Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

Boyle on Pesick: 'Maniacal', 'One-track-mind'

2. December 2004 • Ari Paul
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Frequent AU commenter David Boyle takes Michigan Daily editorial page editor, Jason Pesick, to task in the Letters section today.

Columnist evokes tyrants to inflate his own image

To the Daily:

While Googling “Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder” from Jason Z. Pesick’s A Thanksgiving wish (11/30/2004), and finding, by the way, some interesting results like “Lowliness Is Young Ambition’s Ladder: Eighth Concubine Surnamed Ho” at http://www.ubcpress.ubc.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=2008, I found that the quote is from Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” and is about people pretending to be humble until they spring to the top of the heap, and then become scornful for everything and everybody below them. Is this the kind of role model Pesick wants to set out if indeed he “moves up a couple lines” and becomes Daily Editor in Chief?

I should hope not, but then Pesick further gloats, besides his gloating about climbing the Daily’s greasy pole; we get to learn about his sibling’s acceptance to the University, and then we are treated to the truly maniacal “Just wait until I can control page 1.” Has Pesick been watching “Dr. Strangelove” too much lately?

Pesick’s columns have descended over the past several years into increasing rancor, such as his April 15 rant End of the Vulcans against Student Voices in Action-type activists, the sort who would dare to … boycott the mighty Daily. Ooooooh. How dare they, those dirty activists. His columns also show a repetitive obsessiveness with the wonders of globalization, including the glory of outsourcing any U.S. job to foreign countries except, apparently, his own job. Is such one-track-mindedness healthy? With all that plus his desired “control” of page 1 and other Daily pages, it is beginning to smell like those “114 Years of Editorial Freedom” can kiss their sweet (self) good-bye. Who knows, Pesick may ironically himself become the cause of another Daily boycott, and be forced to feel “lowly” indeed, but without pretending this time.

David Boyle

Alum