Capitol Ideas/Stanford, Angela, and Me
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS STANFORD, ANGELA, AND ME O ne of the things adults do today that may seem peculiar in the future is hold hands in public. At Stanford University, on the day after the Gulf War began,...
...Oh-ho," a student next to me said to his friend, "authentic sixties teach-in . . . " Also on the panel with Angela Davis were Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, and Clay Carson, a professor of history and editor of the Martin Luther King Papers project...
...They have no alternative if they don't want to end up in prison," she said...
...The panelists sat on stage behind a trestle table by Tom Bethel...
...She quietly took her seat...
...To no avail...
...We heard some beautiful music, we availed ourselves of the opportunity to meditate upon the suffering, present and future, resulting from the outbreak of this war, and when at last the president spoke he was listened to with great attention...
...About 800 students were gathered in the Kresge Auditorium...
...As to the present war, he said we should acknowledge "the legitimate rage of the Arab people," but—and here was the hard partaddam Hussein is no Ho Chi Minh, no Daniel Ortega...
...R eaders will no doubt be relieved to hear that Your Correspondent was not on the same panel as Angela Davis, professor of Women's Studies at San Francisco State University, and vice-presidential candidate on the Communist party ticket...
...Prof...
...Gagnier duly invited late-arriving students to come and sit on the stage...
...The teach-in was duly held, a week after the war began, and, along with Bill Evers of Hoover, I was invited to participate...
...A little Radical Nostalgia here, folks...
...had launched a preemptive strike against a Third World country because it was not in compliance with a string of United Nations resolutions...
...At Stanford University, on the day after the Gulf War began, there was a "nonpartisan community gathering" on campus...
...I did attend her panel, however, which dealt with "lessons from past protest movements...
...Then he repudiated his own sanctions and switched to ofTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 11...
...Here she paused to let the impressive-sounding phrase sink in with the Stanford students...
...She spoke of her work with Toronto lesbians organizing a benefit for "the Mohawk nation...
...1.9 percent black...
...At the end of the session I spoke to Ms...
...I'm a socialist and I really do supportthe redistribution of wealth," Lerner said...
...He was, evidently, obsessed with Saddam Hussein, and regarded the attack on Kuwait by Iraq as unprecedented since 1945...
...But all we were given was a form of what I have heard referred to as 'academic psychobabble...
...This was obviously intended to awe the students, and they applauded warmly...
...She was wearing a black top, mauve balloon pants, circular metal earrings the size of piston rings, and a flamboyant mane of braided cornrows...
...I saw them drop dynamite, I saw them shoot back, I saw them, so this is what was going on, there was a war going on...
...Students at Santa Cruz had told Angela Davis that in opposing the war they "felt disempowered...
...The ex-Green Beret SWAT Squads pouring thousands of rounds of ammunition into the Black Panther party headquarters...
...Above all, I felt a sense of shock...
...Ronald Reagan and the University Regents...
...Here was a large gathering of students and faculty, sitting in their concentric circles with remarkable patience, quietly waiting for the head of our university to say something substantial," she wrote in Campus Report...
...A jury of eleven whites and one Mexican-American acquitted her of all counts...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution...
...Bush is already copiously on the record on the topic...
...Yet this is what "a growing number of people feel," she went on...
...Lerner self-deprecatingly noted that "when I was sitting in prison that didn't sound so great...
...The neoconservative columnist Charles Krauthammer pointed out a few weeksbefore the war began that the U.N...
...And as I told the Stanford students, liberals should be more wary than they are of international organizations like the U.N., especially when they legitimize preemptive strikes on small countries because they might one day grow stronger...
...After her acquittal and a fundraiser at Madison Square Garden she joined the Communist party and traveled to the Soviet Union, where, by one account, "she was accorded a heroine's welcome...
...The Soledad Brothers...
...In retrospect, Bush's policy resembled a classic "bait and switch" operation...
...Thoughts and beliefs, of course, need not be coupled predictably with other thoughts and beliefs...
...She looked younger than her forty-seven years...
...It is a mockery of that appropriate response to attempt to diffuse it...
...The Strike Committee at UCLA...
...Regenia Gagnier, professor of English, was the moderator...
...First he used the presidential war-making powers to put in sanctions and a defensive force...
...A "major Teach-In" was called for, she concluded—not at some vague time in the f uture but now...
...The truth or falsity of arguments is not determined by those who make them...
...Robert Gregg, Dean of the Chapel, wearing a navy blue blazer, with no tie and a white shirt unbuttoned at top, was holding hands with the university president, Donald Kennedy, who was wearing coat and tie and a yellow ribbon tied around his left bicep...
...A petition was meanwhile making the rounds, expressing "outrage" over the University's "dismal record on affirmative action for faculty...
...Prof...
...But Hussein was more bank robber than "courageous socialist redistributionist...
...The war was also launched under the protective cover of "collective action" provided by the United Nations...
...If America is to prevail in the world, we must do so by example, not by force...
...Kennedy said that different beliefs and convictions can lead to similar feelings, and so, when considering the Gulf War, "the first thing to ask your fellows is not 'What do you think?' but 'How do you feel?' " That may be a sign of our times—the prescribed subordination of thought to feeling...
...A crowd of about a thousand students and faculty held hands in the Inner Quad and faced a potted olive tree...
...deadline that many congressmen recognized that anything else would lead to national humiliation at so late a date...
...He received a standing ovation...
...Gagnier omitted the Communist party association but noted that in 1970 Angela Davis was charged with murder (of a judge in the Marin County Courthouse), and was once "on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List...
...Carson was talking about Americans killing Europeans in World War II and since then killing people of color, when Angela Davis made her late entrance...
...In our day," she went on, "we didn't even have that language...
...In order to deal with this problem, she noted, "we have to develop a class analysis in a way that we didn't" in the sixties...
...policeman...
...Levertov expressed her "deep disappointment" with Kennedy's speech...
...The U.S...
...She, too, stressed feelings, but appended a call for something more instructive...
...Having been caught robbing the bank, he had cunningly tried to pass himself off as Robin Hood...
...C o, said Arnold Beichman, my old interlocuter at the Hoover Institution, how come you are associated with people like that...
...The suggestion was that great progress has been made in surprising ways...
...The pilot said over the intercom: "We've just heard that the bombing has begun in Iraq...
...In a very sophisticated address, he signaled his support for the war, yet retained the affection of the students—most of whom (but by no means all) seemed opposed to it...
...Why not just say that race is not a relevant consideration in discussing the war...
...Ostensibly she raised certain issues, but in reality she was saying: Hey kids, I was no mere onlooker in those heady days...
...Israel-bashing" should be "rejected," and above all the conflict won't fit "the old categories of the left...
...In its long-run consequences, smashing a small and distant country which did not and does not constitute a threat to our interests cannot be good for the United States...
...Native," evidently, has gone the way of "Indian...
...The Stanford students seemed impressed by this eyewitness testimony...
...You can say, 'So do I, let's start from there.' " A few days later, English professor and poet Denise Tom Bethel...
...I agreed with some things that were said at the teach-in and disagreed with some things...
...fense...
...M ichael Lerner, who was wearing a yarmulke, was introduced as the former chair of Berkeley SDS, once indicted as a member of the Seattle Seven, and described by J. Edgar Hoover as "one of the most dangerous criminals in America...
...There has been nothing like this since World War II," he told David Frost...
...And so on...
...Perhaps also it is a strange ordering of priorities at a leading institution of higher learning...
...All in all, trying to end the war involved "complex realities," Lerner said...
...Hussein "should be stopped," but he added that we also should "stop the ground war before it starts...
...She was too flippant, self-preoccupied, and her talk was mainly an exercise in radical name-dropping...
...Academic tenure, no doubt, has preserved the white male "power structure" intact...
...Top this if you can...
...I'd heard the news that the war had begun a few seconds al-ter we touched down at San Francisco airport...
...This is correct, but we should be wary of getting into wars under false pretenses...
...At present, apparently, the Stanford professoriate is: 88 percent male...
...Perhaps Angela Davis and I agree on that point...
...5.2 percent Asian...
...of speaking to stu10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 dents at Santa Cruz, and prisoners in San Francisco ("the more prisons, the more the overcriminalization of our community...
...Prof...
...We were advised to be sensitive and tolerant to each others' feelings, to be mutually 'supportive.' That is all very well, but it is not enough...
...No doubt there will be new revelations about President Bush's inner thoughts, but they won't add a great deal to what we already know...
...After the session I participated in, a (medical) student came up to me and wondered what he would tell his kids, two or three decades from now, about how the war started...
...At the first jam-packed event a professor urged students to come up and sit on the stage...
...Frequently heard was the conspiratorial claim that the military build-up and war were a calculated White House and Pentagon response to impending military budget cuts...
...So, she concluded, "you have to lead us...
...Davis briefly while she was still on the stage...
...Her style throughout the session was not that of the serious Communist, however...
...and of her "personal revulsion" at seeing this black chairman of the Joint Chiefs—why, her mother had been at Colin Powell's wedding...
...I told him I thought this was not the right way to look at the question—secret minutes, classified documents, and so on...
...Implicit in the talk was the idea that our feelings would include sadness, apprehension, worry—but outrage...
...Surprisingly enough, the university has "failed to keep any statistics on the employment of people with disabilities, and gays & lesbians...
...Carson was talking about: "Struggle to eliminate racism .. . struggle to eliminate war . . . struggle for social justice . . . time for struggles for justice and freedom . . . " He also said that he "wouldn't put the task of THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1991 9 achieving a New World Order in the hands of the United States government," and I agreed with that...
...Nothing of this moral importance...
...The lesson of Munich...
...If we didn't strike now, when it was still weak, we had been repeatedly told, we would only have to strike later, when it was stronger...
...He still retained his enthusiasm for the sixties, with the following caveat: "We saw Americans as evil people rather than deeply scarred as a result of growing up in the capitalist system...
...All this made it "problematic" to bring the troops home now...
...2.1 percent Latino...
...covered with plain white paper, three microphones, and bottles of Evian mineral water...
...He was holding hands with a senior student, who was wearing blue jeans and a yellow ribbon around her left bicep...
...Translation: We should continue the air war...
...In her introduction, Prof...
...Or am I just growing older...
...He added right away that we would probably know by then because at that point the relevant documents would surely be declassified...
...Congressional authorization was narrowly given, but probably only because the vote was so close to the U.N...
...They seem so young and innocent, these students today...
...Feelings of outrage were not mentioned...
...Often the answer will be, 'I feel scared, I feel anxious, I feel troubled, I feel concerned,' " Kennedy continued...
...More "diversity" was sought—l'in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and scholarship...
...Angela was educated at Brandeis and the Sorbonne...
...90.8 percent white...
...should not be the "primary policeman" in the area, "we do need a policeman, a U.N...
...I really don't mind...
...And although the U.S...
...and 0.72 percent "National American...
...The numerous blacks in the military...
...furnished a convenient "fig leaf" for what was essentially us against Iraq...
...Couldn't express the concept...
...She told me that she was still a member of the Communist party...
Vol. 24 • March 1991 • No. 3
