virus: The End of Freedom: Enforced Conformity

From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2003 - 17:37:29 MDT

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    Enforced Conformity

    Source: The Progressive (http://www.progressive.org/july03/roth0703.html)
    Authors: Matthew Rothschild*
    Dated: 2003-06 [2003-07 Issue]

    Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times who shared one of the
    paper's 2002 Pulitzer Prizes, was the commencement speaker at Rockford
    College's graduation ceremony on May 17. Hedges, the author of War Is a
    Force That Gives Us Meaning, which was a finalist for the 2002 National Book
    Critics Circle Award, dispensed with the usual pap on pomp day and got right
    down to serious business.

    "I want to talk to you today about war and empire," he began. (We reprint
    his speech in its entirety, along with the hostile crowd reaction, on page
    24).

    "Not long after I began speaking, a significant segment of the crowd began
    to shout me down," Hedges tells The Progressive. "They were yelling, 'God
    bless America,' 'Send him to France,' 'Get him out of here,' stuff like
    that."

    Twice during Hedges's eighteen-minute speech, his microphone was unplugged.

    Some people even charged the speaker's stand. "People were climbing on the
    platform," Hedges says. "It was threatening, and a little bit disturbing."

    He had to abbreviate his remarks, and when he finished, he was lustily
    booed.

    Rockford College in Illinois is 157 years old. "Our vision: to be Jane
    Addams's college in the twenty-first century," its website states,
    proclaiming its values of "Liberal Arts and Citizenship." (Jane Addams
    graduated from Rockford College in 1882.)

    A few days after commencement, Rockford College President Paul Pribbenow
    apologized--not to Hedges, but to the students. In a May 21 letter to
    Rockford College graduates, Pribbenow wrote: "Unfortunately, our
    commencement address this past Saturday did not focus on your educational
    accomplishments and the challenges you will meet in the future. . . . Our
    speaker presented his ideas in a style that suggested the day was about him
    and not you. For this, I am very sorry."

    Hedges told the Rockford Register Star, "You don't invite a speaker like
    this if you want 'Climb Every Mountain.' "

    On Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!, Hedges reflected some more on his
    experience. "Crowds, especially crowds that become hunting packs, are very
    frightening," he said. "As I looked out on the crowd, that is exactly what
    my book is about. It is about the suspension of individual conscience, and
    probably consciousness, for the contagion of the crowd--for that euphoria
    that comes with patriotism. . . . That kind of contagion leads ultimately to
    tyranny. It's very dangerous, and it has to be stopped. I've seen it, in
    effect, take over other countries. But of course, it breaks my heart when I
    see it in my country." Hedges told Goodman that the campus security guards
    were worried about his safety, so they "hustled me out" while Pribbenow was
    "handing out the diplomas."

    Hedges's speech also has gotten him into trouble with higher-ups at the
    Times. They are "looking into whether I broached the protocol in terms of my
    very pointed statements about the Iraqi war," he told Goodman. "That's
    something that makes them uncomfortable."

    "Chris Hedges's commencement speech at Rockford College did not adhere to
    the guidelines set forth in our ethics code," says Catherine Mathis, vice
    president of corporate communications for the New York Times Company.
    "Specifically, he engaged in public discourse concerning his political or
    personal views."

    What happened to Chris Hedges is only a sample of the goon squad style that
    is so in vogue today. Rightwing talk radio ran an apparently successful
    effort to end Danny Glover's ad campaign for MCI because of his anti-war and
    anti-Bush views. Sean Penn and Janeane Garofalo may have lost acting jobs
    for their outspokenness. Susan Sarandon was supposed to speak to the United
    Way in Tampa on the uncontroversial topic of women in volunteerism, but the
    United Way rescinded her invitation. She and her partner, Tim Robbins, were
    disinvited to Cooperstown to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of Bull
    Durham. And everyone has heard about the Dixie Chicks.

    Less well known, however, are the incidents of neo-McCarthyism that affect
    noncelebrities. Some of these make the national news, and some don't.

    You may have heard about Stephen F. Downs, the chief lawyer for New York
    State's Commission on Judicial Conduct, who was arrested on March 3 for
    refusing to take off a peace T-shirt in a mall near Albany. The shirt said
    "Peace on Earth" on one side and "Give Peace a Chance" on the other. He had
    just purchased the shirt in Crossgates Mall, the same mall that ordered him
    to remove it. When the mall's security guards told him to take the shirt off
    or leave the premises, Downs refused. They called the police, and he was
    handcuffed, arrested, and charged with trespassing. Downs pleaded not
    guilty, and the mall later dropped the charges.

    And you may have heard about Bretton Barber, a junior at Dearborn High
    School in Michigan. On February 17, he was wearing a T-shirt that had a
    picture of Bush on it and the words "International Terrorist." "At lunch,
    the vice principal came and said I had to turn it inside out or go home,"
    Barber told The New York Times on February 26. Barber went home--and called
    the ACLU.

    But many stories don't make the national news, and I'm sure some don't even
    make the local news. They simply go unreported: quotidian acts of
    repression. I've been trying to track incidents of neo-McCarthyism since
    shortly after September 11, 2001. And I can barely keep up.

    "A chilling message has gone out across America: Dissent if you must, but
    proceed at your own risk," writes Anthony D. Romero, executive director of
    the ACLU, in the foreword to its report "Freedom Under Fire: Dissent in
    Post-9/11 America."

    "Some government officials, including local police, have gone to
    extraordinary lengths to squelch dissent wherever it has sprung up," the
    report notes.

    One example comes from Iowa, where two police officers and a county attorney
    "threatened to arrest a pair of Grinnell College students for hanging a U.S.
    flag upside-down from their dormitory window . . . as a sign of their
    'displeasure with the policies of the United States government,' " the
    report notes.

    But it's not always the police who do the squelching, as other upside-down
    flag cases illustrate. Two were reported by Alisa Solomon in the June 2
    issue of The Nation. One occurred at Wheaton College in Norton,
    Massachusetts. After seven housemates hung the distress-symbol flag, "their
    neighbors responded by throwing rocks through the students' windows, calling
    in death threats to their answering machine, and strapping a dead fish to
    their front door, Godfather-style," Solomon reported. "Restaurants in town
    stopped serving kids from Wheaton, and bar patrons harassed them. Norton
    police recommended that for their own safety, the housemates move out for a
    few days."

    Katherine Lo, a sophomore at Yale, "also hung an upside-down flag outside
    her window," wrote Solomon. "Several men wielding a two-by-four tried to
    enter her room late at night while Lo was home. They left a convoluted note
    on her door that ended, 'Fuck Iraqi Saddam following fucks. I hate you, GO
    AMERICA.' "

    John Fleming owns the Roost and Coyote's Den, an activist book and record
    store in Alamosa, Colorado. On the day that Bush began bombing Iraq in
    March, Fleming hung an upside-down flag in his store window. Some outraged
    residents complained to the police. "I had a half dozen calls in thirty
    minutes," Alamosa Police Chief Ron Lindsey says. Lindsey came over to the
    store and told Fleming that he couldn't legally have an upside-down flag on
    display.

    "If I take the flag down and buckle under, don't you see what the
    implications will be?" Fleming recalls asking. "Don't you see what that does
    to the First Amendment, or has Bush destroyed that already?"

    "You know, it's inflaming the community," Lindsey said, according to
    Fleming.

    The ACLU of Colorado threatened to sue, and city attorneys quickly told the
    police chief he had no leg to stand on. Lindsey says he based his action on
    a flag-desecration statute. "I thought it pertained," he says. "Obviously,
    that was the wrong thing to do."

    Fleming's nickname, by the way, is Coyote. The day after an article by
    Sylvia Lobato appeared in the Alamosa Valley Courier mentioning that
    nickname and the flag controversy, he found an unwelcome sight waiting for
    him at the office. "Someone went out and shot a coyote and threw the
    bleeding carcass up against the front door of the Roost," Fleming says. "I
    can't get the blood off the concrete. They took the ears off so they could
    claim the $5 bounty. I took it as a death threat."

    Emily Jane Heynen is a tenant in Minneapolis. She had a problem with her
    previous landlord, Eulalia Rohleder, who lived downstairs.

    Seems the landlord wanted to put up a plastic American flag on Heynen's
    porch, and when Heynen objected, the landlord and her daughter, Penny, took
    offense.

    "I told Penny that the American flag didn't stand for something I believed
    in at this point in time, and that I didn't agree with what our government
    was doing in preparing for this Iraq war," Heynen recalls. "She looked kind
    of horror-stricken and called me 'a little commie' and an 'American-hater.'
    Then she said that her mom was not going to like this and that I shouldn't
    let her mom know about this because she would want me to move out. And I
    asked her to not tell her mom, and she glared and walked away."

    Rohleder called her the next day to raise the subject of the flag, says
    Heynen, who works at the Headwaters Fund.

    "She started arguing with me about patriotism and the importance of the
    flag, and she said that Penny and she feel very strongly about it, and that
    I had hurt them," Heynen says.

    Heynen wrote about the incident in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "At this
    point in our history, the flag does not represent freedom and liberty for
    all," she wrote. "The flag represents our government's intent to politically
    and militarily dominate weaker countries to support our addiction to oil and
    our love affair with the automobile."

    Heynen drew the comparison to McCarthyism: "Is this how people who dared to
    dissent felt during the McCarthy era? Be careful what you say, lest you be
    branded a traitor? . . . It is a threat I now face: Comply or get out. It is
    a threat written in longhand on little pieces of paper that often greet me
    when I get home from work."

    She has now moved out.

    "It was the first time I'd heard that kind of anger," she says. "It was
    really a shock that I'd have to censor what I say. It was scary. I was
    frightened by that intensity."

    When asked about the incident, Rohleder says: "Are you for the flag, or not?
    We have a great big flag flying in our yard, and if anyone has a problem
    with the flag, why would they move here?"

    She says she never demanded that Heynen leave. "My daughter just said to
    her, 'Oh, are you planning on moving?' Because like I say, I have a big flag
    out front, and she doesn't believe in the flag. I tried to explain to her
    that the flag has nothing to do with Bush and his Administration. The flag
    is representative of the United States, and anyone who doesn't like it
    shouldn't be here."

    Another tenant that ran into trouble for anti-war views is District 1199 of
    the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees. It was actually
    evicted.

    District 1199, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, got hit by a complaint from
    its landlord, Carroll Ventures, Inc., claiming it had " 'breached the terms
    of its lease by holding an anti-war demonstration,' " Dan Shingler of the
    Albuquerque Journal reported on May 19. "The union local definitely held an
    anti-war demonstration, but it was at the intersection of San Mateo
    Boulevard and Cutler Avenue, and not at its offices."

    "It's kind of scary," Eleanor Chavez, director of District 1199, told
    Shingler. "What's happening in this country? We talk about going to war with
    Iraq to defend freedom. Well, how do you define freedom?"

    One reason for the eviction is that the union local did not respond to the
    complaint in court, Shingler reports. Both he and The Progressive called
    Carroll Ventures for comment but received no answer.

    To be a freethinking high school teacher or student in New Mexico during the
    Iraq War was perilous. On March 11, Carmelita Roybal, who teaches
    ninth-grade English at Rio Grande High School, was suspended for two days
    without pay when she did not take down her "No War Against Iraq" sign.
    Heather Duffy, who teaches art at the school, hung a similar sign the next
    day in solidarity with Roybal, and she, too, was suspended, according to the
    Albuquerque Tribune.

    On March 13, "forty-five students walked out of class" to support the
    teachers, the paper said. The students "were videotaped by school officials
    and likely will be cited for truancy. . . . School police arrested four
    students when they refused to go to class."

    On March 19, Ken Tabish, a guidance counselor at Albuquerque High School,
    was suspended for two days without pay for refusing to take down anti-war
    material he had posted in his office, including a copy of a speech by
    Senator Robert Byrd.

    That same day, Francesca Tuoni, a language teacher at Albuquerque High, who
    is the adviser to a campus group called "Students for Participatory
    Democracy," was ordered by a vice principal to remove a flyer on her
    classroom wall that advertised a peace rally. Tuoni complied with the order.

    Meanwhile, at a third school within the same district, two other teachers
    got into similar trouble. At Highland High, Geoffrey Barrett and Allen
    Cooper "have been placed on leave for refusing to remove war-related student
    artwork posted in their classrooms," AP reports.

    "Barrett, who teaches history and current events, said the student art
    carried both anti-war and pro-war messages, and was created as part of a
    class assignment," the April 1 AP story says.

    Cooper, who teaches English, displayed one anti-war sign "by an Afghani
    student who has had family members killed in U.S.-led bombings in
    Afghanistan, he said," according to the story.

    Cooper and Barrett were suspended for two days without pay.

    Finally, Bill Nevins, a teacher at Rio Rancho High, in a different district,
    was suspended when a member of the student poetry slam club he supervises
    read an anti-war poem "over the in-school closed-circuit TV system,"
    according to Green Left Weekly. "Following the reading, the student's parent
    (also a teacher at the school) was ordered by an assistant principal to go
    home and search the student's room for a print copy of the poem. The parent
    declined to do so."

    On April 18, the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union sued the Albuquerque
    Public Schools and several administrators for violating the rights of
    Roybal, Tabish, Tuoni, and Cooper.

    "There has to be a space for free speech for teachers," says Peter Simonson,
    executive director of the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union. "And we're
    trying to carve out an appropriate space for that."

    Tom Treece could use that space. He taught a course called "Public Issues"
    at Spaulding High School in Barre, Vermont. This spring, he and some of his
    students found themselves embroiled in a public issue.

    It all started with a dialogue board the school hung up to facilitate an
    exchange of views after September 11. The administrators invited students
    and teachers to post their opinions. One day in March, "I posted a little
    notecard-sized paper that said, 'All hail the idiot boy king.' That started
    the whole fury," Treece recalls. Local residents Paul and Norma Malone, who
    have founded a group called Citizens Advocating Responsible Education, wrote
    a letter to the local paper, The Times Argus, that was published on March
    28.

    "It is unrealistic to expect that current world events would not be a topic
    of discussion among students or faculty," they wrote. "But it is quite
    another matter for a teacher to use taxpayer dollars (his salary, the school
    facility, and related resources) to proselytize his leftwing political
    rhetoric and anti-establishment rhetoric. Of particular concern is the lack
    of respect shown in this reference to the President of the United States as
    'the idiot boy king.' We would advise the board and the administration to
    examine Mr. Treece's teaching practices and course materials."

    Superintendent Dorothy Anderson says she asked Treece to take the "idiot boy
    king" note down. "It was in bad taste, it was strongly worded, and it may
    discourage his students from offering an opposite viewpoint," she says.
    Treece complied.

    That did not mollify the citizenry.

    At a school board meeting on April 7, "about three dozen residents" came "to
    confront the school board about a bulletin board they say has been abused by
    faculty promoting an anti-American agenda," The Times Argus reported. They
    also objected to bumper stickers Treece had on his door that said, "Impeach
    Bush," and, "Vermonters for a Bush/Cheney Regime Change."

    Treece says that some of these residents have been calling for his head. He
    cites a flier circulating in town with his yearbook picture on it, along
    with a copy of his "Impeach Bush" sticker, and the words, "We cannot allow
    this kind of stuff to happen in our schools."

    Things really got weird when a local police officer entered Treece's
    classroom in the middle of the night on April 9 with a camera. He convinced
    the custodian to unlock the door to Treece's classroom, and he took a
    picture of a student project that showed President Bush with duct tape over
    his mouth, and the words: "Put your duct tape to good use. Shut your mouth."
    (Treece had students make posters defending their pro-war or anti-war
    views.)

    The police officer, John Mott, told The Times Argus, "I wanted everybody
    else to see what was in that room. . . . Having spent thirty years in
    uniform, I was insulted. I'm just taking a stand on what happens in that
    classroom as a resident and a voter and a taxpayer in the community."

    Mott, incidentally, used to work at Spaulding High as the Junior ROTC
    officer.

    Superintendent Anderson was not happy that Mott entered the school at 1:30
    in the morning to further his own political agenda.

    "I find this behavior, at the very least, in violation of our policy for
    visitors at the school," she wrote Police Chief Michael Stevens on April 16.
    "I also find it disturbing that a police officer would wear his uniform
    under such circumstances, thereby intimidating our employee into letting him
    in the building at a very unusual hour. I question the intent of his visit.
    Why could he not have come during regular school hours? Please look into
    this matter and determine if any ethical or legal guidelines were breached."

    According to Anderson, the police chief told her "he was going to handle it
    administratively." Stevens did not return several phone calls from The
    Progressive.

    On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called Mott a hero and posted the students'
    artwork on the Limbaugh web page.

    "These kids didn't turn these projects in with any understanding that they
    would end up on Rush Limbaugh," Anderson says. "Their parents feel very
    violated and angry."

    Anderson defends Treece's teaching practices. "In the course of his
    teaching, he does present both sides and gives resources on both sides," she
    says.

    But she is pursuing administrative action against him.

    "I can't teach that class anymore," Treece says. After this year, "they've
    removed me from the class."

    Treece is "very upset" about losing this class. "This is purely a political
    move on their part," he says. The controversy has taken a toll on him. "My
    reputation has been spoiled," he says. "I haven't got a lot of rest in the
    last month."

    While the climate right now is not as bleak--unless you're a Muslim
    immigrant--as it was during the harshest days of McCarthyism, these
    incidents indicate a powerful, frightening trend. Today, deeply reactionary
    forces don't need a Joe McCarthy in the U.S. Senate. The hecklers, goons,
    radio and TV talkshow hosts, nativists, and know-nothings in our midst are
    perfectly capable of doing the tarring and feathering themselves.
    [hr]
    Matthew Rothschild is Editor of The Progressive. He wrote "The New
    McCarthysim" (http://www.progressive.org/0901/roth0102.html) in the January
    2002 issue [Hermit: of The Progressive]. He tracks this subject on the
    magazine's website, www.progressive.org, under "McCarthyism Watch"
    (http://www.progressive.org/mcwatch03/mcwatch03.html).

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