In 1996 an article appeared in The Daily called: "Bigfoot spotted in Red Square, feuds with students".
The article talks about an elderly man with no formal higher education who stood on Red Square holding up posters and engaging students in discussion. The tone of the article was one of derision. Students were reported to have been outraged and offended by the messages on his signs, but The Daily failed to quote so much as a single one of them for readers to form their own opinions.
Some notable quotes from the article:
- "Controversy heated up when he [Bigfoot] insisted that institutionalized education is ignorance and true education comes from reality..."
- "Bigfoot blasted the press and the media in particular for delivering false information. 'The papers are delivering lies all the time. You often have to pay to get your news.'..."
- "Many were confused when Bigfoot referred to George Orwell, the British novelist who wrote 1984 and Animal Farm, as a prophet..."
A week later, a student who had heard "Bigfoot" speak wrote this letter to the editor:
"The gentleman you cutely referred to as 'Bigfoot' had many interesting things to say. Some of his views were absolute malarkey, founded in paranoid-schizophrenic delusion, but a good portion was deadly serious, and dead right. While the clever, if sophomoric, students gathered around were battering him on semantics, they missed any grain of wisdom coming out. With a massive cascade of opinions, such as this, could not one open the mind enough to try and catch just a cupful of knowledge? He was right in his views of institutional education. The educational system is not designed to enrich human life, but to train the proles to conform to acceptable behaviors, to teach us the secret code, and which fork to use at dinner parties. We are trained to stand on the shoulders of giants, do as we're bloody well told, and any true creativity or genius is spat at, ground down, and held up high, subject to ridicule. If this opinion were wrong, the aforementioned student would have had a deeply fulfilling discourse and left Red Square deep in thought. But while I was in Red Square, I couldn't find a single thought amongst the lot of them."
If anyone was on Red Square in 1996 and remembers any of Bigfoot's posters, please contact me so that I can post them so that we can judge for ourselves whether what he had to say was of value.
Postscript
I recently dug up two more articles in The Daily about Bigfoot here and here. To the Daily's credit, these articles were better balanced and much less derisive.
Postscript
I recently dug up two more articles in The Daily about Bigfoot here and here. To the Daily's credit, these articles were better balanced and much less derisive.
