Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume 35 Number 6. April 11, 1972

Crytics [Letter from C. Clayton]

Sir,

Thank goodness the art of the sermon is not dead. Dedicated preachers are alive and pricking on the centra-spread and the back page of Salient No. 4. I have always preferred to have someone tell me what I ought to be doing end what is right end wrong than to work it out for myself (Here endeth the leaden sarcasm).

Here follows a short (very very short) selection of the idiocies in these two features.

The back page.

Economise on everything except education." Old age pensions to you mate. Think before you mouth.

"Resist the anti-human fashion exploitation industry (wear coalsacks)" Believe it or not coalsacks are uncomfortable, and more important clothes are sometimes ways of self expression instead of camouflage. However, maybe everyone looking the same in coalsacks would be more convenient.

Gro-up-oly.

Square 19 "Parents teach you to read... what a drag... post-literate era of man." I find the idea that the written word is of no further use to be amusing.

Square 5. "Birth in a sanitized hospital. Miss a turn." It is such a pity that babies miss all those lovely germs.

Square 39 "2+2=4 ("wrong) Don't believe it." All forms of mathematics are tools and methods tor/of communication. Communication is impossible unless the vocabulary used is understood by both the sender and receiver - an exponent of 2+2=5 is unintelligible to a person who says 2+2=4 (and that should have been obvious).

Getting a job on square 84 puts you back 9 spaces. Are you objecting to working, or the system under which we are forced to work. And most people are forced to work because if you're not completely self sufficient (end if you're a music lover have you ever tried to build a transistor or any acoustic guitar?) You need money if not your own, then somebody eises. Making stupid simplifications helps nobody.

Square 49. Superman comics are pretty shallow -don't you really mean that the methods of teaching English rather than the entire content is wrong. If so, why inflict your confusions, and trendy simplistic generalisations on us.

Personally, I read Salient to be informed and to be amused. About the amusement, I prefer to laugh with people rather than at them. About the information, it is fitting if a university newspaper can exclude views which display primer (albeit fashionable) mentality. Although it's probably very nice for the authors to live in the golden lands of childhood, it doesn't help anybody else very much.

C. Clayton.