The New Concept April 20, 2006
Posted by westernconcept in Opinions/Editorials.trackback
by Ray Wheeler, Guest Columnist
How wonderful it is to have a Western Concept once again! But at the risk of sounding ungrateful, I wish it were being printed on paper. As handsome as the Concept site is, I’m still wed to paper. I like to hold what I’m reading; I want to feel the words– feel them in the bathtub, under the bed, on rocks, on horseback, on a wobbly psychiatric couch, and in church restrooms—problematic places for those slimy laptops and their eye-wrecking screens.
During my three-quarters of a century in higher education, I’ve never heard of a university except DSU that didn’t have a student newspaper. Even that football-crazed cow college down in Fargo has one!
It was an unfortunate time for us when a lot of events intersected, and the Concept quietly disappeared. The blame for its demise was variously attributed to student apathy, a lack of readers and writers, a snobby English Department, a greedy Student Senate, the presence of chartreuse mucus in the universe, and what Nietzsche called “the will to ignorance.” Pay your money and blame whom or what you will.
A virtual Concept is better than no Concept, as long as you have a printer nearby. Only the diehard cognoscenti of high tech gabblefarb want to read a paper (or anything else) on a monitor. Human beings want their print on paper, and they want standard newsprint paper because of the many wonderful uses it has after we’ve read the print.
Nothing shines windows better than newsprint. It makes an incomparable liner for cat boxes and canary cages and knows no equal as kindling for kindling in campfires. One time in Manhattan I even bought a carp fillet from a vendor who wrapped it in the NY Times classifieds, which enhanced the flavor of that fish.
My grandfather kept a considerable stack of newspapers in his outhouse back in Kansas. Right after I graduated from kindergarten a year before the start of World War I, I asked him if you were supposed to read those papers, make airplanes out of them, or something else. You would have thought I had asked him why he was so bone ugly. “If you’re any indication of the future, we’re in deep doo-doo,” he said rancorously. “You talk like a Commie.” He was deeply distrustful of city people like me.
I hope others will be as glad to see the Concept’s return as I am. I especially hope students will want to read and write for it. One of the prime movers for its return comes from a country with no free press. I hope that irony will be lost on none of us.
note: Dr. Ray Wheeler is a Professor of English at Dickinson State University
