The Try-Works

Just got this today.  Funny, Al Lewis has a blog at the Denver Post where he posts correspondence, and for some reason I ain’t seen hide nor hair of this letter.

Wonder why?

Cajamarca, Peru
August 9, 2007

Mr. Al Lewis
Columnist, Denver Post

Dear Mr. Lewis,

I would like to send an open letter to you and to the academic community of the University of Denver.

I have read your column, Not all that Shines is Good (was this the original title?), and I feel only consternation and indignation at the decision of the Dean of the School of International Studies at Denver University to award a prize to the ex-CEO of Newmont, Mr. Wayne Murdy, “for building relationships between Denver and the rest of the world.”  Due to the actions of Newmont, for the rest of the world where this company operates, Denver, Colorado is now seen as the headquarters of the company that destroys our ecosystems, corrupts our societies, threatens our lives, and condemns our people to live in pollution and poverty.

I am a parish priest in Cajamarca, where the Yanacocha Mine operates, the largest gold mine in Latin America, of which Newmont is the principal shareholder.  The majority of my life has been spent studying in different universities in Peru, as well as the Papal Gregorian University in Rome.  My life has been tied to academic work at universities and to pastoral service among the poorest peasants of my diocese, helping them to live in harmony with God, their brothers and sisters, and Nature.  I have always believed that universities are places for searching for knowledge and truth, and ethically I have always felt that “the truth shall set us free” (John 8.32).

So I was completely dumbfounded to hear that Denver University awarded a prize to Mr. Wayne Murdy, who has been responsible not only for the economic success of Newmont, but also for the destruction of habitats and the suffering of so many people in Ghana, Bolivia, Indonesia, and Cajamarca, Peru.

I met Mr. Murdy in two shareholders’ meetings in Denver, which I attended to present a group of demands having to do with violations of human rights and environmental damages that his company is committing in Cajamarca.  On both occasions, Mr. Murdy publicly committed to write letters responding to the demands.  Mr. Murdy lied to us, as he never sent the letters.  On the contrary, his company initiated an espionage operation in 2006 to intimidate and endanger the security of environmental leaders in Cajamarca. And in recent months, we have received death threats, and dirty campaigns have been unleashed against us in many of the media connected to Yanacocha.  Most painful is that three peasant leaders who were defending their water and lands have been killed for opposing Newmont’s expansion of mining activities in Cajamarca (November 2004 in La Zanja, August 2006 in Combayo, and November 2006 in Yanacanchilla.)

Yanacocha removes more than 600 tons of rock daily, it consumes more than 3 million gallons of fuel monthly in the watershed of my region, and it uses immense quantities of cyanide and water for leaching.  The consequences are devastating: lakes, springs, rivers and streams have disappeared, in order to make way for new monstrous mountains for cyanide leaching.  In all of the rivers affected by the mining operations, there have been systematically documented fish deaths.  Hundreds of peasant families have lost their water sources, and many others complain that their livestock have died because they cannot drink the water, or they die from unexplained strange illnesses. As the official health statistics show, so-called environmental illnesses have increased exponentially in the region: dermatitis, conjunctivitis, and respiratory illnesses- all during the same period of time as Newmont’s mining operations.

Of course, Yanacocha has also received awards in Peru: for provision of water, for social responsibility, and also for their work in communication.  All of these awards have been given by associations tied to the government, which is Newmont’s principal ally due to the money and benefits that many times are given to the families of government authorities for jobs or contracts with the company; or in other cases they have been awarded by private associations that receive donations or contributions from the mining company itself.  Personally, I had thought that only in poor countries would important institutions such as universities beg for funds from the companies that then impose conditions on research results.  I know that Denver is a city that has benefited from Newmont’s income.  But should a school in that University forget or turn a blind eye to the fact that a large part of that income comes from the dirty work that Newmont does in the rest of the world?  Even worse, that the School of International Studies awards a prize to Wayne Murdy for “building relationships between Denver and the rest of the world”.  The relationships that poor countries such as Peru would hope for with Denver are relationships of respect, collaboration, and solidarity, and not of lies, exploitation and abuse. As long as American institutions, such as the School of International Studies of Denver University, continue to close their eyes to the reality that Americans’ well-being is achieved at the cost of suffering, pollution, and exploitation of poor countries’ resources, prizes will not be awarded for the goodwill and wisdom of illustrious American citizens in solidarity with the rest of the world, but rather to promote impunity and justify greed, which in our countries translates into more poverty, more corruption, and environmental contamination.

What unpleasant news for the people of Ghana, Indonesia, Bolivia, and Peru to find out that a school at an American university, in exchange for financial support, ends up paying homage to a company such as Newmont, whose history is stained with the suffering of many countries!

Worse, in Cajamarca, Murdy’s award will not be seen as something far removed from our history.  According to the logic of the Dean of the business school at Denver University, certainly Pizarro, the Spanish conqueror, should be awarded a prize because over 500 years ago, also out of greed for gold, he murdered thousands of indigenous people and killed Atahualpa, the Inca ruler, a curious way in which the powerful of the North think they are creating relationships between our countries.  It is unacceptable that a University would be complicit in this.

Sincerely,
Father Marco Arana Zegarra
Recipient of the National Award for Human Rights, Peru

Word also has it that Tom Rowe has responded to Vincent Carroll’s horseshit column (first update).  Anyone wanna take a bet on whether the Rocky Mountain News prints it?

Stay tuned.

(New readers: I haven’t repeated all the backstory on this protest, but you can find all you like here.)

As I said yesterday, the Newmont Mining protest went swimmingly. It was good rough, lively fun. As long as you weren’t one of the Korbel Dinner guests, that is. From what I could tell, the guests were having no fucking fun at all, and my money is that the Marriott will never, and I mean never, host anything like this again.

Western Shoshone elder Carrie Dann received her award. Graduates of the University of Denver’s Graduate School in International Studies burned their degrees. Newmont Mining stockholders burned their stock certificates. And a gorgeous puppet of Wayne Murdy was given a citation.

(You can’t see the lady walking ahead of the puppet, but she’s wearing signs that read “Pimp that School!” and “Hey! We’re Talking $$$ Here!” and leading Mr. Murdy’s doppleganger with a carrot. An allusion to Tom Farer’s singularly stupid explanation for giving a serial human rights violator a humanitarian award.)

But the most effective tactic, as alluded to above, was the hectoring of the shindig’s attendees. They were ravaged, starting as they waited at a dead stop in a line of cars to unload, where protestors were assailing them through the car-windows with a litany of Newmon Mining abuses, and giving ’em holy hell for taking part in, as one commenter put it, “Eichmannalooza.” (Catchy, no?) Then, of course, they had to totter from their luxury cars into the Marriott. Over-dressed, incredibly-quaffed, pinch-mouthed, upper crust shitbirds, just begging for ridicule.

And, oh boy, did they get it.

There was the rather restrained, but always effective, “you should be ashamed of yourselves,” but there were also a few, shall we say, more vigorous folks. Some of the best lines I heard:

“Newmont Mining poisons people for money. Hey, do you think we could pay the Marriott to do the same?”

“How’s about we throw Wayne Murdy off a bridge? How’s about we throw Madeleine Albright off an even bigger bridge?”

“How’s about we feed a cyanide cocktail to your kids?”

“You guys should read Ward Churchill. He’d scare the hell out of you, because you’re,” then after a dramatic pause, in a wonderful game-show announcer’s voice, “little Eichmanns!”

And, my favorite, at a woman in a ridiculous hat that looked something like a very large rat eating a partridge, “holy shit, look at that hat! You look like a little Eichmann train wreck!”

If nothing else, the Marriott paid in spades for its Director of Event Planning, Joe Humerickhouse’s, cowardice and servility. I doubt there was a Marriott guest during the four-hour protest that wasn’t really, really wishing they’d stayed somewhere, anywhere else. (Nor, for that matter, a Marriott employee that wouldn’t rather have been working anywhere else.) It was an excellent example of the ways in which, with only a megaphone and a vicious sense of humor, non-corporate entities — meaning, people — can bring their own kind of pressure.
(The goon in the suit is, of course, Omar Jabara, Newmont Mining PR hack. The young man with the bullhorn is Nick Brown of the delightful Revolutionary Anti-Imperialist Movement - Denver. Mr. Brown was responsible for the vast majority of the great one-liners hurled at the Eichmannalooza attendees.)

Needless to say, the $500-a-plate crowd entered the Marriott flustered, red-face and muttering to themselves. Just as funny was the contingent of Denver’s finest who just stood there fuming and purpling.

One enterprising businessman stalked over to make his outrage at being called a “little Eichmann” known. Unfortunately for him, he picked Glen Morris of Colorado AIM to vent on. Mr. Morris takes no shit, and didn’t take any from this gentleman. He laid into him, running down a whole litany of things he was rather outraged by. Like, say, a fucking butcher being awarded a humanitarian award. Needless to say, Mr. Morris had the gentlemen walking on his own tongue before their lively discourse ended.

Then, as if we weren’t having enough fun, Omar Jabara, Senior Director of Communications and Media Relations for Newmont Mining, came out and made a horseshit pretense of taking the concerns of the protestors seriously for the local media.

The highlight of that exchange came from the Ghanan WACAM representative Awon Atuire, who told Mr. Jabara in no uncertain terms that he’d like him to get out of his country and stop killing his people. Predictably, Mr. Jabara protested that Newmont Mining worked with many Ghanan leaders. To which Mr. Atuire responded, “And you know what those people are? They’re slave traders. And so are you.” That shut Mr. Jabara down fairly effectively.

All in all, it was a gas. Oh, and I didn’t get to meet Madeleine Albright, but Al Lewis of the Denver Post introduced himself. It happened while Carrie Dann was speaking. There were a group of protestors still hanging around Mr. Jabara, arguing with him. I’ve never thought much of the concept of trying to argue with little Eichmanns. You can’t educate them. They know what they’re doing, they just consider their own financial gain, how shall I put it, worth the cost. As such, it seemed to me that these folks might be better served listening to Carrie Dann. I walked over and told them as much. Al Lewis, who was following Mr. Jabara around dutifully all evening, kind of grinned and turned around, held out his hand and introduced himself.

I actually asked him later why he was following the Newmont Mining flack around all night, and he protested that he was a journalist. So I asked him why he wasn’t getting the other side. He asked me if I’d read his first article. I said I had, and that it was pretty good. He said, “wait until you see the next one, dude.”

I have no idea what that means. Could be he’s decided to go hard pro-Newmont as we so offended him, or it could be that the next article’ll be much tougher on them. But I told him I’d reserve judgment, and I will.

Update: Vincent Carroll has weighed in on Wayne Murdy’s award, castigating Tom Rowe for his guest editorial in the Denver Post. It’s a shoddy piece of work by even Mr. Carroll’s usual standards. The predictable Indian hating whopper comes here:

“In North America,” Rowe writes, “Newmont operates on Western Shoshone lands without their permission, damaging the environment and paying no royalties to the tribe for taking their resources.”

Wouldn’t a scholar interested in fairness have mentioned that this mining land, while claimed by the Western Shoshones under a 19th century treaty, is in fact among holdings of the federal Bureau of Land Management, as Newmont has repeatedly pointed out? Isn’t it more than a tiny bit inflammatory to suggest to readers that Newmont is simply occupying tribal lands as a rogue multinational?

If Rowe sympathizes with the Western Shoshone and considers Newmont’s behavior atrocious, so be it. Make the case. But at least acknowledge that the mining property is, say, within “ancestral Western Shoshone lands,” as less biased activists do.

Keep reading.

Speaking of playing fast and loose with the facts, these are “ancestral Western Shoshone lands,” sure, but they’re also lands guaranteed the Western Shoshone by the Treaty of Ruby Valley. It’s the only agreement ever signed by the US government and the Western Shoshone, and the land granted therein has never been ceded. The Bureau of Land Management can claim to own anything they like — hell, I can claim to own Vincent Carroll’s house, that doesn’t make it mine — but the Ruby Valley Treaty is the law. And, as we all know from Article VI of the US Constitution, them treaties are the supreme law of the land.

As always, I’m a little awestruck by Mr. Carroll’s casual contempt for the US Constitution, not to mention those principles of property rights he’s always on about. A little awestruck, but never surprised. As we all know from long experience, any pretense of principle goes out that Colfax window when Mr. Carroll gets an opportunity to express his pathological hatred of Indians.

Update II: RAIMD’s recap of events is up. They got to see Madeleine Albright. Motherfuckers. I’ve been hating Ms. Albright since they were playing cops and Assata with AK-47 squirt guns. (Yeah, I’m old.) Anyway, more good stuff from Mr. Brown and all those positively charming lads and lasses whom I hope and pray we shall be hearing from for a long time to come. Read it.

Update III: Slapstick Politics and The Legend of Pine Ridge are shocked and offended that I’ve endorsed Newmont Mining’s methods be applied to people who aren’t brown and poor. Being that they don’t seem like the quickest pair of guns in the right-wing blogosphere, I’ll point out the obvious: if poisoning people’s kids is terrorism when advocated by leftist cat-callers, then it’s sure as shit terrorism when actually fucking done by corporations. If you don’t like the logic, press for an end to terrorism. I’d start with, as the folks at RAIMD have so eloquently put it, tossing Wayne Murdy and Madeleine Albright off a bridge.

Update IV: Snapple’s been working overtime. All my life I’ve pined for some lunatic stalker, and I’ve finally found him (or her). Now if only he could find it within himself to manage an accidental lobotomy while chewing on his pencil.

Update V: Al Lewis’ promised article is up. It’s kind of revealing, in that Al Lewis indicates he considers Newmont Mining flack Omar Jabara a fucking liar, right before slobbering all over him and buying the poor dear a drink. It’s shit, of course. The kind of shit that would get any reporter in any respectable newspaper reassigned to suburban pie-baking contests. Luckily for Mr. Lewis, he doesn’t work for a respectable newspaper.

The only interesting tidbit comes in Mr. Lewis’ professed terror of the protesters. And that he didn’t even bother asking Carrie Dann for comment. I guess I’m one of the people with “menacing stares” who “hassled him” until he identified himself. I don’t believe I was rude to the tender soul, I just wanted to know why he was following a fucking Newmont Mining PR flack around, and entirely ignoring folks like Carrie Dann who have to live with the consequences of Newmont Mining’s actions.

The answer now seems obvious: he’s Omar Jabara’s media counterpart: a chickenshit flack, who, as he put it, didn’t dare “look her in the face.”

Which was probably a wise move.

(I’ve posted this elsewhere, but I’m repeating it here in light of some of the recent comments about the American holocaust.)

Most of you ain’t never heard of Nick of the Woods. There are a few reasons for that, not the least of which is it being a hugely popular example of a genre which most people would rather forget existed: a fictional argument for the “final destruction” of American Indians. It’s a weird book, to put it mildly, hinging on an schizophrenic Quaker with a secret identity: by day, quivering pacifist, by night, superhuman Indian killer.

It’s also intensely racist, often degenerating into nothing but a long string of orgiastic racial epithets. In fact, the plot seems all but irrelevant to the author, Robert Montgomery Bird, serving as little more than a skeleton to drape with some of the most ingenious racist lingo ever put to paper, such as this war cry delivered to a band of Shawnee by Salt River Roarer, Ralph Stackpole:

H’yar you ‘tarnal-temporal, long-legged, ‘tater-headed paint-faces! . . . h’yar you bald head, smoke-dried, punkin-eating red-skins! you half-niggurs! you ‘coon-whelps! you snakes! you varmints! you raggamuffins what goes about licking women and children, and scar’ring-anngelliferous madam! git up and show your scalp-locks; for ‘tarnal death to me, I’m the man to take ‘em–cock-a-doodle-doo!

Or this expression of surprise and dismay by the same character:

“Tarnal death to me!” cried Stackpole, looking upon Edith’s pallid visage and rayless eyes with more emotion than would have been expected from his rude character, or than was expressed in his uncouth phrases, “if that don’t make me eat a niggur, may I be tetotaciously chawed up myself!”

Who also provides the most purely inventive racial epithet of the book:

You switches gentlemen, do you, you exflunctified, perditioned rascal? Ar’n't you got it, you niggur-in-law to old Satan? you ‘tarnal half-imp, you? H’yar’s for you, you dog, and thar’s for you, you dog’s dog! H’yar’s the way I pay you in a small-change of sogdologers!

All of this orgiastic racialism finally culminates in a climactic act of symbolic copulation, as the aforementioned superhuman Quaker, Nathan Slaughter, confronts the evil Shawnee leader, Black Vulture — also known as Niggur Nose — in a remarkable unsubtle description of the homoerotic joy found by Bird’s ilk in racial slaughter:

The knife took the place of the hand, and one thrust would have driven it through the organ that had never beaten with pity or remorse; and that thrust Nathan, quivering through every fibre with nameless joy and exultation, and forgetful of everything but his prey, was about to make. He nerved his hand for the blow; but it trembled with eagerness.

So, yeah, just a little bit racist. But what makes Nick of the Woods most interesting — at least to me — is its insistence on being the Realistic corrective to soft-headed Romantic depictions of American Indians. This is one of the oldest Indian-hating tricks on the books: an insistence that the virulent racism ejaculated by the author exists only to rectify falsely Romantic depictions of Indians. As Bird claims in his preface to the second edition, Nick of the Woods was written during a period when:

the genius of Chateaubriand and of Cooper had thrown a poetical illusion over the Indian character; and the red men were presented–almost stereotyped in the popular mind–as the embodiments of grand and tender sentiment–a new style of the beau-ideal–brave, gentle, loving, refined, honourable, romantic personages–nature’s nobles, the chivalry of the forest . . . The Indian is doubtless a gentleman; but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and lives a very miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him alive except the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt–which we dignify with the name of war . . . if he drew his Indian portraits with Indian ink, rejecting the brighter pigments which might have yielded more brilliant effects, and added an ‘Indian hater’ to the group, it was because he aimed to give, not the appearance of truth, but truth itself.

That’s a straw-man from the get-go. You gotta wonder if Robert Montgomery Bird ever picked up a copy of any of Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Sure, a few Indians are romanticized, but no more so than the equally ridiculously embellished figure of the frontiersman found in Hawkeye — or, for that matter, Bird’s aristocratic frontiersman, Roland Forrester (Knight of the Forest, get it?). More to the point the vast majority of Indians in the Leatherstocking Tales are hardly “nature’s nobles.” Most of them are indistinguishable from the filthy, verminous, rapacious savages found in Nick of the Woods. Truth be told, those few Indians passed off as nearly human are described as such solely because they’ve been able to sublimate their Indian nature. As Cooper describes his noblest of noble savages:

Uncas stood, fresh and blood-stained from the combat, a calm, and, apparently, an unmoved looker-on, it is true, but with eyes that had already lost their fierceness, and were beaming with a sympathy that elevated him far above the intelligence, and advanced him probably centuries before, the practises of his nation.

Cooper’s novel hinges on the superiority of the Delaware to all other Indians, but this passage narrows the field of good Indians even further. Uncas is centuries advanced not only of his race, but of his nation. He is a good Indian precisely because he is un-Indian, and Cooper’s great romantic folly lies not in his sympathetic depiction of all Indians, nor even all Indians of a nation of Indians, but of a single Indian — with all others being centuries behind him in intelligence and practice.

That’s what Bird is so offended by, in a nutshell: not that all Indians are presented as romantic heroes, but that even one has managed to repress his Indian nature to a degree he’s become almost human.

So, what is that Indian nature that he’s repressing? Bird’s pretty clear about that:

The single fact that [the Indian] wages war — systematic war — upon beings incapable of resistance or defence, — upon women and children, whom all other races in the world, no matter how barbarous, consent to spare, — has hitherto been, and we suppose, to the end of our days will remain, a stumbling block to our imagination: we look into the woods for the mighty warrior, ‘the feather-cinctured chief,’ rushing to meet his foe, and behold him retiring laden with the scalps of miserable squaws and their babes.

This gruesomely stupid insistence on the Indian as the only race on earth that wages war against women and children is the core of the Indian-hating, whether given us by Bird, Francis Parkman, or the framers of the United States’ Declaration of Independence, which states in its final charge against King George: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

It’s pure mythology. The history of Euro-American military engagement has been an unbroken lineage of warfare on women and children, from Manhattan to the mass graves at Wounded Knee. Take the Mystic massacre of 1637, or the systematic braining of the village of Christian Delaware at Gnadenhutten, or the winter campaigns of Phil Sheridan and George Custer, or the Texas Rangers’ long history of indiscriminate butchery. Not to mention, from my neck of the woods, the Sand Creek massacre, wherein the Colorado First Volunteer Cavalry slaughtered an entirely peaceful village, and then made trophies of women’s genitalia to parade through Denver.

And these are only the most sensational examples. As Air Force Academy historian John Grenier has argued, the American way of war has always been war on civilians, honed on the bodies of Indians.

To attempt to argue that American Indians are the only race to wage war on women and children is fantastic. Worse, it’s the cornerstone of a racist mythology used repeatedly to drum up support for exactly the sort of genocidal campaign just given. And it is always delivered under the guise of Realism.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that I ain’t the first to make the argument that Bird’s Realism is a stalking horse for his extermination argument. Even at the time of publication Bird was accused of creating his fictions to further the extermination of the American Indian. In fact, he responds to such accusations in the preface to the second edition of Nick of the Woods:

Having, therefore, no other, and certainly no worse, desire than to make his delineations in this regard as correct and true to nature as he could, it was with no little surprise he found himself taken to account by some of the critical gentry, on the charge of entertaining the humane design of influencing the passions of his countrymen against the remnant of an unfortunate race, with a view of excusing the wrongs done to it by the whites, if not of actually hastening the period of that ‘final destruction’ which it pleases so many men, against all probability, if not against all possibility, to predict as a certain future event.

That might hold water, might, but for the fact that Nick of the Woods is structured specifically as an argument for extermination. The novel is one long didactic parable, leading Easterner Roland Forrester from his pacifistic tendencies to the light of extermination through the figure of Nathan Slaughter.

The novel’s animosity towards pacifism is announced at the outset by Ralph Stackpole, who challenges Slaughter to a wrestling match by mocking his unwillingness to defend the settlement’s women and children against Indian attack:

Yea verily, verily and yea!” cried Ralph, snuffling through the nostrils, but assuming an air of extreme indignation: “Strannger, I’ve heerd of you! You’re the man that holds it agin duty and conscience to kill Injuns, the redskin screamers–that refuses to defend the women, the splendiferous creatur’s! and the little children, the squall-a-baby d’avs! And wharfo’? Bec’ause as how you’re a man of peace and no fight, you superiferous, long-legged, no-souled crittur! But I’m the gentleman to make a man of you. So down with your gun, and ‘tarnal death to me, I’ll whip the cowardly devil out of you.

And just in case Roland Forrester misses the point, the argument is immediately reiterated by the author:

The doctrine, so eloquently avowed by Captain Ralph, that it was incumbent upon every able-bodied man to fight the enemies of their little state, the murderers of their wives and children, was a canon of belief imprinted on the heart of every man in the district; and Nathan’s failure to do so, however caused by his conscientious aversion to bloodshed, no more excused him from contempt and persecution in the wilderness, than it did others of his persuasion in the Eastern republics, during the war of the revolution.

And if you managed to miss even that, it’s repeated only a few pages later when the naïve Roland Forrester expresses dismay at all the talk of scalping and the sundry other bodily mutilation visited upon the indigenous population of Kentucky.

“Stranger,” said Big Tom Bruce the younger, with a sagacious nod, “when you kill an Injun yourself, I reckon,–meaning no offence–you will be willing to take all the honour that can come of it, without leaving it to be scrambled after by others. Thar’s no man ‘arns a scalp in Kentucky, without taking great pains to show it to his neighbours.”

The lesson is repeated throughout the book. Over and over again. And it’s important to remember that Forrester ain’t the primary target of Nick of the Woods’ education: that would be the reader.

Roland Forrester, like the reader, finally learns his lesson, when, towards the end of the book, his cousin/sweetheart is taken captive by the Shawnee. After a discussion of her probable fate according to Nathan Slaughter, including all the ubiquitous references to rape that are attendant to these discussions in the discourse of Indian hating — see The Searchers, by way of example — Roland finally succeeds in his rite of passage into manhood; i.e., the will to genocide:

“You have told me she is dead–murdered by the foul assassins,’ said Roland; “and if it be so, it avails not to deny it. If it be so, Nathan,” he continued, with a look of desperation, “I call Heaven and earth to witness, that I will pursue the race of the slayers with thrice the fury of their own malice,–never to pause, never to rest, never to be satisfied with vengeance, while an Indian lives with blood to be shed, and I with strength to shed it.”

All of Bird’s equivocating aside, that’s the sole point of the book: American Indians cannot be civilized; as long as they are in contact with civilized peoples they will rape and butcher them. They are, in other words, inherently savage. The only way of dealing with them is to wipe them off the face of the Earth.

It’s not an argument that’s gone away. The critical adulation for furiously racist — not to mention wholly inaccurate — movies like Black Robe and Apocalypto bear witness to that fact. When each was released, film critics from coast to coast were whipping themselves into a frenzy to laud their Realism.

One has to wonder why? Are we to believe that, say, Vincent Carroll of the Rocky Mountain News is an expert on pre-contact Mayan culture?

Of course not. He’s not praising Apocalypto for any real sense of Realism, he’s praising it because the Indians contained therein are straight out of Bird’s mold.

I.e., filthy, verminous, rapacious savages, for which there is only one corrective.

Extermination.

This morning’s Vincent Carroll column happened to catch my eye.  Especially this tidbit:

University officials have no business trying to cull students with unpopular or provocative views from the classroom. But weeding out intimidating or scary weirdos is a different proposition.

Keep reading.

Now, I’d thought to go on a long tangent about who exactly gets to make the call as to who’s weird and who ain’t.  Perhaps delving into Vincent Carroll’s so called conservatism, which always seems to end up on the side of greater governmental intrusion in the lives of everyone who ain’t, well, a corporation.

But instead, I thought I’d just try this tack.  By Mr. Carroll’s logic, would you let this fucker set foot on a college campus?

(And, yes, I know.  I’ve run variations of this joke six or seven hundred times now.  But, good Christ, look in that evil shitbird’s eyes and just try to tell me you haven’t already found your gunhand unconsciously moving to the bedside table where your .357 lays.)

The definition of plagiarism includes lifting others’ ideas and/or general language, not just word-for-word thefts.

Y’all remember that?

Well, bearing that in mind, take a gander at this snippet from the Vincent Carroll column in today’s Rocky Mountain News:

The Ward Churchill saga, which enters its final phase this month, is like an overwritten novel we thought would never end — 900 pages when it should have been 200, a host of plot lines when a handful would do.

When the University of Colorado Regents finally discuss whether to terminate the wayward professor two weeks from today, it will be 21/2 years since a furor erupted over his essay on 9/11 — prompting the scrutiny that led to his official exposure as an academic fraud.

I say “official,” because anyone who listened to Churchill or read his work before 2005 knew he was no scholar. They knew he was an intellectual bully, even if they were unaware of the extent of his contempt for historical truth. Which is why when Churchill is finally fired, we would do well to remember the most disturbing fact involving his downfall: He was chair of the Ethnic Studies Department, where his perspective was absolutely commonplace.

If your son or daughter is thinking of majoring in ethnic studies, you might want to check out its Web pages on the CU-Boulder site. Much of the content reads as if its authors are winking at us; you couldn’t write a better parody of radical gibberish if you tried.

“The Department of Ethnic Studies encourages participatory, experiential, student-centered learning and empowers students to move beyond existing social, cultural and political paradigms to more inclusive paradigms in which they are the subjects of their own reality. Consequently, all students are encouraged to examine and analyze their own inherited political/economic and social/cultural background and identities.”

Any questions?

“We stress critical thinking, the construction of grounded social theory, data gathering and comparative analysis. . . . We engage emergent epistemologies of racial/ethnic communities to critically question established disciplinary canons by encouraging our students to move beyond being objects of study toward being subjects of their own research.”

Whew!

As for their “primary areas” of research, they include “critical race theory with various strands of critical pedagogy, critical class theory, feminist theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, and postcolonial theory.”

This is a department that was content to have Churchill as its leader. The king is being deposed, but the kingdom looks about the same as always.

Keep reading.

Kind of amazing how similar Mr. Carroll’s column is to this post by Mr. Paine of Pirateballerina, ain’t it?

I particularly like this line from Mr. Carroll: “Much of the content reads as if its authors are winking at us; you couldn’t write a better parody of radical gibberish if you tried.” It ain’t quite Mr. Paine’s take of, “it’s clear from that last paragraph that ES should have added ‘advanced self-parody’ and ‘exquisite irony’ to the list,” but I’d say it’s close enough.

Though, to be fair, Mr. Carroll ain’t lifting solely from Jim Paine. He seems to also owe a certain debt to Mr. John Martin.

From Mr. Martin’s keyboard: “How any parent could let a kid major in ethnic studies at CU (or anywhere else) after reading the department’s mind-boggling drivel is beyond me.”

Seems rather alike to Mr. Carroll’s, “[i]f your son or daughter is thinking of majoring in ethnic studies, you might want to check out its Web pages on the CU-Boulder site,” don’t it?

I don’t pay Messrs. Martin and Paine very many compliments. But I do try to give them credit where it’s deserved, and compared to Vincent Carroll, they’re role-models of intellectual honesty.

Of course, I mean that in the way that I might favorably compare, say, Alferd Packer’s culinary skills to Jeffrey Dahmer’s.

Update: From our We Say It Here, It Comes Out There department: Pirateballerina’s Jim Paine discovers (with no apparent help from us) Vincent Carroll’s lifting of his post.

Update II: Mr. Paine had this to say over at Mr. Martin’s place about the, shall we say, suspicious timing of his notice of Vincent Carroll’s plagiarism.

I see DBAB Central has also picked up on Carroll today (right around the same time, too…. we must subscribe to the same Google alerts); Churchill’s dog, Benjie, even has a kind word for you and me.

Keep reading.

A little on the defensive side, don’t you think? Around the same time?

Well, yeah, that’s true. According to my site stats, he visited at 11:03, and then posted his squib about ten minutes later on his site. I suppose that satisfies his bit of dodging.

Hell, what’s a bit of link-poaching amongst friends? I, for one, am always happy to see Mr. Paine post any material he hasn’t stolen from wardchurchill.net.

Of course, there’s just a wee bit of hypocrisy in that Mr. Paine’s squib is in reference to others poaching his posts — a practice which he’s rather prone to — but as Mr. Paine’s hypocrisy goes, to make too much of it would be akin to bemoaning Dick Cheney’s posture while he’s in the act of roasting a succulent Iraqi child over an open flame.

Update III: Snapple’s razor-sharp intellect at work!

Yep, Vincent Carroll’s heard about the Magnificent Boulder Seven Plus Two, and he ain’t happy.

Seven University of Colorado professors have issued a warning to their colleagues who were brave enough to serve on a committee that condemned a plagiarist and fraud. If that committee’s report on Ward Churchill isn’t retracted, the seven promise, they’ll consider “filing charges of research misconduct against the authors.”

This ominous pledge is also signed by two non-CU professors, one from Cornell and the other from Kansas, and alleges five specific “violations” of scholarly norms in the anti-Churchill report.

Keep reading.

A last-ditch attempt to turn the tables? Of course, and from professors who in at least some cases share Churchill’s political outlook. But fear not: Even if the committee’s report were as rotten as this gaggle of Churchill defenders contends, it would still provide more than enough basis for the professor’s eventual, much-delayed firing. Indeed, the committee’s conclusion that Churchill is a serial plagiarist is not even challenged. Apparently that is now conceded by all sides.

Well, Mr. Carroll would know, wouldn’t he?  After all he’s the Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters at Cornell, who specializes in federal Indian law and American Indian Studies.

Oh.  Right.

Moron.

The money line, however, comes towards the end of the column.

In issuing a report of 124 pages, the committee investigating Churchill undoubtedly made a few mistakes.

Undoubtedly.  Just as in a publishing career which includes around 25 books, Ward Churchill undoubtedly made a few footnote errors.  Funny, how when those you agree with make mistakes you’re so easy to forgive them, Mr. Carroll?  While calling for the lynching of anyone you happen to disagree with for similar oversights?

Smacks of selective prosecution, don’t it?

Tell you what.  I’m starting to get real smug about this.  My money still says you shitheels will find a way to fire Churchill, due process be damned.  I don’t think it matters what the appeal committee says, Hank Brown’ll still fire Churchill.

But my money then says that the court case is gonna put a hurting on CU that’ll continue for generations to come.

And they couldn’t deserve it more.

Any takers?

(Thanks to John G. Martin, whom has been doing a fair bit of whining about the recent roasting handed him by our always delightful commenters.)

The Rocky Mountain News ran the following regarding about their decency standards in the comments.

We’re concerned about vulgar language, not because we’re unfamiliar with those words - it’s a newsroom, after all - but because readers are put off by vulgarity. (And besides, I tend to think that people who can’t talk without being vulgar are unlikely to have anything valuable to say, unless I have personal evidence to the contrary.)

After we admonished one commenter he (or she) replied, “Hey, Editor, did someone pee in your corn flakes this morning? I didn’t say anything close to what even the FCC would disallow. Anyway . . .” and went on to repeat his comment in a slightly more subdued manner.

But we’re not the FCC, and if we invite you to come sit on our porch for a while and watch the world go by, we can disinvite you, too, if you are making the space uncomfortable for others.

Keep reading.

First of all, I hate that canard. “I tend to think that people who can’t talk without being vulgar are unlikely to have anything valuable to say.” That’s nonsense. Worse, it’s a cliché. And it’s the worst kind of cliché, in that it represents that the cliché-monger hasn’t invested the slightest energy in actually pondering what it is that spews out of their mouth. After all, by the Seebach’s logic, we should ignore, say, Shakespeare, because he was as willfully vulgar as was allowable in his time. Everybody knows the joke behind Much Ado about Nothing, right? (Under the Language heading.) And we should certainly toss Chaucer from the shelves. And Hemingway, the furor over the vulgarity in A Farewell to Arms being legendary.

But more amusing, at least to me, is the wholly arbitrary application of those standards in The Rocky. Take for instance, the comments from this bit of tooth-gnashing over the White Privilege Conference, by, you guessed it, Vincent Carroll. (He’s agin’ it.) They’re led off as follows:

Success in this country is not a rigged game? Of course it is.

The rappers copied Imus and made a lot of money. And now all the white guys are blaming the rappers, when it was Imus who paved the way to making money filling the air waves with insults.

In fact Mr. Carroll your daily column is thiny veiled insults wrapped in a cynical and elitist vocabulary that you pretend is intelligent.

And here you go again trembling with fear that those less educated than yourself could hold you to task for your disguised view of yourself as exceptionalist because you believe being selfish is a virtue.

April

Which earns her the following:

April, you ignorant slut!

lol - just playin’ - don’t be a victim! (or a nappy-headed ho)

But, honestly, if you think the game is rigged you are either stupid, willfully ignorant, or some combination, thereof.

Please, I pray for you, enlighten yourself, educate your mind, expand your sources of information, clear your head, work hard, and find the great American dream - and lose the socialist, hate-America-first drivel that has been trundled into your little head.

Have a nice day!

SoS

“Ignorant slut” and “nappy-headed ho,” hmm? Funny how that one slipped by the crack censors at, The Rocky, ain’t it? Especially in a column that lead by castigating those who believe

most middle-aged white guys talk like Don Imus when among friends — spewing venomous jokes about blacks, women, Jews and gays.

Keep reading.

Well, I don’t know about “most middle-aged white guys,” Mr. Caroll, but it seems your supporters certainly do.

Not mention, y’know, the editorial page editor, who presumably controls the comments.

What’s his name, again?

As most of you have probably noticed, I’ve been a little lackadaisical in my blogging duties of late.  It’s nothing personal, I’ve just had other projects on my mind, I suppose.  But I didn’t realize how lax I’d gotten until I picked up a week-old copy of The Boulder Daily Camera in an office this morning, opened to a typically horseshit Clint Talbott column and read the following:

Some students and others say the the (sic) University of Colorado has infringed upon Ward Churchill’s academic freedom. They say he doesn’t distort history and twist facts to suit his own extreme political agenda. They’d have more credibility if they didn’t distort history and twist facts.

“The only complaints are politically motivated,” said Aaron Smith, a CU senior ethnic studies major. “We’re not going to stand idly by and let them fire one of CU’s most distinguished professors.”

. . .

As a new faculty privilege and tenure committee report looms, the pro-Churchill forces are mobilizing. At least one new Web site condemns the “Denver media’s neo-Stalinist smear” of Churchill (www.tryworks.org).

Keep reading.

Why, that hurts, Mr. Talbott.  New Web site, indeed.  We’ve been doing what we do for more than a year and a half.  Just ask Vincent Carroll.

By the way, you might have noted your own dipshit rag’s contribution to said neo-Stalinist smear.

One thing I love about the folks Rocky Mountain News, what they lack in integrity, they more than make up for in disingenuous. You know my favorite example, right? I’ve been harping on it for nigh two years now. And, at the risk of alienating you, dear reader, I’m about to do so again. See, I awoke this morning, pilfered a copy of the Rocky from my neighbor’s doorstep, and couldn’t help but notice this:

Ward Churchill’s claims of Indian ancestry were questioned in an extensive genealogy by the Rocky Mountain News in 2005, which identified 142 direct forebears of Churchill and found no evidence that any of them were American Indians. Now the controversial University of Colorado ethnic studies professor says he has black ancestry as well.

Churchill made that claim while answering questions at the Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair in San Francisco on March 17. In a video clip available at tinyurl.com/yvlr9b, Churchill criticized as racist the vote this month by the Cherokee Nation to oust freedmen - descendants of slaves once owned by Cherokees - from tribal rolls. After repeating the debunked claims of his Indian ancestry and membership in an established Indian tribe, Churchill said: “Actually, I do have black ancestry.”

Keep reading.

I like that “debunked” by an “extensive genealogy” line. Surely, when a major daily newspaper like the Rocky makes such claims, they must have something fairly substantial to back it up, right? Assumedly, they assembled a panel of professional genealogists? Including an expert or two in American Indian ancestry claims?

Or that’s what you might think if you were dealing with any newspaper save the Rocky. But, since you are dealing with the Rocky, how’s about this: their panel of genealogical experts consisted entirely of two anti-Churchill bloggers and a New Jersey cop?

This from the article introducing their so-called genealogy:

The News’ genealogical research was conducted both in-house and in concert with several outside researchers.

Jim Paine, 51, of Hartsel, who heads several Internet database companies, maintains an anti-Churchill site at www.pirateballerina.com.

He worked with Bill Cullen, 35, a New Jersey police officer who plans to become a professional genealogist.

Jack Ott, 65, of Lakewood, a retired telecom planner, engineer and amateur genealogist, maintains an online Churchill tree at home.comcast.net/~jackott2/ahnentafel1.htm

Keep reading.

Crackerjack work, there, John Temple. Since you’re broadening your pool of experts to include anyone who will agree with you, whether or not they have any fucking idea what they’re talking about, I’ve got some ideas.

Like, Snapple dabbles in forensic science, how’s about asking her for her analysis of the JonBenet case?

And, hey, why stop there? Maybe next week you can commission hot-dog vendor Peter Fotopoulos to diagnose a certain editorial page editor’s chronic racist wasting away disease.

Yeah, look into those eyes, see if you can stand it. Click again. And again. Makes you want lock up your children and install dead-bolts on your doors, doesn’t it? Or hide under your table, hugging your knees and whimpering with the kind of existential dread not usually experienced outside of a CIA-backed torture chamber? Jesus, I look into those eyes, and I feel my soul shift; I’m ready to call in an airstrike on the entire human race.

By the way, Ernesto Vigil also mentioned the Rocky’s horseshit genealogy in the comments to a post over at Jim Paine’s place. (And, yes, the same Jim Paine who also serves as the Rocky’s professional genealogist. Amazingly, he still has time to moonlight as a horse breeder.)

The genealogy published by the Post and the Rocky was compiled by a professional genealogist, a member of the Association of Professional Genealogists and an expert in Indian ancestry claims. It is airtight, and conclusive proof that Churchill’s stories about his Cherokee ancestry are false. Churchill’s only comeback is to bitch and moan.

Really? That’s funny, I’m fairly familiar with the Rocky’s “Churchill Files,” and I don’t recall mention of any such thing. See, the lack of a professional genealogist was one of those omissions so glaring, so striking, so wonderful, that I almost wept when I saw it. Not only did it call into question the Rocky’s entire methodology, the only thing it proved was the depth of the sewer John Temple and Vincent Carroll were willing to swim in.

And, Noj, Jim Paine already ran your line of shit on me, claiming that the genealogy he’d dreamed up had been vetted by a professional who preferred to remain nameless. That would kind of speak volumes in itself, even if one were tempted to believe Mr. Paine, wouldn’t it? That the Rocky couldn’t find a single “member of the Association of Professional Genealogists” to attach their name to the thing? They’re not exactly a rare breed. One would almost be tempted to wonder why. I mean, if there were any chance Mr. Paine weren’t lying through his teeth. Just like Mr. Vigil.

Anyway, since you’ve made the claim Mr. Vigil, please, name the genealogist in question. I’d love to hear it. But if you can’t, do shut the fuck up.

Oh, and since we’re on the subject, anyone catch the whopper in Westword’s latest article about the Try-Works?

Try-Works has demonstrated just as much resolve when going after perceived enemies, as Rocky writer Charlie Brennan understands. In 2005, after the site spent weeks ripping Brennan’s coverage of Churchill, a Try-Worker got hold of sometimes flirtatious, often embarrassing e-mails the reporter sent to a woman he may or may not have thought was an American Indian Movement source and began posting them in serial fashion. Before long, Brennan vanished from the Churchill beat. He refers questions about the move to Rocky editor/publisher/ president John Temple, who characterizes it as a mutual decision designed to avoid any perception of bias.

Keep reading.

Nice to see you working to avoid “any perception of bias,” Mr Temple. Funny how employing two openly hostile bloggers with no documented expertise whatsoever in genealogy as genealogical experts slipped under your editorial radar.

I’m starting to think you’ve been peddling horseshit so long that you’ve become a bit addled by the fumes. I recommend you find a new line of work while you still have two brain cells left to rub together.

Oh, and not that I mean to crow or anything, but how are the layoffs going? Down to just you and Vincent Carroll yet? Given the rabidly pro-Capital stance you and Mr. Carroll have adopted, there’s a grand irony in that your rag seems just a little less profitable than, well, Enron.

Anyway, keep up the good work. The way your company’s hemorrhaging money, the only thing worth reading anymore are the obituaries. You know, in case that chronic racist wasting away disease turns out to be fatal.

After I posted the list of quotes on blood purity and extermination from T. Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West, Charley Arthur rightly pointed out the similarity between Roosevelt and Rocky Mountain News exterminationist, Vincent Carroll.

Nor did it take Mr. Carroll long to make the connection explicit. This from Tuesday’s On Point.

To be sure, there is a good argument against the bill authorizing ethnic heritage license plates, although not one that Tupa may be disposed to make. It goes to a worry expressed by Theodore Roosevelt more than 90 years ago.

“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all,” he said, “would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans . . . each preserving its separate nationality . . .”

It’s one thing for Americans to have pride in their roots and to express it occasionally by way of a parade or folk festival. It’s quite another - the word “overkill” comes to mind - for them to trumpet their tribal membership literally everywhere they go.

House Bill 1120 has been approved by the full House and a Senate committee. After all, who wants to say no to professional ethnics?

Other than TR, of course, but his kind have passed.

Keep reading.

Yes, Roosevelt has passed. Though, unfortunately his insane brand of imperialism and racialism remains. Especially in the halls of the Rocky.

That said, it might behoove Mr. Carroll to actually read the rest of the text of the 1915 speech he’s quoting. That it’s a favorite among anti-immigration types speaks more to the lack of familiarity with Mr. Roosevelt exhibited by that gaggle of morons than anything else. See, the speech winds up with a fairly fiery indictment of everything Mr. Carroll stands for: i.e., unchecked corporate power.

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery.

Keep reading.

As my dear old grandfather used to say, even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Vincent Carroll’s pissed off at the Cherry Creek school district. Seems they’ve been reading his mail.

Caplis and Silverman’s too.

If my “violent imagination” makes all of Ethnic Studies an intellectual slum, what’s this make of Denver talk radio?

(And I won’t even get into the Denver Archdiocese.)

Unlike that of, say, Vincent Carroll and the rest of the MSM.

Hell, nice to know he’s reading.

And call me crazy, but I’m betting the reason he didn’t want to dignify the site by printing its name might have more to do with some of his own rag’s dirtier tricks, not to mention good-buddy Senate-candidate Dan Caplis’ proclivity for filing junk lawsuits in hopes of quashing stories he doesn’t like.