Who Else Would We Invite?

Now that reports about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have become boring and dated, according to the rule of “But I’ve read lots of stories about this,” we can finally turn our attention to the real question facing Columbia: would we have invited Hitler to speak here? If you kept up with either insane anonymous Internet commentary or Fox News, you can confirm that this was the issue on everyone’s mind. Of course, as many of you no doubt know, Hitler died many years ago, almost making the question seem stupid and pointless. To avoid controversy, however, I think I’ll just go ahead and say that I would not have invited Hitler, because the policy of ignoring him while he stayed in Germany seems to have panned out so well. With that all cleared up, we can now turn our attention to the people we would invite.

The most obvious choice is President George W. Bush. Some conservatives might doubt the sincerity of our desire to hear him speak, but they clearly weren’t paying attention to our treatment of Ahmadinejad. Did you see what Bollinger said to that guy? “I doubt you will have the intellectual courage to answer these [our] questions.” We would love to talk to Bush like that, even if it didn’t give us a chance to reuse the exact same line.

The only problem is that Bush would never come. We would offer him an organized academic environment that would allow him to explain his policies and actions to people with serious questions, which is basically his nightmare. He doesn’t like his reality to be disagreeable, which is why, despite having substantial control over the world, he spends a third of the year moving tree branches around at a ranch in Texas. Unlike Ahmadinejad, Bush simply does not have the rhetorical skills to intelligently engage with any crowd of capable college-educated people, much less one as polemical as Columbia’s. If we asked Ahmadinejad about war with Iran, he would answer with an obtuse analogy involving some combination of science, angels, and Palestine. Bush would chuckle and give us a horrifying wink.

The only Democratic presidential candidate I would invite is Barack Obama, CC ’83, because he’s a magical ray of sunshine in a bleak political world. John Edwards is boring, and I dislike Hillary Clinton because I believe she will beat Obama in the primary and then lose the general election. My main question for her would be, “You voted for both the PATRIOT Act and the Iraq War Resolution?” and then I would sit down. I don’t care what she has to say about it, I just like to point it out every now and then.
The main problem with the Democratic candidates as speakers is that they are competent and sane. Aside from a few cool people, like Obama, most interesting speakers will have only one of those qualities, like Ahmadinejad and Bush. If you don’t have either quality, you wind up with the Minutemen, and, really, you only need to be kicked in the head by scary xenophobes once in your educational career.

The Republican candidate who best exemplifies the great-speech formula is Rudy Giuliani, who has somehow managed to turn his insanity into an eery form of competence. I’m a little reluctant to invite him, because I’m afraid that if Bollinger gave him the ol’ “petty and cruel dictator” line, Rudy would be so offended by the slight that he’d have Bollinger brutally killed. On the other hand, he might show up in a dress and a pro-choice button. He’s a weird guy, and I’m not ashamed to admit that he frightens me.

As a gesture of good will, I think we should also invite Bill O’Reilly, who characterized Bollinger as a “pinhead” in the critically necessary “Patriots and Pinheads” segment of his show. I can tell that O’Reilly values honest discourse because he writes the words “No Spin” on most of his show’s flag-themed merchandise. I imagine he’d leap at the opportunity to have an open conversation in an academic setting. O’Reilly has rightly characterized people like Hillary Clinton and Snoop Dogg as cowards for refusing to appear on his show, so I can’t see him turning down our offer to appear here, unless he’s some kind of self-aggrandizing hypocrite.

We all know that he is, of course, and that he’ll never come. Like most of Columbia’s critics, he prefers the shouting-at-from-a-distance tactic over our policy of actually engaging with people who disagree with us. I think most of us would be more than happy to have major conservative leaders speak here, but most of them would never engage in a debate unless they got to control the whole thing. Ahmadinejad is a terrible human being, but he had the balls to stand up for himself in person, even though he knew he had no better argument than the no-gays-in-Iran line. Guys like Bush and Cheney and the pundits who feed off of them just don’t like conflict. They leave the fighting up to other people.

Anyway, the point is, they’re invited.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and comparative literature.
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