Dan Fishback, of Sontag Award fame, rhapsodizes about protesting Cheney's visit to Penn last Friday. Cheney was at Penn to dedicate the Wharton School's new Hunstman Hall; the Vice President is a personal friend of Huntsman's, and the dedication was planned as a private affair. But campus malcontents couldn't seem to grasp this, and instead built an entire micro-movement on the idea that Cheney was expressing contempt for public debate by not appearing in an open forum, that this exemplified Cheney's well-known cronyism and lack of accountability, and that Judith Rodin was a hypocrite for allowing such arrogant behavior on a campus that she represents as a free speech zone dedicated to the unfettered exchange of ideas.

Fishback's editorial exemplifies the contorted illogic that fed Friday's unrest. It's a triumph of nastiness and presumption: the larger-than-life Cheney puppet that formed the centerpiece of resistance morphs, in Fishback's jaundiced imagery, into an "11-foot Dick"; Judith Rodin is depicted as "staring like a deer in the headlights at the protesters" as they shouted "Shame on you! Shame on you!"; and, in a display of positively loathsome condescension, the Huntsman children themselves are depicted as Stepford kids, little blonde robots who are already too saturated with privileged self-satisfaction to be able to comprehend the naked truth of the world as presented by protesters who confuse absurdist street theater with social activism.