The Try-Works

The Valve is one of a very few websites/blogs that I read pretty much daily (and, one of the ones from which I poach a good portion of my links, as fellow readers probably know).  It’s the place to go if you’re looking for lively cultural commentary, knockout literary musing, and, always. a good, smart brawl in the comments.

So, needless to say, I was all too happy to see this post.

Sometime in early 2009, the Denver District Court will begin to hear testimony in Ward Churchill’s lawsuit against the University of Colorado.

It will be a very different national political climate than the one in which Churchill’s reference to Hannah Arendt’s classic study of the banality of evil*, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) set in motion events that led to his termination on charges of “plagiarism” and “research misconduct.”

The processes of shared governance at the University of Colorado’s flagship campus will themselves be on trial. The result may raise questions about the integrity of those processes not just at UC, but at many other campuses with similar (or lesser) degrees of faculty participation in decision-making.

My own views** are consistent with those of the national American Civil Liberties Union, and Eric Cheyfitz, Cornell’s Ernest I. White Professor of American Studies and Humane Letters.

Cheyfitz, who examined the investigating committee’s report and testified about it before a UC panel, concluded that the charges were “fabricated” and “fundamentally baseless,” and flow from “problems in the investigating committee’s own flawed scholarship.”

The “research misconduct” charge is that Churchill didn’t provide enough evidence relating to his account of the origins of a 19th century smallpox epidemic. Whether or not one agrees with Churchill’s account, I found in reading the investigators’ report that I had to share Cheyfitz’s opinion that “what is properly an academic debate about the relationship of Native peoples to United States history was turned into an indictment…. The research misconduct charges disappear when you start looking at them closely.”

The use of the “research misconduct” charges to discredit Churchill should be particularly troubling to all of us–as Churchill supporters made clear by promptly filing “research misconduct” charges against the investigating committee, using the same standards for “misconduct” that they employed against him (and which future observers may well find more convincing!)

The “plagiarism” charges are 1) that the prolific Churchill cited articles that he had ghostwritten, 2) published a piece in which a co-author’s name was omitted by an editor and 3) copyedited a piece in which another person, unknown to him, had plagiarized.  Of course there can be serious disagreement about these choices and the degree of personal responsibility that Churchill bears for them.

But the plain fact is that neither the investigating committee or the appeals panel felt that they merit dismissal.  And it’s fairly clear that neither committee was stacked in Churchill’s favor.  Indeed, the constitution of the committees will likely represent a key element in the lawsuit.

What I like about Cheyfitz’s analysis, as reported by Daniel Aloi for the Cornell Chronicle, is that it connects the elements of political retaliation in the case to the climate of intellectual fear produced by the larger attack on tenure and faculty self-governance under corporatization:

Keep reading.

Given the editorial bent of this site, you can probably imagine how fucking amusing I found this.

An ethics group has filed a complaint accusing Republican Jim Geddes of ducking campaign-finance laws in his run for a CU regent seat that’s highly coveted by conservatives.

Colorado Ethics Watch, a nonpartisan legal watchdog group, filed the campaign-finance complaint Wednesday with the Colorado Secretary of State’s Office, saying Geddes’ campaign hasn’t filed two sets of contribution and expenditure reports that were due May 1 and June 2.

Geddes, a trauma surgeon from Sedalia, could face late fees exceeding $4,000, and critics question whether he’s committed to CU’s mission to be open and accountable to the public.

Geddes’ campaign could not be reached for comment Thursday after repeated attempts.

Geddes is the lone GOP candidate for the Republican-heavy 6th Congressional District, which blankets Douglas, Arapahoe and Elbert counties. He will face Democrat AJ Clemmons.

CU Regent Paul Schauer, R-Centennial, last month said he wouldn’t seek re-election — an announcement that came amid complaints from conservatives that he was ideologically soft. Schauer, managing director of the Colorado Ready Mixed Concrete Association, has said he is not running to defend his seat because he’s busy changing occupations.

Some observers speculate whether a stricter conservative on the already Republican-heavy board would give the GOP more power over highereducation in the state.

Split in conservative opinion

Schauer — a moderate Republican who has been a swing vote on the CU board — has been slammed by conservatives for not getting behind the creation of a Western civilization department that was pushed by his GOP colleagues.

Regent Tom Lucero, R-Johnstown, proposed that CU start Western civilization departments on its campuses in December 2006. The board voted unanimously to table the motion, and in January 2007, Lucero asked that it be scrapped, acknowledging shared governance among faculty members, administrators and the board. The Boulder campus offers a program that awards certificates, which are similar to minors, in Western civilization studies.

An outside conservative political organization called Coloradoans for Reform in Higher Education circulated fliers in 6th Congressional District neighborhoods this spring comparing Schauer with fired professor Ward Churchill, who ignited national furor with an essay he wrote comparing 9/11 victims with “little Eichmanns.” The fliers said both Schauer and Churchill opposed Western civilization.

The rest.

I think I’ve done this before, but I’d really like to challenge Tom Lucero to a debate, just for shits and grins.  You pick any single period you think best exemplifies “Western civilization”, Mr. Lucero, and let’s roll up our sleeves, get dirty, and see who has a better grasp of the works therein.  My guess is your knowledge consists of half-remembered quotes from David Horowitz.

Found this at Max Forte’s Open Anthropology, where I have the feeling I’ll be spending an afternoon or two in the near future.

Agreeing with writers such as Ward Churchill, I have been arguing that the notion that the U.S. does not “intentionally” kill civilians in its bombings of civilian areas, and thus is “not terrorism” is not a convincing argument. U.S. military planners know that the bombings will kill civilians, they pre-label the fatalities as “collateral damage” and prepare press briefings in advance condemning the enemy for using “human shields” — that the enemy wants to defend its neighbourhoods is dismissed — and this amounts to a logic of calculated killing, of knowing murder, and thus terrorism. One might quibble about whether the primary or secondary target is civilian.

Keep reading.

Yeah, I posted the same quote last year, but I ain’t found nothing since that better exemplifies the disparity between the horseshit “freedom” Americans like to brag about, and the, shall we say, facts on the ground.

Ward Churchill, adapted from a speech given at the University of Regina.

Truth is one thing, and reconciliation is something else entirely. The two terms have somehow become fused, however, to the point where they usually come out as just one word: truthandreconciliation. Kind of like some other fusions that I’ve encountered in my life — innocentamericans, for example. I had thought innocent was a qualification that had to be earned, and you didn’t just have it by virtue of some national identity. It’s nonsensical, and I would suggest that truthandreconciliation might be as well.

You see, were the truth to be expressed, internalized and acted upon, there might be a basis for reconciliation. People and communities can indeed reconcile within and among themselves, but that process is fundamentally different from the sort of superficial blather of the dominant society which is the primary promoter of the truthandreconciliation process in Canada, especially with regard to the ongoing effects of the system of residential schooling imposed for well over a century upon First Nations children.. . .

If it’s “truth and reconciliation” we’re after with regard to the residential schools, then the first truth we need to establish is that the Indian Residential Schools were not the result of a “misguided policy undertaken with the best of humanitarian intentions,” as they’re often described, but rather a pillar in the attempted genocide of Canada’s indigenous peoples.

This truth is masked, hidden, denied. It’s the official posture of the government of Canada that the word genocide will not be used in connection with the residential school truthandreconciliation process. But genocide is exactly what it was, and until that truth is recognized, reconciliation remains impossible.

Keep reading.

(The following interview was filed by Try-Works reader Romeo Zambaletti.)

Ever since June 25, the trolls over at PB have been busily yukking it up over Ward Churchill’s recent surgery. Just to set the record straight on a few of things said thereon, we dropped in on the Good Professor yesterday. The following interview results:

Try-Works: It was initially reported by Colorado AIM that you’d suffered an aneurysm in your leg and had been admitted to the hospital for corrective surgery. The story was then picked up by Drunkablog and, from there, found its way onto PirateBallerina. So let’s start there. How accurate was the information?

Churchill: Not very, although it’s easy to see how the AIM folks got it wrong. The aneurysm that caused alarm was abdominal. The surgeons got to it through my femoral arteries, however, so the incisions were in fact in my upper thighs. That said, it’s good to see John Martin openly admitting that information coming from Colorado AIM should be considered entirely accurate.

Try-Works: “Noj” has been gloating that your undergoing surgery indicates an admission on your part that you “think Western medical knowledge is superior to indigenous healing.” Do you have a response?

Churchill: Yeah, the argument is stupid enough to have come from Thomas Brown. The procedure I underwent involved the installation of a stint. Stints, as I recall, were invented by the Incas, who had already perfected the necessary surgical techniques long before Columbus washed up on the beach. So, it seems to me that I simply availed myself of traditional indigenous medical practice.

Try-Works: “Noj” also says s/he hopes you had “a nice Chinese immigrant doctor.” The implication, I guess, is that if your surgeon was white… You get the drift. Any comment?

Churchill: That’s even more stupid than the last one. But, the moron can rest easy, since his “hopes” were more or less fulfilled. I don’t know whether she’s an immigrant, but my lead surgeon was certainly Chinese. In fact, believe it or not, her last name is Mao.

Try-Works: Okay, here’s another one from “Noj.” He was positively jubilant about your suffering “terrible tobacco and alcohol withdrawal while hospitalized.” How about it?

Churchill: Ludicrous. I’ve no idea where this idiot got the idea that I’d be undergoing “alcohol withdrawal,” since I’m about one step removed from being a tee-totaler. As to my not being allowed to smoke, well, that’s simply delusional. First of all I was in the hospital for less than 30 hours. I refused to be admitted the night before surgery, showed up at 10 in the morning for the procedure, came out from under anesthesia around 5 in the afternoon, and left the hospital directly from the ICU a little after 2 the following afternoon. I was asleep most of that time, but whenever I was awake, I had a wheelchair available for the express—that is, pre-negotiated—purpose of getting me outside any time I wanted a cigarette. We made 3 trips total during the roughly 21 hours I was in ICU. It was very nice out, so we didn’t hurry. I smoked 3 cigarettes on each occasion, for a total of nine. That’s well below my normal rate of consumption, but it was really all I wanted under the circumstances. Suffice it to say that I suffered no “tobacco withdrawal.”

Try-Works: The basis for the claim about alcohol seems to be that piece in the Weekly Standard written by Matt Labash, wherein it’s recounted how you favor Jameson’s Irish whiskey, and how you and he sat around getting drunk during your interview.

Churchill: Did Labash really say I drink Jameson’s? Damn. He must’ve gotten drunker that I thought. If I’m going to drink Irish whiskey, which I do from time to time, like every 3 or 4 months I have a couple of shots, it’s going to be John Powers. The night I did the interview with Labash was rather exceptional, however. He offered to buy shots of anything I wanted to drink at a fairly upscale Berkeley bar, so I sampled three pretty exotic whiskeys at $20-30 a pop, compliments of William Kristol. Labash himself had rather more than three shots, as I recall, but I expect he’s had a bit more practice in that regard than I have. In any case, he spun a pretty good yarn out of not much.

Try-Works: “Noj” has also been crowing that you “absolutely must kick tobacco” if you “don’t want to die of this thing.” True?

Churchill: That’s just another instance of his having no idea what he’s talking about. The type of aneurysm I had, which is fairly rare, is hereditary in something like 95% of all cases. My biological father died of one at roughly the same age I am now, as did my grandfather. Neither of them ever smoked a cigarette. Get the picture?

Try-Works: “Noj” exults that you’ll have to take a medication called Coumadin for the rest of your life. Is there any truth to that?

Churchill: I’ve no idea what s/he’s talking about, and strongly suspect that, as usual, s/he doesn’t either. Not only has nobody mentioned such a drug to me, but the fact is that I’ve been prescribed no medication at all. Why? Because the consensus is that I need none.

Try-Works: There are more medical questions I could pose, but let’s shift gears a bit. “Mia” claims that you’ll soon be afflicted with “salary withdrawal,” and both “Noj” and “Retired Bill” are concerned about when you’ll be eligible to receive retirement benefits. Care to comment?

Churchill: Sure. My retirement benefits began on July 25, 2007. Since then I’ve been receiving a monthly bank deposit from PERA in pretty much the same amount I was taking home before I retired. As to “salary withdrawal,” there’ll be none, since the university paid me the equivalent of year’s salary in a lump sum during the second week of August 2007. I do have to decide whether to start receiving an additional few hundred bucks a month from Social Security in about 2 years, or wait for the larger monthly amount for which I’ll be eligible in 4. I’ve no worries, either way.

Try-Works: Last question. Jim Paine seems to be trying to break out as a poet. I’d like to read you his latest verse and get assessment of its aesthetic merit. Okay? Here goes, “Well said, Fred.” Whatcha think?

Churchill: Wow! I didn’t know he was capable. Just a bit more minimalization and he may actually achieve an eloquence worthy of his intellect.

For your midweek listening pleasure, a couple of hip-hop tunes featuring your favorite outlaw scholar.

• Break the Trance
• Why We Hot

You can find more info about the music here.

(This is a guest editorial from Grad Student.)

As part of my research for my MA thesis, I was watching a documentary on Indian land tenure the other night. I’m not recommending the film to anyone because it’s too long by half and for the most part deadly dull. Still, there came a point at which I was jarred out of my detail-induced torpor by a completely unexpected scene. There, on the screen, was Arizona Senator/Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain holding forth on how “our long history of exploit[ing] Native Americans [began] with the Pilgrims providing a local tribe with some blankets infested with smallpox”!

I replayed the senator’s remarks three times, just to be sure I’d heard him right.

It occurred to me, of course, that among the other accusations recently sustained by an investigating committee at the University of Colorado against Professor Ward Churchill is that he’d “fabricated an historical incident” by describing very much the same Pilgrims/blankets/smallpox scenario as McCain. The professor’s rebuttal, as I recall, was—at least in part—that, he’d been hearing variations of the story from the time he was a grade-schooler, therefore could not have been its inventor, and in any case saw it as falling within the realm of commonly-accepted historical fact.

For their part, the committee members professed never to have heard any such story—making them, as I heard Professor Churchill put it in a subsequent radio interview, “perhaps the only five people in all of North America who haven’t”—implying that he’d made that up as well. Their report, including a finding to that effect, was submitted in May 2006, at roughly the same moment that Senator McCain was making the statement quoted above.

Now, either McCain had been reading Ward Churchill’s material, and had been sufficiently influenced by it that he was simply repeating information he’d encountered therein, or he’d heard the same stories as Churchill and, like the professor, believed them to be a recounting of historical fact. Either way, if I were Ward Churchill, I’d be calling John McCain as a witness during my upcoming lawsuit against the university.

(Note: This is a guest editorial by Ward Churchill.)

I’m still chuckling over the bang-up job Law Professor did yesterday in ripping the quivering innards out of Jim Paine’s idiotic contention that the Right’s favorite neonazi inebriate, Joe McCarthy, had nothing to do with blacklisting.

For me, though, the real howler in the latest batch of Painian drivel came amidst his gleeful commentary on the “unexpected pleasure” he experienced upon “learning that Hamilton College stopped payment on Churchill’s speaking fee check” back in the spring of 2005.

The source of this interesting factoid? An “exercise in mythology”—Paine’s evaluation—I published in Social Text a few months back. Well, ho-ho-ho.

We can afford to be charitable with this one, boys and girls. Let’s start by setting aside the fact that most English-speaking folks tend to refer to a “speaking fee check” as an “honorarium” (you can look it up, Bubba). The boy may well have been trying, as would even the most half-assed of editorial writers, to calibrate his prose to degree of literacy manifest in his readership.

And, since it’s obvious that neither Fred or Noj had the least idea what Paine was saying, even when he geared things down to the level of “see Jane run,” it seems appropriate that cut the guy some slack on this score.

Similarly, we shouldn’t poke fun at the glaring illogic of Paine’s managing—in the same sentence—to both declare my article to be an “exercise in mythology” and to gloat over what he obviously takes to be certain of the facts recited therein (hint: “factual” is an antonym of “mythic,” Bubba; do look it up).

After all, a pronounced inability to follow a coherent train of thought has been a hallmark of the “analyses” delivered on Pirate Ballerina since day one, and, given the intellectual impairments of it’s audience, the consistently with which it has offered self-contradictory argumentation has proven to be one of the blog’s most attractive features for readers like PhD Anthro and, er, Mickey Mouse.

No! No, I say. A thousand times no!

We must refrain from indulging in cheap laughs, since, as I’m sure we can all agree, they’re far beneath the dignity of the mighty Try-Works. Besides, they’re entirely unnecessary in this instance.

What’s really funny—at least in my admittedly twisted estimation—is Paine’s open endorsement of what, under Colorado law, adds up to a criminal act on the part of Hamilton’s “liberal” president, Joan Hinde Stewart.

Ho-ho. Talk about a fella stomping on his own dick. So much for your effort to pose as a “law and order conservative,” eh, Bubba? At this point, you’re coming off a lot more like some sort of weird cross between Charlie Keating and Glenn Spagnolo in drag (i.e., Spagnolo stripped of both his moxie and his balls).

Ye gads, man, have you no shame?

It gets better. Since Ms. Stewart’s check-stopping gambit was flagrantly illegal, she—or, rather, Hamilton College—did end up paying me the full and duly-contract amount. It also had to pay my attorney. And it was stuck with the tab for all costs associated with the case, which, to be sure, included a stable of sleek—and very pricey—Manhattan mouthpieces retained to try and stave off the inevitable.

That was in the fall of 2005, Bubba, about six months after the low-rent maneuver rousing all those warm and tingly sensations in your grubby little loins. So stop yankin’ on that pitifully undernourished nub you call a “luv muscle” and listen up. Your miniature woody’s already wilted, and I promise that the tale I’m about to tell will not be told in a manner too turgid for your notoriously tasteless sensibilities.

Here goes (ho-ho).

By the time all was said and done, President Stewart—or “Phoney Joanie,” as she was called by those who knew her best—had taken to emitting eerie howls over her cellphone, the result, it’s said, of noticeably spastic bowels, caused in turn by an increasingly vast sense of despair and personal humiliation—dare I say “degradation and defilement”?—that seems to have grown ever deeper—maybe even worse and worse—as the weeks rolled by.

While the onset of Joanie’s malady generated much astonishment among those unversed in such things, it came as no great surpise to who bothered to examine her situation in a rational manner.

I mean, what other outcome might reasonable people have expected to obtain from the facts that she’d authorized the expenditure of roughly triple the dollar amount the college originally owed me, all to prevent my receiving a cent, only to find herself staring in the face of the ugly prospect that she could even wind up being cuffed and jailed like a two-dollar whore for her trouble?

Well, sure, judge, your honor, sir. You bet. I’ll be happy as a clam to press charges against President Stewart. You know me, judge. I’m up for doing whatever I can to preserve and protect the integrity of America’s academic institutions from morally corrupt sleaze-bags like her. Clearly, there’s not a moment to lose. The sooner this wretched woman is in a holding tank, the sooner we can all breath easier about the example being set for our kids. Where do I sign?

The Great Wheel of Karmic Justice having thus begun to turn in earnest, Joanie was reduced to a frantic spate of telephonic grovelings, imploring me to please, please, PLEASE accept her supplications—not to mention a nice fresh check, certified this time and couriered to my lawyer—rather than having her publicly flogged, shorn, and placed in stocks.

How mortifying do you reckon that must have been for someone who’d figured to establish herself as a Heroine of the Right by putting me quite firmly in my place? Ho-ho.

Worse still, at the point she was compelled to figuratively assume that posture of craven submission most commonly associated with baboons (you can look that one up, too), she’d been unable even to secure the usual quid pro quo agreement that the whole transaction would remain secret.

Really, Bubba, long before her prematurely palsied hand put pen to paper, Joanie knew she’d gone and fucked the monkey, big time. Her defeat was, well, total, her bright future as an omnipotent administrator resembling a turd swirling in a toilet bowl on full flush.

Immediately after the check was sent, Joanie’s deterioration became much more conspicuous, or so I’m told. Her slide into the abyss was grim, amazingly swift, and apparently marked by an unremitting series of barks, shrieks, and moans, eventually subsiding into mewls, then gurgles.

Yes, it’s a savage and brutal story, Bubba, even tragic by some estimations. But, what the hell? Veni vidi vici, right?

I hear that the crumbling husk of what used to be the president of Hamilton College has been subjected to an intensive therapy regime involving regular injections of Ibogaine and constant emersion in icy baths for more than two years now, but, alas, it’s been all to no avail.

The prognostic consensus is that Joanie’s condition has become quite intractable, impervious to treatment, as if she’d chosen to enter a realm of true mindlessness, most likely as a means of freeing herself an intolerably anguished situation from which she saw no other possible escape.

As I understand it—although I might be wrong—the last coherent words she’s known to have uttered were, “Oh my god, they’re laughing at me again… Won’t that man ever stop? Please, can’t you make him just go away?”

What she may have meant by that is of course unknown, but they say the look of horror on Joanie’s face when she said it was simply indescribable, and those unfortunate enough to have witnessed her ghastly visage have suffered recurrent nightmares about it ever since.

Well, maybe not…

But one thing is certain: Whatever Joanie’s actual circumstances, she’s got plenty of company. Several of her peers have tried to run similar scams on me over the past three years, and I’ve got framed color copies of their now-cashed checks hanging like so many coonskins on the wall of my office to prove it. Right beside hers. Ho-ho.

There’s a lesson to be learned from all this, Bubba, but I think I’ll just let you sit around and fester for a while, trying to figure it out. You will, eventually. You can trust me on that score. I know about such things, and I doubt you’re going to find it especially amusing.

Editor’s Note: In a remarkable validation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection, it appears that Jim Paine may have at last and no doubt unwittingly stumbled into a useful ecological niche. Hence, we’d like to thank Mr. Paine for the fine job of proofing he did on this article—pro bono, we might add—and note that we have entered the appropriate corrections. This being so, we feel it only fair, since proofing is one of the functions often associated with copy-editing, we hereby reward him for his services by formally crediting him as copy editor. It also seems fair to inform him that, since questions concerning authorship of the article have been raised on PB, the copy editor will be held responsible for any and all plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, misrepresentation contained therein. The basis for assigning such responsibility to a copy editor is of course the bizarre precedent established in the recent Ward Churchill case at CU, heartily endorsed by, among others, Jim Paine.

(Note: This is a guest editorial by longtime Try-Works commenter, Law Professor.)

No matter how often he announces that Dr. Ward Churchill has become “irrelevant,” Pirate Ballerina’s Jim Paine simply can’t stop talking about the man (so, too, PB’s dwindling number of readers, but that’s another story).

Whatever the reason for Mr. Paine’s obsession—anal compulsion? a sexual fixation of some sort?—we should perhaps all be grateful for it, given the richly comical results it often generates.

Take, for example, Mr. Paine’s “analysis” today of an article by Churchill published in Social Text. Therein, Mr. Paine informs us, among other interesting things, that “Senator [Joseph] McCarthy compiled no blacklists.”

This, of course, is an assertion roughly on par with the Right’s current pretense that UC Berkeley Con Law Professor John Yoo’s grotesque distortions of the U.S. Constitution in the “torture memos” he wrote for the Bush regime has “nothing to do with his scholarly integrity.”

Or claiming that Hitler had nothing to do with the Holocaust simply because he never personally ordered it in writing.

In fairness, it may be conceded that likening Mr. Paine to a Holocaust denier is a sense unwarranted, at least in this instance. Far more likely, he simply—and all too typically—had no idea what he was talking about.

By his own admission, Mr. Paine has been prone to confusing the Senator McCarthy whose activities he purports to explain to us—JOE, a right-wing Wisconsin Republican who died in 1957—with Minnesota Senator EUGENE McCarthy, a Democrat and “leftist” antiwar candidate for President in 1968.

Some “expert,” this Jim Paine, similar in quality to those on Fox News who confused the “Mr. Douglas” debated by Abraham Lincoln—a white senator named Stephen—with the black abolitionist leader, FREDERICK Douglas, this week.

So much for the lofty “standards” of the Right.

Anyone wanting to assess McCarthy’s actual involvement in blacklisting might find it useful to begin with the chapter titled “The Academic Blacklist in Operation” in Ellen Schrecker’s fine study, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press, 1986) pp. 265-82.

There are several more good references, for those wishing to delve deeper still. Just let me know. (Sorry, Mr. Paine, but you and yours will actually have to acquire—and read—the books. Mere googling will not suffice.)

So, dear reader, I got an interesting anonymous tip over the weekend about the identity of Pirateballerina clone and anti-Churchill crony, the appropriately named William T. Sherman. (”The more Indians we can kill this year the fewer we will need to kill the next, because the more I see of the Indians the more convinced I become that they must either all be killed or be maintained as a species of pauper. Their attempts at civilization is ridiculous.” — William T. Sherman)

See, Mr. Sherman recently left the following comment on Pirateballerina:

Anyway, I don’t need a committee or a specialist to tell me that the Mandan smallpox blanket claim was fabricated. The claim is illogical on its face, and for some reason, the Churchill rashly gave a recorded interview where he could not point out the evidence in the book he used. The reporters opened the book to the page he cited, and he just hemmed and hawed and got pissed. Squirm-inducing stuff.

The rest.

What’s so interesting about that, you ask?

Well, according to my anonymous tipster, though such an interview did indeed take place, it was never published.

Meaning, it only stands to reason that Pirateballerina’s most prolific commenter is none other than the person or persons who gave the interview, right?

So who gave the interview? Well, according to my tipster, none other than the Rocky Mountain News’ very own ace reporters Berny Morson and Kevin Vaughan. And since Kevin Vaughan is the author of the Rocky’s horseshit smallpox piece, my money’s on Mr. Vaughan for the pseudonym William T. Sherman.

Which would go a long way towards explaining the, shall we say, cozy relationship between the Rocky and the anti-Churchill blogging bloc. (A cozy relationship, it’s worth remembering, that led to such bizarre decisions as the Rocky using entirely unqualified anti-Churchill blogger Jim Paine of Pirateballerina as their genealogical expert.)

Update: the anonymous tip is doubly interesting, in that the IP address indicates it comes from the Rocky Mountain News. Just so you know.

Update II: It’s also interesting that the Rocky Mountain News never published this interview. That in itself, is enough to make one doubt the authenticity of Mr. Vaughan’s account.

It’s a good ‘un.  (Thanks, Mr. Hawkins.)

Via Westword, Max Karson has tried his hand at rap again. It’s bad. Really, really derivatively bad in all the ways that Eminem is really, really derivatively bad: it’s nauseously self-pitying and absolutely fucking idiotic when trying on serious subject matter. (“Keep your dick in your pants and you won’t get diseased.”)

I want to defend Mr. Karson, but this makes it more difficult. Not because the subject matter is offensive, it’s no more offensive than any number of corny super-gangsta rap albums, but because of the limited imaginative scope of the project. My advice to Mr. Karson: read Britton, read Burroughs, read Mirbau, read Bataille, read Krassner, read Genet, read Ballard, read P-Orridge, read Melville, read Thoreau, read Crews, read the Marquis de Sade, fuck, read Eldridge Cleaver, and for Christ’s sake, read Churchill. Not because there’s much you need to take from them, but because you need to know where the edge of the envelope actually is.

I am a dilettantish believer in transgressive literature — and yes, I know, many of those listed don’t fall comfortably in the designation, nor should they — but one must actually transgress. Playing on the now hokey tropes of nineties rap is neither interesting nor challenging. Yeah, it’ll piss off academic middle management suits, but fuck academic middle management suits. One might as well take it upon one’s self to anger chipmunks. Don’t irritate them, soak them in gasoline and burn them in the street.

I love the idea of a school shooting rap from a college student, but I need more than the same shit that’s been rerun on CNN since the Virginia Tech shootings rephrased in the now-cliched terminology of urban hipster understanding. Give me why, to quote Breton, “the simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” Or, if not that, make me understand why flickering fluorescent lights might demand the same.

Enjoy.

(There are some funny lines. For all my criticism, I’ll take this over Eminem any day.)

We are all Eichmann.  And so there is no Eichmann.  Or something.

The Eichmann of the trial—a trial carefully orchestrated by the Israeli authorities and broadcast all over the world—symbolized a virulent threat to Jewish lives which necessitated the existence of a strong Israeli state which could ensure that the Holocaust would never be revisited upon world Jewry. One of the reporters covering the trial, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, saw things differently. Her Eichmann represented the capacity for individuals in advanced technological societies to abdicate their moral and ethical judgment and instead conform blindly to the directives of the state or of mass public opinion.

It is around this time also that another semiotic Eichmann becomes the object of scientific investigation. Stanley Milgram designed a controversial experiment to answer the question: “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices . . . were just following orders?” He found, horrifyingly enough, that nearly all of his subjects were willing to deliver fatal electrical shocks to perfect strangers when ordered to do so by an authority figure.

The latest semiotic Eichmann is the “little Eichmann” which emerged in the mid-1990s when the anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan published an article called “Whose Unabomber?” In it, he branded the Unabomber’s victims as “many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World.” Ward Churchill drew ire when he used the little Eichmann concept to describe some of the victims of the September 11th attacks. To Zerzan and Churchill, Eichmann is the exemplar for a long tradition of technocrats who are unconsciously complicit in mass murder from a comfortable distance.

With so many Eichmanns, each one carrying its own accusations and its own political solutions, what are we to make of Eichmann today? Certainly we are disgusted and angered by Eichmann, but how should that disgust and anger manifest itself? The Israeli government as well as Zerzan and Churchill would have us eliminate the Eichmanns, or at the very least council us not to object to those who do kill Eichmanns in the name of justice and peace. Arendt, on the other hand, places the responsibility squarely on the Eichmanns themselves; it is they who must recover their moral judgment. Milgram, perhaps the least interventionist of the group, would have us find a scientific explanation for the “extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority.” Unfortunately, none of these seem a very promising avenue for us.

All four of the Eichmanns I’ve mentioned do share one thing in common. They are all indicative of a belief that Eichmanns still roam the earth, that even though Eichmann is dead, many more Eichmanns have sprouted up to take his place. To the people behind these multifarious visions of Eichmann, however, Eichmann always turns out to be somebody else.

I propose another semiotic Eichmann to solve this problem: the Eichmann within. Instead of scouring the planet searching for new Eichmanns “out there”, we should be looking at ourselves, at our communities, and at our society. Anyone who pays taxes in the United States, for example, has played some small role in bankrolling the murder of 600,000 to 1 million Iraqi civilians; we each participate—by either our silence or by the ineffectiveness of our protest—in Guantanamo Bay and CIA black sites; many of us are still reaping the windfall of the slave trade. In short, if Eichmann has any meaning today, if in fact the whole terrible 20th century is to serve any function today, it must force us to interrogate the million ways in which we are all somebody’s Eichmann. Furthermore, we must then act to change the situation, because when our time in the bulletproof chamber comes, in this world or possibly in others, we will not be able to say that we were just following orders.

The rest.

Okay, one of you anyway: why I love Ward Churchill’s 9/11 essay, with some Thoreau thrown in.

All in the context of Madeleine Albright, of course.  Don’t miss the fun.

Ishmael Reed on Reverend Wright’s moment of clarity and precision.

Wasn’t Wright conservative when he mentioned just two of the horrendous crimes against humanity committed by the American government? Nagasaki and Hiroshima, attacks that were unique in the history because the Japanese are still suffering from the damaging genetic effects of the war. He could have gone all out as Ward Churchill does in his book A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present (Paperback). He could have reminded them that the West has been bombing Muslim countries since 1911 (see The History of Bombing by Sven Lindquist.) Wright didn’t blame the three thousand casualties world trade center on the victims (nor did he say that it was an inside job, MSNBC’s Willie Geist’s lie). The fact that people abroad might be enraged by the country’s policies is a difficult message for the American public which has been kept in a bubble of ignorance by the media and the school curriculum. Three thousand lives were lost as a result of the American invasion of Panama alone. Rick Sanchez of CNN said on March 21 that some Hispanics warmed to Obama’s speech on race because they remember invasion of Panama and the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile.

The rest.

After his posting yesterday about why Ward Churchill’s scheduled debate with Victor Davis Hanson at UC Boulder has been so abruptly cancelled, PirateBallerina’s head moonbat Jim Paine seems to have gone to sleep at the switch.

That’s a polite way of saying that he’s neglected to inform the lesser Ballerinas that, by this morning, Mr. Hanson—who, it may be recalled, was Paine’s source on this particular tidbit of “All Things Churchill”—had completely changed his tune.

As Hanson’s website now puts it, his April 2 debate with Churchill “has been canceled at this time and we are working on an upcoming debate. Our apologies to Ward Churchill for misstating the reasons earlier.”

Yeah. Right.

Hanson doesn’t say WHO his “upcoming debate” is intended to be WITH. Nor does he indicate who comprises the “we” that he supposedly has “working on” it.

Most glaring of all, while Hanson admits to having “misstated the reasons” for cancellation of the Churchill debate—and apologizes to the Good Prof for the bogus nature of said mistatement—he offers no hint as to what the real reasons ARE.

Churchill confirms that both Hanson and the self-described “paleoconservative” Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Chad Kifer are actively dodging his requests for an explanation.

Let’s face it, kids. The stench of ACTA’s Hank Brown, Bruce Benson, Michael Poliakof, and Bud Peterson—CU administrative heavies, every one—is getting stronger by the moment.

So, too, the sweet scent of a lawsuit.

Some of you may have noticed Jim Paine’s story on PirateBallerina this morning claiming that an upcoming debate between our own Professor Ward Churchill and the right’s erstwhile “intellectual” icon Victor Davis Hanson, scheduled to occur in CU’s Mackey Auditorium on the evening of April 2, has been canceled.

Why? Because, Paine says, “Churchill unexpectedly pulled out.”

Now that didn’t sound quite right, but Paine attributed the statement to Hanson himself, and provided a link to the man’s website. So we followed up and, sure enough, the quoted verbiage appears thereon.

So, too, the observation that the “cancellation” will last only “until [Hanson] can come up with another opponent.”

At that point, we contacted Churchill, who informed us that there’s a wee bit of a problem with what Hanson’s saying, to wit: It’s a lie.

Better yet, as proof, the Good Prof forwarded us the whole e-mail exchange between himself and a young man named Chad Kifer, Director of Program Advancement and
Collegiate Debates for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a rightwing speakers bureau.

While we now have everything from Kifer’s original overture to Churchill on the idea of debating Hanson, to their discussion(s) of the topic to be debated, to the contractual arrangements involved, the following e-mail, received by the Good Prof last Thursday, shows very clearly that the debate was NOT cancelled because Churchill “pulled out” (”unexpectedly,” or otherwise).

What follows is Mr. Kifer’s message, in full:

Dear Ward,

I am writing to regretfully inform you that we have had to cancel the debate for April 2, 2008 at UC Boulder. This is due largely to matters outside our control. I am grateful for your willingness to participate in the program and I hope that we can find another forum that would be more suitable for this dialogue.

Thank you again and I will be in touch with future prospects as they  become available.

Most sincerely,

Chad G. Kifer
Director of Program Advancement and Collegiate Debates
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
800-526-7022
www.isi.org

Churchill also informs us—and has provided a copy of his reply to back up what he’s saying—that he strenuously objected to the cancellation and demanded a detailed explanation as to the grounds upon which the debate was canceled and who, exactly, did the canceling.

He also states unequivocally, in the same e-mail to Kifer, that he himself is ready to proceed with the event, as scheduled, and implies that he is prepared to assert his contractual rights in the matter.

Finally, Churchill says that he’s got several calls in to both Kifer and Hanson, neither of whom have as yet replied.

Stay tuned, guys and gals, because this one’s shaping up to look like more than the usual measure of fun.

The second semester of Ward Churchill’s student-sponsored lectures will take place as follows:

2/26/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 199
3/4/2008     7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
3/11/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
3/18/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/1/2008     7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/22/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252
4/29/2008    7:00 PM  10:15 PM  Hellems Room 252

Michael Roberts is on a roll, checking in with another update about Ward Churchill and the Boulder Daily Camera.

A More Messages blog from January 30 includes an e-mail Q&A with Ward Churchill, who responded to a query about the dropping of charges against one of his supporters over an episode involving Boulder Daily Camera reporter Heath Urie. However, the final section of the communique was temporarily omitted because it made a separate accusation against the Camera that required a response from the paper. With apologies to Paul Harvey, here’s the rest of the story, which deals with the 2005-2006 period when the question of whether or not Churchill should be allowed to continue in his role as University of Colorado Boulder professor ate up huge chunks of newsprint at publications across the Front Range.

The concluding section of Churchill’s e-mail found him responding to an assertion that editors at the Camera couldn’t squeeze in letters or op-ed pieces from some of his most prominent defenders, including the University of Hawaii’s David Stannard – yet somehow space for attacks against him was always available. According to him, this claim is accurate. He wrote that the Camera “simply declined to run [Stannard’s] or any of a number of other pieces favorable to me submitted from scholars around the country, meanwhile finding room to run hostile material on a regular basis.”

“The Camera wasn’t alone on this score, BTW,” he went on. “The Colorado Daily did pretty much the same thing… and so did the Post. The Rocky, of course, was worst of all. The Boulder Weekly was pretty much the only Metro Area rag that even made an effort at retaining something resembling balance.”

In addition, Churchill wrote that a Camera representative told him that, “despite running editorial material about me every single day, their policy was that responses appearing under my name could not appear more than once or twice per month. They did allow, however, that they were aware that this placed me at a rather glaring disadvantage, and that this was undoubtedly unfair. That’s when it was suggested that I write responses under other people’s names, and that they’d run them with a wink and a nod, thereby letting me have ‘my’ say while still maintaining ‘appearances’ (of what was left a tad mysterious). My response to that proposition was to ask why, if they felt material arguing my case [could] appear under names other than mine, they weren’t publishing the material submitted by people like Stannard. I got no answer.”

Clint Talbott, the Camera’s editorial page editor, begs to differ. Here’s his take:

Thanks for giving us the opportunity to respond. My brief response is this: The charge that the Camera declined to publish letters and op-eds favorable to Churchill or from Churchill supporters is completely false.

We strove throughout the relevant time to include letters and op-eds from supporters, detractors and those whose opinions could not be easily categorized. Below, you’ll see a sample of letters from 2005 that defended Churchill’s right to speak, his scholarship and/or his blow-back critique in the “Eichmann” essay.” [This material has been placed at the bottom of the blog.] We also published op-eds from vocal defender Tom Mayer, local activist Ty Gee and instructor Ursula Lindquist that challenged the Camera’s editorial view (and the academic committees’ damning assessment) of Churchill’s academic practices.

For the record, the Camera consistently defended Churchill’s right to make provocative claims about 9/11 victims. His scholarship was another matter, to us, and to his colleagues at the university.

I have no record of receiving anything from David Stannard, and I am not familiar with that name. I know I have received suggested op-eds from [CU sociology department staffer Tom] Mayer (and perhaps others) that were far too long to print. I have not spoken to Churchill since sometime in the mid-90s. So this conversation, if it in fact occurred as he says it did, took place either between one of two former editorial writers, one of whom is deceased.

It’s easy to say we declined to print “any number” of pro-Churchill pieces. It requires more rigor to specify a number; just a wild guess that he did not specify so much as a ballpark figure. Similarly, it is easy to recount an alleged conversation with an unnamed staff member. It is more revealing to name the staffer (which, I’m inferring, Churchill does not do).

We do have a once-a-month policy on letters. And we do not bend it for public figures, even when they are in the national spotlight. I can certainly believe someone here told him that much. Beyond that, however, I guess you’d have to take Churchill at his word.

Let me know if you have any other questions.

Clint

What follows is nearly 7,000 words worth of pro-Churchill material – the sort of commentary that may resurface if and when the onetime CU prof’s lawsuit against the university over his July 2007 dismissal reaches the courtroom stage. By then, Churchill and the Camera will likely have plenty more about which to disagree.

The rest.

Of course, almost all the “nearly 7,000 words worth of pro-Churchill material” comes in the form of letters and open forum blog postings, rather proving Churchill’s point, and Mr. Talbott seems to have included anything that mentions Churchill in any sort of positive light by every letter writer in the last three fucking years.

So what’s missing?

Well, the obvious. During the period in question, the Boulder Daily Camera was giving space to every jackass, lunatic and rapist/murderer who’d ever had a bone to pick with Mr. Churchill. And then, as I understand it, was relying on their once-a-month policy to forbid any sort of rebuttal.

It’d be sort of like me, as a newspaper owner, calling Clint Tabott a rapist on the first of the month, printing his rebuttal, then calling him a child molester on the fifteenth and refusing to allow him to respond out of my sense of journalistic integrity.

An example?

How’s about when the Boulder Daily Camera, riffing on one of my favorite of the local media’s sleazy tricks, ran a Suzan Shown Harjo editorial accusing Ward Churchill of being an ethnic fraud, quoting Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt to that effect.

Think it might have anything to do with anything that Ms. Harjo’s buddies, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt, have a longstanding feud with Mr. Churchill that ain’t got a thing to do with his ethnicity?

That maybe what really gets under their skin is that Mr. Churchill and others in Colorado AIM have been accusing them for about a decade of being involved in a particularly nasty bit of kidnapping, rape and murder?

And that said accusations seem borne out by the fact that one of their cronies has already been convicted of said rape and murder and another one’s been extradited from Canada to stand trial?

Now, don’t you think the Boulder Daily Camera might should give a little space to that kind of information? Even if it violates their once-a-month rule?

Seems like a fair question to me. But, hell, maybe rebuttals as regards that sleazy little maneuver were some of the ones “far too long to print.”

Or, maybe, just some more examples of correspondence the Camera doesn’t care for getting, ahem, lost.