“Fetishize,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition, means “to make a fetish of.” A “fetish,” then, is (besides a magical object associated with shamanistic religious practices and an object or body part that arouses remarkable sexual desire) “an object of unreasonably excessive attention or reverence” or “an abnormally obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a fixation.”

You fetishize this article.

I write today to explain your fetishization of this article and to inveigh against it. Some students’ responses to an article last week that I wrote called “‘-isms’ and ‘ities’ and crayons and coloring books” were the most profound of a number of examples I’ve seen in the last few years of a really bizarre, undue attention that the average human gives to language laid down permanently and in an organized way in ink: a fetishization of the printed word.

I notice this also from the incensed responses many of our columnists glean online from responders often going by “Anonymous” or the default “Your name.” Often readers feel personally affronted by the opinions printed in Washington University’s independent student newspaper, and by extension by those same articles online.

Many students (and faculty) feel that after they read someone’s opinion they disagree with in the newspaper, they have to “set the record straight” and publicly declare how vehemently their opinion differs from that originally expressed. They will write online comments, or letters to the editor or entire opinion-editorial pieces to defend their cause, their organization and their sense of self.

The reason this alarming urge to respond to what is said in our newspaper confuses me is that it assumes that the words printed in our newspaper are in some way especially legitimate.

Let me assure you: They are not.

I want to tell you a little about the process. It is 12:36 a.m. right now on Sunday night. I know I need to finish this article and send it to my editor sometime tomorrow, along with those of Wednesday’s staff columnists, so she can edit them for grammar and put them on the Student Life server.

I conceived this article in thinking about the response to my last article. It bothers me a) that I feel many people misinterpreted that article and b) that those people felt personally insulted by an opinion that, I felt, was quite personal to me and me alone. So I am reacting to that feeling.

I will send this article in tomorrow, after proofreading it maybe once, and at about 6 p.m. Tuesday night our Forum designer for Tuesday will copy and paste it into a text box in Adobe InDesign, place my headshot at the top of one of the columns and organize other similar articles to fit on the page in a visually pleasing way. Then I will come in at about 9 p.m. and make sure the layout fits our design vision, because that’s my job too, and our editor in chief will PDF the InDesign file after it is copyedited three times, and it will be sent via some sort of server to a printer who will print what we all created, and then a bunch of dudes whom nobody at Student Life knows will put the paper out in some of the prime spots around campus (which spots they skip on which days is always worth betting on) and people will pick it up and read it.

Notice that at no point did God, or a wizard or your mother give me, my editor or any of our columnists their blessing. Notice that we wrote what we wanted to and that that was it.

The words on this page are things that people think, organized into a comprehensible and compact design so that you can more efficiently and pleasurably read them. Why do we do it? What is the point? I write because I think that the things I think about are worth telling other people about. That’s all.

I have no more legitimacy than your boyfriend who claims Florida is a country in eastern Europe or your professor who does not know what reading he assigned for today.

I am just a person, and I am just typing on my computer.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Forum, Staff Columnists. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.