Westwood College Is on the Mend With Texas and Wisconsin Regulators

It’s interesting to see Peter Wood speak in a more personal vein, something often missing from his posts.  And there’s no way to contradict his personal experience or his own conclusion after a decade.

However, I find he does paint with too broad a brush.  For those who lost loved ones in 9/11 is the time for grieving really over, or ever finished?  Is it really appropriate or helpful to just tell them to buck up and get on with it?  ”Victimhood, passivity, and the search for refuge”…is that really an accurate description of all or most of those affected directly by 9/11 or indirectly of the national character?

“McClay mentions ‘the idea, peddled by figures like the literary critic Susan Sontag, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, and the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, that America was somehow to blame for the attacks, and fully deserving of them.’”  Again, too broad a brush, and inaccurate to boot.  Sontag’s essay actually addresses something else: the immediate cries that the terrorists were mad, insane, crazy, etc., and above all, cowards.  She argued, quite carefully and not in appreciation of them, that they were actually serious and determined in their thinking and that therefore to combat them we needed to understand the rational basis for their actions.  This is, in fact, the lesson that has been taught in the service academies, the War College, and other policy and military think tanks ever since 9/11.  

Churchill is a somewhat different case.  He was stupid, careless, or whatever (you choose a term) to claim that all the victims were “little Eichmanns.”  People working in food service or the cleaning staff or the first responders who died were not Good Germans or collaborators with imperialist finance.  Nor were the passengers and crews on the flights.  But he did get right the blatantly obvious fact that it was the World TRADE Center and the perfect symbol of US capitalism in its global reach.  (It had after all been subjected to a 1993 bombing for the same reason.)  And, of course, the Pentagon.

Given that  Bin Laden and the bombers were most motivated to attack the US for its military, policy, economic and diplomatic support of a repressive and undemocratic Saudi regime, and support of other repressive regimes, the choice of the targets was pretty obvious, especially for creating a world wide media event.  Is America to blame?  Well, American policy has pretty relentlessly supported repression in the region.  For about a month after 9/11 it was possible to have a reasonable discussion in the public sphere of “blowback,” and then that discussion was driven out with a lot of pseudo patriotic posturing.  It still goes on–among professional military, the CIA and State Department, etc.–because real people who have to exercise power try to understand what’s going on, what works and what doesn’t work and why.

Jeremiah Wright?  Come on!  He was done in by highly selective editing of his sermons for sensational effect.  Listen to the entire thing and you couldn’t  reasonably come to the same conclusion.

Most people have a 9/11 memory and life lessons to draw from it  I do find it odd and sad that Peter Wood only got “toughen up” and “don’t look back” out of it.  Some folks became less selfish, more compassionate, more committed to peace and justice.

Chuck Kleinhans

cwm4c, always nice to meet a FOP (Friend of Peter).  

But you’ve got it wrong: I don’t hate Peter; I pray for him. ;-)

As far as constantly responding, you must have confused me with someone else.  Since the beginning of July, Wood has written 11 essays, and I’ve only responded to 4 of them by my reckoning.

I don’t have “auto notification” of Wood’s postings (and how would I do that, anyway?), but perhaps you have it set for me, since you did a cut and paste here of your response to my comment on Wood’s Sept. 1 remarks.

But more to the point:  I think Wood and I share a long standing and deep commitment to certain issues in higher education.  Obviously we have different ways of analyzing those issues and usually arrive at different conclusions.  I thought the purpose of having this kind of blog-and-response format was to increase the give-and-take, the exchange of views, and thus sharpen each opposed argument.  In fact, Wood often returns to the theme that we need more diversity of thought, exchange of ideas, in higher education.  I agree.  But some conservatives seem to want to implement this by forced hiring of ideological conservatives, or in the David Horowitz version, exposing and firing of ideological leftists (his book on the “most dangerous professors”).  Is that your position too?

I don’t hate Peter, not at all.  But I do strongly disagree with some of his arguments, and it does seem that over time that’s had mildly reforming effect on him.  (I’m not the only one, but numerous folks have taken exception to some of his statements.)  Remember his absurd claim that a handful of gay activist bloggers, who were calling for a boycott of the Chik-fil-A fast food chain after Chik-fil-A publicly co-sponsored an anti-gay event, somehow were intimidating the $3.5 billion fast food corporation?  Or that gay marriage was a dismissible “policy issue,” rather than a matter of basic human rights?

My comment above was offered as a corrective to Wood’s mistaken appropriation of a badly distorted and false characterization of Sontag, Churchill and Wright.  Perhaps it will nudge Wood to go back and look at the original sources and see if McClay gets it right (we know he gets it right wing) or if he’s rewriting history.  Hey, it’s a reminder to check his sources.  The core of scholarly and intellectual discussion, correct?

Chuck Kleinhans

Peter,

This is an extraordinary statement.  Thank you for making it.  

Anne Shea