Specialization has made mincemeat out of the great body of knowledge.
--Camille Pagila
Ethnic Studies has made mincemeat out of the great body of humanity.
--JdB
by Jerome du Bois
While we watch Ward Churchill's money burn --over $6,300 in cancelled fees so far and counting-- and his kite (and frequent flier miles) go down, let me point out four or five characteristics he shares with a local clone of similar sensibility: John Jota Leaños (hereafter JJL), Arizona State University (ASU) assistant professor of what he calls "Xican@ Studies." (I'm not kidding. More below; it's hilarious.)
I refer to, specifically, (1) their similar art backgrounds and styles, (2) their systematic corruptions of the English language, (3) their promotion of the abolition of private property by violence and the disintegration of the United States of America, including literally dissolving its borders --plus (4) a constant hatred of and contempt toward all humanity, even toward those they purport to champion. I will show specific examples of each from each of these dangerous clowns below. They also both have comfortable jobs in big, and intermittently respectable, educational institutions, scarfing up the middle-class money, and they are surrounded by crews of acolyte zombies called "students," who used to think, who used to have minds, but then gave them up to be flacks for these fascists.
Let me take these similarities in turn, beginning with --yeah I know, I left this crap behind, so I'll make it quick-- art. (But I linger on the rest, so bring a sandwich and a cup of coffee.)
According to PirateBallerina.com, a Ward Churchill clearinghouse, he was an "Instructor of studio art and art history at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, S.D., 1975-1976." Dave Kopel of The Rocky Mountain News also passes along this tidbit:
In February 1994, Westword detailed the bitter political divisions in the radical Indian community, noting that the national American Indian Movement accused Churchill of falsely claiming to be part Indian. The article observed that Churchill is "A part-time painter who lost the ability to sell his work as 'Indian art' after a 1990 federal law required Indian artists to prove their ethnic authenticity . . ." (Well, if you can't paint them, you can still talk about them: "Lecturer, American Indian studies, film studies and sociology, University of Colorado system, 1978-1990.")
That's it with the art background. Now: Check out these images at the Ethnic Studies Department where ol'Wardo works. Please, peruse them at your leisure before reading on.
Next, examine JJL's website project page. And here. Compare the style, collages and themes. These guys are taking their crayons out of the same box: dead-ass academic Marxism and boilerplate self-loathing leftism. And they love the blood and guts. JJL has just tweaked it cyber.
As to their corruption of ordinary language, it derives from both Newspeak and the Humpty-Dumpty Theory of Meaning ("A word means just what I want it to mean, no more and no less.") I won't subject the reader to the turgidness of their extended sentences, which is like watching someone knead white bread dough in slow motion --only the titles and phrases of books, articles, lectures, and course titles. Let's start with Wardo, Mr. Insideoutski, who is in love with violence:
"Pacifism as Pathology." Wherein a reasoned, principled political position is redefined as a disease.
"The Demystification of the Assault Rifle." Happiness is a warm gun, I guess.
"Indians Are Us?" Also known as "Indians 'R' Us." Wherein Indians are subjected to --horrors!-- marketing! (Q: Why should they be exempt, when nobody else is?)
"On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality." Includes the now-infamous 9/11 essay, in which the innocent are redefined as guilty, criminal murderers as gallant warriors, and so on.
"Life in Occupied America." Would that then make UC at Boulder, widely known as "The People's Republic of Boulder," a righteous rainbow enclave surrounded by mobs of beige barbarians?
"Speaking Truth in the Teeth of Power: Lectures on Globalization, Colonialism, and Native North America." In which our hero takes advantage of our country's marvelously integrated infrastructure, flying around to various venues collecting speaking fees for preaching to the converted.
"Islands In Captivity: The International Tribunal On The Rights Of Indigenous Hawaiians." At this conference Churchill is on CD saying that Native Hawaiians should kneecap tourists with baseball bats whenever they can. He doesn't specify aluminum or wood, which is odd, considering his interest in weapons.
"Confronting The Crime Of Silence: Evidence Of U.S. War Crimes In Indochina." Hey, wait, were you on Kerry's swift boat, too, Wardo? Man, you get around.
I know I've been facetious, but it seems elementary to point out that he assumes what he has to prove in his titles, in most cases. Also, note the breathless drama: The Crime of Silence, Imperial Arrogance, Islands in Captivity, Occupied America. Oh, Lordy, I'm gettin' the vapors here!
Keeping it light for a little longer, let's begin talking about JJL with his helpful redefinition of . . . well, just read:
Identifying as Xican @ --written with an "X" and with an "@" symbol as a progression of the term Chicano-- has become increasingly complicated and hybrid since the rise of cultural empowerment and nationalist movements during the 1960s and 70s. Twenty-first century diversity and hybridity of Mexican-American experiences --Mexitaliana/o, "Jewsixcana/o," Native-Chicana, Salvadoreña-Chicano, Chicana/o-queer, etc.-- have greatly expanded the terms on which we can identify as Xican @ s. What has remained a constant, though, is that Xican @ identity is steeped in social and economic justice, race, gender and sexual equality, cultural progression and decolonization under a shared, albeit diverse, Mexican-American experience, history and cultural origin. Departing from ideas of Ana Castillo, José Cuellar describes Xican @ in his entry on "Chicanismo/Xicanism@" in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures:
Xicanism @ " is a contemporary extension of the 20th century Chicanismo that is ideologically rooted in the Chicana feminist "Mexic Amerindian" consciousness that rejects machismo, exclusionary ethnocentrism and nationalism while emphasizing our prehistoric tendencies toward interdependence and cooperation that transcends gender, class, race, and geographic boundaries. ..."Xicanism@" appears more frequently as an orthographically distinctive identifier and definer of the U.S. Mexican consciousness that is at more feminist, cultural guerilla, and more Amerindio than ever."
When JJL gave a speech about his Pat Tillman poster (more below), he said the following:
"I am a Xican@ public artist, performance artist and cultural worker."
But how did he say that? Zee-cah-nat? Chee-con-at? See-con-at-sign? (Yes, I see him.)
I used to (assistant) manage a Schlotzsky's (on the ASU campus, in fact), and if I had taken this description to the kitchen staff, most of whom were from Jalisco, they would laugh in my face, and rightly so. Every day they had to face learning simple English, without any help (though I tried), and this bozo wanted to impose a panoply of mincemeat categories, just to satisfy his own anxiety and political agenda. I mean, Jeebus: Chicana/o-queer?
In Spring 2003 JJL taught a class called "Techno-Mythologia: The Webopticon, Corporate Shamanism, and The Global War Machine." When I downloaded the pdf syllabus, I found these wonderful section titles:
Magic, Metaphysics and the Messiah of the Digital Universe
The United States Global Empire
Digital Capitalism and the Engines of Globalization
The Global Economic Infrastructure: IMF, World Bank & WTO
The Webopticon: Systems of Surveillance and the Underclasses
The Webopticon: Middle-Class Privacy and the Policing of the Poor
Terrorism, the Myth of Security and the Nation State
Global Policing, the Rogue State and Carnegie Mellon University (the Corporate-Military Institution)
[JJL used to teach at CMU; now he wants to bite the hand, I guess.]
Post-Humanism, the Culture of Robotics and the Politics of Gaming
Militarization of the Southern Border
Los Cybrids Performance at the Miller Gallery
That last one is about a performance art group that JJL is a major actor in. Students are required to attend the performance and write a 500- to 1000-word (don't want to tax their brains) review. Finally, the last session is entitled "Techno-Edutainment and the Digital Divide."
Hey, he wrote it, parents, to educate your young; let him explain it.
Now let's move on to the third topic, the "redefinition" of private property. You see, JJL also wants his students to break the law. That's right, come to ASU to learn to be a criminal. For example, JJL has an essay forthcoming in an anthology entitled With and Without Permission. The essay is called "The (Postcolonial) Rules of Engagement: Cultural Activism, Advertising Zones & Xican@ Digital Muralism." You can read it here. And right now JJL is co-teaching a class called Social Art Tactics in which language is turned into, as these Marxists are fond of saying, praxis: in other words, they put their money where their mouth is. Problem here is that the praxis is vandalism and worse, and those acts are illegal.
But they're going to teach these tactics anyway:
CHS 494/THP 494/598
Social Art Tactics
Spring 2005
Instructors: John J. Leaños & Ramón H. Rivera-Servera
Office: Leaños, Coor 6642, (480) 727-6113
Rivera-Servera, GHALL 219, (480) 965-0157
Course Description
Social Art Tactics is a hybrid art course co-taught by Ramon Rivera-Severa of the Department of Theater and John Jota Leaños of Chicana/o Studies. In this course, students will engage in the praxis, theory, and historical foundations of social art practice with special emphasis on Latin@ and Border art. Students will be exposed to artwork that strives for and stimulates social change and transformation in the fields of performance, theater, digital media, interventionist art, muralism and photography. The goal of the course is to develop a series of student-driven socially pertinent artworks that will be performed, displayed and installed in unexpected places.
Readers may remember last October, when JJL and his zombie crew created and distributed 250 posters slandering the memory of Pat Tillman, deceased Army Ranger and genuine American hero. (You can read JJL's self-serving gusano statement here.) I wrote about it here, and here. To quote myself in the second piece:
[JJL wrote to Greg Esser, a Phoenix public art official]: I think you must be aware of the value of doing public art both with and without permission. You are probably aware that Indigenous and Chicana/o visions of public space differ most definitely from predominant paradigms. We believe that the southern border, for instance, is a temporary expression of a failing social order. The hegemony of Private Property may be seen in the same vein. Chicana/o and Indigenous peoples have occupied this territory for many generations and have been told over and over that our concerns, ways and aesthetics do not matter. Many Chicana/o residents of the Downtown and Garfield Districts view the downtown arts community as paving the way for gentrification, a whitewashing of diverse cultural expression in order to replace it with an aseptic, "sponsored" and paid for culture. It seems that your actions are in tune with this project.
[And I added:] Ooh, meet El Presidente/a/o! Tell you what, Jota, every Chicano I've met, and I've worked side by side with many, same work, same pay, would take exception to you getting your skinny hands on their private property. And if I see you or any of your robots around my place, be ready for blood in your eyes, pendejo. [And I repeat the warning here.]
The only other point I want to make is this: none of these "interventionists" has the wherewithal to create their own compelling venue, so they steal what others have painstakingly organized --but carefully. For example:
Notice that JJL and his zombies wheat-pasted their slander in a not-so unexpected place --on the funky buildings of the downtown Phoenix First Fridays arts district, with its crucial captive crowd which was there for another reason than his, and where it's safe to say most of the viewers would sympathize with his case --and where the cops don't care.
But look: just down the street we see the Herberger Theater, and Symphony Hall, and the Opera House. Why not go down there, where the crowds waiting outside are bound to be more conservative, to get your message across? Come on, crew, slap those posters up on the polished granite, the wide sheets of glass! Why not? Answer: COPS.
JJL is a coward and a vampire. After all, he could stage his own little demonstration on campus, but who would come, who would care? That's why he needs the very infrastructure, the very vital, complex society around him, that he so longs to destroy, for his fascistic ego satisfaction. His envy has poisoned his soul, and he would rather wipe out the present social order for the sake of his prehistoric vision than build on the present, no matter who has to suffer.
Before we move on to cover Ward Churchill's own contempt for humanity, let's go back to JJL's Social Art Class for a little thought experiment. Suppose some students in his class enacted the following for their "interventionist art" project:
As for UC, last year it originally banned its College Republicans from holding an "affirmative action bake sale" on campus. As Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) reported, these "sales" have been organized across the nation to satirize affirmative action by charging black and Hispanic students less for baked products than white and Asian students. Even though UC eventually permitted the sale protest to take place, the university did not stop pro-affirmative action students from (as reported in a local newspaper) forming a "mob," surrounding the sale, shoving the organizers, and tearing down their signs. As Lukianoff asks, would UC have allowed such "unlawful intimidation" at a "Free Tibet" event? "Sadly," he concludes, "while universities seem willing to abuse 'intimidation' to punish individuals they dislike, they are unwilling to apply the principle when it is warranted."
What kind of grade do you think JJL would give the cookie bakers? And what kind of grade for the shoving mob?
Now, as to Wardo . . .
Last Friday, Wretchard at The Belmont Club pointed out two instances of the casual cruelty of the Left, one by convicted lawyer Lynne Stewart, which I will ignore, and the other by the shake-n-bake shaman. The post, called "Easy To Be Hard; Easy To Be Cold," is written with Wretchard's usual pungent clarity:
Leftist professor Ward Churchill, who is under fire for describing victims of the World Trade Center attack as "little Eichmanns", said in his book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens that perhaps a few thousand would have to die for society to come around to his point of view. But they were nothing to cry over: just expendable Nazis. [Churchill quote follows.]
Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.[End of Churchill quote.]
The little Eichmann victims at the World Trade Center included fifteen Filipinos, sixteen Jamaicans, seventeen Columbians and fifteen Mexicans -- all dismissed with a wave of a hand. The Rocky Mountain News records Churchill as saying, "I'm not backing off an inch. I owe no one an apology". One of the sources of the inhuman 'strength' of the Left is its refusal to acknowledge the existence of anything smaller than a mass noun. Rhetorical service to the people, masses, workers, peasants; the poor and the downtrodden are objects worthy of the Left; but love, pity and sorrow for individuals is sentiment beneath contempt.[End of Wretchard excerpt.]
Churchill actually went further in an April 2004 interview with Satya magazine: he wants the United States as a political system "wiped off the planet."
Q: So if it takes eradication of the beast from within, how would you see that happening?
Well, first the withdrawal of consent, people imbued with consciousness to withdraw altogether from an embrace of the state.
If I defined the state as being the problem, just what happens to the state? I’ve never fashioned myself to be a revolutionary, but it’s part and parcel of what I’m talking about. You can create through consciousness a situation of flux, perhaps, in which something better can replace it. In instability there’s potential. That’s about as far as I go with revolutionary consciousness. I’m actually a de-evolutionary. I don’t want other people in charge of the apparatus of the state as the outcome of a socially transformative process that replicates oppression. I want the state gone: transform the situation to U.S. out of North America. U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.
Q: So what does that look like?
There’s no U.S. in America anymore. What’s on the map instead? Well let’s just start with territoralities often delineated in treaties of fact—territoralities of 500 indigenous nations imbued with an inalienable right to self-determination, definable territoralities which are jurisdictionally separate. Then you’ve got things like the internal diasporic population of African Americans in internal colonies that have been established by the imposition of labor patterns upon them. You’ve got Appalachian whites. Since the U.S. unilaterally violated its treaty obligations, it forfeits its rights—or presumption of rights—under international law. Basically, you’ve got a dismantlement and devolution of the U.S. territorial and jurisdictional corpus into something that would be more akin to diasporic self-governing entities and a multiplicity of geographical locations. A-ha, chew on that one for awhile.
There’s no overarching authority other than consensus or agreement between each of these. There has to be a collaborative and cooperative arrangement rather than something that’s centrally organized and arbitrarily imposed.
Forget thousands; let's destroy millions. They're just elements of a mass noun undergoing change. But a person, an individual, a sovereign unique human being? What's that? Who's that? Fork 'em. In fact, let's kill some:
Churchill contends groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front haven't gone far enough in defending "animal rights." He claims that drawing a "line in the tactical sand" that embraces "property damage" but excludes murder is "arbitrary" – and again invokes Eichmann: "Given the opportunity to do either in, say, 1942, would it have been more effective/appropriate to have torched the office of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat whose peculiar expertise made an orderly implementation of the Final Solution possible, or to have eliminated Eichmann himself? The answer need not be rendered as an abstraction."
The answer need not be rendered as an abstraction.
Shh-chock! Is that the sound of a shotgun being racked? This is a dangerous man, who will lead you right into the ovens and light his cigarette off your burning flesh, as long as you are a white citizen of the United States. And then this lifelong bully will gloat that the victim is now the victor.
Twelve years ago Camille Paglia exposed these fools in her essay "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf." (Also "The MIT Lecture," from the same book.) In the first essay she describes the kind of curriculum she would like to see enacted. For example:
Artifacts, monuments, and sacred sites and rituals from European, African, Far and Near Eastern, Pre-Columbian, Native American and Oceanic cultures would be closely studied. The method would be rigorously old historicist. There would be no melodramatic victimage scenarios, that drippy amateur soap opera which fuzzy academic liberals, suppressing recognition of their own innate aggression, aggressively project backwards. The human record is virtually universally one of cruelty barely overcome and restrained by civilization. Imperialism and slavery are no white male monopoly but are everywhere, from Egypt, Assyria, and Persia to India, China, and Japan.[Pp.238-9.]
This is called recognizing reality, and it is overdue in academe. One more extended paragraph:
Modernization means Westernization. The modern technological world is the product of the Greco-Roman line of mathematics, science, and analytic thought. The academic pop-politicos, pandering to students, rob them of their future. Education must simultaneously explore and explain the world's multiculturalism while preparing the young to enter the Apollonian command-system. But ethnic descendants should, as much as possible, retain their creative duality. I feel Italian but love America. Oprah Winfrey shifts wonderfully back and forth, with jazzlike improvisation, between her two voices. African-Americans must study the language and structure of Western public power while still preserving their cultural identity, which has had world impact on the arts. We must expose the absurdity of our literary ostriches who think we need the death-by-sludge French theorists to tell us about multiple "discourses." The established scholarship of comparative religion, anthropology, and art history had already prepared us with a flexible, accurate methodology for negotiating among belief-systems and identifying the inconography and symbol-schemes of different cultures and periods.
You see the generosity of spirit, the embrace of the world's complexity, and the confidence in ordinary humans? There's no squinty-eyed, astringent resentment anywhere, because Camille Pagila is a genius and a mensch who loves humanity, and Ward Churchill and John Jota Leaños are adolescent-minded twits who seethe because the world rightly gave them the go-by, and now they would rather pick gnat shit out of pepper over in the dunce's corner than join the ongoing, ever-new banquet at the common table.
I know you loathe yourselves, Wardo, JJ --I don't blame you-- but as it says in the title, You gotta face your face when the race fad fades.
[I have written about Ward Churchill here, here, and here.]
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Posted by Jerome at February 16, 2005 07:30 PM | TrackBack