Careful With That Megaphone, Coop Manager...

Having now had six energy drinks in the last two days, I need hardly bear witness as to they rank so highly in my estimation. My caffeinated mind does it for me.

Some supposed managers of the Coop have taken umbrage at my reporting of their discrimination against Rockstar, and demanded, of all things, a retraction because I didn't -- and their manager/clerk behind the counter, who I asked about that, didn't know -- that Coca-Cola had dropped Rockstar and that therefore, the message from their message board saying that Rockstar doesn't support equal rights isn't the reason that they discontinued providing it. I didn't get it wrong, per se, the picture was just incomplete.

Incomplete because I did not know about a Facebook group from Pomona has sought to and incomplete because I, though I made a good faith effort, did not know that alleged reason that Pomona had dropped Rockstar was not that Michael Savage's son was behind its creation, but that Coca-Cola had dropped Rockstar from its offerings.

But ask yourself, gentle reader, was it really a bridge too far for me to think that the Coop had dropped it for political reasons? People at Pomona banned a song that had no racist origins and tried to ban "Killer Coke" itself. They even banned two CMC students.

Of course, this being Claremont, someone has to be blamed for me getting an incomplete picture as to the motivations surrounding the end of Rockstar at the Coop. Megaphone, a blogger who claims to be a manager of the Coop, has written a venomous attack on me on her/his own blog, which you might look at here in which s/he calls me fat, evil, and sloppy. Stay classy now, Megaphone. Here's what s/he said,

Last year, Coop Store clerk Teddy Bingham PO '11 started a facebook group concerning the beliefs of Michael Savage and the views he espoused. Teddy also brought his concerns to the Coop Store managers, making a very convincing case. Whether or not the Coop Store, its managers, its employees, or Pomona College saw these concerns as serious enough to "ban" RockStar, as the Claremont Conservative alleges, is irrelevant. If you look at the recent news for the Facebook group carefully, it points out that the reason the ASPC Coop Store stopped carrying the beverage is that Coca-Cola dropped RockStar. Our vendor stopped carrying it. That's why there is no RockStar at the Coop Store. And that is why the poor post author has to settle for Honest Tea, Red Bull, Coca-Cola products, coffee from the Coop Fountain, or even certain flavors of Vitamin Water or Naked Juice to get his caffeine jolt from the Smith Campus Center - since, you know, god forbid that someone who was once memorably described as "pudgy and questionably evil" (an attack he, for reasons unknown, reposted onto his own blog) would have to walk into the village and buy a RockStar from the Village Market over on 2nd and Indian Hill...or stop a couple blocks earlier and go to Starbucks.

Why is it irrelevant? Surely there might be other means to procure Rockstar if other students were, as I am, interested in purchasing it?

That'd be fine, if the attack stopped there, but Megaphone's a real luminary, citing the talk show The View of all sources and then turning around and criticizing me for citing from original source material that was up on Wikipedia which shows that Michael Savage had nothing to do with the management of his son's startup and that Mr. Weiner, the founder of Rockstar and denizen of a very .

(Of course I didn't know what The View was, so I had to Wikipedia that...) If Megaphone has such a problem with Wikipedia as a source when it links to the press releases and other commentary on the matter, I call on Megaphone to promise to never use Wikipedia ever again. One wonders if Megaphone would pass any of her/his classes, without it.)

I rightly condemn the attack on Rockstar as the kind of sins of the father visited upon the son kind of boycott. There's no indication that the son shares his father's views, nor that his mother, the erstwhile CFO of Rockstar, did as well. I wonder how Pomona students would like it if we just assumed that they had the same politics as their parents...

Finally, I'm not particularly fat or pudgy, but I do like to remind my readers that when various people have no argument against what you are arguing, they like to point to your weight. Note the election of that greatest of fat men, Chris Christie in New Jersey, as if girth might be a disqualifier for political breadth and wherewithal to get the job done. I am not a fat guy by any stretch, but I will vocerifously rush to their defense when the nannies come nannying. First they came for the fat man, and I did not speak up and all that jazz. Some of our fattest leaders -- Winston Churchill, anyone? -- have been our finest.