April 6, 2007
Ward Churchill and Hamilton College II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:00 PM EST I’d like to make one point regarding Fredric Smoler’s post, with which I largely agree, although I would have disinvited both Churchill and Paulin on the simple grounds that new information had shown them to be unworthy of being invited. Seems like a good reason to me. He writes, “Josh Zeitz quite correctly observes that allegations about Churchill’s mendacity, fraud, scholarly misconduct, and plagiarism have nothing to do with this question. For one thing, these allegations surfaced after the Hamilton controversy, not before it, so they cannot retrospectively justify Hamilton’s decision, even if they have all proved to be true.” In fact, members of the Hamilton faculty had evidence of Churchill’s scholarly malfeasance and used it to argue against having him speak. The evidence was later turned over to the University of Colorado at Boulder and formed the basis of the charges against him there, charges of which Churchill was later found guilty and dismissed from his professorship.
April 6, 2007
Ward Churchill and Hamilton College Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST I have been reading with interest Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon’s discussion of speech rights. I have a couple of thoughts on one of the issues that seems to have kicked off this exchange, the case of Ward Churchill and Hamilton College. In 2005 Hamilton invited Ward Churchill to speak on American Indian rights, an invitation subsequently withdrawn after a death threat to Churchill, with Hamilton asserting that it could not guarantee Churchill’s safety. Churchill, however, was more than willing to speak, despite the death threat. Should Hamilton have let him speak? Josh Zeitz quite correctly observes that allegations about Churchill’s mendacity, fraud, scholarly misconduct, and plagiarism have nothing to do with this question. For one thing, these allegations surfaced after the Hamilton controversy, not before it, so they cannot retrospectively justify Hamilton’s decision, even if they have all proved to be true. Josh noted that “Churchill is a bête noire of the political right for his comments linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism.” It is possible that Hamilton withdrew the invitation to avoid offending the political right, but I think it is more likely that they withdrew the invitation to avoid offending a different constituency, and one closer to home. Churchill’s particular manner of “linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism” was to call some of those murdered at the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns,” and as it happened, one of Hamilton’s undergraduates present on campus at the time was the son of a man murdered on 9/11. To quote Churchill more extensively: “As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire, the ‘mighty engine of profit’ to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved, and they did so both willingly and knowingly”. The people who invited Churchill to speak were unaware of these remarks at the time they had extended the invitation, and I am pretty sure they would not have extended the invitation had they know of the remarks. You could argue that while no organ of American government has the right to suppress this speech, neither does Hamilton College have an obligation to offer a platform, and a substantial speaking fee, to a man who has so described the recent murder of the father of one of its undergraduates. To call a man a “little Eichmann” seems to suggest that his actions were comparable to genocide and his killing just. Churchill has on various occasions sought to blur the issue, for example by refusing to condone the killing of Eichmann. But the offensiveness of his remarks remains startling. The ability to take offense being very widely distributed, any policy of banning all speakers who excite rage and disgust would doom intellectual life on any campus in the country. But the Hamilton case seems to me to make for a hard decision. Should Hamilton have withdrawn the invitation out of fear of offending the political right? Of course not. Should Hamilton have withdrawn an invitation to a vicious crank who might publicly gloat over that recent murder in the presence of the victim’s child? Maybe not, but had it invoked Churchill’s want of minimal human decency as its justification, rather than public safety, I would have trouble mourning its actions as an unforgivable blow to academic freedom. I can also imagine taking the other view. A little earlier, in November of 2002, the president of Harvard insisted on maintaining an invitation to the British poet Tom Paulin after it was discovered that Paulin had recently called for the murder of all Brooklyn Jews living in Israeli settlements (his decision to give a pass to Jews from the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island remains mysterious). Then Harvard President Lawrence Summers seems to have thought that you should not back down from an admittedly bad decision about a speaker under political pressure. I know what he meant, and I rather admire Summers for having taken that position. On balance, I would have let both Churchill and Paulin speak and pocket their fees, and it may be relevant that that both institutions could have afforded the additional security costs. But I have trouble feeling true outrage at Hamilton having made the opposite decision.
April 5, 2007
Arthur Herman's Vietnam Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:50 PM EST On March 30, Josh Zeitz posted a comment on Arthur Herman’s article “How to Win the War in Iraq,” which John Steele Gordon had linked to the day before. Josh takes issue with Herman’s argument about Vietnam. Herman had written that “by 1972, the American military there had broken the back of the Viet Cong insurgency, had fought the North Vietnamese army to a standstill, and had forced the government in Hanoi to the bargaining table. Here at home, meanwhile, the end of the military draft had removed the domestic antiwar movement’s most powerful wedge issue. Nevertheless, reorganizing itself, the movement began to lobby Congress vigorously to cut off support for the pro-American governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia. The refrain, exactly as in the Algerian case, was that this would both bring the killing and suffering to an end and allow the Vietnamese and Cambodians to ‘find their own solutions to their problems.’ Once Watergate destroyed the Nixon presidency, and ‘peace’ Democrats took control of Congress in the 1974 midterm elections, funding to keep South Vietnam free from communist control evaporated. Victory was turned into defeat; the ‘solution’ advanced by the antiwar Left turned out to be the crushing and disappearance of the country of South Vietnam.” Josh wrote that “Herman’s timeline is remarkably pat. War was won by 1972, lost by 1974. Really? The United States managed to break the back of the NLF and North Vietnamese Army, but enemy forces were able to rebound within one year (1974–75) of the cessation of American military aid to Saigon? I don’t think most historians would agree that the NLF/North Vietnamese insurgency was a dead letter by 1972.” While I have some disagreements with Herman’s analyses of the three wars he discusses, I don’t think the above sentences necessarily contradict Herman’s statement quoted above. Herman says that the United States had fought the North Vietnamese regulars to a standstill—and the U.S. had. The North Vietnamese government and army clearly retained the will to fight after 1972, but the threat to Saigon was no longer an insurgency. The NLF’s main-force units had been shattered in the Tet offensive, and Saigon did not fall to insurgents, it fell to North Vietnamese regular divisions, led by tanks. We know that the South Vietnamese Army backed by American air power could stop regular North Vietnamese units, because it did, most famously at An Loc, in 1973, in a campaign that saw 150,000 casualties, and was a clear South Vietnamese victory. Deprived of American air support, the South Vietnamese Army failed to stop the North Vietnamese offensive in 1975. I’ll make one tepid gesture of agreement with the North Vietnamese official Le Duc Tho: I don’t think the South Vietnamese Army, backed by U.S. tactical air power, could have driven the North Vietnamese Army out of the less accessible parts of South Vietnam (where relatively few people lived). On the other hand, I do think that with continued U.S. air support, it could probably have held the cities of South Vietnam and much of the rest of the country, for the foreseeable future. I do not think South Vietnam could have for the foreseeable future defended itself unassisted, but neither South Korea nor West Germany were ever expected to defend themselves unassisted. We still have troops in South Korea, and we kept troops in West Germany until East Germany collapsed. Securing those countries from Communist conquest is normally considered a success. Had we achieved as much in South Vietnam, such a feat might by now be counted a comparable success. I know no reason to assume that while the brutal and corrupt South Korean dictatorship could over decades evolve into a prosperous democracy, the South Vietnamese could never have done the same. Such an outcome, if possible, would have required American support for a very long time. I am not sure why giving that support would not have been preferable to permitting what actually happened. Why did the South Vietnamese collapse in 1975? For a lot of reasons, but being deprived of U.S. tactical air support and suffering significantly reduced military aid surely helped. At the time, and for that matter ever since, many said that people who cannot defend themselves cannot expect others to defend them forever. As political morality, I find this a curious doctrine. People who cannot defend themselves unaided do not on that account alone deserve to be conquered, for on such a theory justice triumphed at Sedan in 1940. To refine the point, I’ll add that people with unattractive authoritarian governments do not on that account deserve to be conquered by more militarily formidable totalitarian governments; if they did, justice triumphed in Warsaw in 1939. The North Vietnamese Communists were not, of course, as bad as the Nazis—but Pol Pot was, and Congress also allowed his victory in 1975.
For various reasons, I am not sure Algeria is a parallel case, and the case of Iraq differs in at least as many respects. For one thing, unlike the North Vietnamese Army or the Algerian FLN, I do not see how the Sunni insurgents of Iraq can possibly win; they are vastly outnumbered. While they may be able to secure Turkish aid against the Kurds, some of their other enemies, the Shiite Arab majority, while split among themselves, will probably be able to call on Iranian support, and Iranian support is likely to massively outweigh any support Sunni Arab states give the insurgents. One part of Herman’s parallel does make sense to me, though. If the antiwar movement forces the early end of all U.S. support for the Iraqi government, even worse things are likely to happen to the Iraqis than are happening now.
April 5, 2007
Defining Free Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:30 AM EST When discussing the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, I should have been more explicit in stating that we were dealing with children and school, which makes it a special, not a general, free-speech case. Children have their civil rights restricted frequently because they are, well, children. To not do so would be folly. And schools have an obligation to maintain an environment conducive to learning. If that requires restrictions on free speech (and it does), then so be it. Children are in school for only a fraction of their time and can express themselves fully the rest of the time, so what is lost is minimal and what is gained is considerable. That seems an entirely reasonable tradeoff to me. I think my analogy to the man serving on a jury is apposite here. While in the jury box his free-speech rights are severely restricted, and for good reason. The fact that the boy was, physically, not on school property is neither here nor there. The students had been let out of school solely for the purpose of watching the Olympic torch go by. They were thus subject to school discipline just as though they were on a class trip to, say, a museum. If the school had a right to tell the boy to take down his sign, had he been carrying it in a school corridor, then it had a right to tell him to take it down in this instance. Mr. Zeitz writes, “. . . if we allow students to wear crosses or stars of David on the grounds of religious freedom, why can’t a student in Alaska hoist a banner that invokes Jesus?” Because he wasn’t expressing a religious sentiment. By his own admission he was only trying to provoke a reaction from school authorities. It was just a stunt, a rather amusing and clever one, but a stunt. That’s why I think this case is a Hurricane Katrina in a nearly microscopic teapot. Just because someone yells “Free Speech!” doesn’t mean we have to send our brains to the dry cleaners and cower before the majesty of the expression. Part of the problem here, undoubtedly, is the concept of “zero tolerance” regarding drugs, etc., which is why the school principal ordered the boy to take down the sign. Schools, especially public schools, are necessarily run by bureaucracies, and bureaucracies love hard-and-fast rules, as they require no thinking or even common sense. But the idiocies that result from “zero tolerance” are legion (see
here). Mr. Zeitz points out a girl disciplined for wearing Winnie-the-Pooh socks. My favorite is the six-year-old boy who was suspended for sexual harassment, having touched another six-year-old “inappropriately.” (You would think that a school would be familiar with the way six-year-olds actually behave, but apparently not in this case.) The boy had to sign a statement on the matter (I guess he used block letters) before his parents were called. Does anyone think that a six-year-old is capable of understanding the meaning of “sexual harassment”? Best of luck explaining it to one. So, as I said in my first post on this subject, the first mistake was the school’s reaction to the sign. It had nothing to do with drugs and nothing to do with religion. It should have been ignored and the boy should have later on been given one of those now-you-see-here-young-man lectures we all remember so fondly. Had that been done, maybe a half million dollars in legal fees and court costs would have been saved. The money, instead, could have been used to fight malaria in Africa (probably behind a subscription wall, alas) and saved the lives of dozens of school kids. There’s a reason Jefferson listed life as the first of the unalienable rights with which we are all divinely endowed.
April 4, 2007
Defining Free Speech III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 09:05 PM EST Defining Free Speech III In his original post on this subject, Mr. Gordon drew a distinction between “meaningless” words or “mischievous acts” on the one hand and substantive free speech on the other. He characterized the now-famous “Bong Hits for Jesus” banner as belonging in the first category and thus deemed it unworthy of court protection. My question was this: If we apply such a standard, who decides (and according to what criteria) what is and isn’t meaningful speech? In his latest post, Mr. Gordon largely sidestepped this question and instead focuses on the age of the person hoisting the banner. He writes, “Mr. Zeitz fails to note the fact that the plaintiff in this case was a child.” (Not quite. In my original post on this subject, I explained that the plaintiff was “a high school student in Alaska.”) Abandoning for the moment his prior reliance on the distinction between the meaningful and the mischievous, Mr. Gordon instead takes issue with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), which affirmed the right of students to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. Mr. Gordon writes: “Children have a right to wear armbands, display signs, stand on soapboxes . . . and proclaim truth to the world. They should just have to do it outside of school.” On legal principle, I disagree with this notion (as did a majority of the Supreme Court), and I would remind Mr. Gordon that the Alaska plaintiff was operating outside school grounds, though on school time, which makes matters somewhat more complicated. In the context of 1969, I disagree doubly. During the Vietnam War, the average combat soldier was 19 years old. Of the 2.5 million men who served in the war, two thirds were either drafted or were draft-motivated enlistees. Representatives of the armed forces actively recruited on high school grounds in those days, and if my memory serves me right, they were still doing so when I was in high school in the late ’80s and early ’90s. They may still recruit in public schools today; I’m not sure. In any event, students who wore black armbands to school in 1969 were often mourning the loss of people with whom they had attended the same school. To deny them that right was to make a mockery of the very system that asked 17-year-olds and 18-year-olds to fight the war, and that drafted many of them the moment they were handed their high school diplomas. Returning to Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, The New York Times ran a short article last month on a 14-year-old middle-school honors student from northern California who was reprimanded for violating her public school’s dress code. Her crime: sporting Tigger (of Winnie the Pooh fame) knee socks. This was the twelfth time she had been sent home for violating the dress code. Amazingly, one of those times her offense was wearing a T-shirt with an antidrug slogan on it. Along with five other students, the girl in question is suing in federal court, arguing that the school district has violated her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights. John Glasser, the district superintendent, explained that the code was intended to clamp down on the use of gang iconography and argued that “there are other ways to express your individuality in an academic environment.” (Of course, as we learned earlier in this thread, writing and performing an original play about the Iraq War is not one of the acceptable ways to express individuality. No wonder kids hate high school. They’re told to think and punished when they do.) The Napa Valley Unified School District clearly needs a new dress code and, arguably, a new superintendent. But what of the law? If the operative point is age rather than content, should a school district be permitted to impose dress codes on students? If students can’t wear Winnie the Pooh logos on their socks, or black armbands on their sleeves (in fact, they can, but Mr. Gordon wishes they couldn’t), can they be barred from wearing Christian T-shirts, crosses, yarmulkes, and head scarves? After all, if we can limit one part of the First Amendment inside school grounds, why not the other parts, too? And if we allow students to wear crosses or stars of David on the grounds of religious freedom, why can’t a student in Alaska hoist a banner that invokes Jesus?
April 4, 2007
Defining Free Speech II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:05 PM EST Well, it is certainly nice for Joshua Zeitz to produce an argument to back up his position instead of just a sneer of contempt for anyone who could be so unenlightened as to not agree with him. It is an argument worth a serious reply. All of the famous cases cited by Mr. Zeitz, many of which are the basis of the modern jurisprudence regarding free speech, involve adults engaged in the serious expression of ideas: an editor criticizing a state judiciary, a person of antiwar views distributing pamphlets advocating resistance to the draft, a socialist expressing a basic tenet of socialist doctrine, even a newspaper spewing hate. The case of the schoolboy holding up a banner saying “Bong Hits for Jesus” involves neither adults nor ideas. Mr. Zeitz fails to note the fact that the plaintiff in this case was a child. While children most certainly have civil rights, no one has ever argued—at least that I know of—that they enjoy the full panoply of them. Do six-year-olds have the “right” to decide when to go to bed, whether or not to take a bath, what to eat for supper, where to live? Of course not. To be sure, the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969) that students had the right to wear black armbands in school to protest the Vietnam War, calling it a matter of free speech. I think it was a disastrously wrong-headed decision, and I am not alone. Justice Hugo Black—as firm a friend of the First Amendment as has ever sat on the Court—dissented vigorously, writing, “The Court’s holding in this case ushers in what I deem to be an entirely new era in which the power to control pupils by the elected ‘officials of state supported public schools . . .’ in the United States is in ultimate effect transferred to the Supreme Court.” Black was right. Children have a right to wear armbands, display signs, stand on soapboxes (not that soapboxes actually exist anymore, I suppose, but plastic milk crates will do nicely), and proclaim truth to the world. They should just have to do it outside of school. For six hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, they should be learning, not teaching. Tinker made matters that are properly decided by educators and parents a matter of judicial process instead of common sense. That, 99.9 percent of the time, is a ridiculous waste of money and time. It is a measure, I suppose, of just how rich this country has become that we can afford to spend tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of dollars arguing in court a case this trivial. Mr. Zeitz writes, “The United States is governed by laws, and by a written constitution. Is there a place in such a system for the distinction that Mr. Gordon is making between protected free speech and unprotected mischievous speech? If so, who should be the arbiter of whether speech merits protection, and what are the standards that should govern this decision?” The jurisprudence of free speech requires distinctions between what is allowed and what is not allowed (yelling fire in crowded theaters, libel, false advertising, inciting to riot, etc.) all the time. It is judges who make those distinctions, by means of well-established legal standards. In the case of schoolboys in school, it should be educators using the standards of common sense. If the schoolboy in question genuinely thinks he has been seriously wronged, he should complain to his parents when he gets home and let them decide if he is right and, if necessary, speak to the school. Or he can just wait until two o’clock, when he will be entirely free to exercise his unalienable right to proclaim the sacred truth of “Bong Hits for Jesus” to the world.
April 4, 2007
Getting the Past Right in Fiction: A Talk with Bruce Olds Posted by Allen Barra at 12:10 PM EST Bruce Olds is one of the most acclaimed and intriguing of recent American novelists, a writer who has combined the techniques of postmodernist fiction with the traditional historical novel. Raising Holy Hell (1995) and Bucking The Tiger (2001) both examine the lives of notorious nineteenth-century Americans. His latest, The Moments Lost: A Midwest Pilgrim’s Progress, takes a more personal approach to American history. The protagonist, Franklyn Shiv, who writes about one of the most turbulent eras in American labor, was inspired by the life of Olds’s great-grandfather. I talked with him about all three of these books.
Your first two novels, Raising Holy Hell, about John Brown, and Bucking The Tiger, about Doc Holliday, fit uneasily into the category of historical fiction. I say uneasily because many of the techniques you used seem light years from the novels that get lumped into that category. In The Moments Lost, you also take historical themes in a new direction—but I'll get to that in a moment. What would you say your primary influences have been in both fiction and history?
I suspect my own influences go more to writing—to the use of language and the form that language assumes—than to either fiction or history per se. I always have read and still do read a lot of poetry. I’m quite hopeless when it comes to writing the stuff myself, haven’t the knack, but I’m tremendously drawn to the Poem, capital P, and its privileging of and sensitivity to language and form. In this respect I’m particularly fascinated by poetry that works with historical content, specifically American history. I reckon I’m what the academics would call a formalist on the fiction side, an Americanist on the historical.
That said, the first book I recall being truly excited by—this would have been in grammar school, seventh grade perhaps—was Ivanhoe. Which, looking back, makes almost too much sense. Later, at university, I briefly fell under the sway of the old New Journalists—Mailer, Wolfe, Breslin, Talese, McPhee, Murray Kempton, that crowd—until I discovered the meta-fictionists, William Gass in particular. I'm still a huge fan of his work. Sentence for sentence, I find its bravery galvanizing.
But perhaps the work that fuses all of these elements and influences most effectively for me is that of Paul Metcalf, Herman Melville's great-grandson, with whom I carried on a correspondence for some while before his death in 1999, and to whom I dedicated the second novel. Paul described his work as “the personal poetry of pure document,” and he had much to say about the relationship between poetry, prose, history, and fiction and the synergy to be exploited between them, which he likened—his words—to “the plunge of sex, accomplished with sexual energy, the focus of all one’s vitalities.”
Paul was an unapologetically subversive guy, which is why, perhaps, he seldom published in other than obscure and offbeat presses. My favorite quote of his is, “It is those of us who cannot untangle ourselves from the past who are really dangerous in the present because we hurl ourselves across the present with a language they cannot understand.” Isn’t that great? I agree, entirely.
You’ve referred to Raising Holy Hell and Bucking the Tiger as “fictional biographies.” The Moments Lost seems to draw heavily from the history of your own family, though Clarence Darrow, Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, and the Wobblies all put in appearances. You’ve said that Franklyn Shiv, your protagonist, is inspired by your own great-grandfather; how does his life actually connect with the historical figures in the book?
I don't know if the story itself draws heavily from the history of my own family, but the impetus behind its writing certainly does, since my ancestors lived in the place (Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula) where and the time (the early twentieth century) when the story is set.
As my great-grandfather was killed in a mine cave-in in 1910 at the age of 37, three years before the strike, the character of Franklyn Shivs was not directly inspired by him. Rather, Shivs is based on an actual person, a newspaper reporter named Frank Shavs, about whom we have no more than a scant paragraph’s worth of historical information.
Which is to say that, in light of the book being 470 pages, Shivs is largely a fictional creation. If his life connects with anyone’s, his interior life I mean, I would imagine that it connects most closely with my own, albeit in ways about which I remain in the dark even now.
The only character in the book who was inspired in the way you are referring to, is the character I call “the Kid.” He’s my grandfather, at a similar age.
At the end of The Moments Lost, there’s a section called “Family Plot.” There are several pages from what appears to be your grandfather’s diary as well as an extract from a mine inspector’s report about your great grandfather’s death in a mine accident. I say “appears” because I was wondering if it was real or whether or not Bruce Olds the novelist was pulling a literary prank, the sort of thing Nabokov did with the open letter from the lawyer in Lolita that was actually written by Nabokov. I’m betting, by the way, that the diary and the report are real documents.
As a novelist, I have nothing but admiration for that sort of Nabokovian legerdemain when it is well done, but in this case you win. Those are real documents, save for some few emendations I chose to make for aesthetic reasons, none of which alter their meaning or truth. On the other hand, had I felt the aesthetic need to fabricate them of whole cloth, I would not have hesitated. There is historical fact and there is fictional truth, and while I wouldn’t presume to speak for others, the distinction between the two, in my opinion, is one that could use more blurring, not less.
It’s axiomatic that no one writes a historical novel unless he feels he has an objective view of the history he’s writing about. That’s not to say that any novelist can ever truly be objective, but that it was necessary for, say, Tolstoy or Sir Walter Scott, for that matter, to feel that he had achieved an overview that was essentially correct. But how does one stay objective when writing about one’s own ancestors? Your vision of your great-grandfather would have to be more of a fictional creation than, say, Big Bill Haywood or Clarence Darrow, wouldn’t it? Did it make you feel uneasy to reimagine the lives of your ancestors?
But I wasn't reimagining their lives as much as I was reimagining the cultural dynamics of their lives, their historical circumstances, the social and political and economic cross-currents at play in that place at that time. As I say, none of the characters in the book, save one, are based on my ancestors, and that one, in the context of the story, is a child.
That said, I don’t disagree that it never hurts to steep oneself in the historical facts of the matter, to do one’s homework, so to say. Not that all historical novelists feel this way. I recall William Styron remarking that he did just enough research in preparation for The Confessions of Nat Turner to trigger his imagination. That beyond that he was afraid he would know too much, that the facts would inhibit him, that the history would handcuff and tether him, leave him too earthbound.
Personally I am more comfortable knowing too much than not enough. When I toy with, or twist, or ignore, or flat violate the historical facts, I want and need to know that I am doing so for aesthetic reasons, with premeditation and malice aforethought.
Besides, a large part of the fun for me lies in doing the research. I really enjoy the spadework. At some point, of course, one is compelled to call a halt and get on with it, but if I can be faulted in this regard, it would be for over-researching, not its opposite.
A pretentious critic in the Los Angeles Times wrote of Bucking the Tiger, that Olds “lights a torch for American historical fiction.” Is that a tough mandate to live up to?
No, I don’t find it a tough mandate to live up to because I don’t interpret it as a mandate. The only mandate I subscribe to is to write the next sentence as well, as felicitously, as I am capable of writing it. Believe me, there is no tougher mandate in the world.
April 3, 2007
Defining Free Speech Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 11:10 PM EST Mr. Gordon misses the point when he writes that I do not “deign to inform the rest of us why [he is] wrong to think that ‘Bong Hits for Jesus’ is not in any real sense an exercise of free speech but rather merely the mischievous act of an apparently clever schoolboy.” My argument is simple and falls along standard civil-libertarian lines. Any speech that does not immediately imperil other people (or, to paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., which is not akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater) falls under the rubric of free speech. For his part, Mr. Gordon argues that some speech is constitutionally protected, while other speech is too silly to enjoy protection. So it’s up to Mr. Gordon—not me—to explain exactly how he would differentiate protected speech from “mischievous” acts unworthy of court sanction. In 1907 the U.S. Supreme Court sustained the contempt conviction of an editor from Denver who had criticized the state judiciary. In his lone dissent, Justice John Marshall Harlan declared it folly “to conceive of liberty as secured by the Constitution against hostile action, whether by the nation or by the states, which does not embrace the right to enjoy free speech and the right to have a free press.” The Court took Harlan’s dissent to heart in 1925 when, in its first use of the Fourteenth Amendment to “incorporate” the Bill of Rights, it ruled in favor of Benjamin Gitelow, a socialist and former New York assemblyman, who had been sentenced to prison for claiming in a public address that social change was contingent on an overthrow of the “parliamentary state.” In Gitelow v. New York, the justices agreed that “for present purposes we may and do assume that freedom of speech and of the press—which are protected by the First Amendment from abridgment by Congress—are among the fundamental personal rights and liberties protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment from impairments by the states.” I agree that “Bong Hits for Jesus” does not match either of these cases in political rigor. But this fact mitigates against Mr. Gordon’s distinction between free speech and mischief. If the Constitution demands that we risk the consequences of revolutionary speech to uphold the letter and spirit of the First Amendment, how can we deny the same right to someone whose speech is unlikely to elicit anything more than a few chuckles? The Court famously ruled in Schenck v. United States (1919) that there can be reasonable limits against free speech, but that “the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” (Italics added for emphasis.) “Bong Hits for Jesus” surely doesn’t threaten the war effort in Iraq. So how can it be banned? And do we want to entrust that decision to a local high school principal? Mr. Gordon’s distinction between the silly and the political also breaks down upon further analysis. In 1931 the Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law that barred newspapers from making any statement of a “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” nature. In this case, the state had shut down an anti-Semitic newspaper that violated the spirit and letter of the statute. Finding in favor of the paper, the Court ruled simply: “It is no longer open to doubt that the liberty of the press and of speech is within the liberty safeguarded by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Surely political and social satire falls under this ruling. Like Mr. Gordon, I don’t really “get” the “Bong Hits for Jesus” banner. I’m not even sure I find it as clever as he does. I also don’t find certain columnists, comedians, or cartoonists to be funny, clever, or prescient. But surely someone does. And that’s the point. Mr. Gordon wrote off as “cheap” and puerile my suggestion that he look for political work in Zimbabwe or Iran. I intended this aside in good fun, but the idea behind the quip still goes unanswered. Iran and Zimbabwe are run by despots who are all too comfortable with making summary rulings about what is, and what isn’t, protected speech. The United States is governed by laws, and by a written constitution. Is there a place in such a system for the distinction that Mr. Gordon is making between protected free speech and unprotected mischievous speech? If so, who should be the arbiter of whether speech merits protection, and what are the standards that should govern this decision?
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech VI Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:20 PM EST Mr. Zeitz writes, “Mr. Gordon has changed the rules in mid-play. I provided evidence of a case in which a college was forced to cancel an appearance by a left-wing speaker because that speaker was threatened with violence, and he replied with a long list of interesting facts that have little bearing on the subject at hand.” I have not changed the rules by so much as a millimeter. Here’s what I wrote on the very first post on this subject, way back on October 6 of last year: “I would be genuinely interested in learning instances in which right-leaning students have sought to prevent leftist speakers from having their say. I know of no examples. Examples of the opposite abound.” There were no right-leaning students threatening violence to prevent Ward Churchill from speaking at Hamilton College. The faculty opposition to his speaking was because Ward Churchill is a scholastic fraud, unworthy of being heard by honest scholars. Those seem to me to be relevant facts. Certainly they are a lot more relevant than the fact that right-leaning students at the University of Michigan staged a sophomoric stunt (and exercised their rights of free speech in the process, by the way) involving BB guns and pictures of John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Six months ago, I asked for an apple. Since then Mr. Zeitz has brought forth crates if not boatloads of oranges, bananas, grapes, pawpaws, mangoes, papayas, loganberries, and even the occasional carrot and rutabaga. He has produced not one single, solitary piece of fruit that any reasonably objective person could call an apple. I’m still waiting, but I seem to be waiting for Godot. Mr. Zeitz writes, “Yes, Ward Churchill has been accused of shoddy research.” No, Ward Churchill has been convicted—by his peers, unanimously—of far more than shoddy research. He was convicted of “four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.’” Surely Mr. Zeitz knows that fabricating information and using other people’s work without acknowledgment are not shoddy research. They are the scholarly equivalent of capital crimes. Mr. Zeitz writes, regarding the two free-speech cases he wrote about a few days ago, “This idea [my distinguishing between the two cases and coming to a conclusion regarding one that Mr. Zeitz does not approve of] works, but only if we appoint Mr. Gordon the final arbiter of what constitutes meaningful speech. Of course, we can’t do that. Our Constitution doesn’t allow for it. (It might be possible in Iran, or maybe Zimbabwe. I’ll look into this and get back to Mr. Gordon as soon as I learn something.)” I’ll ignore the cheap—indeed typical of a junior high school debate in a less-than-top-drawer school system—insult. But what have I done that causes this freshet of gratuitous insult from Mr. Zeitz? I looked at the facts in the two cases, reached conclusions regarding them, and explained my reasoning. Mr. Zeitz, in contrast, seems to have simply adopted the ACLU party line as revealed truth, thus saving unnecessary wear and tear on the little gray cells. Mr. Zeitz’s reaction is to say, in effect, “He disagrees with me, therefore he’s wrong.” He doesn’t deign to inform the rest of us why I’m wrong to think that “Bong Hits For Jesus” is not in any real sense an exercise of free speech but rather merely the mischievous act of an apparently clever schoolboy. (One has to admire how the schoolboy manages to hit two educational hot buttons—drugs and religion—in the space of only four words. Of course, had he written, “Black Gays Demand Bong Hits for Jesus,” he would have hit four buttons in only seven words. But I digress.) Mr. Zeitz, in fact, seems to think that his conclusion regarding this case is indeed the only acceptable one. “The question is,” he wrote, “will conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon also stand up for students in Juneau, Alaska, and Wilton, Connecticut?” I can’t speak for “conservatives who insist on a constitutional right to carry a concealed semiautomatic weapon,” but I just don’t think the student in Juneau needed standing up for and said why I so thought. Mr. Zeitz, awash in the moral smugness so characteristic of American liberalism in its pathetic dotage, only sneers at me for disagreeing with him.
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech V Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:30 PM EST Mr. Gordon has changed the rules in mid-play. I provided evidence of a case in which a college was forced to cancel an appearance by a left-wing speaker because that speaker was threatened with violence, and he replied with a long list of interesting facts that have little bearing on the subject at hand. Yes, the institute that invited Churchill to campus is left-leaning. Yes, Ward Churchill has been accused of shoddy research. Yes, Jeane Kirkpatrick was a more respected scholar than Ward Churchill. To this list, one might add: Hamilton College is located in upstate New York, in a small town called Clinton. The average January snowfall in Clinton, New York, is 30 inches. I have no doubt that Mr. Gordon feels genuinely sorry for right-wing students, like those at the University of Michigan who staged “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day” and a “Fun With Guns” event last year. The latter involved using BB guns to shoot targets representing John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. But on the issue of free speech, Mr. Gordon is inconsistent. He rends garments over quite deplorable instances of left-wing thuggery on college campuses, but he argues that the young man in Alaska who was suspended for hoisting a “bong hits for Jesus” banner deserved to be dressed down by his local school. According to Mr. Gordon, his speech was “essentially meaningless, intended solely to get a reaction. . . . There was no idea or opinion related to the real world being offered . . . the court of first instance should have dismissed the case under the doctrine of de minimis non curat lex. There was no real-world First Amendment issue here. Claiming one, and the courts taking the claim seriously, just because ‘words’ are involved is, at best, silly.” On the other hand, Mr. Gordon does believe that the students in Connecticut who were not permitted to perform an original play about the Iraq War have been done a great wrong. This idea works, but only if we appoint Mr. Gordon the final arbiter of what constitutes meaningful speech. Of course, we can’t do that. Our Constitution doesn’t allow for it. (It might be possible in Iran, or maybe Zimbabwe. I’ll look into this and get back to Mr. Gordon as soon as I learn something.) Again, I wonder whether groups and individuals who support an expansive reading of the Second Amendment will attempt to strengthen the individual-rights emphasis of the Bill of Rights by defending the broadest possible speech rights for students.
April 3, 2007
Guns and Speech IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Joshua Zeitz writes, “Jeane Kirkpatrick at Smith, Ward Churchill at Hamilton. Parallel examples” and hopes that I am satisfied. No, sorry, I’m not, for the two cases in fact are not parallel at all. First, the opposition to having Jeane Kirkpatrick, a distinguished scholar as well as a high government official, speak at Smith in 1983 came entirely from Smith students and left-wing faculty who disliked her politics and the policies of the Reagan administration. It was they who threatened violence and presented a clear and present danger to her safety. They were out to suppress free speech, plain and simple. The opposition to having Ward Churchill speak at Hamilton in 2005 came, as Mr. Zeitz says, from such people as Bill O’Reilly and David Horowitz, neither of whom have anything whatever to do with Hamilton College. Some Hamilton faculty members objected to having Churchill speak there, not because of his obnoxious opinions regarding 9/11 but because they regarded Professor Churchill as a scholarly fraud. They were right. In 2006, according to Wikipedia, the Investigative Committee, a subcommittee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where Churchill was a tenured professor, “agreed unanimously that Churchill had engaged in ‘serious research misconduct,’ including four counts of falsifying information, two counts of fabricating information, two counts of plagiarizing the works of others, improperly reporting the results of studies, and failing to ‘comply with established standards regarding author names on publications.’” The university chancellor dismissed Churchill. The matter, as far as I know, is still under appeal. Second, it has never been established where the anonymous threats of violence against Churchill, should he appear at Hamilton, came from, but they certainly did not come from a campus mob or faculty members. They might well have come from people personally affected by 9/11 who had heard about Churchill on television. The inability of the college to guarantee his security might well be owing to the Kirkland Project having recently invited the 1960s radical Susan Rosenberg, of the Weather Underground, to come to Hamilton as an “artist/activist in residence.” (The term “activist in residence” speaks volumes.) Ms Rosenberg, before having her 58-year sentence commuted by President Clinton—one of his infamous I’m-out-of-here pardons and commutations—had spent 16 years in a federal prison for assorted crimes of violence and had taken part in the armed robbery of a Brinks truck in which a Brinks guard and two Nyack, New York, policemen had been killed. Hamilton, a liberal arts college, is located deep in the countryside, near the small town of Clinton, New York, and is dependent on local police to provide security over and above what the very modest campus force can provide. The local police at the time were understandably not inclined to help out an institution that had given a “scholarly” appointment to a cop killer. (Susan Rosenberg, facing near unanimous disgust, withdrew before taking up the appointment.) The Kirkland Project, which has an independent endowment, is thus largely independent of college control. Run by a very left-wing faculty member, it has been far more interested in “activism” (of the left only, of course; no diversity of ideas, please, we’re liberals) than in scholarship. To learn more about the Kirkland Project I would recommend reading this op-ed piece by Robert Paquette, who is Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History at Hamilton College and whom I have known and admired for a number of years. So, we’re still waiting for an instance in which a college speaker was forced to withdraw because right-wingers on campus objected to his or her politics and used violence or the palpable threat of it to disrupt or prevent the free expression of ideas. I’d also like to learn about any left-wing campus publications that have been stolen and destroyed by right-wing students.
April 2, 2007
Guns and Speech III Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 03:30 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “I still await learning of a single instance where a campus speech, discussion, poster, or newspaper was disrupted, systematically defaced, or destroyed by right-wing students. These sorts of actions seem to be exclusively, not ‘more likely,’ the province of left-wing students.” In 2005 Hamilton College invited left-wing Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado to speak on the subject of American Indian rights. The talk was to be sponsored by the college’s Kirkland Project for the Study of Gender, Society and Culture, as part of a series entitled “Class in Context.” Though his scholarly work focuses on ethnicity—particularly, on Native Americans—Churchill is a bête noire of the political right for his comments linking the September 11 attacks to American global imperialism. Even in the face of widespread conservative dissent, at first the college staked out a firm position in favor of free speech. Joan Hinde Stewart, Hamilton’s president, said: “There have been calls for me to rescind the Kirkland Project’s invitation to Ward Churchill and cancel the event. But there is a principle at stake, for once the invitation was extended by the Kirkland Project and accepted by Ward Churchill, it became a matter of free speech.” But after several weeks of right-wing shock incitement by the likes of Bill O’Reilly and David Horowitz, Hamilton College canceled the talk. The official reason: Physical threats against Churchill made it impossible for the college to guarantee his safety. I hope this will satisfy Mr. Gordon, as during last year’s exchange, he offered the following example of violent left-wing interference with free speech: “In 1983, when Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the United States ambassador to the United Nations, was invited to give the commencement address at Smith College, she was forced to withdraw after violence was threatened and the college president, Jill K. Conway, said that she could not guarantee her security.” Jeane Kirkpatrick at Smith, Ward Churchill at Hamilton. Parallel examples.
April 1, 2007
The Wit of Science Posted by John Steele Gordon at 09:55 AM EST Scientists as a general rule are known for their brains, not their wit. But there are occasional delightful exceptions. A recent scientific paper (available here) ponders the question of why of all the great apes, only humans have two species of lice with which to contend, while gorillas and chimpanzees have one (and orangutans, luckily for them, are lice free). Of the two human lice, the head louse is related to the chimpanzee louse and, indeed, split off from it at the same time that humans diverged from chimps, about six million years ago. The human body louse, however, is closely related to the gorilla louse, having diverged only about three millions years ago. How it made the jump to humans is unknown and probably always will be. (Yes, I know what you’re thinking, but there are many innocent possibilities beyond interspecies hanky-panky.) What makes the story interesting to other than louseologists, however, is that it makes it possible to date with some precision when humans lost most of their body hair. As long as we were hirsute, there was room for only one louse, thanks to the general biological truth that only one species can occupy a single biological niche at the same time in the same place (because competition will always eliminate all but one species). But once we had hair only in certain parts of the body, with, in effect, a cordon sanitaire around our hairless necks, then two niches were created and early humans could scratch different critters in different places. So where’s the wit? The title of this in fact very serious paper is “Pair of Lice Lost or Parasites Regained: The Evolutionary History of Anthropoid Primate Lice.” This reminds me of one of the most elegant scientific jokes of all time, which first saw the light of day on April 1, 1948, 59 years ago today. On that day the premier British scientific journal, Nature, published a paper called “The Origin of Chemical Elements.” It proved to be a major, and very early, contribution to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Indeed, it was so early that the theory wouldn’t even acquire its popular name until 1955 (courtesy of one of its most formidable opponents, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle). The authors of “The Origin of Chemical Elements” were Ralph Alpher, then a graduate student at George Washington University and now a vastly senior and greatly honored physicist, and his advisor, the late George Gamow, a highly distinguished physicist in his own right as well as the author of many popular works of science (most famously One, Two, Three . . . Infinity, which is still in print after more than 60 years). Gamow, who was once described by a reporter as “the only scientist in America with a real sense of humor,” recognized an opportunity when he saw it, and added the name of a friend, the great physicist Hans Bethe—who in fact had little if anything to do with the paper’s creation—to the list of authors. Thus the paper would be written by Alpher, Bethe, Gamow and it’s been known as the a?? paper ever since.
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