The Ward Churchilling of the Radical Left: It’s OK When Libruls Do It!
(originally posted at Progressive Independent)
“I was determined that my Radicalism should not be called in question.”
—Charles Dickens, 1870
I am a radical. This means I tackle problems at their root: symptoms of fundamental underlying social, political and economic ills are of little concern to me, I am interested in root causes. Accordingly, I have little interest in “fighting the Rightwing”—in discussing their “ideology,” debating their “issues,” debunking their arguments. The Republican base does not interest me, nor do their representatives in government. Their behaviors are merely the extreme symptomatic expressions of more deeply-rooted and widespread ideologies: indeed, symptoms of a society that was once described by the Hungarian artist George Tabori (also a self-proclaimed radical) as “sick.” “America is a sick country that has lost its innocence and must find a new identity,” he said, and he was right.
As the burgeoning crisis of criminality in government becomes increasingly apparent, many Americans are waking up to the tragic truth of Tabori’s statement. America is a sick country that has lost its innocence. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the liberal blogosphere. But, the comfortable conclusion liberals in the ‘Sphere arrive at is: BushCo is sick. And if we can just frogmarch these criminals out of office, preferably bound in shackles, everything will be fine. We will “take our country back” and everything will be fine. America can begin to heal. We can get America back on the right track. What about those of us on the left who never thought America was on the right track in the first place? What about those of us who never needed the wake-up call? Those of us who have always been acutely aware of the Americas affliction?
Was it Santayana who said “the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference” or am I confusing attribution with “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it”? I don’t know: all I know is that I have no time in my life for right wing nutjobs or for repeating the mistakes of the past, and so have (long since) arrived at the happy place of indifference to what the hate-mongers on the Right have to say. From the unhappy place of trying to insure that the Left quit repeating the mistakes of the past, I continue to cooperate with left wing liberals in combating policy issues by writing letters , more letters and more, making financial contributions, signing petitions, attending protests and voting for Democrats as the lesser of two evils—doing everything that is expected of any self-respecting liberal. But, I am not a “left wing liberal” and I am not a “progressive”—I am and always have been a starkravinglunaticradical.
Unlike most of my like-minded friends currently on the path of least resistance, looking the other way when it comes to the way the very same patterns of intellectual dishonesty, social dysfunction, elitist cronyism and the myopic navel-gazing that are symptomatic of the Republican malady-machine also act as a substitute for looking in the left-wing-liberal mirror, I cannot participate in the same “ignore them in bliss”-survival strategy. Because I have my eye on “what comes next.” What comes next, that is, after we have removed this scourge from office?
Seems that every time anyone on the radical left dares to express criticism of the liberal left, the Democratic minions come out like the Charge of the Light Brigade: “Hoorah for the Life of a Democrat! Can’t we all just ‘get along’ and join forces in removing the abomination that is BushCo from office? We’re on the same side for Christ’s sake!” Ousting the Bush regime is a ‘noble cause’ is worth fighting for and it might even be worth casting off the mortal coil of differences in opinion, taste and approach between us in order to achieve that goal. But my concern is not just seeking remedy to the present crisis of criminality in government. My concern is and always has been: the future. Seven generations. From this perspective, I must seriously question whether we really are all “on the same side.”
I was talking to some friends of mine recently about some of these things, and I said:
No wonder a lot of us (radicals) are wise enough to keep what we
really think safely tucked beneath our hats or between our tails. By comparison to what we say ‘behind closed doors,’ most of the shitstorms that ensue from daring to say aloud in liberal communities is polite--sanitized and “civil” by comparison to what so often goes on behind closed doors.
And I asked my friends, in a voice and venue loud enough for the liberal left to overhear the question:
Why do we all just keep smiling and pretending “we’re all the same inside,” pretending we’re all “on the same side,” pretending those crazy motherfuckers are the “sane” ones, the “reasonable” ones, the “civilized” ones, and why do we keep coming home at night to vent ourselves blue in the face behind closed doors: “Jeezus H. Christ, man, and did you see how that whacked out motherfucking piece of shit went off on me when I suggested to that soulsucking, “shamanistic” Wannabee over there that she keep her filthy heart, hands and mind off the eagle feathers, the dream catchers, the cedar, the sweetgrass, the sage—not to mention the drums; and did you see that scumbag sellout, Uncle Tom’s dicklickin’ apple over there and the way he came runnin’ behind her flat little cheezy-caked booty, sayin’ ‘aw honey, that’s one of them bad Injuns, dontcha know—don’t listen to her, don’t let her get you down—we ain’t all like that, there’s good Indians, too, and we like—in fact, we LOVE—your kind.’”
(And to cite George Tabori again: the liberal left's response to these kinds of criticism is generally to engage in "the old Hamletian ploy of dodging action by mindfucking." Anyone interested in the gory details of the mindfuck which elicited that string of invectives is invited to witness the “Stark Wars” fiasco here, and the fallout as it spilled over here, here, and here) in an 8-day classically Rovian onslaught which included vicious defamations of character, a litany of libelous and slanderous assaults not on my screenname “starkravinglunaticradical”, but on the real person that is the author of this piece and many others to which I have since been forced to attach my own name in a belated attempt to defend my personal and professional integrity—all as the liberal left’s way of exacting retribution for the publication of these 2,500 or so words—words which I stand behind to this day exactly as they appeared in their original version and which were well-received by many, not so well by others).
So what’s the point in dragging all this shit up now? Why not just “let it go”? Here’s why: nearly every time I ask just about anyone (especially in academia) why they are not more outspoken in their resistance to the fascism that is no longer “creeping up on us,” but rather hitting us head-on like an out-of-control train wreck, you know what they say? They say, “Well, just look at what happened to Ward Churchill.” I’ve been asking academics and public intellectuals on the far left the same question for quite a while now. And it’s amazing how often I get the exact same answer: “Well, just look at what happened to Ward Churchill.” Radicals be advised: if you cross the Michael Moore-line, the left will not have your back. Au contraire: they’ll be on your back and at your heels like a pack of junkyard dogs. This knowledge then functions as a self-censorship mechanism not only in the academy, but in the liberal blogosphere and in the real-world of political dissent. The left is perfectly willing to eat its own—and it’s doing a heckuva job.
The same thing that happened to Ward Churchill happens to me all the time—though not-- as is the case for Ward Churchill--to the extent that now, when I google my own name, I get nearly 800,000 hits of hate-filled screed attached to it. Not to the extent that my entire career has been destroyed, that I have had to step down from my position as head of the department, that my tenure is jeopardized, and every bit of scholarship I have ever published or produced is being subject to meticulous scrutiny, and I need a police escort for my speaking engagements--as is the case for Ward Churchill. I never sought a tenured position to begin with: I teach as a “visiting assistant professor” and do so by choice, not because it’s the best I can do. I will NOT tether myself to tenure thinking this provides some guarantee of a lifelong position. Because it’s not. How many people do I know who enter this game of academic hazing telling themselves, “Well, I’ll just shut up about what I really think long enough to get tenure, then I’ll come out with it.” But once the noose of tenure is tied around their necks, they rarely do. And the reason, I think, is that they are afraid of being “Ward Churchilled”—by the left, not the right. Who gives a fuck what the right thinks? Anyone with have a brain can get on Bill O’Leilly’s shit list. In fact, anyone who’s not on O’Leilly’s shit list should ask themselves: “What am I doing wrong?” If you’re a full-fledged academic, and you’re not on Horowitz’s list of 101 Most Dangerous Academics, you, too, must be doing a “heckuva job”!
Getting tombstoned at DU, banned from dKos or stalked around the internet by some batshit loony-lefty armed with advanced google skills and too much time on his hands is a badge of honor few bloggers are willing to bear, but since the comportment of posters in places like DU and dKos is beginning to look more and more like Freeperville’s Rovian character assassination machine by the day, taking the heat in these venues should be seen as a noble cause because it’s not OK when the left does it, either.
The left certainly doesn’t want to associate with any batshit loony radicals whose hearts and minds are firmly planted to the left of Michael Moore, “What will the Republicans think!”—and anyone who crosses that line is fair game for the left-liberal smear machine. So the radical left is shit out of luck and left out in the cold: any radical who refuses to “get the hint” and leave the moderate climes of the left-wing-liberal blogosphere on her own volition will be flogged with “hey you fucking asshole, I think you must be a freeper plant—a drunk or a poseur lying about everything from your place of employment to your shoe size and your real political motives.” The radical left knows what to expect. Character assassination. Public defamation. Cyber lynching.
Sometimes I think these left-wing librul bloggers would be better served taking a lexical refresher course than wearing out their tendons on the refresh button. Radical. Just what is a “radical”? Well, I don’t know how other people understand that term, but ever since I first encountered the works of the radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly, it has meant, for me, “going to the root.” And I’ve got Skeats and the OED on my side on this one. Daly, of course, like anyone who seeks to go to the root of the problem—anyone who is not satisfied with toppling the above-ground structures, but seeks instead to uproot the beast from below--became the target of the same sort of character assassination campaign as Ward Churchill.
In the months since this piece was first penned and posted at Progressive Independent, Sydney Blumenthal has come out with a new Bushbashing book titled, How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.
In a recent Buzzflash interview, Blumenthal defends his use of the term “radical” as follows:
When most people see the word "radical," they think that it must refer to something left wing. Some people also may think of it as referring to far right-wing marginal groups. But here we have a president of the United States at the center of power, sitting in the White House, who is a radical.
Why do I call him a radical? I call him a radical because he is undertaking a fundamental transformation of our Constitutional system of government and of our longstanding policies that have been accepted for literally generations. He thinks to concentrate unaccountable power in the Executive. He thinks you alter the laws so that, as Commander in Chief, he can determine, under what he says are wartime conditions, what the laws are, which laws should be enforced, and declare by fiat what our policy should be, even abrogating longstanding international treaties.
This is a long project whose main driver is the Vice President, Dick Cheney. Bush has overthrown a sixty-year consensus on foreign policy. He has exhibited hostility to science that no other president has ever displayed. He has adopted a formal policy of so-called preemptive, first-strike attack that was rejected openly by Presidents Kennedy and Eisenhower. And he has deliberately polarized and divided the country for political purposes, politicizing the most basic questions of war and peace for partisan advantage. Those are some of the policies and politics he’s pursued that lead me to call him the most uniquely radical president we’ve ever had in the White House.
As much as I agree with Blumenthal’s overall sentiment, I am concerned about the ramifications for left wing radicals with the appropriation of the term “radical” to describe the insidious reactionary politics of this regime for those of us who continue to insist that the country is in dire need of radical reform—of going back to the real roots of this democratic experiment and asking ourselves why it has foundered as tragically as it has. Those of us advocating the radical reforms and paradigmatic overhauls needed to halt the downward spin into planetary oblivion that has only been accelerated by the Bush regime, not initiated by it, are likely to be feeling the heat now more than ever.
Bush may be “radical” in the sense that his is indeed an assault on the legal and constitutional foundations of this country, but his “radical” approach does not address the root causes of the problem/s. His radicalism is a reactionary radicalism: it is a radical reaction to “resistance exerted by a body in opposition to the impact or pressure of another body” (that “other body” being the international community, and in ever increasing degree, the American people). If reactionary politics is “a movement towards the reversal of an existing tendency or state of things...a return, or desire to return, to a previous condition of affairs,” then the Bush doctrine is radically reactionary in its desire to reverse the worldwide tendencies to eliminate the totalitarianism that brought the world to a stunned standstill at the end of World War II and to return instead to the previous condition of affairs: i.e., fascist world domination at the hands of the “masters of mediocrity.” If we take the liberal foundations of this country seriously, if we accept the sincerity of post World War II tendencies against imperialism and tyranny (and not all of us do accept the sincerity of these tendencies, based on the “facts of the case”), then the notion of a “rightwing radical” is a contradiction in terms: because a rightwing "radicalism" is a reaction to those tendencies--it is reactionary, not radical. And it cannot ever be a "root cause"--it shall forever remain a symptom.
Blumenthal has just added a new weapon to the arsenal of those who would endeavor to eradicate those radicals who advocate a fundamental re-thinking and re-structuring of the “American way of life” because they know: it is a way of death. It is a suicide mission, and very nearly accomplished.
The most radical question of our times is the same question leftwing radicals have been asking all along: what is the root cause that allows rightwing reactionary politics to emerge? What factors and conditions allowed a reactionary one-party rule to assert itself in the first place? Rightwing reactionary politics are symptomatic of fundamental flaws in the system anchored the foundational principles of this country: these include, but are not restricted to, sexism, genocide and slavery.
With Blumenthal’s interpellation of Bush as a “radical,” those of us concerned with the root causes of these reactionary movements have been backed even further into a corner. Now, all the lily-livered, lying-in-the-lap-of-luxury-liberals who are loathe to being taken beyond the customary limits of their own imaginations to envision a world that is not hurtling headlong into the straits of mutually assured destruction have the imprimatur of Blumenthal to back them up: if we are radicals and Bush is also a radical, then DarkSyde was right, right? Lilian M. Friedberg is a freeper troll. A bona fide Rovian radical. We are the pariahs, we are “life unworthy of living,” we are “fucking assholes.” We are the “vermin.” We must be purged from the ranks of self-respecting libruls, lest the Rightwing smear machine get wind of the fact that the left has room in its “big tent” for the likes of us. We are the people you’re parents didn’t warn you about.
My question for the left is this: as you work to “take back ‘your’ country,” as you work to rebuild the Great Society and wrest it from “radical” Republican control, as you seek to first regain a majority in congress, then to occupy the White House: what is your plan for us left-wing radicals? What are you going to do with us? How are you going to shut us up and shut us down? Have you begun constructing containment camps and Gitmo centers to keep us quiet and quiescent, cyberpadded cells to keep us from posting on your sites? Perhaps you are intending to have us clean your latrines with our PhDs once your character assassination campaigns have succeeded in rendering these hard-earned degrees meaningless by stripping us of our jobs?
And this is a serious question: inquiring minds want to know. What is the liberal-democratic-progressive plan for left-wing radicals? Where do we fit in your vision of the “new America”? What happens to us after the frogmarch? What are you going to do with us?
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