Serpent's Tooth

While pro-lifers often hold candlelight vigils to remember the lives that aborted children never get to lead, Students for Choice recently held a vigil to show their need for the right to choose (or perhaps mock their opponents). Some less-publicized events the organization sponsors are the annual Yom Kippur pork roast, Valentine’s Day hate rally, and Easter march in favor of the crucifixion of religious figures.

Attention! Attention! Barely used, impeccably white sheets left over from the Review’s Halloween party are now available for purchase! (Warning — some sheets may have holes cut out.)

Dan Granger: Pig-in-a-Pokey. We look forward to reading his prison letters in MIM Notes.

Ah, yes — fall has arrived. The leaves are turning colors. If it were up to the leaves, they would happily remain green all year; however, with the wave of his magic wand, President Bollinger commands the green foliage to change into other colors. Apparently green isn’t diverse enough.

Halloween is almost upon Ann Arbor. Serpent’s Tooth would like to know: how we are supposed to tell the difference between those dressed up to celebrate the night, and the city’s normal collection of freaks, weirdos, and evolutionary U-turns?

Well, you have to hand it to the sports staff of the Daily; those guys really know their college football. So far this season the Daily’s three “experts,” Sharat Raju, Jim Rose, and Mark Snyder, are a pathetic 102-116-3 on picks against the spread, and an awful 8-10 on their supposed “Best Bets.” FYI, .500 is considered the “Mendoza Line” for sports forecasters. Get your degrees, gents — you sure aren’t going to make a living betting college football in Vegas. These guys must have been Pete Rose’s gambling advisers.

And speaking of sports, all you obnoxious New Yorkers (saying obnoxious and New Yorkers is a bit redundant, we know) can put away your Yankee caps, T-shirts, etc., which have flooded the campus after New York’s World Series victory last Wednesday. What’s the big deal? All George Steinbrenner did was win the annual contest to see which owner can buy the best team, which is essentially all that the World Series determines now. Give him the payroll of the Pittsburgh Pirates and see if you’d stay as brash as you are.

Those of you who have read Jacob Oslick’s expose on SAPAC (see page one) now know that Jacob has joined Managing Editor C.J. Carnacchio in the ranks of “rape colluders.” They are currently hiding in Honduras since SAPAC has marked them for penile separation. SAPAC’s Lorena Bobbit Brigade was dispatched to track them down and exact vengeance.

A recent edition of Time Magazine featured a newly discovered photograph of those two Marxist heroes, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevara, playing golf, of all things. We’re sorry — did the workers’ revolution take place on the front nine or the back nine? Castro, Guevara, O.J. Simpson — what is it that murderers find so attractive about golf? What’s next, a picture of Lenin and Trotsky sipping cognac on a yacht in the Black Sea? How bourgeois...

Oh, and back to the subject of candlelight vigils... Seeing as how they’ve become so popular, we’d like to announce that the Review will be holding a candlelight vigil to mourn the death of Western Civilization on January 20, 1999 — the six-year anniversary of the day Slick Willie promised to “faithfully execute” the Consitution of the United States. Apparently, our definitionally-challenged president chose the wrong meaning of the word “execute.” We should have been suspicious when he whispered to the Chief Justice, “What does ‘faithfully’ mean?”

A Note to our Readers

“Serpent’s Tooth” has always been a place in which we try to laugh at the foibles of liberalism in academia and politics. It is not always a tasteful place, nor in fact do we think that it should be. Modern politics is hardly a civil arena, and if the Left has outlets to get in its below-the-belt licks, then so should we.

However, in a recent “Serpent’s Tooth” we quipped that, given the abortion-rights stance of several Daily editorials, and specifically the writings of Editorial Page Editor Jack Schillaci, we wished that Schillaci’s mother “had been a lot more pro-choice about two decades ago.” This was clearly outside the bounds of good taste, and we apologize to Mr. Schillaci for the insult.

We should note two things, however. First, there is a point to be made regarding the pro-choice lobby and abortion — one we should have made more clearly in the joke. Pro-choice advocates typically invoke the refrain that pro-lifers should put themselves in the role of a poor mother, struggling to survive, who finds that she is pregnant. What, the pro-choicer asks, should we tell them? What would you do in her position? This is certainly a valid question. Therefore, putting a pro-choicer into an analogous moral quandary should also be fair game. Thus, it is a valid question to ask a pro-choicer how they would feel if they were a fetus being aborted. This point, though poorly made, is what we were trying to get at in the joke.

Second, we should note that “Serpent’s Tooth” is not always going to be perfectly acceptable to everyone, particularly those on the Left. This space is meant to be humorous, and the “Marquis of Queensberry” rules don’t necessarily apply here. Matters of taste are a grey area. However, it seems that one could well begin with the rule “Thou shalt not tar one’s political opponents by wishing them dead via a politically charged method of death.” This rule makes sense, and we broke it. For that, again, we apologize.

The Editors

This article was published in the 28 October 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 3).
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