Back to Ward

If you don't know the story, (Bill O'Reilly seems to have mostly forgotten about this little former passion of his), the University of Colorado at Boulder is still trying to fire one of their long standing, and most prolific professors, Ward Churchill. The big attention started, from the Governor of Colorado calling for his dismissal, to the main-stream media picking up the story and painting him as this terrorist loving, maniac communist, cop-killing, threat to the social order, because of a small article he wrote (not in a scholarly publication, nor speaking for the University, simply giving his opinion), in which he likened the members of the corporate elite (who do help pay for a good deal of our governments actions), who died in the 9/11 attacks, to "little Eichmann's."

Eichmann was a Nazi. He wasn't a soldier, he didn't work at a concentration camp, he probably never saw anyone die. He arranged train schedules. He was a cog in the terrible and hideous process of committing genocide. He was tried for War Crimes, and rightly, found guilty. Ward was making a point. The people who work for the companies in the World Trade Center, many of their jobs do, somewhere down the line, cause someone, somewhere, some distress. LITTLE would be the key word in Ward's statement about the likeness between Eichmann and participants in a capitalist system which does do a lot of damage around the world.

All of us who live in modern society, who are the benificiaries of the present social order, are on some level committing genocides, at least directly against a number of species, (please see any number of reports on Global Warming, pollution, habitat destruction, etc.). So let's just give him the benefit of the doubt to begin with, and assume that Ward was trying to provide a context for deeper thought. I don't have to agree with him, but I can at least admit that the article was well thought out, and the comment taken out of context, and blown out of proportion by an obsessive, uptight media. Ward Churchill's ideas fundamentally threaten the present American image of itself, they question our legitimacy, they force us to look at ourselves from a different perspective, and the system under threat does draw strong reactions.

Many academics around the country are speaking out against Ward's dismissal, arguing that it is an attack on academic freedom and intellectual thought. As a published scholarly author, free thinker, tenured professor, and activist, Ward has a lot of people who support him. I just want to join the ranks and offer my personal experience as his student to the argument against his dismissal.

I want to come to the defense of my former professor. He was probably the most influential teacher of my college career. He helped open my mind and wrap myself around some far out ideas. Professors like Ward Churchill helped change the way I think.

Here's a guy (me) with a few things going against his intellectual career. I was a pretty conservative kinda guy once, (certainly not the type who'd be defending Ward Churchill, or admiring of him, or both.) There were a few years when I used to sleep with a gun under my pillow. I was basically a republican with liberal tendencies; I guess I was a closet liberal. According to at least one interesting study, there are actual differences in some of the common habits of the types of people who end up liberals or conservatives. Like a good liberal, I'd always liked having a lot of colors around. I was always a touch messy (I still can't keep a room neat), I had always been curious about other cultures. I had always identified more with the global community than with my core family, religious, or national identity. I took solace in a multitude of different spiritual belief systems. I always reading some out there book about some distant, foreign religion. I danced a lot, often alone. I was actually a pretty fair mix between my mother, a hippie type, and my grandparents, historically conservative, who I went back and forth between (continent to continent) my first few years of life, finally settling with the grandparents in Colorado till they sent me to boarding school when I was 12. It was a lot like going back and forth between red states and blue states. A fair mix I may have been, but a conflicted one. It's hard to be a conservative (generally this means believing in the defense of the status quo) and also believe that all human beings are equal, and deserve to be taken care of.

Anyways, my mother was this far out lady, who's had her share of gurus and traveled the world seeking the spiritual walk. My grandparents, on the other hand: Houstonians, Oil on one side, and a Scotch Presbeterian Doctor on the other. Good, Loyal, Republicans. The only fly in the mix was that my grandma turned feminist, and divorced my granddad after 40 years of marriage when I was twelve. But somehow I came out of it rooting for the underdog. The two of them oppressed each other so much over the years, I can't really say which of them wore the pants. Maybe they both thought they did.

The point is that I was what you might call unconsciously conflicted in a number of ways for a number of years. I didn't really know what I believed, but I always believed strongly and outspokenly, and in retrospect, I can see that most of my beliefs were conflicting. I believed I was connected to the world, but I also believed WE were better than everyone else.
When I walked into Ward's classroom the first time, in the fall of 2002, I had just been realizing
and enjoying a new liberal potentiality which I had only first discovered having landed comfortably in the liberal arts in 1999. I guess it might have started earlier; maybe in my first class at the University of Colorado at Boulder: Political Science 1101, Summer, 1998, fresh before my senior year of high school. My teacher was an out-spoken Communist and prairie dog advocate who regularly put herself in the line of fire to get hunters to stop shooting her cute little friends. I think she got through to me somehow, but I didn't quite understand what it meant yet.

I still wanted to believe that all the Republicans around (my whole family except for mom) actually knew what they were talking about. To interject here! I just want to give a shout out to Republicans, who are dedicated believers, and understandably so. I think it was Ward who told the story about an Indian who once said that Reagan's Trickle Down Economics felt eerily like getting pissed on; but it does feel good to pee.

I'm just going to reluctantly and humbly admit that when I started college in 1999, I was an ardent Clinton criticizer and I voted for Bush. I used to blab away about why Clinton wouldn't have been elected if it wasn't for his Chinese connections, and blah blah blah. I couldn't stand Al Gore, I thought he was boring, and I was a gun owner type. I thought the world was a dangerous place. When 9/11 happened I was damn pissed off, I thought it was all "their" fault, and I was glad that we had a "decider" like Bush as President who would do something about "those people in the Middle East." Today I have a hard time believing that I ever believed those things, it's like looking in a mirror and not recognizing the person you were.

American Studies, Women's Studies, Sociology, and Churchill style Native American Studies really helped adjust my perspectives and beliefs. Thinking about how much people pay to go to retreats to have their personality adjusted, sometimes 50,000 dollars for a month, makes me laugh at how cheap an in-state liberal arts education is in terms of it's life-changing potential. To think I could have ended up in Economics for my education, sitting in an office today making too much money to make too much money for some corporation instead of sitting here contemplating the meaning of life. I owe that change to professors like Ward Churchill, who choose to go to work day after day, not getting paid what they probably deserve, saying the same thing over and over again, year after year, just to get through to a dumb kid like me every once in awhile.

Bill O'Reilly once said about Ward Churchill, in a phone conversation with Governor Owens, that "...he's making 100,000 dollars, or close to it... Of taxpayer money," as if it were an outrage that he was making so much money... How much does Bill O'Reilly make to talk his nonsense, (much of which is most certainly as much nonsense as the most non-sense that Ward has ever spoken)? How much do CEO's get paid to work to better-less the world than Ward works in his sleep to try and better it? I can't put a price on the value of the work that Ward does to open closed minds like mine. It's about education, about big, heavy, in your face ideas, which don't fit with the way we are trained to see reality, which often make us feel sick, uncomfortable, and guilty; they make us feel like there is something wrong with the picture, they make us question why we are not doing something to stop the train.

Ward always taught us as students, first and foremost, that if we want to talk, we better be ready to substantiate our argument. That guy had the most ridiculous foot-notes in his books. He backed up his talk. And if you didn't want him to make you look like a damn fool in front of the rest of the class (he never hesitated to make this mostly white, mostly well-off, bunch of us uncomfortable), you learned real quickly to know what you were trying to say, and you had better be ready to defend it against the strongest, fastest, most blunt, intimidating, fact-filled, straight talk, logic, I've ever seen. The guy does a good job. There is no greater service to the minds of all of us, than to be expanded. The Ward Churchill's of the world are invaluable. We do not need to agree with everything they say, but we have the great opportunity to let them inspire us to at least think about what they are saying.

It took some true believers like Ward Churchill to help me figure out who I am, and what I believe. I just want to paint him in that true light right now. He is a teacher. And he is the best damn teacher the University of Colorado has. Bill O'Reilly should be spanked for how much trash he has talked about Ward and the Governor of Colorado should be forced to wear an "I'll promise to try and learn something new today" hat for a year. Ward has won teaching award after teaching award, and he is a student favorite. I took three of his classes and used to go talk to him in his office hours because it made my brain expand. He made me angry, he inspired me to react, he just made me think. I always went looking for that guy, even though he is the gruffest, tuffest, often grumpiest old intimidating guy I know. That's just Ward.

Would you expect a guy who everyday writes, lectures, and thinks about the inequality and wrongdoing his government has perpetrated, and perpetrates, at home and abroad, economically, militarily, and environmentally, to have a rosy character? Would you expect him not to try as hard as possible to identify with a non Patriotic-American identity (The Cherokee Nation), which is certainly a group which does far less damage as an entity than the United States of America, and is therefore probably a healthier identity to participate in as a group member?

As an alumni of the University of Colorado at Boulder, I want to call on my school to do whatever it can to keep him as a professor. He deserves an apology. The Regents and the Dean should have been behind him all the way, defending him and reminding people that he is a beloved and celebrated member of the faculty. The students have honored him again and again. If the University of Colorado leadership believes in their choice of students at that University, then they should be trying as hard as possible to keep Ward around. CU wouldn't be the same without him, and his absence would be a tragic loss. He makes people think. He makes his students think. Everyone is allowed to disagree, but at least Ward Churchill forces people to ask themselves questions they are generally conditioned not to ask. We are only too-lucky to have him. I could have left his class in total disagreement with him. There were plenty of students who never took to his style or radical beliefs. Professors like Ward help young minds figure themselves out. I'm totally comfortable in my shoes today, as an ardent and out-of-the-closet liberal who believes some serious changes would make the world a better place. (Let's just start with Gore/Obama ticket in 2008, if another Red president wins I'll cry.)

I will close with this. Ward didn't teach me to think like him, (he probably hates Al Gore more than he hates Bush or vegans. Ward likes guns, his right to smoke wherever he pleases, and he likes to wear sunglasses indoors.) I'm not a little Ward, I'm probably still more of a little Eichmann when it comes right down to it. Ward isn't a danger to students, his absence is a danger to students. He helps people figure out how to think for themselves. He is a de-programmer, and he deserves his job.

Anyone for LCD?

We used to get high when we got high. I remember a time, before I ever had a cell phone, before there was such a thing as high definition, before 9/11, back when reality TV was new and interesting and not gross. I remember those days, and I remember taking drugs to get high. I took drugs to warp my bored mind. Now I am afraid to take anything, lest things get any weirder. I noticed a big sign today advertising some new special flat screen television, as a man stood next to me talking on a flip cell phone, which was ultra thin, with a clear plastic flip top, and I thought to myself, I've never seen anything so mind warping as this modern moment on even the strongest Acid. It was a moment which was both awe inspiring and sad.

Things are moving so darn fast now in modernity. We don't just have electricity ( a pretty strange thing to begin with), which has led to these things called phones, computers, the internet, and lights at night, but we have wireless phones, wireless internet, super high definition televisions, everything we even conceive of seems to materialize by our hands. It might sound like i'm on acid right now, but is anyone noticing that we have planes flying through the air with us on them? We have submarines, deep beneath the surface of the sea. We have fish farms, cow farms, we have big, strong guns. We have tasers, tear gas, laughing gas, prosac, and valium to mellow it out. We don't sell LSD over the counter, but we do sell a pretty altered sense of reality. THIS REALITY.


Look around. We are being sold, and we are selling, this altered perception of reality, this modernity. As if it were real, we are selling it and buying it all the time. We make it real with our perception. We are raised in it, and as we are raised in it, it seems like the norm. It takes a few years to catch up to us that things aren't quite as they were.

I took flying for granted as a kid. I didn't really think, "wow!! I'm getting on a big piece of metal, and it's going to fly me through the air." I just assumed that it was normal, just like phones, cars, gas ovens, microwaves, skyscrapers, nuclear weaponry and power, and the myriad other oddities that were just there from my first breaths, and therefore, like the sky being blue, like the fact that bears shit in the woods and Popes are Catholic, even before you learn what a bear is, or a Pope is, they just are, and it doesn't seem weird. Then the cell phones landed, the internet landed, wireless landed, and suddenly the newness of it all, the Brand Spanking Newness, just whacked me.

When I think about it, I am forced to acknowledge that nothing is real but what we make real. The ever-changing nature of reality forces me to believe this. We are talking about the earth going from round to flat, from flat to round. We are talking about the possibility that human perception is truly the creation of realities. And these realities actually affect human beings, their lives, their experiences, and therefore, their perceptions, which in turn affect the perceptions of their off-spring. We are reality creating machines.

What does a cell phone mean? Maybe it simply means that I can talk to another human being who is on another continent, at the same moment, in a different "time zone," without any wires connecting us. But what does that mean?

If we were alive 20 years ago, and were having a conversation, and I told you that you could go stand alone in a pasture in China while I went and stood alone in a pasture in Wisconsin, and then we could put these plastic, battery powered devices up to our heads, and we could talk to each other as if there were only a curtain between us, you would have told me I was wrong, and you probably would have thought I was crazy; and you would have been right. But when I tell you that it's true today, you just say "yep, I know, it's just reality?" What does that mean?

It suggests, I think, that the world is more than flat or round, or inhabited by people who speak different languages, who are black, white, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Catholic, Christian, who are Americans, French, Iraqi, or in any and all other assorted ways "different" in terms of perception....



It suggests, I propose, that we don't have a clue what is really going on. It suggests that the greatest thinkers at any one moment are most certainly as blinded by their preconceived notions of reality as those contemporaries of Columbus who "knew," by way of fact, that the world was flat.

So my friend. What does that mean?

Bush's Best Beans

I watched a little piece of our 43rd President's history tonight. It was the most complex, detailed, articulate speech of his Presidency. It was a mighty good try. Whoever wrote it was gifted, with a fine intellect, an attention to detail, and a definite capacity for complex thought. The President read it well. Indeed it may have been his finest reading. It was his opus of spoken language.

I can only imagine the high fives he got from Cheney, Rice, Rove, (maybe a guest appearance by Rummy?), and whatever other members of the Steam Team were waiting for him behind the red curtain to congratulate him on the job well done.

He didn't stumble, bumble, jumble, or crumble, the President and his words were one. He sounded like Anderson Cooper, but the steam he spoke, though he didn't go and choke, is still bound for poop scoopers. I was impressed.

But let's get down to the core issues.

He admitted, or at least the speech-writer did for him, that the responsibility for mistakes is his own. Nice.

He's gonna have soldiers knocking on doors throughout Baghdad. That's gonna go over nice, everybody loves a knock on the door, machine guns invited in for coffee and tearing the place apart looking for WMD's (an AK47 or two??) in the dusty Whirlpool Dishwasher.

He's not going to talk to Iran, Syria, he's not going to do that whole diplomacy thing, he's buttering us up to Attack them, telling us how much all the bad stuff in Iraq is their fault. Hmm, come on, I don't really need to say anything here do I?

He's going to send in more troops, gonna kick it up a notch, but only to numbers we've had in there before, but somehow he thinks that's going to be enough, even though it wasn't before. OK sounds like a good plan. Same Same. But different. More of the same, but it sounds like changing something. Great idea.

He says we've got to "advance liberty," but we are going to do it by increasing our troop numbers in a country where the majority of citizens don't even want us. Right.

He said "Al Queda" in that Texan drawl. OK, NEWSFLASH!! PGWB It's not working anymore.

He's listened to the advice of everybody around, lots of generals, senators, former president's, and he hears what they are saying but he's just gonna GO HIS OWN WAY. Oh wait, does it sound like he's listening to someone? Wait, wait, who's that I hear in the background? I hear their cackle whispers coming out from behind his ear bud reciever. AHAH! There they are again. It's the Neo-cons. They're like the 87 Raiders, they're mean, and dumb, and I see them on bumper stickers everywhere.

He's listening to somebody, and they put together a good speech for him to read, and boy he must have been practicing. But it's not looking good. It doesn't add up. This war doesn't add up. Beware Middle East!! They are waiting for you to blow something up in America! Hey Iran! Those boats off your shores aren't there to fish. Beans and steam, beans and steam, beans and steam. Great speech. Too bad it stunk.