The Key to the Gates
New Hope Journal
Personal Essays and Public Opinions since 1979
_____________________________________________
Part 2: Ghosts Gathering Thickly Around Us
Larry L. Dill's 2001 essay on 911
February New Hope Journal
Full Index of New Hope Journal Essays,
Poetry and photos: 2004-2005
Book length work in progress:
What did you do in the war, Daddy? Notes of a sort of a conscientious objector
As I said at the beginning of this essay, the Ward Churchill affair put me to thinking about my own class consciousness. I recalled how I first learned that I was not a “plutocrat” and I told the story of my father’s own experience with social injustice. My own first essay on 911, “911 and the I and Thou” (written just two months after the tragedy) dealt with the need for compassion and understanding of the “other” in the face of terror and tragedy. On reading Churchill’s essay now in 2005 I saw a different perspective. One in which understanding the “other” could only come from understanding ourselves.
Class consciousness is an unfamiliar term in America outside old socialist circles unless you put it into the folksy vernacular that I did at beginning of Part 1. Writers from John Steinbeck to John Henry Faulk and Jim Hightower have tried to bridge the gap between a folksy, stoic approach to social injustice (like my father’s) and a revolutionary Marxist critique of Capitalism (like Ward Churchill’s) by returning again and again to the American tradition called populism. Ironically, though, because of the denial of the existence of class in America by America’s ruling elite, the American Dream (as the populist “creation story” might be called) has neutralized the growth and development of populism.
Populism in future history books on the late 20th century is more likely to be characterized by the blue collar workers who voted first for Strom Thurmond, then George Wallace and then eventually became the bedrock of the Republican Party that elected Nixon, Reagan and the two Bushes, than it is to describe the grassroots social reform movements begun in the 19th century and then petered out perhaps, in the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
In “On Democracy and Education” (Paradigm Publishers, 2005) Howard Zinn and his collaborator Donaldo Macedo lay out three key factors in what they consider to be the failure of American education (key factors for me in the failure of the American Dream): the failure of educators to recognize and to teach that the American social order is a class system (with all the injustices that such a system entails), the failure of educators to understand and to teach that American foreign policy has been violently imperialistic from its founding to the present (from internal tyranny over Indians, Blacks, Latinos and Asians to tyranny abroad from Latin America to Iraq) and thirdly, that the one class that could stop America’s imperialistic injustices, the working class ( populism not recognizing itself as a class) has been unable (outside of its major gains in the 1930s) to gain control over the American discourse about what is right and what is wrong with the American system.
In “The Hidden Injuries of Class” (Knopf, 1972) Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb conduct a series of interviews with working class families in Boston. They elicit from these interviews an incredible portrait of the interior landscape of the lower class mind in American society, succeeding like Steinbeck, Studs Terkel and Arthur Miller before them in portraying the tortured soul of the working man. The tortured soul I saw in my own father. The tortured soul that Ward Churchill sees in the forgotten American Indian and in the ghosts of the dead children of Iraq which he portrays in his “infamous” essay as riding in on the wings of the airplanes that crashed into the world trade center and the pentagon on September 11, 2001.
At the end of "Hidden Injuries," Sennett and Cobb evaluate their results by comparing the class structure in pre-revolutionary France to the state of class consciousness in late 20th century America. In the Ancien Regime, they argue, class structure was so rigid that it could clearly be called a caste system because members of the lower class were thought by the upper class to be of an altogether different species. If you were born a peasant, then a peasant you would die.
As the Age of Revolution arrived, enlightenment writers like Diderot, rather than calling for the complete abolition of class distinction as socialists have done for over two hundred years, created a flawed alternative to the Ancien Regime by accepting the idea of class as an inevitable consequence of the human condition but arguing that there was no reason why through hard work that a commoner might not rise through the hierarchies of class to a higher position in the social order. This was the American Revolutionary model as well.
This legacy of ambivalence is still with us today, Sennett and Cobb argue, in the American myth that there really is no class system in America because anybody who works hard enough can change his station in life. This myth is what I am calling the American Dream. Sennett and Cobb’s interviews reveal the tortured inner landscape of the American working class who have no choice but to believe in the American Dream or else be thought to have failed themselves and their families. Hard working Americans who fail to achieve the American Dream suffer not only the material deprivation of being poor their whole lives, but they must also suffer the guilt and humiliation of having failed or of always being on the verge of failure. This lifelong anxiety is what Sennett and Cobb call “the hidden injuries of class.”
I have brought Sennett and Cobb and Zinn and Macedo into this discussion of Ward Churchill because I believe that the public rejection of Churchill’s analysis of 911 is directly linked to the ideology that sustains the working class in its efforts to deny its own class injuries by accepting as its own, the views espoused by the power elite, what Noam Chomsky calls the “necessary illusions” of American democracy. Everyone from the highest level elites in American government and industry to the lowest levels of the working classes in this country are taught in school that America is a just society treating all its citizens equally and only involves itself in the affairs of other nations when its purity of vision is needed to establish justice and equality in those nations as well. All of America’s wars have been defensive and just, and therefore any claim that America or any of its citizens could in any way be responsible for what happened on 911 is both false and treasonous.
Only the most obtuse in either the upper or the lower classes is unaware of the obvious disparities between rich and poor in this country, but the lower classes, locked inside the American Dream, are loathe to abandon the myth that is foisted upon it by the power elite, lest they falter in their quest to move up the ladder of social and economic success.
Churchill’s essay on 911 proceeds on the assumption that his readers understand that the American Dream is based on false pretenses and the lies we were taught in school. He wants to move quickly beyond this recognition to the stages of recovery and reconciliation that might lead to America’s redemption.
Though Churchill’s career and his reputation are being destroyed because he compared financial technicians in the World Trade Center to Adolph Eichmann, little attention has been paid to the fact that in the larger context of his essay Churchill is trying to compare American atrocities to German atrocities because what the German people have attempted to do in the aftermath of World War II is to understand the elements of social dysfunction that made Nazi Germany possible. Germany was not some savage land. In many ways Germany was at the pinnacle of Western Civilization just like America is now. This fact, Churchill argues, should not go unnoticed.
Churchill looks to the writings of German moral philosophers Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers for clues to understanding what Arendt calls the “banality of evil.” In 1945 Jaspers proposed a “schematic of culpability,” which Churchill sees as a useful beginning for Americans who want to go beyond jingoism and denial of the truth of 911 to some understanding of its historical antecedents. Someone is responsible for 3,000 dead on 911. But someone is also responsible for 500,000 dead children in Iraq in the immediate decade before 911, Churchill argues. Who is it? Churchill clearly believes it is us. But who is us? All of us or part of us? Is it just the government? Or is it the corporations? Where does the ordinary man fit in? Who is ordinary? Is a soldier guiltier than a stock broker? Or are they both guilty? Or is neither one? “Such issues,” Churchill says, “must be faced straightforwardly, without dissembling, if Americans are ever to hold rightful title to the ‘good conscience’ they’ve so long laid claim to.”[10]
I began this essay by saying that the Ward Churchill story made me think about my own contempt for the “system,” and my parents’ own deep ambivalence about class status in America. I was concerned that there was some connection between my parents’ career choices (both growing up on dirt farms in the depression and then becming low level civilian workers on US military bases in San Antonio) and the American hegemony in the world that has led ultimately to Ward Churchill’s idea that the chickens eventually came home to roost on September 11, 2001 (perhaps the very same bantam chickens my father once owned that froze to death during the great depression).
I have tried to portray Churchill fairly in all his unwieldy bluntness. I have tried to find evidence apart from his (which I believe I found in Richard Sennett and Howard Zinn and others) that Americans, rich and poor, live in a fairy tale world called the American Dream, and to wake up from that dream is going to take what Churchill himself calls, a “most thoroughgoing reconstruction of American history, and thus a complete resignification of the codes of meaning and value residing within it.” [11]
As I write this in March, 2005, Ward Churchill’s fate at the University of Colorado hangs in the balance. He has been accused in the past few weeks of everything from plagiarism and art fraud to impersonating an Indian, faking his military records, threatening his colleagues and browbeating his students, to terrorism and high treason. Few men in American history have been able to achieve such infamy in such a short period of time with so few words (and, I might add, so little cause).
Ward Churchill has committed the unforgivable sin against the American Dream. He has told America the truth about itself with the arrogance of the prophet Jeremiah. And like Jeremiah he will pay for his frankness. For those of us with ears to hear, though, he has made us think.
The University of Texas professor Robert Jensen is one of the few intellectuals in America to speak out in Churchill’s defense, not only for his right to speak, but for the rightness of his core assertions. But as forcefully as Jensen defends Churchill, he is equally forceful in suggesting that the loved ones of those who died on 911 might be in need of condolence from the very Jeremiah who has brought America’s truth to the surface.
I went to Ground Zero in New York 3 months after 911. I took my children there. The smoke and the smell of death were still present. And we grieved for all the souls who perished there: those who worked in the twin towers, those captives in the planes that crashed, and the passersby. All were innocent as far as we were concerned. All collateral damage. As collateral as the 500,000 children Ward Churchill rightly claims we Americans killed in Iraq. And the millions more in America’s bloody history.
When George Joe interviewed Churchill for "Indian Country" on March 18, 2005, Churchill showed the reporter a card he had received from the mother of a fireman who died at the World Trade Center. ''There's no pain quite like it. I believe it deeply that Iraqi and Palestinian women bear the same pain when their children are violently killed," the card read.
''She got it," Churchill intoned. "So that is what I was after. If the mother of one of the victims can get it, God damn it, anybody can.''
We don’t use suicide bombers in the west. And if you would believe our leaders, we don’t bomb civilian targets. But Ward Churchill is not the first person to point out that America’s cumulative collateral damage is greater than that of any other nation in the history of the world. It is something to be ashamed of and it is something to grieve, and as I believe Ward Churchill might phrase it, it is something that it is damn well time we faced up to.
______________________________________________________________
Endnotes for parts 1 and 2 of Ward Churchill, 911 and the American Dream
______________________________________________________________
[1] Marx's Concept of Man, New York, Fredrick Unger Publishing (1961), p.14.
[2] Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development, Monthly Review Press (1942), p.22.
[3] Custer Died for Your Sins, New York, Macmillan (1969). Reissued by the University of Oklahoma (1988), p. 51.
[4] In a brief history lesson before introducing Ward Churchill at his February 8 self defense lecture, One of the co-founder of the American Indian Movement, Russell Means, said of Churchill’s Indian blood,
We are the only ethnic group in the world that has to prove our degree of blood, like the dogs and the horses. It is because we live on America's concentration camps; the 'little Iraqs' called reservations, you know? We also don't have control of our natural resources, and the corporate might has been ripping us off from day one. That's part of the books, and part of the education that Ward has given not only to the university and its generations of students, but throughout the country and indeed, throughout the world. I want you to know that we are forbidden from choosing who are our Indian people, by the United States government. My own twin brothers were 32 years of age, and it was only after the American Indian Movement, and one of the leaders being Ward Churchill in the late seventies, got the right to be enrolled on my father's reservation, where I am enrolled. I wonder how many of Clear Channel columnists and naysayers are gonna condemn my brothers for not being Indian. Ward is my brother. Ward has followed the ways of indigenous people worldwide. If you do not believe so, then go to Geneva Switzerland, to the United Nations office of the working group of indigenous peoples, and you will find out that we as one people in the world, we say, if you know your ancestry, then you are who you say you are.
In the writings of Adolf Hitler, he began his idea of separation by race, in such a preference, by following and reading about the Indian policy of the United States of America, and he wrote in Mein Kampf, or in other writings, that it was a good idea to put people in reservations; hence his labor camps, hence which became concentration camps. And he classified people they did not want, by race. Apartheid South Africa, in 1964, passed the Bantu Development Act thirty years after the United States government passed the Indian Reorganization Act. The act that institutionalized apartheid, by race and degree of blood, in South Africa was literally copied from the Indian Reorganization Act of the United States. Both of those governments no longer exist, and you have these corporate minions from Clear Channel and the corporate media telling us who is our Indian leaders! Telling me that my brother is not an Indian! Because he hasn't been adequately registered.
[5]The original essay, "Some People Push Back: on the Justice of Roosting Chickens" is available in various places on the internet. One is www.darknightspress.org.
[6] Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, New York, Henry Holt (2003), p. 191-192. The reference by Chomsky to Heinrich Himmler is a quote from Charles Maechling who Chomsky says led US counterinsurgency and internal defense planning from 1961-1966. Maechling is quoted in the Los Angeles Times March 18,1982.
[7] Original essay, op. cit.
[8]On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of US Imperial Arrogance and Criminality, Oakland, AK Press (2003), p.17. The "categories of denial" quote is from Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War, Anchor Books, New York, (1993).
[9] Ibid, p. 19-20.
[10] Ibid, p. 22.
*Title of Part 2 inspired by a line in a poem by Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick, Appalachian State University.
Ward Churchill, 911 and the American Dream
Part One: The Crucible of Ideas
911 And the I and Thou
Back Home
all rights reserved
www.newhopejournal.com
address comments to:
larrydill@newhopejournal.com