The American Spectator

Reader Mail

Biden His Time

8.26.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 5 of 5)

Where to begin? Start with the simple fact that I used not one word, in that sentence or any other, to "malign" those four people, and I defy anyone to present evidence that I came anywhere close to doing so. Then move on to the simple fact that no troops fired into a group of children on that day. The mobs were made up of young adults. To name them children is a disservice to them, as well as an effort to change the chemistry involved in the events that lead to the shooting.

One young man, a ROTC cadet by no means given to left-wing conviction or behavior, was at the scene of the shooting as an observer. One young woman was no more than an aspiring school teacher on her way to an afternoon class. The other two kids were there to demonstrate their objection to the incumbent president and to the war he refused to end in a timely manner. None of them deserved to die at that time, in that place or in that manner.

But die they did, and the memorial service convened on the Kent State campus every May is usually loaded with crackpots and halfwits that use their deaths as an endorsement of whatever bag of horse feathers they happen to be flogging. Shrill women and their endless demands, diversity nerds, people who conduct seminars in urban guerilla warfare, persons seeking aid and comfort for whatever convicted murderer is popular this year, you name it and some unsavory character will claim those four dead died to make the world safe for it. I've been there, more than once, and that's how it was.

What I find most amusing, and most discouraging, about Mr. Campbell's remarks is the way he so easily dismisses anyone who doesn't agree with his awkward, overstated rhetoric. That's the way it is, he said, and "[t]o suggest anything else is to make this country less than what it is." How, exactly, disagreement with Mr. Campbell makes this country "less than it is," or how, exactly, one makes any country "less than it is," is a matter I leave to those who came of age after all Freshman English became remedial Freshman English.

The mainspring of my letter dealt with an Ohio Guardsman who was snubbed when his duty was done, in 1920. I described the Kent State event to draw a parallel example of other Ohio Guardsman who were left out of the swim of things; it happened when the academics and other pests who expected the world to be impressed with the way they were reconciling with one other, made no attempt to understand or reconcile with the kids who spent that awful May day in uniform. That suggests their reconciliation feast was no more than the usual perfumed histrionics, lined out in general-purpose left wing rant.

There is some reason to believe that, among various college officials and senior Guard officers, there was an inclination to raise the response to civil disorder to something appropriate for a totalitarian army of occupation. But among those who were marching in rank and file there were kids â€"and many were no older than the students they faced- who were simply doing what they had to do. They deserve a lifetime of vilification far less than the vandals who set about creation of a four day sequence of disruptive and violent behavior, which culminated with the shooting and death. It was a tragedy of historic proportion, but I doubt it was a "disgrace." And if it was, there is disgrace enough to tar both sides.

Mr. Campbell presents himself as a 28 year old youngster who is not a slave of fashionable political conviction; but he readily deploys some of the rhetoric that serves that conviction. I say to him: loosen your shoes, sir; breathe into a paper bag; lie quiet and contemplate the enormity of all you do not know.
-- Edmund Dantes

LITERACY TEST
Re: Edmund Dantes's letter (under "Hair Splits") in Reader Mail's Here's to Youth:

Dear Mr. Dantes, I just wanted to let you know I re-read your letter and found your phrase "the 69th in its final form" is nowhere to be found in the story of the reunion. It was therefore, because of a lack of an included timeframe, not a case of my "splitting hairs," it was only a case of my "getting it right." The 69th was not yet a part of the 42nd.

It is my hope that is literate enough for you.
-- Michael Skaggs
Murray, Kentucky

LAUGH TEST
Re: Justin's letter (under "Get It?") in Reader Mail's Here's to Youth:

Sigh. As if we need further proof that certain people have absolutely no sense of humor (or the absurd)...
-- Lee Hoffman
Honolulu, Hawaii

Letter to the Editor

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