Drew Armstrong: No brunch for you! The case for Carlos Gomez.

I'll confess that when I heard he called Judy Rodin a Nazi on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I thought Carlos Gomez was crazy. Not crazy in the brave and daring way, but nuts and maybe kind of stupid. His comparison of Rodin and her administration to Stalinist Russia, the Third Reich, apartheid Africa and just about everything else unholy struck me as the rantings of some SoHo socialist walking around in Diesels and DKNY while bemoaning the world's starving children. I still disagree with the substance of what Gomez said. Judy comes to speak at our DP banquet every year and seems like a very nice lady. She shakes some hands, cracks 10 minutes worth of self-deprecating jokes and makes a graceful exit. She doesn't strike me as the genocidal type. But in several interviews since the MLK breakfast incident, Gomez has stood by his remarks. To him, Rodin not taking a stand on what he considers imperialist and repressive U.S. policies compares to Nazi war criminals "just following orders." If Rodin isn't out in the streets protesting, she's one of the bad guys. Gomez thinks that if Rodin took a stand, the rest of academia would follow in opposition of current U.S. foreign policy and put a stop to the hullabaloo over Iraq. Personally, I doubt that Bush will put much stock in what the professors have to say. (This is a man who had a C-average at Yale -- I doubt he listened to professors when he was in college.) And, unfortunately for his argument, by Gomez's reasoning, anyone who isn't making active, vehement opposition to the impending war with Iraq is a Nazi. That means that you, me and a lot of the folks reading this column are jackbooted swastika jockeys. (Gomez doesn't like silent dissent -- he quotes King's "A time comes when silence is betrayal" rather frequently.) The logic fails -- it ends up in absurdity, calling a bunch of Jewish Penn students card-carrying Third Reichers just because they're not marching down Locust Walk with banners. But in his poem, Gomez stopped this reasoning at a point convenient to him and his rhetoric -- and I'm not buying it. Labels like "Nazi," "Stalinist" and "fascist" get thrown around with a bit too much abandon by the young and the restless. Rodin isn't actually a member of the Nazi party, as most of us know, but the word has taken on a far broader meaning. Gomez's meaning is more of the "Soup Nazi"-sense than the "Hitler Nazi"-sense. The word might shock, but it doesn't mean what it did circa 1945. So why don't I think Gomez is just another whiny college kid stupidly martyring himself for attention? Because while I think what he said was incorrect and flawed, he did take a tame, "Kumbaya"-singing national observance and kick some controversy into it. I don't believe it was a publicity stunt, either (though last week's glowing profile of "The poet behind the controversy" in this newspaper won't hurt his career). Gomez acknowledges that it was premeditated -- he stared Judy in the eyes when he insulted her -- but a big part of his plan, he says, was simply to energize a generation often criticized for its willingness to go along with authority. Whatever his reasons for crying Nazi -- and whether or not I think it was the right thing to say -- the fact is that while most Penn students were sleeping off hangovers from a three-day weekend (I'm guilty), Gomez was at the breakfast, stirring things up a little bit. Self-serving or not, campus discussion of MLK Day events has gained a shelf life far longer than it ever would have had before Gomez called Judy a fascist. Gomez was right in that all the "sock stuffings" and "banner paintings" in the world aren't going to fix racial injustice and inequality. Not that I think Gomez's poem will, either. But it did put some spark back into an event that long ago dwindled into Valentine's Day for race relations. I stand by my statement that calling Judy a Nazi was ridiculous. But I'm glad Gomez was willing to do it -- if only because he got people upset (and even thinking) on a day when perhaps too many were busy patting themselves on the back, going along with the motions of racial harmony. Drew Armstrong is a senior English major from Ann Arbor, Mich.

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