don't feel like satan but i am to them
Hmmph.
I work in Boulder, and passing the newspaper boxes at the bus station this afternoon, I caught sight of a headline warning one and all of Ward's impending meeting with the regents of CU-Boulder. I had been winding up to a nice long post of my own on this topic, which was suddenly news again after nearly four years - four years of more overseas butchery and ugly lies and even Twin Towers Fun Money - though, of course, nobody loses any jobs over any of that.
Though surprised, I didn't believe for a second he'd go down - the bad old essay is now nearly four years old, and the book said essay was expanded on has been on the shelves for about two and a half years now, not to mention the lecture he delivered on the subject called "Pacifism as Pathology," which has been available on AK Press' site for the last year. He gets to keep his teaching gig, but you could say the refs are going to be calling him that much tighter for a long while.
Right or wrong, listening to Ward Churchill speak, or reading one of his better essays, was akin to watching the Allen Iverson of a few years ago play basketball - a sometimes frustrating, always thrilling mix of big talent, fuck-you audacity, and searing anger.
Anyway, for the post in question, I'd planned to parse out what it was Ward Churchill said that had so many people up in arms, what it's commonly believed he said that got them there in the first place, what was thought-provoking about what he said and what was just clumsily provocative about what he said, as well as the political breezes blowing on Colorado college campuses circa 2005 that enabled this academic mugging - which was what this is, nothing more, nothing less. It's remarkable that while campus lefties get so much grief - though sometimes deservedly so - for relativist posturing, it goes unremarked that campus righties have their own little no-go-zones, too. Like putting 9-11 into context. Or criticism of the President. Or anything, ever, about America. This sorry episode should rank with one of the lower moments in the recent history of the rich kid's pigpen/liquor still/date-rape factory that is the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In all honesty, I can't see this as anything but trying to keep that election high going, today the White House tomorrow CU: as Donald Rumsfeld once asserted, and he should know, sweep it all up, things related and not. It's not enough to just march, no, we must march on a road of bones.
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