Latest Insurgent Meeting

So I just went to the latest meeting of the Student Insurgent collective, the radical student newspaper on the UO campus. It was by far the most eventful meeting I have attended. An obviously mentally ill lady spoke to us (P, J, D, and I, no Natty) to start off. She ended up speaking for nearly an hour about her life story. It seems that she wished for us to publicize her plight against doctors in control of the pharmaceutical industry who were incompetent to treat her sleep disorder because all they did was prescribe her expensive drugs. She somehow took this to court and lost. She was definitely seriously paranoid (which she denied), and even suggested that someone had been breaking into her old house to mess with her and someone else was responsible for the times she woke up in hotel rooms with needle marks in her arms. She is paranoid and currently homeless, and says she used to be a doctor. She simply thinks her problem is a misdiagnosis of her sleep disorder, and expects us to write about the corruption that is the cause of this misdiagnosis. I felt sympathy for her, and I think she is crazy and that the real story here is that her mental illness has certain social and environmental roots (which her story seemed to suggest). Very very long story short. Anyway, when she left, we discussed the delicacy of the situation (she's gonna come back and we want to write about her but not necessarily from the angle she wants.) It will be challenging, we don't want to cut her off and send her out alone into the world again, but she is very difficult.

Once we got that behind us, we had the most productive critical, internal interaction at a meeting ever. The older guy, D, who has some background in newspaper work and is technically The Editor of the paper, even though it is run by our collective, began to voice some issues he has. He seems to be under lots of stress lately, so it all came out. Apparently, his ideal vision of a radical newspaper is not being fulfilled. No surprise, I don't think any of us can say we agree fully with even most of the paper's content, because we are a relatively open and kinda diverse collective. This is fine. But D seems to be upset that he doesn't have more control. He 1) thinks my articles are too academic, 2) thinks some of the articles are too long and not captivating (like Natty's excellent piece on Israel/Palestine) which again ties into the whole academic thing, 3) thinks there are too many animal liberation articles (I tend to agree, but what are we gonna do, censor? This is a goddamn collective!) and overall 4) wants more straight news devoid of analysis and context. At one point, when we tried to counter him, he wailed about how he is the editor and he is the one who went to editor school (or whatever the hell he was talking about.) He was extremely authoritarian. This triggered some very helpful discussion.

To begin with, we all three strongly put D back in his place. That is, he is not a dictator and does not own our newspaper. It is a student publication run collectively by students. He hopefully understood, no love lost. Moving on to the issues he brought up, we all agreed that we have different focuses but that unity in diversity is a good idea in this case. P defended the animal lib stuff, and she had very good points about supporting local activists. J did as well, and they both agreed with D about Natty and I and our academic style. But the two of them accept it and just said it is kind of hard to understand or even to work up the effort to read. I acknowledged these criticisms, and said that I am not interested in dumbing down anything I wish to say for a larger audience, and would like to focus more on analysis and theory than just news. And we all accepted each other in the end (D did grudgingly.)

D went out and said it and Natty and I have been joking about it together all year: our stuff doesn't belong in a newspaper, it belongs in academic journals.