From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 17:37:29 MDT
Enforced Conformity
Source: The Progressive (http://www.progressive.org/july03/roth0703.html)
Authors: Matthew Rothschild*
Dated: 2003-06 [2003-07 Issue]
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who shared one of the
paper's 2002 Pulitzer Prizes, was the commencement speaker at Rockford
College's graduation ceremony on May 17. Hedges, the author of War Is a
Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book
Critics Circle Award, dispensed with the usual pap on pomp day and got right
down to serious business.
"I want to talk to you today about war and empire," he began. (We reprint
his speech in its entirety, along with the hostile crowd reaction, on page
24).
"Not long after I began speaking, a significant segment of the crowd began
to shout me down," Hedges tells The Progressive. "They were yelling, 'God
bless America,' 'Send him to France,' 'Get him out of here,' stuff like
that."
Twice during Hedges's eighteen-minute speech, his microphone was unplugged.
Some people even charged the speaker's stand. "People were climbing on the
platform," Hedges says. "It was threatening, and a little bit disturbing."
He had to abbreviate his remarks, and when he finished, he was lustily
booed.
Rockford College in Illinois is 157 years old. "Our vision: to be Jane
Addams's college in the twenty-first century," its website states,
proclaiming its values of "Liberal Arts and Citizenship." (Jane Addams
graduated from Rockford College in 1882.)
A few days after commencement, Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow
apologized--not to Hedges, but to the students. In a May 21 letter to
Rockford College graduates, Pribbenow wrote: "Unfortunately, our
commencement address this past Saturday did not focus on your educational
accomplishments and the challenges you will meet in the future. . . . Our
speaker presented his ideas in a style that suggested the day was about him
and not you. For this, I am very sorry."
Hedges told the Rockford Register Star, "You don't invite a speaker like
this if you want 'Climb Every Mountain.' "
On Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, Hedges reflected some more on his
experience. "Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs, are very
frightening," he said. "As I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what
my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and
probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd--for that euphoria
that comes with patriotism. . . . That kind of contagion leads ultimately to
tyranny. It's very dangerous, and it has to be stopped. I've seen it, in
effect, take over other countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I
see it in my country." Hedges told Goodman that the campus security guards
were worried about his safety, so they "hustled me out" while Pribbenow was
"handing out the diplomas."
Hedges's speech also has gotten him into trouble with higher-ups at the
Times. They are "looking into whether I broached the protocol in terms of my
very pointed statements about the Iraqi war," he told Goodman. "That's
something that makes them uncomfortable."
"Chris Hedges's commencement speech at Rockford College did not adhere to
the guidelines set forth in our ethics code," says Catherine Mathis, vice
president of corporate communications for the New York Times Company.
"Specifically, he engaged in public discourse concerning his political or
personal views."
What happened to Chris Hedges is only a sample of the goon squad style that
is so in vogue today. Rightwing talk radio ran an apparently successful
effort to end Danny Glover's ad campaign for MCI because of his anti-war and
anti-Bush views. Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo may have lost acting jobs
for their outspokenness. Susan Sarandon was supposed to speak to the United
Way in Tampa on the uncontroversial topic of women in volunteerism, but the
United Way rescinded her invitation. She and her partner, Tim Robbins, were
disinvited to Cooperstown to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Bull
Durham. And everyone has heard about the Dixie Chicks.
Less well known, however, are the incidents of neo-McCarthyism that affect
noncelebrities. Some of these make the national news, and some don't.
You may have heard about Stephen F. Downs, the chief lawyer for New York
State's Commission on Judicial Conduct, who was arrested on March 3 for
refusing to take off a peace T-shirt in a mall near Albany. The shirt said
"Peace on Earth" on one side and "Give Peace a Chance" on the other. He had
just purchased the shirt in Crossgates Mall, the same mall that ordered him
to remove it. When the mall's security guards told him to take the shirt off
or leave the premises, Downs refused. They called the police, and he was
handcuffed, arrested, and charged with trespassing. Downs pleaded not
guilty, and the mall later dropped the charges.
And you may have heard about Bretton Barber, a junior at Dearborn High
School in Michigan. On February 17, he was wearing a T-shirt that had a
picture of Bush on it and the words "International Terrorist." "At lunch,
the vice principal came and said I had to turn it inside out or go home,"
Barber told The New York Times on February 26. Barber went home--and called
the ACLU.
But many stories don't make the national news, and I'm sure some don't even
make the local news. They simply go unreported: quotidian acts of
repression. I've been trying to track incidents of neo-McCarthyism since
shortly after September 11, 2001. And I can barely keep up.
"A chilling message has gone out across America: Dissent if you must, but
proceed at your own risk," writes Anthony D. Romero, executive director of
the ACLU, in the foreword to its report "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in
Post-9/11 America."
"Some government officials, including local police, have gone to
extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent wherever it has sprung up," the
report notes.
One example comes from Iowa, where two police officers and a county attorney
"threatened to arrest a pair of Grinnell College students for hanging a U.S.
flag upside-down from their dormitory window . . . as a sign of their
'displeasure with the policies of the United States government,' " the
report notes.
But it's not always the police who do the squelching, as other upside-down
flag cases illustrate. Two were reported by Alisa Solomon in the June 2
issue of The Nation. One occurred at Wheaton College in Norton,
Massachusetts. After seven housemates hung the distress-symbol flag, "their
neighbors responded by throwing rocks through the students' windows, calling
in death threats to their answering machine, and strapping a dead fish to
their front door, Godfather-style," Solomon reported. "Restaurants in town
stopped serving kids from Wheaton, and bar patrons harassed them. Norton
police recommended that for their own safety, the housemates move out for a
few days."
Katherine Lo, a sophomore at Yale, "also hung an upside-down flag outside
her window," wrote Solomon. "Several men wielding a two-by-four tried to
enter her room late at night while Lo was home. They left a convoluted note
on her door that ended, 'Fuck Iraqi Saddam following fucks. I hate you, GO
AMERICA.' "
John Fleming owns the Roost and Coyote's Den, an activist book and record
store in Alamosa, Colorado. On the day that Bush began bombing Iraq in
March, Fleming hung an upside-down flag in his store window. Some outraged
residents complained to the police. "I had a half dozen calls in thirty
minutes," Alamosa Police Chief Ron Lindsey says. Lindsey came over to the
store and told Fleming that he couldn't legally have an upside-down flag on
display.
"If I take the flag down and buckle under, don't you see what the
implications will be?" Fleming recalls asking. "Don't you see what that does
to the First Amendment, or has Bush destroyed that already?"
"You know, it's inflaming the community," Lindsey said, according to
Fleming.
The ACLU of Colorado threatened to sue, and city attorneys quickly told the
police chief he had no leg to stand on. Lindsey says he based his action on
a flag-desecration statute. "I thought it pertained," he says. "Obviously,
that was the wrong thing to do."
Fleming's nickname, by the way, is Coyote. The day after an article by
Sylvia Lobato appeared in the Alamosa Valley Courier mentioning that
nickname and the flag controversy, he found an unwelcome sight waiting for
him at the office. "Someone went out and shot a coyote and threw the
bleeding carcass up against the front door of the Roost," Fleming says. "I
can't get the blood off the concrete. They took the ears off so they could
claim the $5 bounty. I took it as a death threat."
Emily Jane Heynen is a tenant in Minneapolis. She had a problem with her
previous landlord, Eulalia Rohleder, who lived downstairs.
Seems the landlord wanted to put up a plastic American flag on Heynen's
porch, and when Heynen objected, the landlord and her daughter, Penny, took
offense.
"I told Penny that the American flag didn't stand for something I believed
in at this point in time, and that I didn't agree with what our government
was doing in preparing for this Iraq war," Heynen recalls. "She looked kind
of horror-stricken and called me 'a little commie' and an 'American-hater.'
Then she said that her mom was not going to like this and that I shouldn't
let her mom know about this because she would want me to move out. And I
asked her to not tell her mom, and she glared and walked away."
Rohleder called her the next day to raise the subject of the flag, says
Heynen, who works at the Headwaters Fund.
"She started arguing with me about patriotism and the importance of the
flag, and she said that Penny and she feel very strongly about it, and that
I had hurt them," Heynen says.
Heynen wrote about the incident in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "At this
point in our history, the flag does not represent freedom and liberty for
all," she wrote. "The flag represents our government's intent to politically
and militarily dominate weaker countries to support our addiction to oil and
our love affair with the automobile."
Heynen drew the comparison to McCarthyism: "Is this how people who dared to
dissent felt during the McCarthy era? Be careful what you say, lest you be
branded a traitor? . . . It is a threat I now face: Comply or get out. It is
a threat written in longhand on little pieces of paper that often greet me
when I get home from work."
She has now moved out.
"It was the first time I'd heard that kind of anger," she says. "It was
really a shock that I'd have to censor what I say. It was scary. I was
frightened by that intensity."
When asked about the incident, Rohleder says: "Are you for the flag, or not?
We have a great big flag flying in our yard, and if anyone has a problem
with the flag, why would they move here?"
She says she never demanded that Heynen leave. "My daughter just said to
her, 'Oh, are you planning on moving?' Because like I say, I have a big flag
out front, and she doesn't believe in the flag. I tried to explain to her
that the flag has nothing to do with Bush and his Administration. The flag
is representative of the United States, and anyone who doesn't like it
shouldn't be here."
Another tenant that ran into trouble for anti-war views is District 1199 of
the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. It was actually
evicted.
District 1199, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, got hit by a complaint from
its landlord, Carroll Ventures, Inc., claiming it had " 'breached the terms
of its lease by holding an anti-war demonstration,' " Dan Shingler of the
Albuquerque Journal reported on May 19. "The union local definitely held an
anti-war demonstration, but it was at the intersection of San Mateo
Boulevard and Cutler Avenue, and not at its offices."
"It's kind of scary," Eleanor Chavez, director of District 1199, told
Shingler. "What's happening in this country? We talk about going to war with
Iraq to defend freedom. Well, how do you define freedom?"
One reason for the eviction is that the union local did not respond to the
complaint in court, Shingler reports. Both he and The Progressive called
Carroll Ventures for comment but received no answer.
To be a freethinking high school teacher or student in New Mexico during the
Iraq War was perilous. On March 11, Carmelita Roybal, who teaches
ninth-grade English at Rio Grande High School, was suspended for two days
without pay when she did not take down her "No War Against Iraq" sign.
Heather Duffy, who teaches art at the school, hung a similar sign the next
day in solidarity with Roybal, and she, too, was suspended, according to the
Albuquerque Tribune.
On March 13, "forty-five students walked out of class" to support the
teachers, the paper said. The students "were videotaped by school officials
and likely will be cited for truancy. . . . School police arrested four
students when they refused to go to class."
On March 19, Ken Tabish, a guidance counselor at Albuquerque High School,
was suspended for two days without pay for refusing to take down anti-war
material he had posted in his office, including a copy of a speech by
Senator Robert Byrd.
That same day, Francesca Tuoni, a language teacher at Albuquerque High, who
is the adviser to a campus group called "Students for Participatory
Democracy," was ordered by a vice principal to remove a flyer on her
classroom wall that advertised a peace rally. Tuoni complied with the order.
Meanwhile, at a third school within the same district, two other teachers
got into similar trouble. At Highland High, Geoffrey Barrett and Allen
Cooper "have been placed on leave for refusing to remove war-related student
artwork posted in their classrooms," AP reports.
"Barrett, who teaches history and current events, said the student art
carried both anti-war and pro-war messages, and was created as part of a
class assignment," the April 1 AP story says.
Cooper, who teaches English, displayed one anti-war sign "by an Afghani
student who has had family members killed in U.S.-led bombings in
Afghanistan, he said," according to the story.
Cooper and Barrett were suspended for two days without pay.
Finally, Bill Nevins, a teacher at Rio Rancho High, in a different district,
was suspended when a member of the student poetry slam club he supervises
read an anti-war poem "over the in-school closed-circuit TV system,"
according to Green Left Weekly. "Following the reading, the student's parent
(also a teacher at the school) was ordered by an assistant principal to go
home and search the student's room for a print copy of the poem. The parent
declined to do so."
On April 18, the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union sued the Albuquerque
Public Schools and several administrators for violating the rights of
Roybal, Tabish, Tuoni, and Cooper.
"There has to be a space for free speech for teachers," says Peter Simonson,
executive director of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union. "And we're
trying to carve out an appropriate space for that."
Tom Treece could use that space. He taught a course called "Public Issues"
at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont. This spring, he and some of his
students found themselves embroiled in a public issue.
It all started with a dialogue board the school hung up to facilitate an
exchange of views after September 11. The administrators invited students
and teachers to post their opinions. One day in March, "I posted a little
notecard-sized paper that said, 'All hail the idiot boy king.' That started
the whole fury," Treece recalls. Local residents Paul and Norma Malone, who
have founded a group called Citizens Advocating Responsible Education, wrote
a letter to the local paper, The Times Argus, that was published on March
28.
"It is unrealistic to expect that current world events would not be a topic
of discussion among students or faculty," they wrote. "But it is quite
another matter for a teacher to use taxpayer dollars (his salary, the school
facility, and related resources) to proselytize his leftwing political
rhetoric and anti-establishment rhetoric. Of particular concern is the lack
of respect shown in this reference to the President of the United States as
'the idiot boy king.' We would advise the board and the administration to
examine Mr. Treece's teaching practices and course materials."
Superintendent Dorothy Anderson says she asked Treece to take the "idiot boy
king" note down. "It was in bad taste, it was strongly worded, and it may
discourage his students from offering an opposite viewpoint," she says.
Treece complied.
That did not mollify the citizenry.
At a school board meeting on April 7, "about three dozen residents" came "to
confront the school board about a bulletin board they say has been abused by
faculty promoting an anti-American agenda," The Times Argus reported. They
also objected to bumper stickers Treece had on his door that said, "Impeach
Bush," and, "Vermonters for a Bush/Cheney Regime Change."
Treece says that some of these residents have been calling for his head. He
cites a flier circulating in town with his yearbook picture on it, along
with a copy of his "Impeach Bush" sticker, and the words, "We cannot allow
this kind of stuff to happen in our schools."
Things really got weird when a local police officer entered Treece's
classroom in the middle of the night on April 9 with a camera. He convinced
the custodian to unlock the door to Treece's classroom, and he took a
picture of a student project that showed President Bush with duct tape over
his mouth, and the words: "Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth."
(Treece had students make posters defending their pro-war or anti-war
views.)
The police officer, John Mott, told The Times Argus, "I wanted everybody
else to see what was in that room. . . . Having spent thirty years in
uniform, I was insulted. I'm just taking a stand on what happens in that
classroom as a resident and a voter and a taxpayer in the community."
Mott, incidentally, used to work at Spaulding High as the Junior ROTC
officer.
Superintendent Anderson was not happy that Mott entered the school at 1:30
in the morning to further his own political agenda.
"I find this behavior, at the very least, in violation of our policy for
visitors at the school," she wrote Police Chief Michael Stevens on April 16.
"I also find it disturbing that a police officer would wear his uniform
under such circumstances, thereby intimidating our employee into letting him
in the building at a very unusual hour. I question the intent of his visit.
Why could he not have come during regular school hours? Please look into
this matter and determine if any ethical or legal guidelines were breached."
According to Anderson, the police chief told her "he was going to handle it
administratively." Stevens did not return several phone calls from The
Progressive.
On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called Mott a hero and posted the students'
artwork on the Limbaugh web page.
"These kids didn't turn these projects in with any understanding that they
would end up on Rush Limbaugh," Anderson says. "Their parents feel very
violated and angry."
Anderson defends Treece's teaching practices. "In the course of his
teaching, he does present both sides and gives resources on both sides," she
says.
But she is pursuing administrative action against him.
"I can't teach that class anymore," Treece says. After this year, "they've
removed me from the class."
Treece is "very upset" about losing this class. "This is purely a political
move on their part," he says. The controversy has taken a toll on him. "My
reputation has been spoiled," he says. "I haven't got a lot of rest in the
last month."
While the climate right now is not as bleak--unless you're a Muslim
immigrant--as it was during the harshest days of McCarthyism, these
incidents indicate a powerful, frightening trend. Today, deeply reactionary
forces don't need a Joe McCarthy in the U.S. Senate. The hecklers, goons,
radio and TV talkshow hosts, nativists, and know-nothings in our midst are
perfectly capable of doing the tarring and feathering themselves.
[hr]
Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive. He wrote "The New
McCarthysim" (http://www.progressive.org/0901/roth0102.html) in the January
2002 issue [Hermit: of The Progressive]. He tracks this subject on the
magazine's website, www.progressive.org, under "McCarthyism Watch"
(http://www.progressive.org/mcwatch03/mcwatch03.html).
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