ACTA's Must-Reads

Oh come on! But hey, I'll bite:

a) Academic freedom: If academic freedom covers pedagogy and not just content, then the use of humor at the expense of the most powerful person in the free world is warranted. Bush himself stepped ass-first into debates over the teaching of evolution, so he made himself fair game ('tho the professor doesn't mention this as a justification).

b) Abuse of authority: Any such abuse would need to create real victims. And no one was injured in the making of this joke.

c) Political content: No clear political position was forced upon the students. Comparing Bush to a monkey doesn't even mean that one is not a Republican, seeing as Bush has broken nearly every traditional plank in the conservative platform. Comparing a famous person to a monkey is not a political comment, any more than a "yo momma" joke is.

d) Harmless, meaningless joke: When you've eliminated all the other possibilities, whatever's left, no matter how outrageous, is the truth.

In the end, it is every biologists' right to openly mock, in and out of class, anyone who opposes 200 years of scientific research. Biologists should consider revoking the benefits of scientific research (medicine, surgery, and so on) from anyone who believes the earth is 3000 years old or that humans and dinosaurs were best buddies.

Why do you even bother to comment, Alvin? Just to troll?

Because any one of us can quite easily compose your predictable responses for you.

The biology classroom isn't a place for partisan politics. Now go wank to Democratic Underground and let the adults talk.

The indefatigble Monsieur Alvin Lucier (acronym: 'MAL') has offered us his usual flaccid, 'whatever, dude', 'everybody does it!' response to ridicule of conservative politicians like President Bush--but just try 'bestialising' the opposition and hear the indignant jackal-howls of protest from the left. . . . Nevertheless, I should offer the redoutable MAL my thanks for allowing me the chance to prick the over-inflated, buffoonish pig-bladder(s) of his Lilliput colossus, His Serene Mandarinity, His Miles Gloriosus, Michael what's-his-name, and his host of swarming oppo-research roaches (dont, en passant, je m'en fous!). Noscitur a socios, MAL. That Prof Bay-Rube-Bay banned me from his "sight" (as did the ALSC-sponsored "The Valve", apparently controlled by humourless lefties at present--oui, c'est ca!--Jacques Albert has earned the honourific 'Banned in Boston!') shows the actual 'commitment' libs and leftists have to 'free speech'. Shall we entrust them with "academic freedom' as well? Let's ask Prof deMenocal. . . . He'd like to do his part. . . .

Cheers, Dr JA

Folks, just a reminder: Please focus on the issues, not on one another. Let's keep this reasoned and civil.

Winston, if by "troll" you mean "disagree," then sure, call me a troll. It's also sad that you equate my pro-science comments with pro-Democrat ideology. Which essentially means that you acknowledge that the Republican Party is anti-science. I'll trust you to stop going to the doctor, stat!

And Winston, how does making fun of the appearance of a president constitute partisan politics? *The Daily Show* has mocked Clinton before, but does that make the writers Republican? In the words of Rob Courdry, "Come on!"

And Jacques, what this has to do with Michael Berube is beyond me. Your inability to contribute anything to the discussion, ever, makes me wonder.

"In the end, it is every biologists' right to openly mock"

Alvin, how would you have felt if "Professor" DeMenocal had interspersed pictures of Martin Luther King with the monkeys. Based on your comments, sounds like that would be perfectly acceptable.

BikeGuy: Well, then the professor would be flirting with a long tradition of racist iconography. I'm not saying there's no content to the "Bush looks like a monkey" joke; I'm simply saying that you cannot reduce it to political indoctrination because there is no clear politics underneath the idea that Bush looks like a monkey. In contrast, there *is* a politics -- racial supremacy -- underriding the "black folk look like monkeys" comparison. The specific sign matters in any act of communication.

The bottom line is that the second Bush weighed in on scientific issues, he became fair game in science classrooms. Martin Luther King, on the other hand, has no relation to science classrooms.

MAL: Sorry you didn't get it, but it's personalising political debates that was exactly my point about DeMenocal's low buffoonery and waste of class time. "Bike Guy" was spot-on with his question about Dr King; as usual, MAL failed his reading test (too distracted REportin' to his BIG-REP capo, Bay-rube-bay?). And, of course, that was also the point of my mention of the oppo-research roaches on MB's site. Encouraging contempt for President Bush by bestialising him serves no edifying purpose, but merely flatters the vanity of those who indulge in it. Why MAL referred to 200 years of 'scientific progress' or creation as 3000 years old is beyond me--even Bishop Usher was more generous. That's where the 'Whatever, Dude' reference fits. Got it, MAL?

Like the termination guy, 'I'll be beck' . . .

Cheers from you know who . . .

"I'm simply saying that you cannot reduce it to political indoctrination because there is no clear politics underneath the idea that Bush looks like a monkey."
Obviously, you are joking.

There's quite a lot of similarity between the hypothetical use of black MLK in this joke and the use of Republican Bush. It's a common stereotype on campus, especially among the faculty, that Republicans are stupid, apelike knuckle-draggers. I know, because I've heard plenty of it from faculty at the university where I teach. Even from some whom I count as friends, who forget, or don't know and can't imagine, that I'm a registered Republican.

The disdain against Republicans and conservatives is not unlike racist bigotry, certainly not at all unlike religious bigotry. Being told constantly that you come from a stupid group, whether due to that group's genes, culture, or deeply-held beliefs, gets to be a kind of bigotry.

Furthermore, it's stupid of scientists to make science a partisan issue. Basically, what they are saying when they do stuff like this is, we don't want Republicans to support science.

Talk about dumb!

Actually, there is nothing similar between comparing Bush to a monkey and comparing MLK to a monkey. The former is a mockery of an individual's ideas and job performance; the latter is a racist attack on a whole group. A better example might be a joke comparing MLK to a clown, if you think MLK was a clown. The Bush-monkey comparison does not invoke centuries of racist iconography. (Of course, the other problem here is that MLK defended the highest American ideals, bettered American democracy, fought for those without rights, and generally succeeded; while Bush . . .)

Disdain for Republicans is disdain for an ideology, a set of ideas. It's not bigotry; it's disagreement. You can disdain Zionism without being bigoted against Jews. You can disdain fundamentalist Islam without being bigoted against all Muslims or various Middle Eastern ethnic groups. You could have disdain for Communism without being bigoted against Poles or Russians. Walter Benn Michaels, in *The Trouble with Diversity*, does an excellent job of criticizing this right-wing adoption of identity politics.

And anonymous guy, it's not scientists who have made science a partisan issue. That culprit would be the American Right. Scientists are simply responding to the attack on science from conservatives around the country.

BikeGuy: What politics are behind making fun of George Bush? Even a critique of Bush's brand of Republican politics is not itself a politics, anymore than a critique of Marxism is a politics. If someone criticizes Marxism, all you can deduce is that that person probably isn't a Marxist. (And my intellectual Republican friends also think Bush is a knuckle-dragging moron.)

Jacques: you continue to miss the point. I never said that mocking Bush is smart politics -- and the professor himself saw it as a joke, not as politics. Also, George Bush himself claimed that schools should teach intelligent design alongside evolution, an idea that expresses the deepest disdain for scientific methods and research. As far as Creation goes, I'm assuming that Bush's brand of fundamentalist Christian wankery includes the fairy tale that the earth is only 3000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed (as on the Flintstones). Bestializing Bush does edify: it reminds students that Bush opposes science, and it does so by comparing Bush to that icon of evolution, the monkey.

Let me first give MAL his due: Here's a chap willing to defend what is in this milieu generally (and rightly) acknowledged as indefencible; and he's also willing to take on all comers (though in full wrong divinity). Note that unlike Mikhail Bay-Rube-Bay's blog-site, or the site of the self-congratulatory leftist ego-strokers at the ALSC 'literary organ',The Valve', he's not banned from the site for expressing 'thoughts out of season', i.e., ideas that counter prevailing opinion. Nor, unlike MAL's cardboard zoot-suit lit-cret icon, does Professor Erin O'Connor at once gleefully and spitefully join in personal oppo-research attacks on those whose opinions differ from her own. So a hat-tip to Professor O'Connor, and, I should think, another to her on behalf of the inevitably wrong-headed but tirelessly game MAL, whose bland consistency in defending every quirky and wacky idea foghorned by the academic left from their ivied minarets or in their smarmy junk-journals like the PMLA, Social Text, Critical Inquiry, etc. is almost quaint.

But let me remind MAL that risible absurdities like 'Bush opposes science' are hardly calculated to persuade. As real scientists (whether Paul Gross, Raymond Tallis, Steven Weinberg or Alan Sokal--or the contingent of mathematicians, engineers and scientists I recently met at the NAS convention in Cambridge the Lesser, for that matter) know and say, the actual threats to scientific thought and progress come from so-called humanities departments at university, where gaggles of post-humans (e.g., post-structuralists, ethnic-gender 'experts', radical feminists, Fraudians, post-colonial animus peddlars, 'social justice' nannies','peace-profs AKA anti-military bigots, millionaire Marxists, eco-radical Chicken-Littles, multi-culties, and the like) cackle out what they fancy are reasons against reason, fallibilist truth, authorial intention and meaning, rules of evidence and even the Aristotelean Laws of Thought (e.g., see the always sensible and moderate Susan Haack's 'Staying for an Answer' on this curious sway-dough academic bestiary and their perverse but influential counterfactualism, as well as the recent article 'Can Humanists Talk to Postmodernists?' by Mark Goldblatt). Yes, MAL, the air round the heights of the towers of academe can indeed inspire a kind of giddy babbling ("Yeah, man . . . B-B-Buh-Bush's . . . EE-vil"), and the next step for the one so afflicted is to plant his or her feet firmly in the air. Sois-sage, MAL--don't do it! Just stay for an answer . . .

Jacques, you really need to stay on topic. No one here is talking about poststructural theory. And I think a slide comparing, say, the Social Text editors to monkeys would also be fair game for a biologist. I'm not going to defend Frankfurt School or poststructural critiques of science, in part because I'm not an expert on them. But you cannot group Adorno and Horkheimer in with the religious Right. It's one thing to say that science taken to one extreme leads to the wholesale consumption of the natural world in the name of instrumental rationality; it's another to say that science needs to take a backseat to mythology and fairy tales. Oppenheimer basically agreed with Adorno. And let's not forget that the President of the Free World has a lot more influence over scientific research and education than literature and philosophy professors.

Bush's record on intelligent design, global warming, environmental science, and stem-cell research all reveal the (lack of) thinking of the religious Right's attacks on science. Here's a man, like Reagan, who has admitted to *waiting* for the Apocalypse in his generation. The man is, simply put, an idiot.

Alvin, when scientists compare Bush to a monkey, after slightly more than half the country voted for him in 2004, it's not only blatantly partisan, it's stupid for science, because the scientists are basically saying they don't want the support of the people who voted for Bush. The scientists are not nearly as superior as they think, because in doing this, they are showing their stupidity about human nature.

As for whether being contemptuous of Republicans is simply self-expression, while contemptuousness of Catholics or Jews or whatever is religious bigotry, it's not an either-or business.

At some point, contempt crosses over into bigotry.

In my experience, the line was long since crossed in the academic world.

First, MAL, keep your imperatives ("you really need to . . .") off my content--you're not decreeing the agenda for this debate--and my comments ARE pertinent to the res or matter at hand here. But there exists--n'est-ce pas?--at least the possibility that your interpretive powers may have suffered some SLIGHT impairment over the course of this running commentary on the Iago-like itch of Prof DeMonocal for bestialisation of his great and dread political adversary, our president.
In any case, let's begin . . .

At least MAL, unlike Prof DeMonocal--whose self-satisfying, clownish and distracting class stunt is at issue here--refers to our nation's president as a man. But what kind of man?--Well, an idiot, says MAL. Ok, MAL . . .cool! And then, MAL, we have your side--what else but pathetic, strutting post-human buffoons who by constantly bestialising our national leader are fostering an attitude of perhaps dangerous bigotry, hatred and contempt for his person or even his life? For these may be the PERHAPS unintended consequences (I'd like to think) of the profoundest critical ratiocinations, like those of MAL and Prof D, multiplied thousands of times weekly in classrooms and on streetcorners near campus cafes, co-op groceries, "The People's" advocacy headquarters, "Red" bookstores and "head-shops" all across the country. Heard a rabble last week at the local "people's grocery" in this political miasma also called a "college town" chanting that the president be hanged, along with other political and military leaders. But at least MAL and I can perhaps agree that Prof DeMonocal's peerless example of a witty and sophisticated satirical tableau might not exactly be the most sagacious use of class time?

Well now, the drowsy leftist "editors" of Social Text (including the BIG FISH hissayulf--who seems recently to have--at long last--"deviate[d] into sense" on the issue of academic freedom as opposed to freedom of speech) have "always already" on a public stage (i.e., in the pages of their absurd and offensive heap of left-wing offal misnamed their "journal"; and passim) beaten each other over their ruffled necks and cone-capped heads with pig bladders during and after the Sokal Hoax (which, of course, stands not as an aberrant incident, but in a sinister synecdochic relationship to the whole murky and mephitic atmosphere of rankly politically-extreme, sociopathic, anti-religious, anti-patriotic, anti-scientific and sway-dough intellectual superstition many taxpayer-financed "humanities" departments exude these days. That the human mind can conceive so many counterfactuals (whether unicorns, or "differance", or "Bush is an idiot") has so addled our academic Laputans like MAL that they actually seem to believe their own groundless, airy delusions of grandeur, that is, that they have anything of importance to say about adult-world affairs during this dangerous face-off between Western civilisation and Islamofascist barbarity. That MAL has decreed that religion is tout court "mythology and fairy-tales" may impress his adolescent captive audience (like the childish "monkey-business" of Prof DeMenocal), but it doesn't qualify as anything more than puerile name-calling and low buffoonery. Perhaps MAL might better swing his anti-religious bigot's hammer at the real menace from radical Islam rather than at the chimera of the so-called American Religious Right and at his absurd cardboard caricature of our president and commander-in-chief. But then, how many of these cone-capped academic Sunny Jims are war vets and have actually defended MAL's and their own freedom publicly to vent such disloyal rubbish? Their right, yes--who seriously disputes that?--but they should know that the mephitic vapours of this "motiveless MALignity" and undeserved contempt drift over the towers of academe out into the public square where extremists and nutters also lurk--and seek, unlike the above-mentioned wimpy academic buffoons and blowhards, opportunities to effect "final" solutions. . . .

Answers:
(a) Loosely within academic freedom,
(b) A modest abuse of authority,
(c) It was readily interpreted as having gratuitous political content and hence
(d) It was neither harmless nor meaningless.

So not a hanging offense, but pedagogically counterproductive because it alienated some students for no good reason. It's one thing to have controversial course material; another needlessly to upset even a few of your students with a dumb joke.

On one point Alvin's case is strong. Countries where you can mock the head of state fearlessly are freer than countries where you can't. President Clinton's troubles a decade ago were the occasion for light (and apparently entertaining) classroom mockery by some of my colleagues and I don't remember any complaints then.

Jacques: the Sokal Hoax proved that *Social Text* was shoddy. That's about it. Your argument that it's some sort of synedoche for the larger intellectual scene is groundless.

Next, if criticism of the president is seen as the condition of possibility for violence against him, we're no longer in a democracy. Then again, you also have no evidence for this claim.

Third: opposing religion is not bigotry -- unless Jacques, like the poststructural theorists he mocks, is also some anti-Enlightenment, back-to-the-mystical nostalgic. Religions are ideologies that elevate ignorance as faith into the grounds for moral and political action. As such, I oppose religion, and I think Islam is as ridiculous as Christianity. Neither even has the good stories and delicious prose of the Jewish, Hindu, or Buddhist writers. But I am no more a bigot than you are a bigot against literary theorists.

As far as extremists and nutters go, it wasn't the anti-religious academic Left that produced the right-wing Oklahoma City bombers. So don't tell me that academic hate "drift[s]" out to the public square. And no American soldier has been deployed to protect American freedoms since WWII. My grandfathers, WWII vets both, opposed every US military action since then -- precisely in the name of defending the sanctity and strength of the American military man and woman.

But let's all remember the subtext of Jacques's comments: criticism of the president leads to violence against His Person, and criticism of religion and conservative ideology leads to anti-American extremist violence and -- say it ain't so -- "final solutions." I think Cicero called this -- correct me if I'm wrong, Jacques -- "argument by crack rock." Or as Rick James said, "Cocaine is a helluva drug."

correction: "DeMonocal"--or is it "DeMoniacal"? (Oh dear!--I'm so forgetful of the names of those I couldn't invite to my table--well, you know, the difference in education and social class . . .-- ma scherzo! and hat-tip to the Great Wimp himself, Woody Allen)--Dr JA

Jacque Albert wrote:

Their right, yes--who seriously disputes that?--but they should know that the mephitic vapours of this "motiveless MALignity" and undeserved contempt drift over the towers of academe out into the public square where extremists and nutters also lurk--and seek, unlike the above-mentioned wimpy academic buffoons and blowhards, opportunities to effect "final" solutions. . . .

Precisely . . . This is the age-old tactic of implanting a not-so-veiled call for violence plus the credibility of authority in the minds of useful idiots, who then become the agents of violence.

"Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?" King Henry II uttered in 1170, and the assassination of Thomas Beckett became a part of history, and history was changed forever (not quite in the way Henry II might have wished).

We see similar calls for assassination and mayhem in the fatwas against Danish cartoonists and Salmon Rushdie, for example, by radical Islamists, who remind the Islamic world that it is the duty of good muslims to protect the Islamic icons and prophets from insult by "any means necessary." The threats are real, as Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and countless others can attest. Though the imams might not know who will act, their fatwa makes it likely that someone will.

And we see this same phenomonen in our own extremist Animal Rights movement, where websites demonize corporate executives and provide personal information about where to find them, plus instructions about how someone might intimidate them and people of like sympathies into compliance with the radical Animal Rights agenda, if someone were so moved.

It remains only for some unknown but well-intentioned extremist or nutter with a clear conscience to take the hint, self-select and accomplish the goal.

Clawmute

Clawmute has a point.

So, moderator, what's ACTA Online's policy on veiled threats of violence?

Atomic Dog wrote:

Clawmute has a point.

So, moderator, what's ACTA Online's policy on veiled threats of violence?

Thank you.

Not to answer for ACTA or the moderator, but my preference would be to encourage an atmosphere of respect for viewpoint diversity.

Towards that end, one of the first thing's I'd like to see is for college administrators to take firm action against those exercising a "heckler's veto" of the sort that we witnessed recently at Columbia University, when the Minutemen's Jim Gilchrist was shouted down amid extremist induced chaos that resembled the early stages of a riot. So far, the administration has done zilch.

If administrators can't draw the line in the case of Columbia, and go beyond that to genuinely celebrate diverse viewpoints by protecting the right to speak on campus of the David Horowitz's and Ann Coulter's of the world as much as they respect the right of the Ward Churchill's and Mohammad Khatami's, how can we expect to see the end of incivility, viewpoint intolerance and veiled threats? (And no, I don't support suppressing the speech of those making veiled threats.)

Clawmute

Why is this discussion going off on the "veiled threat" tangent? Threats of physical violence are not protected by the First Amendment anyway. But the instance at issue here is a professor who compared George W. Bush to a monkey. Let's not pretend that there is any sort of threat, veiled or otherwise, in this professor's deed.

And while you are talking about the heckler's veto, how about this from the SF Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/20/MNG0DMGE091.DTL

Seems that conservatives are simply stealing and vandalizing an anti-war Iraq memorial and using zoning laws to silence a citizen's free speech. So no high horses, OK?

Alvin, I was just following up on Clawmute's comment on the alarmingly unbalanced James DeLater (JA), who has clear reasons to hold a grudge against academia
http://www.hillsdale.edu/collegian/127/127_10/features/112003delater.htm
as well as (see grafs 4,5,9) experience of his own with inappropriate comments in class.

ACTA might think about what kind of climate for discussion it's fostering if comments like JA's "final solution" threat are allowed to stand. I appreciate there may be a range of views on this, but given that there is apparently some sort of moderating process here, I was curious about policy. That's all.

"atomic dog":
So you too ("kai su teknon!"), now apparently in accord in part with the consistently and complacently perverse views of MAL the Answerer, have joined Broob's Boobs' oppo-research roaches scuttling around in the dark on an unswept floor for crumbs of mouldy MALicious gossip rather than addressing the actual issues at hand! That you seem to have made an only partially-veiled appeal to Professor O' Connor to intervene here against us shows me (and perhaps "Clawmute" and others) that you'd rather dabble in "curious" innuendo because you can't quite manage to present a single convincing argument for what you might call your "case". Thanks also for the attempt at "passive-aggressive" character-assassination ("unbalanced"? How quaint!) through fake "psych-out" "ANAL-ysis"--Fraudians have been doing it for more than a century when their MALice gets the better of their easily-depleted powers of reason and argument (see Professor Szasz's book "Karl Kraus and the Soul-Doctors" on this). I'll not make any such shabby appeal to the site administrator to intervene, because I'd rather dispute an issue and put a bit of stick about on these whinging leftist nannies rather than snivel out crocodile tears about supposed foul play. Just play harder, sweetheart; don't bleat to mummy and daddy about changing the rules. Note also how "atomic dog" has perverted my mention of the dangerous climate that savagely loose talk about the President's person can ultimately contribute to (e.g., hysterical accusations that the President is an "idiot", "fascist", "terrorist"; add to this the personally-heard chants that he be hanged, etc. emanating from the mouths of sewers on the Left) to the base and baseless insinuation that I've made any such threats. Vergogna, Signore "atomic dog"! et peccato!--you've now dabbled in the "rough trade" of slurs and innuendo and been caught out in your hypocrisy--and thanks for the effortless victory. . . .

But if you, again like MAL, seriously wish to propose "Bush is an idiot" or "fascist" (which, I grant, you haven't yet) or some other such puerile nonsense, then do it openly and argue your point (if, as I doubt, you've got one--for if you really believed what you seem to be saying, you'd act quite differently or be persecuted by this supposed Nero in the White House). So your "criticisms" of the president seem, at bottom and like MAL's, to be tout court gratuitous, self-gratiying abuse--nothing more. That MAL should simply mention a few issues like global warming and "environmental science" (in which there are many disagreements over specific policies) without further explanation implies that no argument need apply--agreement is simply assumed by all "right-thinking" people, whereupon they all start bobbing their heads (like rear-window dolls) in mechanical agreement (reference Bergson's theory in "Le Rire" for more. But, "atomic dog", how can you whinge about Prof D's "right" to waste class time (in a stunt down there somewhere with passing round "dirty pictures" in a brown paper sac) and then with a straight face challenge MY right to present my views on the implications of Prof D's asinine display? Have another cup of coffee and wake up! Hope you don't need the figurative equivalent (in "The Maltese Falcon") of Sam Spade's slap on the face of that slimy perfumed wimp Cairo, played brilliantly by Peter Lorre! And when you wake up, grow up! Get your GED in life!

Now, MAL, AKA The Answerer:
Interesting, mon vieux, how many on the Left--and I've seen it time and again--can't resist the itch to stifle opposition (especially at university) by any means available when they've the chance (as "Clawmute" notes). But attack their disloyal ventings and vauntings or their politically meretricious self-displays before a captive audience and hear their howls about "free speech" and "McCarthyism", blah, blah, blah. D'accord? C'mon MAL, resist the temptation to side with these penny-whistle pimps of the Left, as you didn't during my thrashing of Mikhail B and his odious sway-dough intellectual appendages a few weeks ago. But I'll give you just one more chance to redeem yourself and clear the detritus blocking your obviously impaired faculties of ratiocination. Think for yourself for a change--don't snuffle round your leftist profs looking for bones, balls and scratches behind the ears--and support David Horowitz's and ACTA's programmes for higher-ed reform. Perhaps it won't, again, as Bogie has it, "get you in good with your boss [es]", but they'll give you a bit more real respect in future. . . .

Now then, to your pathetically-underweight "arguments". Your mention of the OK bombers refers to a lone conspiracy, not a savage world-wide movement--which is right out of CAIR's propaganda playbook for diverting attention away from the real Islamofascist menace, as I mentioned above and you, comme d'habitude, blithely ignored. And your absurd attempts to equate post-structuralism with religious belief (an adolescent, desperate and risible tu quoque that shows that correction is too ponderous a task here)--quid verbis? By the way, where's your specific reference to Cicero come from?--I'm genuinely curious where you snatched this one and then promptly coupled it with "Rick James"--whoever he or she or it may be (lit-cret chic again?--is this what you learned in English grad seminars, sweetheart?--and how IS your Latinity these days?). Also: I've heard so many references to grandfathers, fathers, mothers, etc. from leftists when challenged on THEIR unmade sacrifices to preserve freedom. Know that I honour their ancestors' sacrifices, though at once I rue their descendants' flaccid complacency and disloyalty (in the face of world-wide challenges from our enemies) as they now exhibit in their pipsqueaks' fora at universities and radical venues. And I'll remind you that we've had murderous attacks on presidents (eight presidents in the past century or so, from McKinley through the present President Bush) as well as the penultimate pope, John Paul II. And the murderous threats emanate daily from radical Muslim groups and gangs everywhere, perhaps egged on by, as "Clawmute" has it, "useful idiots".

Not sure about MAL's closing reference to cocaine, AKA Fraud's "cure" for morphine addiction--care to explain, MAL, and then provide us with a cui bono?

My apologies to Professor O' Connor for having posted a second answer similar to the one above--for I thought the first (now posted) was lost.

This whole debate on the above report of Professor DeMonocal's class display has been (and perhaps will yet be) for me just one more exhilarating exercise in traditional adversarial and agonistic rhetoric (inter alia), but I must say, I'm also keen to DISCUSS and LEARN as well as to debate. Last night I talked "books over brews" with a friend and fellow war-vet who's quite keen (in his own idiosyncratic way) on left Hegelianism, Kojeve, Said et al, but open, as I am, to learn from the opposition--and not simply to amass stronger arguments for each others' fixed positions, but to develop each others' trains of thought analogously and dialectically, though perhaps not (usually) synchronically or harmoniously. And with us (comme d'habitude) no view is, as in some university courses and seminars I've sat years ago (and I considered such experiences cautionary when later I taught such courses at university), discounted or invalidated simply by reference to the holder's politics or personality (though connexions can be made here too--but they must be well-argued, not merely invoked as innuendo or slur). And "big reputations" by themselves count for little in discussions such as ours. Another aside here: An old friend and colleague of mine (now sadly, departed)--Labour, agnostic, antinomian to a degree--used to say to me (an inveterate traditionalist and rightist, admittedly a rara avis in academe these days) that he most regretted the lack of challenges to his and his leftist colleagues' positions in humanities faculties, for these challenges would have worked to keep their minds "lively and at ease" (as Jane Austen has it) in stimulating debates and discussions. Nothing, he said--and I agreed--was worse than to hear bad or undeveloped arguments made for what he considered (and I often didn't) good causes. And this present debate (as possibly the proposed series of rhetorical contests between Horowitz and Berube mentioned in a subsequent ACTA article) I hope will continue and will stimulate new discussions and debates (some, doubtless will develop as agones) for those of all literary, political and philosophical persuasions. And that is the value of the present forum, where no view or commenter is excluded. Thanks to this site's administrator for that, and may it continue thus . . .

NATTERING NABOBS OF NADLER-ISM

Thank (Supreme Being), Columbia is private. The public colleges are already an enormous mess. Mr. Bollinger is running Columbia in a way, reminescent (sp?) of the way David Dinkins ran NYC -- right into the ground.

I can't imagine even the Upper East Side crowd, being very happy about what is happening. Like the "Death To Israel" lunatics are running amok, all over campus.

What goes around, comes around. A freakin' joke, IMHO.