The Tillman Tiff

That low thumping you hear this morning is the sound of a million fists beating against a million chests over a column published in the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian, denigrating the combat death of NFL star-turned-Army Ranger Pat Tillman in Afghanistan last week.

Now, it's a puerile and poorly thought out piece. But as is sadly typical with this stuff, one dumb idea broadly disseminated has loosed a tidal wave of intolerant reaction. People are circulating the e-mail address of the writer, which I won't reproduce here; the idea, I hope is just to criticize, but I don't have great faith that everyone will leave it there. We've come to a point in this country where every public disagreement has potentially dire consequences. The writer was foolish to throw a match on this highly flammable issue, but the punishment is pretty certain to go way beyond the crime.

Myself, I would have responded something like this: Tillman's sacrifice, whatever his motivations (and I think they were likely a lot more admirable than this Gonzalez seems to), is deeply moving. A lot of us have mouthed phrases like "9/11 changed me" (maybe, living in NYC and working so close to the site of the attack, I've heard it more than folks elsewhere in the country, but it seems like a fairly universal sentiment); Tillman lived that change and did what he considered best to make something positive of it--in this case, joining his brother in the military. Could the writer claim to have done as much?

By the way, the paper itself published an explanatory note this morning that managed to cover their collective tuckuses, but at least asserted the primacy of the First Amendment in this case:

...it has become very obvious to us at The Collegian that Gonzalez's opinion has caused a lot of controversy and frustration. We cannot, however, compromise the mission of our publication for the sake of ensuring the constant happiness of our readership. Gonzalez has just as much right to the opinion he presented as anyone else does...

Good for them.