STUDENT PROGRESSIVE ACTION NETWORK RADICALS OOZE COMMUNISM
Now that the letterman jackets have returned to their, uh, graph paper (right?), I’ll be a little more effusive. I’m taken to thank the rank communists, anarchists, dumpster-divers and malcontents of the Student Progressive Action Network for doing us all a great service: they have concentrated themselves in one election. Granted, we owe this more to their pragmatic sensibilities than their benevolence, but with these people, I’ll take a good deed any way I can get it.
By practical sensibilities, I refer to the group’s own knowledge that not one of their ragtag buffoons could possibly win any other AMS election - but not for lack of trying. The same tepid radical cesspool from which emerged the leviathan SPAN, produced a lackluster (if ambitiously oriented) unofficial slate last year. Predictably, the slate lost, and lost hard. Rory Breasail, their flagship candidate (so designated both because of his perceived strength and because of his ultra-radical views) was not only beaten but shamed. After a pitiful debate performance, he came in dead last in the polls, despite his persistent, almost militant, protestations that he spoke for students.
What is more, the individual radicals that comprise SPAN have emerged in the ONE race that allows slates. Low profile and new (yet-unlisted) radicals, once identifiable only by their penurious wardrobe, are now officially linked to their better-known ideological allies. Armed with this knowledge, UBC students can be confident their vote is not going to a radical ideologue. And while progressive isn’t most apt word for a group of Stalinist thugs, it is at least a familiar euphemism.
I am reluctant to go into too much detail on the appalling history* of individual SPAN candidates because it is at once too easy and too difficult. (* Appalling is a strong word, and I use it here because it is truly apt. The appalling history to which I refer includes an incident in which two prominent SPAN candidates attempted to verbally and physically intimidate me in the Student Union Building. Rest assured, they were most unsuccessful.)
Too easy, because these are self-identified radicals. My blog, ‘Caught Red Handed’ earned its reputation by exposing latent threats to good governance, from frightening fundamentalists and unscrupulous electioneers. “Exposing” these proud-to-be radicals is rather like being a DEA agent at a heroin convention, or… a midnight screening of ‘The Dark Side of Oz’.
Too difficult, because detailing the sordid history and twisted beliefs of SPAN members is at best a lugubrious necessity, and at worst, a counterproductive exercise that gratifies the very people it decries, by recounting for a wider audience than they could organically attain, their illiberal ideology and their ignoble pursuits of those ends. Just as the vandal relishes front-page news of his handiwork, so too will the radicals sanctimoniously indulge in the infamy garnered from popular and specific criticism.
Fortunately, no such in depth analysis or expositive journalism is necessary in this case. This is one election where both parties vying for your vote are being honest. If you want to find out what they stand for, consult them directly. I write this article only to make you aware of the grave danger posed by the extreme radicals running in this otherwise only marginally important race.
There is no Student Legal Fund Society debate, which is a shame because the SPAN radicals would have been so soundly defeated. One wonders whether the organizing committee couldn’t find a thick enough antimacassar to satisfy the would-be hosts concerns - valid though Kubrickian - regarding communist contamination. It runs in their fluids, after all.
