Dealing with authority and the media

Wow.  Its been a little while since this blogger hopped online.  I guess its been a little busy around here, and as anyone on a campus knows, there's this thing called "work" that starts to accumulate at this point in the semester.

So I've run into a wall, an edifice, an institution.  My open letter that I wrote about Rector Powell was rejected from the William and Mary student newspaper, the Flat Hat.  Most of the time, that wouldn't bother me.  Given the inflammatory nature of the article, it seemed a bit suspicious.  Upon talking to the Editor of the paper, it seems that the piece was given the axe because it focused on Powell himself rather than treating the Board of Visitors as a single unit.  

Something about that really bothers me, and it has to do with the way the power structure responds to criticism.  In my experience, institutions do not see individual criticisms as having "standing," to use a judicial term.  On the contrary, institutions like the Board of Visitors typically answer only to broad organizations that use similar language and ways of organizing information.

But if you break institutions down into their constituent individuals, the game changes completely.  No longer do you have a governing body of a large public University, but rather several separate packets of bone and blood whose purpose in the world is much broader and whose psyche is much more fragile and reactive than the institution they are a part of.  A great example:  Michael Powell defends attacks against him.

So you see, my article was intended to elicit a response.  I am no longer interested, as is dictated by media sources--and budding media moguls--like the Flat Hat, in addressing the "appropriate" facade of order and authority associated with my college.  Its time to deconstruct this power structure and get to the heart of it:  these are people we are dealing with, not machines, so lets bring it to them where it matters most.

Lets show them why they can't do this to us.