I place no stock in the "coarsening of campus debate" hysteria. Such alarms are raised primarily by neoconservatives upset that new generations of scholars have entered the ivory halls of academe in the last four decades with last names other than Bemis, Buckley, and Brewster and are producing new kinds of knowledge and reshaping and reimagining higher education. Yet if such a "cheapening" is taking place, it's because of interventions like Jamie Kirchick's crass, childish, vicious ad hominem attack on Yale activist Thomas Frampton in today's Yale Daily News. The YDN should be ashamed of itself for publishing what amounts to a right wing hatchet job by one student against another. Whether or not Thomas's actions on monday night constitued the height of narcississm, it's clear that Kirchick well deserves such an appelation, and if i didn't think Kirchick had repeatedly proved himself to be little more than a whining child with aspirations to supreme punditude, i might urge others to question his own pathologies. Kirchick's account of the Coca-Cola protest, at which he was not present, is not accurate - police confronted Thomas, not the other way around (i was with him when they did so,) and then allowed him to pass when he presented his student ID), while his callous dismissal of the comapny's litany of global human rights abuses is simply outrageous. (Kirchick's contempt for "New Haven hangers-on" is elitist and offensive, while his numbers are also wrong - while approximately 20 'died' at the protest, there were at least a dozen others in the audience who were part of the action - designated as corpse haulers or leafleters.) I will not futher refute Kirchick's factual innacuracies here (though there are many) save to note that his notion that indignation at Levin's appointment to Bush's sham WMD panel in February was unwarranted and inappropriate ignores Levin's personal friendship with George Bush, which many feel played a role in last July's National Labor Relations Board decision at Brown University which reversed the 2000 NYU Precedent along deeply partisan lines. Kirchick's claim that Thomas's actions were merely theater deserves to be contested from the vantage point of performance theory - after all, all the world's a stage, and Thomas's improvised attempt to speak the truth to power anticipates a far more inclusive and democratic project than the fascist manipulations behind the convention's staging and the militarized perimeter surrounding it. But we also need to ask what theater Kirchick here performs, and why the Yale Daily News would publish such a self-aggrandizing screed of a monologue. But i suppose we can console ourselves with the fact that no one's really listening, anyway.