Hart Missed Point of Flier

To the Editors of The Crimson:

"Those who level charges of PC totalitarianism are playing a dangerous mirror game." So writes Melissa Hart in her March 4 piece, "Who's the Real McCarthy?" Unfortunately, her article indicates little more than that she is playing no such game, for it shows that she both reflected minimally on her central ideas and that she did not subject them to a look in a mirror.

The article's central thesis revolves around somthing akin to the "I'm not stupid, you're stupid" argument, writing that the true totalitarians on campus are not the PC adherents but rather anti-PC fighters. This argument, of course, really doesn't disprove the original point; it only indicates that the respondent subscribes to the "classify and conquer" motif, where one side-steps the contention by dismissing the one who made it.

Hart's piece centers around the flier Sumner Anderson and I disseminated to our classmates' parents. We composed the flier to reach those parents who share our traditional values in order to apprise them of that which Harvard would probably try to conceal from them during their stay. We believed it worked: numerous parents congratulated and thanked us for doing it.

Unlike these parents, Hart did not get the point of the flier. While trying to gainsay the allegation that there exists a PC conspiracy here (one, in fact, we never made, because conspiracy connotes a collusion which we have not witnessed yet), Hart maintains that the flier itself is a child of the complicity of Harvard conservatives. The flier belongs to Sumner and me alone, something the handout states at its bottom. But, as her article demonstrates, classification and consequent dismissal is easier than refutation.

Hart writes that conservatives define PC as "any challenge to traditional, white, male, heterosexual" ideas. She's almost semantically accurate, and deceptively so. More precisely, though, PC is "any challenge to traditional, white, male, heterosexual" ideas simply and only because the ideas belong to someone who's traditional, white, male, and/or heterosexual. In other words, PC means to dismiss rather than to disprove. Conservatives are not at all afraid of an open marketplace of ideas. We have always believed that our ideas are better (as I'm sure the non-relativist liberals have as well), and we desire only a level playing field. The PC phenomena forbids this opportunity.

Finally, Hart alleges that our flier "reinterprets" some of the events of the past few years and that our rendering "is a testimony to the absence of absolute Truth." No, it only proves that subjective interpretation of events can differ. Absolute truth has nothing to do with what people think about it or about events, but rather it concerns what is--something that may or may not be discernible. That's a big difference. Roger J. Landry '92