Democracy Castrated—Smear on Shaw

I have been rendered sick to the stomach by the latest copious cascade of bullshit to flood this campus. I refer of course to the S.G.M. held to consider whether Henry Stubbs would get his rugby balls or whether Alick Shaw would be able to boost his already towering ego by giving the proverbial fingers to Jack and the boys.

One would have thought that we, the smug self-satisfied bourgeois pricks wallowing in affluent apathy would have finally managed to make the band of student bureaucrats, would be revolutionaries and stentorian-voiced ego trippers who deign to lead us, love us for our enthusiastic and interested response to the S.G.M. At last we had beaten the cancer of student apathy, but there was no applause. Our leaders were too busy running for cover behind a curtain of the most outrageous hypocrisy ever seen at Vic.

Peter Cullen, after berating the gathering for its lack of interest in past S.G.M.'s lost control when a formerly apathetic sector voiced its fury at the whole bloody farce. Don't get me wrong, Peter is a nice guy but he is so busy pleasing everyone that he manages to please no-one. The most used President in Vic's history perhaps. But I digress. Everyone's favourite raving demagogue (with more than a hint of a maniacal gleam in his eye) and rabble-rouser extraordinaire Alick Shaw, was so overcome by the violence of his reception that he actually mumbled something about their destruction of democratic proceedure! Shaw, who has devoted much of his time to thwarting democratic proceedure in S.R.C. among other things in order to achieve his own ends criticising a lack of democratic proceedure was just too unreal!

Salient's prissy little article about wicked fascist students murdering democracy in cold blood was the sugar in this hypocritical shit. One thing must be made clear. The Shaw/Wilson/Campbell faction, supreme among others has devoted much of its energy in the past to stacking S.R.C, launching often vicious insults against exec, and those whose beliefs and opinions do not meet their sincerity in the area of personal belief, but how the fuck can they summon up the temerity to accuse 760 students of being guilty of sins they should have suffered for long ago.

How can Salient accuse Mike McKinley and Mowbray of being dirty rabblerousers, when the noble art of rabblerousing has been smiled upon by Salient and looked upon as a saintly virtue. Could it be that Salient thinks their rabblerousing is politically unacceptable while the so-called radical lefts' is? [In that situation, yes it is unacceptable. Ed.]

What these worried would-be revolutionaries witnessed were their pigeons coming home to roost. As ye sow, so shall ye reap lads. Certainly S.G.M. was bloody chaotic and the defeated were poor losers, pissed off at the "Vietnam tax"being imposed upon them by the dubious legality of this farce. For once people lost their apathy and those who have ranted about it for so long were utterly shocked.

Democracy certainly played no great part in the proceedings but only because it has been castrated through countless S.R.C.'s by the very people who are bemoaning its loss now. Accept that democracy is dead on campus, accept that the people who killed it cannot drag it out of the grave at their convenience, and accept that so many people are spouting so much mealy-mouthed hypocritical drivel about it that it must be turning in its tomb. [Abridged—Ed.)

Geoff Honnor.