Breath Of The Beast: Bollinger And Ahmadinejad

From the great blog Breath of the Beast:


Columbia University’s invitation, uninvitation, reinvitation absurd appearance of Ahmadinejad, and the show of refreshing but futile hostility toward him by Lee Bollinger the president of the university, has now passed into history. I've been trying to give my thoughts shape for a few days now. The whole thing was so ill considered from the beginning and has come to such a chaotic and inconclusive end that I was originally going to call this post The Ghost of “Wrong Way” Corrigan, as a reference to the epic reversals of direction and Lee Bollinger’s blind launch into a foggy night and his journey in a direction opposite to his intention. But then I read about the original “wrong way” guy, Douglas Corrigan, and I realized that the comparison was invalid.

Douglas Wrong Way Corrigan
Thanks to Wikipedia I learned that it was most likely that Mr. Corrigan had gone exactly where he had intended to go. Corrigan, it seems, had been an accomplished flyer, aviation mechanic and navigator on that foggy day that he took off from New York city headed for California and wound up a few dozen hours later in Ireland. Although he never admitted it publicly, the probable real story was that there was no chance that his diversion was an accident. In fact, he was one of the crew who had helped prepare Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis for the flight to Paris. It seems that Corrigan had applied for permission to make a trans-Atlantic flight and been denied. So, although to end of his life he never admitted it, most knowledgable observers are of the opinion that when he left New York with a flight plan for California and ended up in Ireland, he was just doing what he wanted to do and daring anyone to punish him.

Columbia University President, Lee Bollinger
I was pretty surprised that Lee Bollinger put on a good account of his promised “sharp remarks” when he addressed them to Ahmadinejad this past Monday afternoon. Having heard his address at this past spring’s graduation ceremonies, I was expecting something far more equivocal. It is not news to me that his guy can thread the ideological needle. He is smart and he is good at what he does. I just didn’t expect hat he would come out as strongly.

I have to confess that when he began his remarks to the Iranian President by saying, “Today, I feel all the weight of the modern civilized world yearning to express the revulsion at what you stand for,” I was initially impressed and relieved. As I listened, though, it dawned on me that, satisfying as it was to have the well, spoken and charismatic Bollinger give this tin-pot despot a tongue lashing was, as I had myself predicted, not a victory at all.


Read the whole thing at Breath of the Beast.