Although I wonder if he’s kidding, “Berwick Realist” (BR) repeats himself often enough that—although only anonymously—(s)he apparently wants to be taken seriously. The upshot of BR’s remarks is that, whatever the critic’s nay-saying, we’ve suffered no loss of civil liberty under the Bush administration, and that those who think so stand among the deluded “liberals,” “socialists,” and “America-haters.”
It’s easy to show that this is drivel. As writer Naomi Wolf documents in painful detail in The End of America, our Constitutional liberties have never in our history seen so systematic and brutal an assault as they have under the authoritarian “security-industrial complex” of the Bush regime. For those unconvinced, I recommend her discussions of the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the harassment of journalists, the control of the media through monopolizing conglomerates like FOX, unwarranted spying on private citizens, the explicit flouting of the Geneva Conventions, not-so-secret foreign prisons—and torture (p. 52-68).
The erosion of our first amendment rights is clear: the actual torture of anyone is the threat to torture—anyone, and if we think we’re safe because we’re good citizens, we’re simply being naïve. As Wolf shows, “enemy combatant” knows no national boundaries; freedom of speech critical of the government died with the Patriot Act.
But perhaps BR is a victim of the spin to which our language has been subjected in recent years in the interest of concealing the truth, creating an inhuman enemy, or diluting the facts so thoroughly that we just don’t get, for example, that phrases like “axis of evil,” “Islamofascism,”and “war on terror” are intended to keep us paralyzed by the fear of some coming Armageddon.
Don’t we get it that the spin-masters who create bigger-than-life-evil-super-power nemeses for us are making whopping big bucks off the manufacture of a culture of war-mongering—all at our expense? Are we so occupied with American Idol that we just don’t care that our kids are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan for nothing but the profits spun out of “Rumfeld-stiltskin” hype? THINK: is the reporting of facts unfavorable to the government treason? Rupert Murdock thinks so. Are critics “enemies of the people”? Ask Sean Hannity. Does “war-footing” justify the complete suspension of the rights of people deemed “enemy combatants”? Ask Bill O’Reilly. Are professors who challenge their students to critically evaluate their government’s actions a danger to civil order? Ask David Horowitz.
This isn’t to say, of course, that we don’t have enemies or that there aren’t real issues to confront. Indeed, I can think of nothing more threatening to global stability than religious extremism. The theocrats within our borders who’d dictate what our children can read, what counts as science, whom we can love, what women ought to aspire to, and who can represent God are the ideological soul mates of the Jihadists.
Wouldn’t it be ironic—and tragic—were we to forfeit our democracy in the very course of defending it from those enemies? This is what we’re doing, whether BR gets it or not. While we reel between the “Renew America” evangelicals and the corporate pirates of the Bush administration, our infrastructure erodes, millions go without health care, our environment deteriorates, and our civil liberties languish; yet we dump trillions into a war for a fuel that’s literally going the way of the dinosaur. We can’t afford BR’s blinders. If we give up the liberty for which our country stands, we will have nothing left at the end of this misbegotten war but spin—and it can’t possibly pay the debt on the lives lost to it.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Why I teach philosophy
Why do I teach? Why do I teach philosophy? I can imagine a hundred worthwhile answers to this question. Teaching offers the opportunity to communicate great ideas to a new generation; teaching in the humanities contributes to the mission of a true university; it helps students to hone their critical thinking skills, hopefully to become better citizens and more self-reflective human beings.
For me, however, the first question isn’t “Why do I teach?” but, “Why philosophy?” Not, that is, “Why did I make philosophy my profession?” or even “Why do I teach philosophy and not something else?” but rather “Where does teaching have its place in my own philosophically driven life?” This is my question because while philosophy is my profession—and a fabulous one at that—it’s no “day job.” I don’t go to class “thinking philosophically,” then head home to think in some other way. No. Philosophy’s a way of life, and there’s no conveying its content in a classroom without exemplifying its value as a way of life—not, at least, for me.
Moreover, I want to persuade my students not only that philosophy is such a way, but that it offers an excellent life. That anyone should call this manipulation or indoctrination is absurd; I can only be persuasive to those whose critical thinking skills equip them to understand the arguments that make philosophy so valuable.
For me, the question must be posed this way because, as peculiar as it may sound, I teach for largely the same reasons I am home to a motley selection of rescue animals, am a committed vegetarian, a long distance runner, a feminist, an environmentalist, and most important of all—a writer. I teach philosophy, in other words, because I really believe its questions are the stuff of the most significant decisions any of us ever make. Questions like “Whom ought I to love?” “What ought I to consume/use?” “What activities contribute to the good life? “What ought I to try to communicate?” are all questions that each of us confronts eventually.
What philosophy offers is a cornucopia of possible responses—but more than this, it offers an example of thousands of year’s worth of people who gave over their lives to struggle with them. It can show us that, no matter how sophisticated we think we are, no matter how shrewd or savvy, questions about why there’s something rather than nothing—and why we’re among the somethings—matter.
Such questions, moreover, are not merely the stuff of our moral quandaries; they inform the content of our creative praxis as well. Fall of 2008, for example, I’ll be teaching both Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy and Aesthetic Experience—and I’ll go out of my way to talk my most interested students into taking both courses. Why? Because questions about the nature of consciousness bear on questions about how certain kinds of experience are possible. Taking both courses will enrich my students experience in a fashion that’s not just about the content, not just about my expertise, and not even just about their academic erudition. It will make them think about the connections among our fields, our ideas, our anxieties. Of what must a creature be able to be conscious in order for experience to be aesthetic? What does it mean to say this? Are there creatures other than human beings capable of aesthetic experience?
Perhaps such questions don’t seem to have anything of the “radical” about them. But they do. In fact, they lead right to some of the assumptions we hold precious—even inviolable. Does aesthetic experience require a soul? Is that why it’s unavailable to nonhuman animals? Is it unavailable? What in human experience counts as having aesthetically appreciable qualities? Can violence? Pornography? We’ll read the likes of Plato, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer right along with contemporary theorists—including feminist critics of classic conceptions of rationality, and theater pieces like The Vagina Monologues.
Bravely journeying where an argument leads—and being able to take folks with you—is, methinks, part of the job description of a good teacher. This is not merely a matter of exercising command over one’s subject matter. No doubt, command’s important, but if I cannot exemplify for my students why I care so much about philosophy, why on earth should I expect them to? As an undergraduate at University of Colorado, I had the immense fortune of having a professor who made ideas simply live in his classroom. He thought on his feet; he said things with which I agreed—and lots of things with which I didn’t. He was loud. He was animated. He trashed a tradition I have come to appreciate. But what he didn’t do, didn’t think he was doing, and would have been mortally offended if anyone had suggested it to him, was indoctrinate me. I came away thinking, and I’ve been grateful to him ever since.
This is the sort of teacher I want to be.
I want to ignite my students imaginations, get them to consider possibilities they may never have considered before, and make them think long and hard about what they take for granted. I want them to see that there’s absolutely nothing worth believing if it cannot hold up under scrutiny, the demand for evidence, and an investigation of its logical coherence. Some call this “no sacred cows” approach “the corruption of youth.” Fine. Philosophy’s no comfy reiteration of what our parents taught us. Others call it “liberal.” Of course it is. “Liberal”: Unafraid to consider ideas that are unfamiliar, and willing to consider the possibility that traditions do not justify themselves merely on the backs of their duration.
Some might even call such an approach “leftist,” you know the “boogy-word.” Also fine by me. I know why folks like David Horowitz and his army of anti-academics fire off this word: to shut thinking down. Why do I teach? Because the value of truth is not found in the smug security of those who think they have it, but in the ongoing inquiry into why our lives are improved by the search.
For me, however, the first question isn’t “Why do I teach?” but, “Why philosophy?” Not, that is, “Why did I make philosophy my profession?” or even “Why do I teach philosophy and not something else?” but rather “Where does teaching have its place in my own philosophically driven life?” This is my question because while philosophy is my profession—and a fabulous one at that—it’s no “day job.” I don’t go to class “thinking philosophically,” then head home to think in some other way. No. Philosophy’s a way of life, and there’s no conveying its content in a classroom without exemplifying its value as a way of life—not, at least, for me.
Moreover, I want to persuade my students not only that philosophy is such a way, but that it offers an excellent life. That anyone should call this manipulation or indoctrination is absurd; I can only be persuasive to those whose critical thinking skills equip them to understand the arguments that make philosophy so valuable.
For me, the question must be posed this way because, as peculiar as it may sound, I teach for largely the same reasons I am home to a motley selection of rescue animals, am a committed vegetarian, a long distance runner, a feminist, an environmentalist, and most important of all—a writer. I teach philosophy, in other words, because I really believe its questions are the stuff of the most significant decisions any of us ever make. Questions like “Whom ought I to love?” “What ought I to consume/use?” “What activities contribute to the good life? “What ought I to try to communicate?” are all questions that each of us confronts eventually.
What philosophy offers is a cornucopia of possible responses—but more than this, it offers an example of thousands of year’s worth of people who gave over their lives to struggle with them. It can show us that, no matter how sophisticated we think we are, no matter how shrewd or savvy, questions about why there’s something rather than nothing—and why we’re among the somethings—matter.
Such questions, moreover, are not merely the stuff of our moral quandaries; they inform the content of our creative praxis as well. Fall of 2008, for example, I’ll be teaching both Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy and Aesthetic Experience—and I’ll go out of my way to talk my most interested students into taking both courses. Why? Because questions about the nature of consciousness bear on questions about how certain kinds of experience are possible. Taking both courses will enrich my students experience in a fashion that’s not just about the content, not just about my expertise, and not even just about their academic erudition. It will make them think about the connections among our fields, our ideas, our anxieties. Of what must a creature be able to be conscious in order for experience to be aesthetic? What does it mean to say this? Are there creatures other than human beings capable of aesthetic experience?
Perhaps such questions don’t seem to have anything of the “radical” about them. But they do. In fact, they lead right to some of the assumptions we hold precious—even inviolable. Does aesthetic experience require a soul? Is that why it’s unavailable to nonhuman animals? Is it unavailable? What in human experience counts as having aesthetically appreciable qualities? Can violence? Pornography? We’ll read the likes of Plato, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer right along with contemporary theorists—including feminist critics of classic conceptions of rationality, and theater pieces like The Vagina Monologues.
Bravely journeying where an argument leads—and being able to take folks with you—is, methinks, part of the job description of a good teacher. This is not merely a matter of exercising command over one’s subject matter. No doubt, command’s important, but if I cannot exemplify for my students why I care so much about philosophy, why on earth should I expect them to? As an undergraduate at University of Colorado, I had the immense fortune of having a professor who made ideas simply live in his classroom. He thought on his feet; he said things with which I agreed—and lots of things with which I didn’t. He was loud. He was animated. He trashed a tradition I have come to appreciate. But what he didn’t do, didn’t think he was doing, and would have been mortally offended if anyone had suggested it to him, was indoctrinate me. I came away thinking, and I’ve been grateful to him ever since.
This is the sort of teacher I want to be.
I want to ignite my students imaginations, get them to consider possibilities they may never have considered before, and make them think long and hard about what they take for granted. I want them to see that there’s absolutely nothing worth believing if it cannot hold up under scrutiny, the demand for evidence, and an investigation of its logical coherence. Some call this “no sacred cows” approach “the corruption of youth.” Fine. Philosophy’s no comfy reiteration of what our parents taught us. Others call it “liberal.” Of course it is. “Liberal”: Unafraid to consider ideas that are unfamiliar, and willing to consider the possibility that traditions do not justify themselves merely on the backs of their duration.
Some might even call such an approach “leftist,” you know the “boogy-word.” Also fine by me. I know why folks like David Horowitz and his army of anti-academics fire off this word: to shut thinking down. Why do I teach? Because the value of truth is not found in the smug security of those who think they have it, but in the ongoing inquiry into why our lives are improved by the search.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Talk About Mercenary: Horowitz and Co. Strike--out--Again
One of this year's howler understatements: a hallmark characteristic of David Horowitz and company's Students for Academic Freedom is its casual relationship with the truth. No surprise, yes? This, however, marks a particularly outrageous departure from anything remotely like journalistic integrity-one that I think we ought to scream from the very tops of our ivory towers.
On December 17th SAF posted a New York Sun story about a Princeton student, Francisco Nava who was allegedly assaulted-allegedly-for his conservative beliefs. Writer Annie Karni describes the incident:
"An outcry from students and faculty at Princeton University is rattling the campus here after a student who is leading a movement to instill conservative moral values among undergraduates was physically attacked Friday, beaten, and rendered unconscious in a rare incidence of violence within the Ivy League.
The incident is prompting an outcry from conservative students and faculty who say they feel singled out by the Princeton administration and the majority of the student body, who have remained silent in the face of what many say is a politically charged attack.
A politics major from Texas who is a junior, Francisco Nava, was assaulted about two miles from campus in Princeton Township by two black-clad men who pinned him against a wall and repeatedly bashed his head against the bricks, he told the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in an interview."
Trouble is, the only thing true about this story is that Nava is a conservative politics major from Texas. That's right, and as I pen this, the story's still running at SAF. Here's the story from the AP wire yesterday morning, December 18th:
"A Princton University student who argued that his conservative views were not accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views, authorities said Monday. Princeton Township police said that Francisco Nava was not immediately charged with any crime, but that the investigation was continuing. Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work too, said detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi. A spokeswoman from the Ivy League university said punishment could range from a warning to expulsion, was pending Monday."
That's Monday, December 17th, which means that the SAF folks likely knew that Nava's story was at least suspicious when they ran Karni's piece. And indeed, this pans out as well. A cursory Google search of the story reveals that it was unraveling by later Monday. Yet here we are Wednesday morning, the 19th, and not only has it not been pulled from SAF, no apology to their (however erstwhile) readers has been issued for having run it without investigating the facts it in the first place.
In fact, the whole thing's even uglier: in the Sun article, Karni reports that Nava "wrote a death threat using an anti-homosexual slur, the Web site Firstthings.com reported this morning. Mr. Nava's roommate at Groton was a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance, according to the Web site. ‘Evidently he did it once when he was a student at the Groton School,' a professor of jurisprudence, Robert George, confirmed to The New York Sun." Yet despite the fact that suspicion tainted Nava's story right from the beginning, it's announced on SAF as if it were a done deal: "Violence Rattles Princeton."
Here are the facts: Nava was not beaten (at least not by anyone but himself); he was not beaten unconscious; he has a history of fabricating just this sort of drama; people knew it. Honestly, what else can we infer from this other than that D-Ho and company will grab at absolutely anything in order to trash academia? That when SAF folks got wind of a possible beating of a conservative student from an Ivy League school, they became psychotically giddy at the prospect of getting to, well, beat up a big name university? They did get this much right, Nava is a conservative student; from the AP wire:
"Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the student newspaper criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he said encouraged a dangerous "hook-up culture.""
But this hardly matters. Nava had ample opportunity for conservative political activism at Princeton. As Karni points out, "[w]ith an active Republicans Club, a pro-life club, three major Evangelical groups, and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions that is led by Professor George, Princeton University is considered one of the Ivy League's more conservative campuses." In other words, for Nava, these opportunities weren't good enough so he faked a beating to get Princeton to stop offering free condoms. For Horowitz and company, however, the story doesn't end there. So hell-bent on destroying academia as we currently understand it, no school is off limits for a SAF attack-even those, like Princeton, who'd seem a little closer to their apparently condom-free (not to mention gay-free) vision of American higher education (not that this is necessarily true of Princeton; conservative students groups need not be composed of Horowitz-crazies).
So here's my take: A graduate of the David Horowitz School of Political Opportunism and Moral Self-Righteousness, Nava deployed a strategy worthy of his own on-line "teachers"-he lied in order to make it look like conservative students are getting a bad deal at Princeton. Scrapes, cuts, and all, he just didn't lie well enough to be convincing. But as Horowitz' bedfellows go, he's now paid his membership dues to that erstwhile brother (and sister)hood at SAF.
Lucky young man.
On December 17th SAF posted a New York Sun story about a Princeton student, Francisco Nava who was allegedly assaulted-allegedly-for his conservative beliefs. Writer Annie Karni describes the incident:
"An outcry from students and faculty at Princeton University is rattling the campus here after a student who is leading a movement to instill conservative moral values among undergraduates was physically attacked Friday, beaten, and rendered unconscious in a rare incidence of violence within the Ivy League.
The incident is prompting an outcry from conservative students and faculty who say they feel singled out by the Princeton administration and the majority of the student body, who have remained silent in the face of what many say is a politically charged attack.
A politics major from Texas who is a junior, Francisco Nava, was assaulted about two miles from campus in Princeton Township by two black-clad men who pinned him against a wall and repeatedly bashed his head against the bricks, he told the student newspaper, the Daily Princetonian, in an interview."
Trouble is, the only thing true about this story is that Nava is a conservative politics major from Texas. That's right, and as I pen this, the story's still running at SAF. Here's the story from the AP wire yesterday morning, December 18th:
"A Princton University student who argued that his conservative views were not accepted on the campus confessed to fabricating an assault and sending threatening e-mail messages to himself and some friends who shared his views, authorities said Monday. Princeton Township police said that Francisco Nava was not immediately charged with any crime, but that the investigation was continuing. Nava claimed to have been assaulted Friday by two men off campus, police said. But he later confessed that scrapes and scratches on his face were self-inflicted, and that the threats were his work too, said detective Sgt. Ernie Silagyi. A spokeswoman from the Ivy League university said punishment could range from a warning to expulsion, was pending Monday."
That's Monday, December 17th, which means that the SAF folks likely knew that Nava's story was at least suspicious when they ran Karni's piece. And indeed, this pans out as well. A cursory Google search of the story reveals that it was unraveling by later Monday. Yet here we are Wednesday morning, the 19th, and not only has it not been pulled from SAF, no apology to their (however erstwhile) readers has been issued for having run it without investigating the facts it in the first place.
In fact, the whole thing's even uglier: in the Sun article, Karni reports that Nava "wrote a death threat using an anti-homosexual slur, the Web site Firstthings.com reported this morning. Mr. Nava's roommate at Groton was a founder of the Gay-Straight Alliance, according to the Web site. ‘Evidently he did it once when he was a student at the Groton School,' a professor of jurisprudence, Robert George, confirmed to The New York Sun." Yet despite the fact that suspicion tainted Nava's story right from the beginning, it's announced on SAF as if it were a done deal: "Violence Rattles Princeton."
Here are the facts: Nava was not beaten (at least not by anyone but himself); he was not beaten unconscious; he has a history of fabricating just this sort of drama; people knew it. Honestly, what else can we infer from this other than that D-Ho and company will grab at absolutely anything in order to trash academia? That when SAF folks got wind of a possible beating of a conservative student from an Ivy League school, they became psychotically giddy at the prospect of getting to, well, beat up a big name university? They did get this much right, Nava is a conservative student; from the AP wire:
"Nava, a 23-year-old junior politics major from Bedford, Texas, found himself at the center of one campus controversy recently when he wrote a column for the student newspaper criticizing the school for giving out free condoms, which he said encouraged a dangerous "hook-up culture.""
But this hardly matters. Nava had ample opportunity for conservative political activism at Princeton. As Karni points out, "[w]ith an active Republicans Club, a pro-life club, three major Evangelical groups, and the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions that is led by Professor George, Princeton University is considered one of the Ivy League's more conservative campuses." In other words, for Nava, these opportunities weren't good enough so he faked a beating to get Princeton to stop offering free condoms. For Horowitz and company, however, the story doesn't end there. So hell-bent on destroying academia as we currently understand it, no school is off limits for a SAF attack-even those, like Princeton, who'd seem a little closer to their apparently condom-free (not to mention gay-free) vision of American higher education (not that this is necessarily true of Princeton; conservative students groups need not be composed of Horowitz-crazies).
So here's my take: A graduate of the David Horowitz School of Political Opportunism and Moral Self-Righteousness, Nava deployed a strategy worthy of his own on-line "teachers"-he lied in order to make it look like conservative students are getting a bad deal at Princeton. Scrapes, cuts, and all, he just didn't lie well enough to be convincing. But as Horowitz' bedfellows go, he's now paid his membership dues to that erstwhile brother (and sister)hood at SAF.
Lucky young man.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
New Years Resolutions, Property Taxes, and Corporate Greed
In the spirit of the coming new year, and inspired by Joe Bageant’s riotous Deer Hunting with Jesus, I’d like to suggest a holiday resolution: Let’s disabuse ourselves of one big myth that’s bedeviled us for too long, one whopper that divides our communities and threatens our children’s educations.
The myth I have in mind is that property taxes are the primary culprit for home foreclosures. This is false, and accomplishes nothing more than playing the foil for those who’d put an end to that bulwark of democracy, publicly funded education. Proposals like the School Property Tax Elimination Act of 2007 are designed to under-fund public education, the consequences of which would be felt most painfully by those who can least afford them. Districts like Benton whose teachers offer high quality education at bargain basement prices would be among the first to feel the fallout of such ill-advised and unnecessary measures—ill-advised because a boon for big business is hardly relief for the working poor; unnecessary because the more responsible culprits are not hard to find. They’re just not folks we can point to—like our neighbors.
It doesn’t take the rocket scientist to see that corporations like Exxon, Walmart, the HMOs, and the big pharmaceuticals have an open hand in our wallets. We blame the unions for demanding the expensive stuff we all want—livable wages, decent working conditions, health insurance—because the costs encourage the outsourcing of labor to places like Mexico and India. But then we resent what’s in fact the direct consequence of our failure to organize for better, namely, the very wages that insure we’ll never be more than a paycheck away from foreclosure—God forbid we get sick. We’re walking contradictions looking for someone to blame—and who better than teachers? Those unionized state employees who get to enjoy the suspicion meted out against the “book smart”? To the rejoinder that Exxon is just how free enterprise works, no it isn’t. They and others enjoy substantial government subsidies and tax breaks—all at our expense.
It’s not surprising that nationalist hate groups gain a foothold on our frazzled nerves; when your among the 47 million Americans without access to healthcare, living on the minimum wage, driving a “POS,” and working night shift for the pay differential, it’s got to be a comfort to think it’s someone else’s fault. And in some important ways, it is. The trick is to see that the fault is not your neighbor’s (unless your neighbor’s Exxon/Monsanto/Blue Cross), and that the enemies those fear-mongering “patriots” make up for you—“leftists,” liberals,” “feminists,” “gays,” “democrats,” “atheists,”—are intended to convert you from being your neighbor’s neighbor into being the neighbor whose righteous anger needs a target. Still, the property tax myth only works when it’s all stirred up by an equally mythical nostalgia, you know, the chicken-in-every-pot story. Never mind that this America never existed for many citizens. It’s still the story that makes the “haves” cling ever more tightly onto what they know they could lose to credit card debt. The “have-nots” are the ones who unionized, agitated for civil rights, and demanded equal pay for equal work. They’re the ones that nationalists like the Renew America folk vilify for taking away “our” America.
Make a New Year’s resolution: Don’t buy simple-minded hype that makes your neighbor into your enemy. Ask yourself the harder question: Where do the nickels and dimes really go? If the answer is gasoline, medicine, doctor appointments, it’s not your neighbor who’s your enemy; it’s the institutionalized greed concealed by slick propaganda like “Falling prices,” “We’re here to help,” and “Beyond Petroleum.”
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
600 words
The myth I have in mind is that property taxes are the primary culprit for home foreclosures. This is false, and accomplishes nothing more than playing the foil for those who’d put an end to that bulwark of democracy, publicly funded education. Proposals like the School Property Tax Elimination Act of 2007 are designed to under-fund public education, the consequences of which would be felt most painfully by those who can least afford them. Districts like Benton whose teachers offer high quality education at bargain basement prices would be among the first to feel the fallout of such ill-advised and unnecessary measures—ill-advised because a boon for big business is hardly relief for the working poor; unnecessary because the more responsible culprits are not hard to find. They’re just not folks we can point to—like our neighbors.
It doesn’t take the rocket scientist to see that corporations like Exxon, Walmart, the HMOs, and the big pharmaceuticals have an open hand in our wallets. We blame the unions for demanding the expensive stuff we all want—livable wages, decent working conditions, health insurance—because the costs encourage the outsourcing of labor to places like Mexico and India. But then we resent what’s in fact the direct consequence of our failure to organize for better, namely, the very wages that insure we’ll never be more than a paycheck away from foreclosure—God forbid we get sick. We’re walking contradictions looking for someone to blame—and who better than teachers? Those unionized state employees who get to enjoy the suspicion meted out against the “book smart”? To the rejoinder that Exxon is just how free enterprise works, no it isn’t. They and others enjoy substantial government subsidies and tax breaks—all at our expense.
It’s not surprising that nationalist hate groups gain a foothold on our frazzled nerves; when your among the 47 million Americans without access to healthcare, living on the minimum wage, driving a “POS,” and working night shift for the pay differential, it’s got to be a comfort to think it’s someone else’s fault. And in some important ways, it is. The trick is to see that the fault is not your neighbor’s (unless your neighbor’s Exxon/Monsanto/Blue Cross), and that the enemies those fear-mongering “patriots” make up for you—“leftists,” liberals,” “feminists,” “gays,” “democrats,” “atheists,”—are intended to convert you from being your neighbor’s neighbor into being the neighbor whose righteous anger needs a target. Still, the property tax myth only works when it’s all stirred up by an equally mythical nostalgia, you know, the chicken-in-every-pot story. Never mind that this America never existed for many citizens. It’s still the story that makes the “haves” cling ever more tightly onto what they know they could lose to credit card debt. The “have-nots” are the ones who unionized, agitated for civil rights, and demanded equal pay for equal work. They’re the ones that nationalists like the Renew America folk vilify for taking away “our” America.
Make a New Year’s resolution: Don’t buy simple-minded hype that makes your neighbor into your enemy. Ask yourself the harder question: Where do the nickels and dimes really go? If the answer is gasoline, medicine, doctor appointments, it’s not your neighbor who’s your enemy; it’s the institutionalized greed concealed by slick propaganda like “Falling prices,” “We’re here to help,” and “Beyond Petroleum.”
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
600 words
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Jamie Glazov's Frontpagemag Interview with Professor Daphne Patai
I wonder if Professor Daphne Patai appreciates what strange company she keeps sidling up to David Horowitz and including herself among the ignominious likes of Ann Coulter and Rick Santorum in support of Islamofascism Awareness Week (IFAW). Strange bedfellows for an academic with her credentials—especially given Horowitz’ slapdash relationship with the truth and Coulter’s unquenchable thirst for attention. For Pete’s sake, Professor Patai, it’s not academic smugness that compels my query; a few minutes of honest research makes it abundantly clear that Horowitz’ “Freedom Center” is about anything but freedom.
Don't get me wrong, I neither support nor condone shouting down or otherwise disrupting pretty much any invited speaker to a campus—even Horowitz, Coulter, or Rick Santorum—however it may be that future historians are likely to record their rants as psychotic. I can hope that the legacy of IFAW will be that campus groups will be more thoughtful about whose solicitation to speak they’ll accept. I can certainly wish that student groups, especially the Young Republicans, will see that they’ve been exploited to ends they may really not endorse, and I can hope that Horowitz’ unprepared, incoherent, and adolescent ramblings at Columbia ends his speaker tenure there. Ahmadinejad may be dead-in-the-water wrong, but he neither rambled nor whined. Horowitz did. Nevertheless, if we, the critics of Horowitz and company, wish to be taken seriously—and I think we must be—we must also encourage the rational engagement that befits us as scholars and academics. After all, we in fact stand on the side of free exchange—and that’s what makes Professor Patai’s interview with Jamie Glazov so peculiar and disappointing.
I should point out that I’m no fan of anyone’s religious fanaticism. In fact, part of what I think the Horowitz camp just doesn’t get (or to which they’re willfully blind) is that what many of those noisy protesters at the IFAW “presentations” were trying to expose is the egregious hypocrisy involved in singling out fanatical Islam as if it were the world’s only example of religiously motivated oppression and terroristic violence. This is, of course, laughably false as is amply demonstrated in the work, for example, of Joe Bageant, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett—not to mention many of the feminists Patai ignores. What makes this point even more poignant, however, is that two of the above pundits, Coulter and Santorum, are poster children for Christian Nationalists whose message is clear: Our (Christian) fanaticism is the right fanaticism and your Islamic fanaticism is the wrong fanaticism. God’s on the side of our anti-Semitic, racist, heterosexist oppression, not yours.
In her interview with Glazov, Patai asks: “Do these students not understand that radical Muslims are serious? Have they failed to notice that these Islamists act on their beliefs and kill those who do not agree with them? And that their targets include political dissenters, Jews, Christians, other Muslims, homosexuals, writers, filmmakers, women who are thought to have transgressed, apostates, critics, infidels of all kinds – the list goes on and on.” Patai criticizes what she perceives as a failure particularly of Women’s Studies academics to interrogate Islamic religious fanaticism, but she fails to ask the same questions about fanatical Christianity: “Do these students not understand that these Christian ideologues act on their beliefs and have killed those who don’t agree with them? That their targets include political dissenters, Jews, Muslims, other Christians, homosexuals, writers, filmmakers, women, apostates, and infidels of all kinds?” It’s not like we have to go back to the Inquisition or the Boxer Wars to find these examples. Coulter’s promotion of the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity and her stunning remarks about how Christians are perfected Jews is cut of the same cloth as the Jihadist’s “striving in the way of God.” As Bageant puts it in Deer Hunting with Jesus, “The push toward theocracy and the infiltration of mainstream Protestantism by religious extremists was one of the biggest underreported political stories of the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 168). Right on Bageant; how could Patai miss this? She’s not living in the outback. She lives in Massachusetts—and has access to books and the Internet.
Am I paranoid to think that it might just be the ideological coup of the 21st century that the hysteria fomented by Horowitz and his minions serves an exceptionally effective dual purpose? First as a smokescreen to distract our attention away from the Freedom Center’s real agenda, namely, to exorcise academia of academic freedom and to substitute right-wing indoctrination for real scholarship and pedagogy? Second, to create an enemy in Islam so vile that it can be utilized as a recruiting tool for Christian Nationalists? Horowitz can point it out until the cows come home that he’s Jewish, but this fact didn’t raise a peep of protest from him over Coulter’s patently anti-Semitic remarks to Donny Deutsch—who’s also Jewish. But Maybe I’m nuts and Horowitz isn’t driven by ideology at all, just crass opportunism. In either case, Patai ought to know better than to encourage either his anti-Constitutional martyrdom or his fixated narcissism.
Patai claims to be (or has been) a feminist scholar. Fine, I take this at face value. So then how then can she ignore the wealth of feminist scholarship and criticism of religion? Many feminists are loathe to single out Islam for the special condemnation that Horowitz demands and, apparently, Patai endorses. But, as she should know, to do so would be a grotesque misrepresentation of history. As feminist scholars of religion show, there’s plenty of blame to go around, especially with respect to the oppression of women and indigenous peoples (for a partial list of these scholars please see this post). How can Patai have missed scholars like Saba Mahmood? Is it because she thinks that the only feminist scholarship worthy of the name is work that condemns in totality everything Islamic? How is this scholarship at all, and not just ideological declaration? History is vastly more complex than the “us against them” mentality Horowitz and company invite, and it’s just mystifying why Professor Patai would descend to what she knows is not merely simplistic but, in being so, false. Islam isn’t that special, it’s just a superbly convenient foil for the mission of the opposing religious fascism.
Horowitz’ aim is certainly not the bolstering of Women’s Studies programs. No, he’s quite clear: Women’s Studies is a nothing but a tool for recruiting the man-haters of the next generation’s feminists and should, as such, be eliminated. Does Patai endorse this too? Seems self-destructive, but apparently so: “As far as I can tell, there is not a great deal of teaching of a critical kind going on in women’s studies programs about Islamic fundamentalism and the particular dangers it represents, or about how Sharia operates in countries where it is enforced.” Really, Professor Patai? Or is it that a professor’s responsibility is to get her/his students to think for themselves about such religious practices—no matter whose they are—as opposed to simply telling them whom and what to condemn? Does Professor Patai really think that fanatical Isalm is the only threat to global stability? I find this hard to imagine given that religion itself is only one part of a much larger story which includes, for example, the end of Peak Oil, the growing abyss between the global wealthy and the global poor, and the daunting human population shifts portended by global climate change.
She continues: “It’s been more than ten years since I parted company from the women’s studies program at my own university, out of dismay at its narrow politics and lack of intellectual seriousness. But I still follow the field and read what academic feminists say and how they define their programs, and I participate in discussions on the Women’s Studies E-mail List (WMST-L). I can tell you that identity politics continue to prevail, and this means that everyone is supercautious about which groups may be criticized, which not, and who is entitled to make criticisms.” Really? Last time I checked, these lists were quite lively with debate. Perhaps what Professor Patai sees as “supercautious” is what I’d call mutual respect for differences of opinion—and the desire to keep the dialogue going. Perhaps, like Horowitz—though sadly—anything short of “us against them” damnation doesn’t rate for her as an adequate response to Sharia. I would, of course, love to see her evidence for this failure.
Instead what I come away with from this interview is hypocrisy. Professor Patai appears to have signed on to the Horowitzean mission to repress accounts of Western history that implicate the United States or Christianity—or men—in the manufacture of contemporary religious fanaticism. But history articulates a far more complex and nuanced vocabulary than what propaganda machines like IFAW would have us speak. The issue here is not whether feminist analyses of religious fanaticism are adequate; that’s the kind of scholarly quest Professor Patai has opted to jettison in favor of the undemanding vocabulary of “us against them.” No, the issue is how a seasoned professional could fail to see that behind the thin veil of propaganda like IFAW lay not a shred of concern for the status of women—Islamic or otherwise—but instead a vision of “how things ought to be” that puts Horowitz and Ahmadinejad in the same bed. Patai concludes the interview with a lament: “I’d like to make it clear that I still believe being a professor and scholar is a noble calling, but it will remain that only as long as we don’t turn it into politics. I’m dismayed that many academics have abandoned a commitment to their profession as anything other than a venue for their political activism.” In other words, scholarship resistant to professing the “right” politics of Horowitzean nationalism isn’t scholarship. Where’s you evidence, Professor Patai? What double speak, and how disappointing.
Wendy Lynne Lee
This blog post can also be found at: http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/
Don't get me wrong, I neither support nor condone shouting down or otherwise disrupting pretty much any invited speaker to a campus—even Horowitz, Coulter, or Rick Santorum—however it may be that future historians are likely to record their rants as psychotic. I can hope that the legacy of IFAW will be that campus groups will be more thoughtful about whose solicitation to speak they’ll accept. I can certainly wish that student groups, especially the Young Republicans, will see that they’ve been exploited to ends they may really not endorse, and I can hope that Horowitz’ unprepared, incoherent, and adolescent ramblings at Columbia ends his speaker tenure there. Ahmadinejad may be dead-in-the-water wrong, but he neither rambled nor whined. Horowitz did. Nevertheless, if we, the critics of Horowitz and company, wish to be taken seriously—and I think we must be—we must also encourage the rational engagement that befits us as scholars and academics. After all, we in fact stand on the side of free exchange—and that’s what makes Professor Patai’s interview with Jamie Glazov so peculiar and disappointing.
I should point out that I’m no fan of anyone’s religious fanaticism. In fact, part of what I think the Horowitz camp just doesn’t get (or to which they’re willfully blind) is that what many of those noisy protesters at the IFAW “presentations” were trying to expose is the egregious hypocrisy involved in singling out fanatical Islam as if it were the world’s only example of religiously motivated oppression and terroristic violence. This is, of course, laughably false as is amply demonstrated in the work, for example, of Joe Bageant, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett—not to mention many of the feminists Patai ignores. What makes this point even more poignant, however, is that two of the above pundits, Coulter and Santorum, are poster children for Christian Nationalists whose message is clear: Our (Christian) fanaticism is the right fanaticism and your Islamic fanaticism is the wrong fanaticism. God’s on the side of our anti-Semitic, racist, heterosexist oppression, not yours.
In her interview with Glazov, Patai asks: “Do these students not understand that radical Muslims are serious? Have they failed to notice that these Islamists act on their beliefs and kill those who do not agree with them? And that their targets include political dissenters, Jews, Christians, other Muslims, homosexuals, writers, filmmakers, women who are thought to have transgressed, apostates, critics, infidels of all kinds – the list goes on and on.” Patai criticizes what she perceives as a failure particularly of Women’s Studies academics to interrogate Islamic religious fanaticism, but she fails to ask the same questions about fanatical Christianity: “Do these students not understand that these Christian ideologues act on their beliefs and have killed those who don’t agree with them? That their targets include political dissenters, Jews, Muslims, other Christians, homosexuals, writers, filmmakers, women, apostates, and infidels of all kinds?” It’s not like we have to go back to the Inquisition or the Boxer Wars to find these examples. Coulter’s promotion of the forced conversion of Muslims to Christianity and her stunning remarks about how Christians are perfected Jews is cut of the same cloth as the Jihadist’s “striving in the way of God.” As Bageant puts it in Deer Hunting with Jesus, “The push toward theocracy and the infiltration of mainstream Protestantism by religious extremists was one of the biggest underreported political stories of the second half of the twentieth century” (p. 168). Right on Bageant; how could Patai miss this? She’s not living in the outback. She lives in Massachusetts—and has access to books and the Internet.
Am I paranoid to think that it might just be the ideological coup of the 21st century that the hysteria fomented by Horowitz and his minions serves an exceptionally effective dual purpose? First as a smokescreen to distract our attention away from the Freedom Center’s real agenda, namely, to exorcise academia of academic freedom and to substitute right-wing indoctrination for real scholarship and pedagogy? Second, to create an enemy in Islam so vile that it can be utilized as a recruiting tool for Christian Nationalists? Horowitz can point it out until the cows come home that he’s Jewish, but this fact didn’t raise a peep of protest from him over Coulter’s patently anti-Semitic remarks to Donny Deutsch—who’s also Jewish. But Maybe I’m nuts and Horowitz isn’t driven by ideology at all, just crass opportunism. In either case, Patai ought to know better than to encourage either his anti-Constitutional martyrdom or his fixated narcissism.
Patai claims to be (or has been) a feminist scholar. Fine, I take this at face value. So then how then can she ignore the wealth of feminist scholarship and criticism of religion? Many feminists are loathe to single out Islam for the special condemnation that Horowitz demands and, apparently, Patai endorses. But, as she should know, to do so would be a grotesque misrepresentation of history. As feminist scholars of religion show, there’s plenty of blame to go around, especially with respect to the oppression of women and indigenous peoples (for a partial list of these scholars please see this post). How can Patai have missed scholars like Saba Mahmood? Is it because she thinks that the only feminist scholarship worthy of the name is work that condemns in totality everything Islamic? How is this scholarship at all, and not just ideological declaration? History is vastly more complex than the “us against them” mentality Horowitz and company invite, and it’s just mystifying why Professor Patai would descend to what she knows is not merely simplistic but, in being so, false. Islam isn’t that special, it’s just a superbly convenient foil for the mission of the opposing religious fascism.
Horowitz’ aim is certainly not the bolstering of Women’s Studies programs. No, he’s quite clear: Women’s Studies is a nothing but a tool for recruiting the man-haters of the next generation’s feminists and should, as such, be eliminated. Does Patai endorse this too? Seems self-destructive, but apparently so: “As far as I can tell, there is not a great deal of teaching of a critical kind going on in women’s studies programs about Islamic fundamentalism and the particular dangers it represents, or about how Sharia operates in countries where it is enforced.” Really, Professor Patai? Or is it that a professor’s responsibility is to get her/his students to think for themselves about such religious practices—no matter whose they are—as opposed to simply telling them whom and what to condemn? Does Professor Patai really think that fanatical Isalm is the only threat to global stability? I find this hard to imagine given that religion itself is only one part of a much larger story which includes, for example, the end of Peak Oil, the growing abyss between the global wealthy and the global poor, and the daunting human population shifts portended by global climate change.
She continues: “It’s been more than ten years since I parted company from the women’s studies program at my own university, out of dismay at its narrow politics and lack of intellectual seriousness. But I still follow the field and read what academic feminists say and how they define their programs, and I participate in discussions on the Women’s Studies E-mail List (WMST-L). I can tell you that identity politics continue to prevail, and this means that everyone is supercautious about which groups may be criticized, which not, and who is entitled to make criticisms.” Really? Last time I checked, these lists were quite lively with debate. Perhaps what Professor Patai sees as “supercautious” is what I’d call mutual respect for differences of opinion—and the desire to keep the dialogue going. Perhaps, like Horowitz—though sadly—anything short of “us against them” damnation doesn’t rate for her as an adequate response to Sharia. I would, of course, love to see her evidence for this failure.
Instead what I come away with from this interview is hypocrisy. Professor Patai appears to have signed on to the Horowitzean mission to repress accounts of Western history that implicate the United States or Christianity—or men—in the manufacture of contemporary religious fanaticism. But history articulates a far more complex and nuanced vocabulary than what propaganda machines like IFAW would have us speak. The issue here is not whether feminist analyses of religious fanaticism are adequate; that’s the kind of scholarly quest Professor Patai has opted to jettison in favor of the undemanding vocabulary of “us against them.” No, the issue is how a seasoned professional could fail to see that behind the thin veil of propaganda like IFAW lay not a shred of concern for the status of women—Islamic or otherwise—but instead a vision of “how things ought to be” that puts Horowitz and Ahmadinejad in the same bed. Patai concludes the interview with a lament: “I’d like to make it clear that I still believe being a professor and scholar is a noble calling, but it will remain that only as long as we don’t turn it into politics. I’m dismayed that many academics have abandoned a commitment to their profession as anything other than a venue for their political activism.” In other words, scholarship resistant to professing the “right” politics of Horowitzean nationalism isn’t scholarship. Where’s you evidence, Professor Patai? What double speak, and how disappointing.
Wendy Lynne Lee
This blog post can also be found at: http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Postscript to the Death of the Patriot's Voice Forum
Having received word from Bravenet that the Patriot's Voice was indeed ordered to remove the slanderous posts from their forum, it now seems clear that this was the motive for Robert Runyon's decision to shut down the libel-factory. No doubt they'll scream that their first amendment rights have been violated, but just as you oughtn't to yell fire in a crowded theater, you oughtn't to make false and vicious accusations of your fellows. Freedom of expression is indeed a right--and so it is a responsibillity. Will they have learned this? Probably not. The last few forum posts were devoted to their martyrdom and victimhood (I learned to keep copies of the whole shootin' match a long time ago). How smarmy.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
The Death of the Patriot's Voice' Anything-but-Open Forum, and the Moral to be Drawn
On November 10th, Robert Runyon, self-declared CEO of the far-right wing Christian Identity wannabe group, the Patriot's Voice (PV), decided to call it quits on the PV-Forum. Although touted as an "open" forum for discussion of timely political topics, the actual forum was anything but. From its inception, it was clearly intended to be used as a rhetorical weapon to counter, and hopefully silence, any possible opposition to the patently anti-Semitic, gay-bashing, monumentally sexist and racist ideology they not only promoted, but insisted was what God intended for human life. Although I know of virtually no Christians who subscribe to the profoundly violent hell-fire and brimstone Christianity the PV espoused, they seemed to be certain that they had the inside track to God's mind--and perhaps they did. Trouble is, their God was nothing more than a projected invention that they aspired to impose on the struggling communities of rural Pennsylvania--prime recruiting ground for hate groups.
What Patriot's Voice members did not comprehend was that the opposition came equipped with an arsenal that they simply were not prepared to deal with, and, turns out, could not compete with, namely reason, respect for evidence, tenacity, and an investment in what education can accomplish. Indeed, I have never encountered people who--although they sought to gain community power by running for school board seats--trashed education, educators, literature, and science with such ferocity.
At first, and for several years, local folks looking for scapegoats for the depressed economies of their towns, suspicious of intellectuals, and always ready for another round of religious confirmation, bought into the PV stump speech of "property tax reform." People just didn't see that all it took was a casual trip to their website--with its celebration of Joseph McCarthy, and its page for vigillantes ready to lynch people accused of child molestation without benefit of a trial conviction--and the property tax front evaporated into the fear-mongering rhetoric of a bonafide hate group.
But then--as folks like myself and others began to challenge the PV on their facts, their assumptions, and their always ad hominem strategies--their assaults on their critics began to become more vicious, more shrill, more slanderous, and more personal. Indeed, one day an anonymous poster calling him/herself "BU (Bloomsburg University) Conservative" posted an attack on me that crossed the line from slanderous to libelous. PV-Members, predictably, alighted on this like vultures on fresh carrion--thinking that because they could access one document from my long-ago divorce on-line that they somehow magically understood the entire case. Needless to say, they didn't, but this didn't stop them from repeating the libelous claims over and over--adding their own embelished flourishes, employing loaded words like "charges," calling me all the names that have called me for years with renewed vigor. Some posters even began to level thinly veiled threats, claiming that the PV had been civil to me for long enough (ha!), but that now the "party's over " and "gloves are off."
Trouble was that at this same time they were running their most attack-dog members as school board candidates for the November 6th elections. So people were checking out their website, and my hunch is that they saw how truly malignant their "open forum" was-- a cyberspace assault rifle used against anyone who dared oppose them. They lost the elections.
Even this set-back, however, did not slow down their relentless--not to mention false--attack on my personal life. Finally I had had enough, and I sent literally hundreds of their assault posts--including the libelous ones--to their server, Bravenet. After all, their webmaster, Robert Runyon, had posted a clear set of rules in the forum's cyber-foyer which unambiguously forbade personal assault. He didn't mean a word of it, of course, and the forum ran from beginning to end on a track built of battery. Within days of my report Runyon called the forum quits. Was it just uncanny coincedence? Unlikely. Dollars to donuts, he was instructed to either enforce the rules or shut down the infamous killing grounds, and because Runyon was not likely to be able to coral his minions and cohorts into anything even resembling civil behavior, he didn't have much choice.
So, chalk one up for the first amendment. Not even the most vile of personal assault was effective in silencing me--and this is not because I'm uber-brave, or even uber-sure of myself; it's because the arguments and evidence I consistently offered to counter their bigotry were the arguments that anyone willing to use their heads instead of appealing to their fears can come up with.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Some relevant contributions to the Press Enterprise's (the regional newspaper) "30 Seconds":
11.12. Is it coincidence that within days of reporting the PV-Forum to Bravenet for possible libel, Runyon posts: “in a few short days this forum comes up for renewal and I am declining the continuance just so you pinheads will have to use other means for reason to unjustly attacking people who were and are about saving public education”? Unlikely. Or take Lysk’s “The forum was fun and we decided to end it, but we're not going away, because it's so much fun to play with bleeding heart socialist and watch them have a melt down”? More likely, they were told to follow their own rules and saw that the jig—using the Internet as a weapon to silence critics—was up. Lesson: Libel and false accusation are not “discussion.”
11.13. What do you bet that once the PV-server, Bravenet, was informed that the forum functions almost solely as a vehicle for character assassination, they told PV-Runyon to either enforce the rules, or shut it down? Runyon can’t enforce the rules without muzzling and hence alienating his fellows, especially PV-Lysk and the Hellers. So, despite a futile attempt at disclaiming responsibility and blaming others, that notorious cyberspace trashing-machine known as “the PV-forum” is no more. A first amendment victory, the message is clear: neither reason nor evidence can be trampled by slander and verbal brutality. In the end reason does always win—and with it, the only freedom that matters, that is, freedom in justice
What Patriot's Voice members did not comprehend was that the opposition came equipped with an arsenal that they simply were not prepared to deal with, and, turns out, could not compete with, namely reason, respect for evidence, tenacity, and an investment in what education can accomplish. Indeed, I have never encountered people who--although they sought to gain community power by running for school board seats--trashed education, educators, literature, and science with such ferocity.
At first, and for several years, local folks looking for scapegoats for the depressed economies of their towns, suspicious of intellectuals, and always ready for another round of religious confirmation, bought into the PV stump speech of "property tax reform." People just didn't see that all it took was a casual trip to their website--with its celebration of Joseph McCarthy, and its page for vigillantes ready to lynch people accused of child molestation without benefit of a trial conviction--and the property tax front evaporated into the fear-mongering rhetoric of a bonafide hate group.
But then--as folks like myself and others began to challenge the PV on their facts, their assumptions, and their always ad hominem strategies--their assaults on their critics began to become more vicious, more shrill, more slanderous, and more personal. Indeed, one day an anonymous poster calling him/herself "BU (Bloomsburg University) Conservative" posted an attack on me that crossed the line from slanderous to libelous. PV-Members, predictably, alighted on this like vultures on fresh carrion--thinking that because they could access one document from my long-ago divorce on-line that they somehow magically understood the entire case. Needless to say, they didn't, but this didn't stop them from repeating the libelous claims over and over--adding their own embelished flourishes, employing loaded words like "charges," calling me all the names that have called me for years with renewed vigor. Some posters even began to level thinly veiled threats, claiming that the PV had been civil to me for long enough (ha!), but that now the "party's over " and "gloves are off."
Trouble was that at this same time they were running their most attack-dog members as school board candidates for the November 6th elections. So people were checking out their website, and my hunch is that they saw how truly malignant their "open forum" was-- a cyberspace assault rifle used against anyone who dared oppose them. They lost the elections.
Even this set-back, however, did not slow down their relentless--not to mention false--attack on my personal life. Finally I had had enough, and I sent literally hundreds of their assault posts--including the libelous ones--to their server, Bravenet. After all, their webmaster, Robert Runyon, had posted a clear set of rules in the forum's cyber-foyer which unambiguously forbade personal assault. He didn't mean a word of it, of course, and the forum ran from beginning to end on a track built of battery. Within days of my report Runyon called the forum quits. Was it just uncanny coincedence? Unlikely. Dollars to donuts, he was instructed to either enforce the rules or shut down the infamous killing grounds, and because Runyon was not likely to be able to coral his minions and cohorts into anything even resembling civil behavior, he didn't have much choice.
So, chalk one up for the first amendment. Not even the most vile of personal assault was effective in silencing me--and this is not because I'm uber-brave, or even uber-sure of myself; it's because the arguments and evidence I consistently offered to counter their bigotry were the arguments that anyone willing to use their heads instead of appealing to their fears can come up with.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Some relevant contributions to the Press Enterprise's (the regional newspaper) "30 Seconds":
11.12. Is it coincidence that within days of reporting the PV-Forum to Bravenet for possible libel, Runyon posts: “in a few short days this forum comes up for renewal and I am declining the continuance just so you pinheads will have to use other means for reason to unjustly attacking people who were and are about saving public education”? Unlikely. Or take Lysk’s “The forum was fun and we decided to end it, but we're not going away, because it's so much fun to play with bleeding heart socialist and watch them have a melt down”? More likely, they were told to follow their own rules and saw that the jig—using the Internet as a weapon to silence critics—was up. Lesson: Libel and false accusation are not “discussion.”
11.13. What do you bet that once the PV-server, Bravenet, was informed that the forum functions almost solely as a vehicle for character assassination, they told PV-Runyon to either enforce the rules, or shut it down? Runyon can’t enforce the rules without muzzling and hence alienating his fellows, especially PV-Lysk and the Hellers. So, despite a futile attempt at disclaiming responsibility and blaming others, that notorious cyberspace trashing-machine known as “the PV-forum” is no more. A first amendment victory, the message is clear: neither reason nor evidence can be trampled by slander and verbal brutality. In the end reason does always win—and with it, the only freedom that matters, that is, freedom in justice
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Islamofascism Awareness Week: Expensive, But Still the Same Old David Horowitz
Having glossed countless FrontPageMag promotional accounts of Islamofascism Awareness Week, having read David Horowitz’ War Blog on each of its wearisome days, having absorbed the big fat hype about how it was the largest conservative student demonstration ever, the unmistakable impression I have finally come away with is that the whole thing was a set-up.
Yep, Islamofascism Week is a big fat ploy to accomplish the same old Horowitz & Co. mission, namely, to assault and discredit Women’s Studies programs, humanities academics, feminists, and so-called “Leftists” in the interest of transforming academia according to a worldview shared by luminaries like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the late, but omni-present, Joseph McCarthy.
All classic Horowitz, all very theatrical, all rather predictable—except that he deployed an armory of particularly lethal weapons this time, thereby escalating the tension in a public discourse already made shrill by an unpopular and immoral war, an energy crisis, the status of undocumented workers, looming global climate change, the failure of U.S. healthcare, the upcoming presidential elections—and the recent return of the noose.
In a way “Islamofascism Awareness Week” was a masterful work of double-speak: Deploy religious bigotry against Muslims in order to promote and legitimize a Coulter-style Christian nationalism, excoriate Women’s Studies programs for not doing a better job of unilaterally condemning the treatment of women in Islam in order to attack Women’s Studies for daring to exist at all, and last but not least, provoke a vicious anti-intellectualism in order to agitate for the surveillance and ultimate replacement of the so-called indoctrinating leftist academics with fascist ideologues masquerading as merely conservative scholars.
This was a week made for Horowitz—and all he had to do was ignore a few critical facts, for example, Coulter’s rabid anti-Semitism, or the wealth of feminist scholarship concerning the status of women in religious fundamentalisms, or the plain and simple fact—pointed out to him many times and proven beyond doubt in the Pennsylvania Hearings—that a professor’s real-life politics are not her/his classroom pedagogy.
But ignoring facts appears to be one of the things Horowitz does best, and in this he joins in spirit if not in financing the company of many smaller organizations whose modus operandi is to fear-monger, lie, and bully their way into the effective obsolescence of the Constitution. One such group, the Patriot’s Voice (www.the-patriot-s-voice.com), torments my small neck of the woods, Northeast Central Pennsylvania by running their members for school board, often exploiting voter apathy to win posts by write-in campaign on the vague promise to “bring accountability” back to public education.
Much like Horowitz’ appeals to “common sense,” “accountability” turns out to be code for the conversion of public education into a form of religious and nationalist indoctrination that rivals any of the theocracies of our terrorist-producing enemies. Amidst their attempts to ban books, keep students from attending Model U.N., slander their critics, and make martyrs for God of themselves, Patriot’s Voice members spout the words of their heroes—Horowitz, O’Reilly, Coulter, and McCarthy among them.
Strange it is, however, that one must strain to hear any whisper of, say, the compassion or respect for justice of a Jesus.
So Islamofascism week came and went. Some folks protesting Horowitz at Emory behaved badly, and that is indeed unfortunate because I, for one, want to hear what he has to say. How else can I formulate a response to the kind of danger his view of the world represents? How else can I come to understand the intimate relationship between organizations like Horowitz’ grotesquely misnamed Freedom Center and the Oxymoronic Patriot’s Voice? Horowitz’ strategies are, no doubt, far more media savvy—as Islamofascism week demonstrates—but his motives are no less those of thugs despite their apparent sophistication.
Like the Patriot’s Voice, Horowitz claims to represent the voiceless—oppressed college students in his case, taxpayers and the alleged victims of unionized teachers in the Patriot’s Voice case—but both in fact represent not people at all but ideologies so anathema to the very first amendment rights that protect them that I begin to wonder if, like Stephen Colbert, their intent is to satire.
I wish.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Yep, Islamofascism Week is a big fat ploy to accomplish the same old Horowitz & Co. mission, namely, to assault and discredit Women’s Studies programs, humanities academics, feminists, and so-called “Leftists” in the interest of transforming academia according to a worldview shared by luminaries like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the late, but omni-present, Joseph McCarthy.
All classic Horowitz, all very theatrical, all rather predictable—except that he deployed an armory of particularly lethal weapons this time, thereby escalating the tension in a public discourse already made shrill by an unpopular and immoral war, an energy crisis, the status of undocumented workers, looming global climate change, the failure of U.S. healthcare, the upcoming presidential elections—and the recent return of the noose.
In a way “Islamofascism Awareness Week” was a masterful work of double-speak: Deploy religious bigotry against Muslims in order to promote and legitimize a Coulter-style Christian nationalism, excoriate Women’s Studies programs for not doing a better job of unilaterally condemning the treatment of women in Islam in order to attack Women’s Studies for daring to exist at all, and last but not least, provoke a vicious anti-intellectualism in order to agitate for the surveillance and ultimate replacement of the so-called indoctrinating leftist academics with fascist ideologues masquerading as merely conservative scholars.
This was a week made for Horowitz—and all he had to do was ignore a few critical facts, for example, Coulter’s rabid anti-Semitism, or the wealth of feminist scholarship concerning the status of women in religious fundamentalisms, or the plain and simple fact—pointed out to him many times and proven beyond doubt in the Pennsylvania Hearings—that a professor’s real-life politics are not her/his classroom pedagogy.
But ignoring facts appears to be one of the things Horowitz does best, and in this he joins in spirit if not in financing the company of many smaller organizations whose modus operandi is to fear-monger, lie, and bully their way into the effective obsolescence of the Constitution. One such group, the Patriot’s Voice (www.the-patriot-s-voice.com), torments my small neck of the woods, Northeast Central Pennsylvania by running their members for school board, often exploiting voter apathy to win posts by write-in campaign on the vague promise to “bring accountability” back to public education.
Much like Horowitz’ appeals to “common sense,” “accountability” turns out to be code for the conversion of public education into a form of religious and nationalist indoctrination that rivals any of the theocracies of our terrorist-producing enemies. Amidst their attempts to ban books, keep students from attending Model U.N., slander their critics, and make martyrs for God of themselves, Patriot’s Voice members spout the words of their heroes—Horowitz, O’Reilly, Coulter, and McCarthy among them.
Strange it is, however, that one must strain to hear any whisper of, say, the compassion or respect for justice of a Jesus.
So Islamofascism week came and went. Some folks protesting Horowitz at Emory behaved badly, and that is indeed unfortunate because I, for one, want to hear what he has to say. How else can I formulate a response to the kind of danger his view of the world represents? How else can I come to understand the intimate relationship between organizations like Horowitz’ grotesquely misnamed Freedom Center and the Oxymoronic Patriot’s Voice? Horowitz’ strategies are, no doubt, far more media savvy—as Islamofascism week demonstrates—but his motives are no less those of thugs despite their apparent sophistication.
Like the Patriot’s Voice, Horowitz claims to represent the voiceless—oppressed college students in his case, taxpayers and the alleged victims of unionized teachers in the Patriot’s Voice case—but both in fact represent not people at all but ideologies so anathema to the very first amendment rights that protect them that I begin to wonder if, like Stephen Colbert, their intent is to satire.
I wish.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Saturday, October 20, 2007
David Horowitz, Women’s Studies, and Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week
Of all the opportunities to be intellectually flabbergasted offered by David Horowitz and FrontPageMag’s ludicrously named “Islamo-fascism Awareness Week” the one that takes my cake involves Horowitz’ claim that feminists and Women’s Studies advocates have not taken seriously the status of women in Islam. Clearly Horowitz simply does not read (and has no doubt never read) Vandana Shiva, Uma Narayan, or Alison Jaggar—just to name a few. Obviously, he’s not familiar with the well-known work of environmentally oriented feminists like Karen Warren, Christine Cuomo, or even my own modest contributions to analyzing the status of women—nationally and internationally—in light of the economic, social, political, and environmental complexities that characterize it. No, what Horowitz really means is that because few feminists are willing to throw in their lot with his crusade to crucify Islam, we’re not his kind of feminists. Because we’re willing to give equal time to the analysis of the patriarchal and heterosexist practices of, say Ann Coulter’s Christianity for bigots—we aren’t even his kind of women.
The truth is that this is just Horowitz’ latest attempt to hijack the language of the so-called Left, or in this case feminism, in the service of his crusade to vilify the work of those who’d dare question the authority of, say, the military-corporate-industrial circle-jerk of the Bush administration, or the “missionary position” women are expected to fulfill as unpaid labor of every kind in the “traditional family,” or the continuing subordination of women in many denominations of the Christian Church. By turning the heat lamp on what few with any sense deny are abuses in Islam, Horowitz effectively erases the history of the Inquisition, ignores the staggering facts of corporate-sponsored labor abuses of women and children in the so-called developing world, skips over the fact that—regardless religion—women perform the vast majority of the world’s subsistence farming—often under environmental conditions so polluted and degraded by companies like Union Carbide and McDonald’s that the children they’re compelled to bear for lack of access to contraceptives starve. Nope, Horowitz doesn’t get to hijack the feminist high road—not on my watch, and not by parading willful ignorance as if it were his own special moment of enlightenment.
Wendy Lynne Lee
The truth is that this is just Horowitz’ latest attempt to hijack the language of the so-called Left, or in this case feminism, in the service of his crusade to vilify the work of those who’d dare question the authority of, say, the military-corporate-industrial circle-jerk of the Bush administration, or the “missionary position” women are expected to fulfill as unpaid labor of every kind in the “traditional family,” or the continuing subordination of women in many denominations of the Christian Church. By turning the heat lamp on what few with any sense deny are abuses in Islam, Horowitz effectively erases the history of the Inquisition, ignores the staggering facts of corporate-sponsored labor abuses of women and children in the so-called developing world, skips over the fact that—regardless religion—women perform the vast majority of the world’s subsistence farming—often under environmental conditions so polluted and degraded by companies like Union Carbide and McDonald’s that the children they’re compelled to bear for lack of access to contraceptives starve. Nope, Horowitz doesn’t get to hijack the feminist high road—not on my watch, and not by parading willful ignorance as if it were his own special moment of enlightenment.
Wendy Lynne Lee
Monday, September 10, 2007
Reasons to take a course in Critical Thinking (Or: Some Plain Truths about Fallacious Reasoning)
During the course of this series my aim is to post responses to examples of poor reasoning skills, to correct them, and to explain why the reasoning is faulty. Some of these will be situated in the context of my ongoing endeavor to expose the manipulative and bigoted reasoning of hate groups like Pennsylvania's Patriot's Voice, and some will be in response to other examples of faulty logic. The point is to illustrate not only examples of reasoning gone astray, but to show how poor critical thinking skills can lead to conclusions that perpetuate stereotypes, encourage harmful behavior, and sometimes even lead to violence. Many of the fallacies I point out can be and often are employed to extort consent from an audience without having provided them either legitimate evidence or a coherent argument.
My first example amply illustrates this point, and is taken from the Press Enterprise (Bloomsburg, PA) call-in column, 30 Seconds: (www.pressenterpriseonline.com)
9.10.07. Confirming voter’s wise choice to reject his Berwick primary bid, PV-Runyon demonstrates his weak grasp of basic facts. Confusing natural law for civil law, he claims that “for law to exist it must have authority.” True for alterable civil laws; false for inalterable natural laws. The former are human artifacts; the latter describe the mechanics of the material universe. Neither require a supernatural creator, and even if the latter required an original cause (also false), a physical event like Big Bang neither is nor requires supernatural deity to produce it.
The name of this fallacy is Fallacy of Equivocation: The author confuses two different meanings of a word as if there were only one, in this case "law."
My first example amply illustrates this point, and is taken from the Press Enterprise (Bloomsburg, PA) call-in column, 30 Seconds: (www.pressenterpriseonline.com)
9.10.07. Confirming voter’s wise choice to reject his Berwick primary bid, PV-Runyon demonstrates his weak grasp of basic facts. Confusing natural law for civil law, he claims that “for law to exist it must have authority.” True for alterable civil laws; false for inalterable natural laws. The former are human artifacts; the latter describe the mechanics of the material universe. Neither require a supernatural creator, and even if the latter required an original cause (also false), a physical event like Big Bang neither is nor requires supernatural deity to produce it.
The name of this fallacy is Fallacy of Equivocation: The author confuses two different meanings of a word as if there were only one, in this case "law."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)