Who's on first? on top?

Des Bieler’s blog in today’s Washington Post online*

     tells of new football coach Jim Harbaugh’s intervention in University of Michigan campus politics, when in response to a student petition led the University to cancel a showing of the film “American Sniper.”

Tweet, tweedle-dee-deet:

The University reversed its decision.

“The petition to cancel the screening of ‘American Sniper’ was led by a Michigan student who had seen the film and told the Detroit Free Press that she ‘felt uncomfortable during it.’

“‘As a student who identifies as an Arab and Middle Eastern student, I feel that “American Sniper” condones a lot of anti-Middle Eastern and North African propaganda,’” Lamees Mekkaoui told the newspaper, also telling the Press that she liked the usual movie events, but Mekkaoui said. “‘I don’t think this film fits that event, which is supposed to be fun and enjoyable. I think it should be played, but not at this event.’”

Getting it back into the event may not have been all Coach Jim. After the movie was cancelled, another petition circulated. From the Free Press:

“The movie American Sniper is not about a racist mass murderer or a criminal,” that petition begins, though may Lamees Mekkaoui, or I, be pardoned if it occurs to us that a movie in praise of a man who gunned down one-by-one 160 Middle Easterners might be - on the face of it - about just that. No matter who hired him.**

Here I’m going to say something (else) bound to rankle many of you: First, I’m surprised the movie wasn’t titled American Hero, since we have taken that term we once would have used for Margery Kempe, Mohandas Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr. and reserved it for these to whom we also say, “Thank you for your service,” now defining that term [service] as going to war or, at least, supporting “the war effort.” In short, we have come to glorify the military – as we never have in my lifetime. They are our heroes. When we lift them up, glorify them, unaware, it seems to me, that by extension we also glorify those that go to war, and by extension we glorify the wars they go to, and by extension we glorify War.

        “Blessed are the peacemakers”? We spew those words out of our mouths faster than God did the Laodiceans.

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   * Thanks to Des also for leading me to the Free Press article on the subject.

   ** Of course, we did; and if Jim Harbaugh clearly cannot, I deeply, deeply regret my part in it.