I and Portland are blessed with a wonderfully snarky, free weekly called Willamette Week. They have yearly shticks such as the Kvetchfest, where readers are invited to share their Portland peeves. They always carry the delightfully quirky horoscopes of Rob Brezsny and one of their regular features is "
Rogue of the Week" wherein they lambast people and entitities actively engaged in assholery.
There's a lot to like about the "Willy Week," as it's affectionately known. I'm also somewhat partial because I've worked for them from time to time. So, full disclosure or something. Whether I'm working there or not, I'm a pretty regular reader. Well, imagine my surprise (and delight) at finding mention of dailykos in one of their recent articles, The Accidental Anti-Semite.
Caelan MacTavish swears he never imagined his name would go for a ride that's still rolling on the Internet, getting blasted by Jews and praised by anti-Semites.
MacTavish, a 28-year-old undergrad in his eighth year finishing a liberal-studies degree at Portland State University, landed in that spot by writing a column this term for the student-run Daily Vanguard using what he calls his technique of "aggression."
...The column--titled "A City Divided"--was published Oct. 18. The backlash took a while to develop, but letters eventually started to trickle in, and that response soon generated more debate than the column itself.
Ten days after publication, the Vanguard published a full-scale retraction, accompanied by a letter of protest signed by 37 professors. Also in that critical mix: letters from the university's president, Dan Bernstine; its Jewish student union; and CAMERA, a Boston-based pro-Israeli media watchdog group. Unpublished were a few unsigned letters from fringe right-wingers praising MacTavish and claiming the Holocaust was a hoax.
Seven days after publication, MacTavish's exercise in ignorance was featured in a dailykos diary by user loganme. By the way, another cool thing about Willamette Week is they're not afraid to cuss in their articles:
In a pre-Internet world, that might have been the end of it. But the website Daily Kos--rated the fourth-most influential blog in America by Blogstreet.com--posted a piece Oct. 25 about MacTavish's column.
Cue the shitstorm.
The Vanguard began to get letters from Iowa, Australia and Tel Aviv. Then accounts of the flap began appearing on other blogs--including libertyforum.org, a far-right website frequented by real-deal anti-Semites.
I beg to differ on the fourth-most influential bit, but that's blogstreet, not Willamette Week. In any event, I doubt that MacTavish will be voted most influential anything any time soon; he's been fired from the Vanguard and who knows when he might actually graduate. When he does, though, he plans to write fiction; maybe his next 15 minutes will be kinder.