University of Virginia Library

I cannot express strongly
enough my contempt for the
actions recently perpetrated by
the editorial board and lackeys of
Rapiet magazine. Whether they
actually "stole" the Olympic flame
is far from clear: but that they
claimed to have done so, in a very
demeaning search for publicity, is
itself outrageous from many points
of view. Specifically, however, I am
anxious to express my chagrin for
the outraged sensibilities of the
foreign students at this university.

Having participated in activities
of the International Student Club
at this university, and having lived
and worked closely with European
students in Scandinavia, Western
and Eastern Europe, I have some
idea of how European students
view their confreres in the United
States and of how they arrive at
their opinions. Many of their
conceptions are, to be sure, rigidly
and unjustly stereotypical, but not,
I fear, without some truth.

To be less than precise,
European students are impressed
with the way many American
students seem to allow their lives to
be externalized and trivialized in
the thoughtless pursuit of
glamorous affluence, superficiality,
and security, a pursuit which is
informed (deformed?) by a lack of
awareness and concern for the
existence and conditions of other
peoples in the world.
Representative of the comments I
have heard is that of a young Swede
who remarked: "Many of you
Americans seem to lack breadth, or
'internationality,' of perspective;
and in your personal lives, you
content yourselves with
bonhomie, rather than depth of
personal relationships:" or, again,
that of a Parisian law student, who
said: "What impresses me about
American women, this is that
they do not seem to want to grow
up, but prefer to remain
adolescents."

In reply to these and other
criticisms, which are largely and
egregiously untrue, I could point
out that a similar alienation
between generations obtains in the
States as in Sweden, and for
precisely the same objections which
were voiced by the Swede. And in
answer to the Frenchman, I could
allude to the political sophistication
and fervor of American students,
many of whom, men and women
alike, are also engaged in the search
for more effective participation in
the higher educational process.
(Naturally, the revolutionary
predispositions of the Frenchman
were inflamed by the word
"participation.")

But how does one answer, or
apologize to, the foreign students
on this campus when confronted
with a paradigmatic instance of the
thoughtless pursuit of glamor, the
lack of any breadth of perspective
whatever, and brutal, philistinian
insensitivity to the feelings of other
peoples?

I beseech the editorial board of
Repier to submit an apology, in the
contemporary sense of that word,
to the International Students Club.
And I submit to the university
community that the lackeys of
Rapier have violated sacred honor
in a much profounder sense that we
customarily, blithely, and
superficially use that much abused
word.