Cartoon fails to amuse
Dear Editor:
I just wanted to drop you a few lines about the “editorial cartoon” in the last issue (Friday, Sept. 2) of Student Life. Cartoonist Brian Sotak presented his view of the deaths of hundreds of Iraqi citizens killed by a stampede during a religious procession. Sotak’s cartoon showed a dying Iraqi with the comment, “Some Iraqis did end up in a holy place.” I was really astonished when I saw this presentation of cultural chauvinism.
I am not a religious person. I am an atheist. But nevertheless I consider it nothing else than disgusting to make fun of an event in which hundreds of innocent people died. What is the message of this cartoon? “Stupid Iraqis, stop your stupid processions and become Christians like us Americans?” I am sure that Student Life would not publish this kind of joke if a Jewish ceremony or a Christian procession ended up in a tragedy as it happened in
Iraq last week. This cartoon is not funny. It looks as though some student who does not know anything about the political situation in Iraq wanted to fill some space with a bad popcorn gag.
Good journalism should encourage the reader to get a different view on political issues, to find an individual opinion in spite of government propaganda and common prejudices. This kind of cartoon does not encourage that. It encourages the reader that these common Western prejudices about these pre-modern, inferior Iraqis are just the right thing.
This does not fit a newspaper that is proud of its “independence.”
Ralf Hoffrogge
St. Louis resident
Workers’ pay hasn’t yet been factored into tuition
Dear Editor:
Chancellor Wrighton claimed in the August 26 issue of Student Life that the $1 million increase in the budget for underpaid service workers would come from tuition. However, the Resource Priority Review Team (formed as a result of the agreement signed by the chancellor and the Student Worker Alliance at the end of the sit-in in April) has yet to meet, and it is tasked in part with finding sources for the additional funding, preferably avoiding a tuition raise.
Additionally, the chancellor neglected to mention that, when divided evenly among the roughly 12,000 full-time students at Wash. U. (counting graduate and professional schools, whose students also benefit from a clean and attractive campus as well as food service on both the Hilltop and medical campuses), $1 million is well under $100 dollars per student, or approximately one quarter of one percent of the total cost of undergraduate tuition room and board. This neglects the fact that the University’s total operation budget is well over twice the total revenue from tuition; were the $1 million dollar increase drawn from additional sources, the cost per student would be even lower.
Joe Thomas
Class of 2007, Arts & Sciences