By Tracy Rose
Editor, the Gauntlet,
[RE: “Stick this in your pipe and smoke it,” Asia Walker, Jan. 25, 2007]
How desperate are you that your paper should publish such ridiculous pieces as this? It’s not as though we haven’t already been inundated with countless opinions on the bylaw, but this one read like a five-paragraph persuasive essay assignment from high school. Besides which, as a former runway model once pointed out to me, sarcasm is the poor man’s irony and I’ve never seen that ring more true than here. By taking the stance of anti-bylaw and proceeding with snotty remarks on why all smokers are dumb (unless one is dumb enough to miss the poorly-executed sarcasm), the article is self-defeating by virtue of how poorly it reflects upon its author.
There are many good reasons why the bylaw could be either a good or bad idea, but this article didn’t highlight any of them. A non-smoker illustrating why people smoke is a terrible idea in the first place, akin to a man writing about why it’s so great to be a woman (“Menstruation is amazing!”). The author offends smokers and leaves non-smokers uninformed. And on the off chance that this article was meant to be humourous… well, it isn’t, at all, though I’ll at least afford that it is a possibility that humour was intended.
It’s not a matter of agreement or disagreement, it’s a matter of an article being, simply, unfit for print. You can do better!
Tracy Rose