Free
speech impediment
A liberal mind does not make a liberal agenda
STORY BY JACKIE MARCUS
PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER GARDNER
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WATCH WHAT YOU SAY
Cuesta College’s Jackie Marcus received threatening
e-mails for teaching a "liberal" agenda in the classroom.
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The year could have easily been 1920. We were having
a glass of wine at a cozy restaurant in the old town of Pismo Beach. Across
the street is a two-story, white-brick building with dark blue awnings
over the angular windows that reminded me of Hollywood in its silent film
days. Palm trees line the street and an antique lamp adorns the hotel
window. The only thing missing is the horse and carriage.
The fog transformed the town into a silent film
of grays and whites, when my friend recalled Russia's brilliant poet,
Osip Mandelstam, and how his life came to an untimely end in prison for
merely writing a poem that poked fun at Stalin.
Perhaps it was our conversation that turned to politics,
the demise of our liberties under Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the threatening
e-mails I received from a fundamentalist supporter of Bush who accused
me of teaching a "liberal agenda" in my philosophy class and of being
a "communist," that brought to mind the Russian Intelligentsia.
If I'm to be charged, like Socrates, of "corrupting
the youth," which translates into questioning political policies, then
let's examine the accusation in light of Russia's history.
According to Masha Gessen, author of "Dead Again,"
there would be no Russian Intelligentsia without the Russian poets, especially
when Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam, Mayakovsky, and many other extraordinary
writers emerged during the early 1930s.
Writers, teachers, and artists were murdered during
The Great Terror years under Stalin's purge. Akhmatova survived, but she
was mentally tortured without being physically harmed or arrested. Even
before Stalin, she had suffered the death of her first husband, Nilolay
Gumilyov, a brilliant scholar who was arrested and then shot by the Bolsheviks
in 1921. And when Stalin came to power, she could do nothing to save her
son, Lev Gumilyov, from being arrested and exiled to the labor camps.
She watched her friends disappear, one by one, into the death camps.
You will not live again.
You will not rise from the snow
Twenty-eight holes from the bayonet
Five from the gun.
I have made a shroud for my friend,
Sad cloth.
She loves, loves blood
This Russian Earth.
-Dedicated to Nilolay Gumilyov
Anna Akhmatova, 1921
In the land of liberty for all, we've had our own
dark history of blacklisting individuals for their political beliefs;
the fact that I was made a target for attack brought back the McCarthy
days of oppression.
Why did this angry woman and her friends launch
a massive e-mail assault? Under her insistence, the Dean of Humanities
asked me to remove the Cuesta College logo from my own "paid for" philosophy
web site for policy reasons.
I agreed on the grounds that I never intended to
speak for Cuesta College as far as my political views were concerned.
Given the study of environmental ethics, the links on my web site informed
my students about the Bush administration's corporate policies that allow
industries to pollute with impunity.
True, I let my students know-because they asked-that
I'm a liberal for a variety of reasons: mostly for the protection of our
environment and constitutional rights. But that should not justify the
actions of a group of vindictive conservatives who are not Cuesta
students.
They stole my picture from my web site and wrote
slanderous lies about my person and my class and then proceeded to use
my photo as a target for insults and threats on their national message
board. I received threatening hate e-mails from places like Texas, Alabama,
and Tennessee.
If my Republican antagonists knew anything about
my class and my students, they'd realize that college students are independent
thinkers; they're perfectly capable of arriving at their own conclusions.
The witch-hunt tactics and the vile e-mails demonstrated hostility instead
of reason, fanaticism instead of intelligence.
During Akhmatova's time, if you so much as whispered
a word of criticism against Stalin, you were dragged off into the night
and no one would explain why you were arrested.
Under the Patriot Act, citizens are being arrested
and our government is not required to explain the charges. Currently,
our Bill of Rights is nothing more than an empty document. By the end
of the semester, my students not only know their rights, they walk away
with a lasting appreciation of our civil liberties and how important it
is to protect them. Ah, there I go again, teaching a liberal agenda .
.
If I'm to stand accused of being a "communist" by
a woman who never met me, let's remember how the writers and professors
were the first to be imprisoned under Stalin's regime. Akhmatova's
prophetic vision of Russian culture was summarized by the poet in the
following way:
"As the future ripens in the past / So the past
rots in the future- / A terrible festival of leaves."
Akhmatova predicted that Russia could experience
a Great Awakening, and that the arts could flourish, but instead, she
saw signs of "culture rot," of writers falling into stagnation and sterility,
a culture that will inevitably bear dead fruit.
Cultural advancements are impossible when artists
and teachers are forced into silence. It's a sad day in America when a
philosophy teacher is called into the dean's office for questioning
Bush's motives for his preemptive, unilateral attack on Iraq, for wanting
to protect endangered species and old-growth forests.
In "Instead of a Preface for Requiem" Akhmatova
wrote:
"In the terrible years of Yezhovism I spent seventeen
months standing in line in front of the Leningrad prisons. One day someone
thought he recognized me. Then, a woman with bluish lips who was behind
me and to whom my name meant nothing, came out of the freezing torpor
to which we were all accustomed and said, softly (for we spoke only in
whispers), "- And that, could you describe that?"
And I said, "Yes, I can."
And then a sort of smile slid across what had been
her face.
No, it was not under a strange sky,
Not strange wings that gave me shelter-
I was in the midst of my people,
There, where, in their misfortune, my people
were.
Have Americans entered a blizzard of fear
where we must speak in whispers? The Russian Intelligentsia not
only represented the educated-poets felt ethically bound to write about
the terrible conditions of political oppression, poverty, and despair.
How would their poetry change things? Change always
begins with awareness. Silencing political discussions, whether
we're talking about violations of individual rights to privacy under the
Patriot Act, or questioning laws that allow energy industries to pollute,
are warnings that we're entering a new technological age of policing each
other, of standing on guard for fear that someone will report us to the
authorities.
Back at the restaurant in Pismo Beach, I could see
the pinkish-red neon light, "Hotel Landmark," glowing softly in the dark,
and the fog gave us the feeling that time is a product of the imagination.
Masha Gessen wrote that during Akhmatova's time,
poetry and philosophy were the cultural activities of the youth.
She asks why this was so, and answered, "Perhaps the young people discovered
in the poetic word a new and vital way of expressing their sensations
and perceptions." The study of humanities is the door to cultural diversity.
The role of the philosopher, from Socrates' experience,
could not be taken lightly. He understood that logic, alone, is not enough.
Faith in something larger than ourselves is also required. Without diversity
of thought, without the freedom to think and question, cultural creativity
dies.
"If a poet wrote a poem today," wrote Akhmatova,
"he has no idea whether he will write one tomorrow or really ever again."
For Osip Mandlestam, laughing at the leader of their country led to a
miserable prison sentence, torture, and finally death. ³
Jackie Marcus teaches philosophy at
Cuesta College.
No need to whisper
STORY BY CHARLEE SMITH
PHOTOS BY CHRISTOPHER GARDNER
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SPEAK FREELY
Businessman Charlee Smith argues there’s nothing
to fear, unless you’re a terrorist or are in the habit of
speaking irresponsibly.
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Currently, nothing chaps
my hide more than to hear someone say, "Our Bill of Rights is now nothing
more than an empty document."
This knee-jerk response to the actions of our government as it works to
balance security with privacy rights while waging the international fight
against terrorism is effective political campaign jargon. Intelligent
people use outlandish statements like this because they are the quickest
way to get attention and support. We are, however, a nation based upon
checks and balances, and checking out the facts can alleviate most fears.
Some of the provisions of the Patriot Act, passed
by Congress in 2001, are the main focus of the "lost rights" issue. I
was irritated by the Act, but only because of the name. Putting the label
"Patriot" (Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct
Terrorism) on the Act, while clever, sent me the message that it would
be un-American to oppose it, and I don't like to be force-fed. It is,
however, a bad name on a good product.
The Act does provide for the option of indefinite
imprisonment without trial of non-U.S. citizens whom the attorney general
determines to be a threat to national security. The government is not
required to provide detainees with counsel, nor is it required to make
any announcement or statement regarding the arrest. The law allows a wiretap
to be issued against an individual instead of a specific telephone number.
It permits law enforcement agencies to obtain a
warrant and search a residence without immediately informing the occupants-if
the attorney general has determined this to be an issue of national security.
As part of a criminal investigation and with court approval, investigators
can obtain previously unavailable personal records. The act also allows
intelligence gathering at religious events, along with many less controversial,
but very effective, provisions.
Many people have stated that under the Patriot Act,
U.S. citizens have been arrested without the explanation of charges. The
reality is that only two U.S. citizens have been detained indefinitely
as enemy combatants since 9/11, and this is based on a 1942 law.
One citizen, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was captured in Afghanistan
fighting with an enemy combat unit. The other, ex-convict Addullah Al
Muhajir (aka Jose Padilla), became an Al Qaeda operative in Afghanistan
and Pakistan and was arrested upon arrival in Chicago for allegedly planning
to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" on U.S. soil. Sure they lost their
rights, but that is the rule of the "game" they decided to play.
Terrorism, as Russian President Vladimir Putin said
last week after a bomb killed 39 in a Moscow subway, is the "plague of
this 21st century." The fact that no bodies have been blown apart by Islamic
terrorist bombs in U.S. cities since 9/11 is a testament to the correctness
of measures and actions taken by President George W. Bush.
But nothing made by man is perfect. Some portions
of the Patriot Act do use too broad a brush, such as one that bars the
giving of expert advice and assistance to organizations with ties to terrorists,
which was ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge in January.
The Patriot Act is a compromise. I'm sure there
are zealots in the Justice Department who would love to round up every
young male of the Islamic faith in America or build a computer system
that would automatically monitor the electronic activities of everyone
in this country without the authorization of a court, but it won't happen.
Despite notices of its death, the Bill of Rights
is alive and well. Many aspects of the Patriot Act simply update past
laws for surveillance to include the more modern forms of communication.
Just as there is no "right" not to pay sales tax on Internet transactions,
there is no "right" to have your e-mails treated differently than your
telephone conversations under criminal law.
The source of most recent cases of true rights violations
can be traced back to political correctness, not federal law.
The incident at Cal Poly when Steve Hinkle was not
allowed to place a flier announcing that a speaker who was to appear on
campus is one example. Another occurred at the University of Washington
last October when students sold the same type of cookies with prices that
ranged from 25 cents to a dollar, depending on the race of the buyer,
with the highest prices to whites.
This was a political demonstration that attempted
to mock affirmative action by applying liberal social policy to the price
of cookies. A sign above their booth said: "Affirmative Action is Racism."
Two students who were offended by this tore the sign down and threw a
box of cookies at one of the sellers' heads. In both cases, individuals
exercised, and got approval of, a right not to be offended (which does
not exist), while the exercise of free speech was ruled by college officials
to be hurtful and against their rules.
The communication revolution of the past decade
has changed many things. An individual's ideas can now be disseminated
with incredible speed. It's virtually impossible to "speak in whispers"
electronically. A simple e-mail can end up in all 50 states overnight.
If you create your own web site that expresses political
or religious views, you had better be thick-skinned. You will be criticized.
You will receive words that hurt. Just don't cry "foul" when it happens.
Respect is not a civil right. As Wendy McElroy says,
"No one can claim a 'right' to the emotional or intellectual approval
of anyone else. Indeed, to mandate such respect is to violate rights because
human beings should be free to assess what is right or wrong, admirable,
or detestable for themselves."
Not one American citizen has been arrested under
any post 9/11 federal law for something that they have said or written.
So don't let fear be the cause of silence. Some common sense must be used,
however. While the constitution gives us freedom of speech, it does not
protect us from some of the consequences of our speech.
We all have the right to say anything to our spouses,
but you won't stay married long if you do. Some Hollywood actors have
seen their careers slide due to their outspokenness, but I'm sure some
have no regrets. Sometimes getting things off your chest produces a far
better spiritual reward than any monetary gain that can come from silence.
³
Charlee Smith is a businessman who lives in the
North County.
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