Last night’s report about Ward Churchill's court “victory” has yielded a string of comments here on Dissent the Blog that are making me blue.First, Anon suggested that Churchill is the paradigm of a “putz.” That’s a Yiddish word.
Next time, Anon, at least try to be clever. Calling a guy a “penis” just doesn’t make it.
Then "Lynn" wrote in to suggest that Churchill oughta go to Supercuts to trim his “mop.”
Lynn gets points for using “mop.” But then, rhetorically speaking, she dives into ugly muck, ending with: “When he was a kid I know Ward's daddy didn't beat his ass enough.”
Next, Anon 2.0 judges the Ward Churchill matter to be “complex and interesting,” which is promising. The poverty of Lynn’s comment inspires 2.0 to say: “Those folks can really think, can't they?”
I don't know whether to admire or condemn such indirectness.
Next comes “Mackmarine,” who asserts that Churchill is “a rigid, unyielding, unsightly, and worthless piece of coprolite.”
He had me until the last word. Coprolite?
Insult rule #1: if you diss a guy by calling him a coprolite, be sure that people know what a coprolite is. For all that any of us knows, coprolite is some kind of copper cookware.
Then somebody—Anon 2.1—writes in simply: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
I guess Anon 2.1 doesn’t own a dictionary.
That’s when I felt the need to step in. I said, “Could we raise the level of discourse here folks?” It won’t do, I said, simply to call somebody, even Mr. Churchill, “a piece of fossilized excrement” (i.e., a coprolite, which isn't cookware after all).
I put on my Educator Hat. I suggested that there are two distinct issues here:
(1) Did Churchill's dismissal occur ultimately because of his not-ready-for-prime-time views? (Probably--and appallingly)
(2) Is Churchill a good/reliable scholar/thinker? (It would seem not.)
OK, I said. Feel free to opine about these issues. But please offer opinions that go like this:
REASON => POSITION
Not,
SNEER, WHOOP, RASPBERRY then EXCLAMATION POINT
Have you noticed? Right-wingers aren’t nearly as fun as they used to be. They don’t even know that their raspberries and sneerings are only funny among the loutery. What do they hope to gain by depositing their rude bleatings here?
Tell me that!
3 comments:
A coprolite is fossilized feces. Look it up in your dictionary.
Well, the firestorm of ad hominem attacks here is an indication of the general laziness of Dissent readers— not all of them of course. What is really disappointing is that for much of human history people have not been able to speak their minds because they lacked the literary skill, or they were politically prevented from doing so. So, here we are today with constitutionally protected free speech, yet very few know how to use it with the slightest intelligence.
I, for one, think this whole Churchill matter is a waste of time and an obvious instance of scapegoating an academic for holding politically unpopular views. In general, I agree with Churchill's argument in his original essay (that 911 was an effect of US foreign policy), but I have mixed opinions regarding his assessment of the victims of the attacks as "little Eichmanns". On the one hand, we're all technocrats contributing to the production of misery across the globe; that's the American way of life. Thus, the 911 victims who worked in the towers are not different than you and I. Churchill was, therefore, scapegoating them in much the same way that U of Colorado scapegoated him. On the other hand, everyday people engaged in their day to day banality are implicated in such attacks, and this should be the catalyst for a critical discussion of how we have become agents of policies that we neither understand nor have the critical tools to question. But it is this latter point that gets lost in the dumbing down, and the ad hominems of this blog, and elsewhere.
As for his scholarly ways, his writing seems more fueled by rhetorical appeals rather than reasoned argument (not that I'm opposed to rhetoric). It's simply sloppy. But, is Churchill the only one? I think not. Should he have dismissed from his position for this? No, unless one is prepared to do the same to thousands of other academics. Enough.
Chunk, "what the fuck are you talking about" is distinct from "what does coprolite mean." You should be sharp enough to pick up the difference.
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