Another Perspective

The Art of the Soapbox

What understanding or intelligence have they? They put their trust in popular bards and take the mob for their teacher, unaware that most people are bad, and few are good.
-Heraclitus

By Brian Roberts

You'll see them everywhere you go these days: signs that read "Under Construction", "Construction Zone", or more simply, "Workers." These beacons of incomplete serviceability are transient: the point at which the eyesore begins to blend into the landscape is the very point at which it disappears, the work completed, to be propped up again at some inconveniently nearby location. I've been asked by my editors to address this phenomenon as it pertains to the construction of the Another Perspective column; like any grateful employee, I said, "Yes, boss, shakin' it, boss"; like any average construction worker, I have spent as much time scratching my ass and patronizing the vending machine as I have laying brick, and am now an impressive two days past my completion deadline.

Deadline, schmeadline. I've been an English major at this school for three years now, and there has yet to be a professor for whom I've turned in every paper on time-no editor is any different. This is far more sick than any simple disrespect for authority, mind you. Professor Jim Boren said it best in a lecture a couple years ago with the quip that lateness for class is an indication of neurosis. Today I learned that according to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, any fixation on a particular way of being constitutes neurosis, so I scrawled into my notebook that in this age of technology and specialization, all modern life is neurotic. Sitting now before a Pentium, with two dictionaries and enough Hamm's to drown a kodiak, I am a thoroughly modern man.

The OC's AP columnist is traditionally characterized by a disdain for deadlines, and if there is any precedent to observe, it is the one set by those fearless souls who have gone before me in risking sanity and reputation on this faux battlefront in the "war of ideas". If I were J. Pierson I would have begun this column by relating to you some idiosyncrasy of your campus radio station. If I were Chris Kantrowitz I would have mentioned that I only write in the nude, an assertion augmented with a little something in Latin. If I were Judah McAuley I might have brought in the big guns by interviewing that famously outspoken personality, my own self. If I were Michael Atkinson I'd narrate to you my last vacation in Hunter S. Thompsonese. I've tried to co-opt each of their acts in the name of paying my dues to the discipline, and endeavored to do so in my own voice, without shouting too loudly or whispering too softly, but I can't get over the feeling that I've been standing on a stack of boxes of Dial, speaking Swahili into the wind.

It seems to be a condition of this enterprise that someone who thinks he has an idea or two will lay them down in what he considers to be a creative combination of words, as if through strength of rhetoric and conviction he will cause those ideas to become other people's truths, after which said other people will react, for the most part, by not reacting. I base this impression on two observations: 1) whenever I read the columns other people are writing-opinion, personal experience, whatever-here on this campus or in national publications, I tend to find myself flooded with indifference, awash in wonder as to why someone would want to relate such subjective triviality to people one doesn't know, vaguely tremulous that people unknown to me might look at my column with the same diminishing eye I can't help but lend to others', and 2) the only feedback I've been able to elicit regarding this column is from people who know me personally and read a lot anyway, who say as little as possible about whatever topic I attempted to address. A couple days ago a friend said something like this: "Well, you've got the art of the soapbox down to a, an, um... well, you've got the art of the soapbox, all right."

What I realized when he said that was that if there is any imperative to this kind of work it is that one build oneself a durable and attractive soapbox stand before getting up to preach. When I undertook this project in October I pledged to do two things: to make fun of all your fruity costumes and to champion the cause of Self-Referentiality in Journalism. Now I must admit that I haven't come close to performing those duties. First of all, the only fruity costumes I've been able to get inside are my own. Secondly, this piece may be riddled, like so much these days, with first-person pronouns, but in no way does it constitute journalism. This is more like Proto-Literary Masturbation. I am the worker who shows up late to the site and spends the day in the tool shed with the company porn, to emerge at quitting time spewing some line about having been drawing up plans for the next project.

As far as that next project goes, it is expected to be apolitical in nature. If a person's life may be represented, as Robert Frost has intimated, by a walk through a wood, it's fair to say that the only thing that keeps me walking is the hope that I will soon reach a waterfall or something to validate the tedium of trudging through miles and miles of pine. In my anxiety to find such an oasis, I have always been one to investigate side paths, to see if I can learn the indicators of trails that lead to waterfalls. Somehow, at some point, I came to a fork in the path of consciousness and took the trail with a sign that read: "Politics is a compelling and meaningful truth-finding endeavor for intelligent people." I've been covering my tracks ever since in the vain attempt to aright my mistake, losing myself ever-deeper in the forest of banality.

So here I am tacking paragraphs together with the hope that they will look sufficiently unlike a soapbox to be safely employed as one. If ever you should find yourself constructing a similar monstrosity, be sure to have the necessary materials: a handful of forgotten utterances of dead people, a couple pints of vitriol, and a hundred yards of irony with which to mask all the vitriol-the last thing you want is someone knowing how you really feel. If you have any of these things to work with, and you think you might be able to it use them to construct a platform on which to say something that will mean something to someone, all I can tell you is that I wish you better luck than I have had.

Brian Roberts, a senior majoring in English is a featured columnist for theOregon Commetator.