Dropping a literary bomb

Aaron Wells

Columnist

2-6-2001

I don't agree with Richard Tillett that opinion pieces are lie a war, but I sure as hell agree with countless historians (too numerous for me to name any names here) that war is like an opinion piece.

An opinion piece, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again.

Much like a war wastes the resources of nations and ruins millions of young lives, so do opinion pieces waste the time of college students and ruin their hands with carpal tunnel syndrome. Just like a war causes countless amounts of blood to flow upon the cold, dirty earth trod up into a horrific mousse by the tromping of many boots, so can you get a pretty bad paper-cut while you're brainstorming on the notepads you steal from the Sagebrush closet that say "professional reporter's notebook" on the cover in big bold letters, the pads that you take with you and lay on the table nonchalantly when you're eating out in the hopes that maybe they'll think you're writing a review for some big paper and not spit in your food.

When you pare down the lies and the patriotism from any opinion piece, you eventually realize that its author is doing it all for economic reasons, deep down. Maybe they want to improve their resume. Maybe they see it as a bridge to a big-time syndicated column, or as an in-road to the highly competitive world of UNR newspaper writing. Maybe they're doing it as part of an elaborate scheme to eventually extort money from the US government for a phony research grant into the "hollow Earth" theory. But there's always an economic cause. Just like wars!

It's been said that World War II brought the US out of the Depression. One could almost as well say that it was opinion pieces that jump-started the American economy. As long as any historians or economists aren't listening, that is.

That's not to say that historians and economists disagree. But for reasons too numerous to state here, they have to PRETEND that wars are not actually like opinion pieces. I don't want to call it a conspiracy, but, well... wink, wink.

A war, one might say, is the penultimate tool of expressing an opinion. It reflects the opinion of an entire nation, or at least of the most powerful individuals within that nation.

The ultimate tool of expression is, of course, the college newspaper opinion piece. It reflects the opinions of the (debatably) very most powerful individuals in any nation: liberal arts students.

A bad war seems to drag on and on. Just as one side seems to be taking decisive action towards wrapping up the horrible ordeal before it turns into a drawn-out bloodsink of attrition, they turn around and meander some more around the action that must be taken. In exactly the same way, a bad opinion piece drags on and on, getting more absurd and traumatic as it continues. Just as the author seems to be going somewhere, the battle lines shift, and you find yourself trapped in an awful description of a conspiracy between historians and economists, leaving you with a bad taste and bad visions of stupid writing that will scar your brain for at least the next couple of hours. The horror, the horror...

Opinion piece writing is hell.

The most notable ways in which a war does not resemble an opinion piece is that hippies loved opinion pieces, and the government does not spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year in preparation for opinion pieces.

In every other way, though, a war is just an opinion piece, on a much larger scale. It's a corollary of the old adage, "The pen is mightier than the sword," that the sword really does look a lot like a pen. And a nuclear torpedo looks even more like a pen than a sword does.