To Fuss is Human, To Rant, Divine!!

To Fuss is Human, To Rant, Divine!! is another Blog by the illustrious William Li. I say, William Li, William Li, or rather, William Li. Possibly I mean, William Li.

There was some guy named Dave something or other who googled his first and last name and then spent a year meeting all of those people and finding that he either did or not not like/have something in common with those people.

This is something of a repeat topic for me, but whatever. What I see is more and more William Li's getting on to the internet and they are getting more interesting, accomplished and distinguished. They are also getting younger.

I wonder if John Smith feels this way.

William, your wife and daughter love you, you are about to have a son, you have a good job, you are enjoying law school, and sometimes you tell funny jokes. Isn't that enough?

Maybe. But sometimes it's hard to let things go. Like:
The time I read some stupid comment made by a guy from Brown saying that the Campanile was a piece of cake. So I fired off an email critizing him for being a loud-mouth nobody. I got the typical "William Li is a big a****** for criticisizing me, and come to think of it, he's just an a*******" tirade in response.

I'm being too stingy. This was not typical. This was the gold-standard. In fact, this is probably my favorite anti-William Li tirade of all time. Why? Because all the classic elements are so perfectly formed:

First, it's really long. Much longer than my stink-bomb of a letter. It's well-structured. The dude utterly demolishes my sad, baseless argument. The guy points out the flaws in my analogy, my empty rhetoric, and I think he is making fun of my grammar.

It is also deliciously self-serving. The guy touts his credentials as a serious journalist (he was op-ed editor at a high school for two whole years).

It's also a back-peddle. Rather than stick to his guns in insulting the Campanile staff for being slow, he walks back his original statement and tacitly admits that the Campanile staff is probably overworked and deserves sympathy (rather than ridicule.)

Most of all, it really got the guy's goat. Something like a year later, my ex-roommate ran into him at a party "You are living with that a****** William Li? That guy came insulted me in The Thresher, what an a*****!"

William, If you are so pleased with the response, why are you re-hashing it now?

There was one part of the whole exchange that got my goat.

"Editor's note: William Li is not a member of the Campanile editorial staff. "

There is almost never editorial comment on letters to The Thresher.So, any comment always means something. In this case it means, "We agree that William Li is just a big a*****."

Up yours, Thresher editors, for such a dirty trick. I guess its my own fault for insulting the easy target (the person quoted) rather than saying what I really thought, is is that the article's author wrote a terrible news story and deserves to be insulted, and maybe the editors of the Thresher should also be insulted for printing such garbage. I supposed that is what I get for being lazy.

Here's my backstory:
I wrote for the Thresher my Freshman year. I did some movie reviews (which I enjoyed writing) but then, they stopped asking me to review movies and kept assigning me sports articles. I didn't want to write them. So.... I didn't, and then I quit. End of story

* * * *

So what?

So I learned a lot about being a lazy journalist from being assigned articles about Rice Sailing and other stupid topics that I didn't want to write about. One of the things that I learned is: when you don't want to write a good article but have to (and worse, are asked by the editors to make it "balanced"), then you phone it in as follows: First you write all the facts. If that does produce a long enough article, then you try to write some pro and con side opinions. If you still aren't there yet, then you go and find people to whom you can attribute your opinions(... erm I mean "you get quotes as a form of so-called facts"). Most of the time this process is totally ham-handed but no one notices because it is buried in the middle part of the article and it makes for nice space filler.

For an example of this "Man in the street" quoting take a look at USA Today and check out how The Onion mocks it. There is also a really funny Mad magazine that mocks how The Onion mocks the USA Today. Mad magazine - yes, it is still funny. Did you hear that the original artist who drew Alfred E Newman ("What me worry") recently died? It's true. But I digress.

When Louren was working on both the Thresher and the Campanile, it became clear that the editors of the Thresher understood the real basis of my criticism even better than I did since they often criticized each other, in private, for exactly that sort of lazy writing.

Anyhow, it has bothered me for years that the real winner of the whole exchange was The Thresher. First, they deflected any notice of their rotten article. Also, they got more space filler. And also, the whole exchange made the Thresher's writers look like geniuses compared to the inane gobbledygook that was being sent in by us foolish letter-writers.

What really bothers me, even still, is the arrogance of the whole thing. Student media is a privilege, not a right. I had a similar problem with the editor of the student newspaper at City University.

I was going to segue from that last paragraph into this whole pronouncement that blogs bust up this whole hegemony, but it's not true, so I won't. At some point, there are too many soap boxes on Speaker's Corner and each new dissenting voice becomes less meaningful. Also, I read the Thresher the other day and I thought that it was fairly well written, so I guess I should quit beating up on the editor from ten years ago.

The truth is, What I am most bothered by is this William Li guy from Dartmouth. There he is... having more colorful rants than, me ... this William Li from Sugar Land. I won't admit that New Hampshire William Li has better rants, but clearly they are (in a 21-year old sort of way) more energetic, more brave (with respect to the topics that he will take on), and delivered with  more certainty. I deeply admire how certain he is about his positions.

My jealously of this energetic young man's blog brings up an ugly truth about me. I suppose I've always attacked people who were so certain because I myself have rarely been certain of anything. Maybe people (like my brother or mom) will disagree about that, but consider: I once wrote a paper in college defending philosophical skepticism over whether or not I had hands (ask Trav if you don't believe me). And for a few years thereafter, I would lie awake at night wondering if I actually did have hands.

For the most part, whenever I take a strong position on anything, there is an element of self-parody. I can always see the other side of the argument, and sometimes I see a third, fourth, and fifth side. I suppose that this will make me a good lawyer, but as a person, it gets tiresome. And as a parent, I wonder how I should answer questions. Dakota is nearly to the age when she starts to ask Why Why Why and What What What. She wants definite answers, and I just don't have them. She thinks that "elephant" and "dinosaur" rhyme... and I see her point, and don't correct her. For now, that sort of flexibility makes me her hero, but I bet she will eventually get frustrated with it.

Hopefully she will come full circle and realize that although I am merely a William Li and not even the one who is the famous fantasy illustrator., the famous engineer-entrepreneur, the pioneering cardiologist, the semiotics-internet guru or even the media executive - none of those William Li would admit that elephant and dinosaur might rhyme. And maybe she will see that as a metaphor for... something. And maybe that could be a good thing; maybe. Well, I hope so, anyway.