’ve tried to be make useful and intelligent, if hyper-critical, contributions to the campus debate. Despite some excesses (and who among us doesn’t have excesses), I send out this final column somewhat placidly, compared to previous ones, content with the sense that I’ve at least done that much. I move forward now, beyond McGill, with more nuanced ideas of politics and of writing.
Thank you for reading.
