New Content: Reply to editorial/Department letter of Monday, July 21....the long version
New Content: Reply to editorial/Department letter of Monday, July 21...short version
New Content: Note to Colleagues at Santa Rosa Junior College of Friday, July 19
New Content: Reply to Agrella statement of Thursday, July 17
New Content: Reply to Paul Gullixson editorial of Wednesday, July 16
Note: I've got to tell you my fellow American Citizens, our country is in such deep trouble right now, this controversy seems silly and unimportant. If it weren't symbolic of deeper issues, I wouldn't even bother. I'm not saying this to depress anyone as I'm confident we'll pull through. Just have some perspective...if we're all going to posture back and forth, can we also interject from time to time some of the weightier matters?
Criticism
I have received a lot of support over my classroom assignment, but I have also received a lot of criticism as well….mostly, by people who got sound-bites of the controversy. I’m rather astonished by how much the media gets wrong. In the best American tradition of hearing both sides and coming to your own conclusion, here’s my rebuttal:
1. This was a hypothetical, experiential object lesson. No email address was given; no president was defined; no one was told to send an email to any place or to anyone. Just type three words on your computer.
2. The exercise was not to “instill a sense of fear” as one newspaper reported, but to bring out the fear and paranoia that already exists within each one of us. And it’s not fear of Al Qaida or Saddam. It’s fear of our own government’s surveillance and of each other. Next we examine who benefits from this state of insecurity and what can be done about it. “You can’t have a National Security State without a National Insecurity State” I tell them. It’s a graphic exercise that has worked well in the past. My class assignment brings out the fear each of us is already carrying around and then discusses how people or institutions capitalize on that baggage. It was not about pulling fire alarms just to see if the fire trucks appear.
3. I’ve taught for 25 years and have been at my current assignment for 12 years. I’ve used this exercise for a long time and have never had a problem. So I suppose the question is “Why now?” Well, it’s been a couple of years since 9/11, so that doesn’t explain it? Do you think it’s because we’re whipping ourselves up into a state of frenzy? But you know, quite frankly, just try the experiment. Type in the words on a computer. Maybe even get you finger near the “send” button and you will feel a near tangible wave of fear come over you. Somebody somewhere is going to capitalize on the hook you just provided them.
Reporters have asked me if I will use this assignment again. I've answered them that the taboo value of the phrase is now lost since "kill the president" is all over the place. My lesson plan will probably morph into a very unsexy and unsensational unit on the engineering of civic codes of behavior and the agents of "official reality" making. (I've since learned that "kill the president" is an underground song. There's even a Killthepresident.org web address.)
4. If the object lesson of my assignment was truly a “melodramatic stunt that demonstrates nothing” as another paper editorialized, then why did they put it on their front page? If the college administration together with the Secret Service and FBI didn’t have an object lesson of their own, why didn’t they keep the investigation to the people involved? Why did SRJC President Dr. Agrella’s office notify the media? Why did they have all the time in the world to prepare their game plan while I ended up with cameras and reporters in front of my class room five minutes before class?
5. Perhaps the concern is that young, impressionable minds can’t handle the responsibility of so weighty a 3-word phrase. Well, I’m at a community college where my students are mainly adults. I don’t know what a fourteen-year-old was doing in my college class, but you’d think he or his parents would check in with me before notifying the FBI. The person who actually sent the email was a 37 year-old woman. But so what? We don’t put knives away just because someone gets stabbed from time to time. We teach responsible knife usage. But let’s assume either of these students had a good reason for doing what they did. People are sick and tired of the constant alerts and alarms. In the face of that, I think one student fed into the fear and the other acted defiantly.
Again, I have used this exercise within the context of government
surveillance in particular and fear of government in general for a long
time. Over the past seven years, probably over 1,000 students have been
involved with no problems and no confusion of content. So why now?
6. I’m not going to take any flak from the 60% of the American people who don’t vote anyway. For them the President and the Presidency are already dead.
7. Nor am I going to take any flak from the Bush administration who hypocritically threatens personal violence against heads of state. Now that we know the Bush administration lied about the evidence of WMDs in Iraq, what can be made of their $25 million dollar bounty on the head of Saddam Hussein? In any case, neither I nor the student who emailed her Congressman has been charged with anything.
8. And as for President Bush, the man...well I'm no fan of his, but I have been impressed at the speed at which this whole episode has unfolded. He should sleep well at night. And maybe while he's busy scapegoating the intelligence services and other secret services for his own blunders in the Middle East, he should reflect back on the hair-trigger performance of those same forces covering his back in such dangerous locations as bucolic Sonoma County. No Osama, no Saddam, no WMDs, but we can certainly find and scare the bejesus out of some political science students in northern California. Now don’t you all feel safe?,
9. If the concern here is the physical safety of the President, this was the worst way to achieve that. It appears to be just another example of “blow back” that our intelligence services have been experiencing of late. They made a big deal of it. Now there’s a reaction and “kill the president” is all over the place. If tracking those words somehow enables the Secret Services to protect the President, didn’t they just make their job more difficult?
10. I’ve become fascinated with other people’s fascination with the phrase “kill the president”. The argument that giving the Presidency legal jurisdiction over this phrase somehow protects him seems silly to me. Any idiot, who actually uses those words even in a full-blown police state where everything is watched, is surely one who can be easily caught. So maybe the concern over the phrase is part of the creation of a Presidential mystique intended for public consumption.
In this spin, the President is not just the head of the executive branch that according to our Constitution is subordinate to Congress in nearly all ways, but actually a sort of “personality cult”. Most Americans would be shocked to learn that outside of the conduct of war, presidents are meant to be very boring administrators, facilitators and bureaucrats. He is most emphatically not our “fearless” leader or Captain of the Football Team or Leader of the Free World. That’s why presidents of every political persuasion like war so much.
Secondly, whether it is an extremely intelligent man like Bill Clinton or George W., a “legacy” student with C grades from Yale, he gets excoriated by the system. No one can fulfill the requirements of the job. Like the pace of media, or our growing fears and paranoia, the demands of the Presidency have spun out of control and are crashing. That’s how Ritalin works, by the way; it speeds you up to slow you down.
Also, let’s face it – we’ve been at war with someone someplace for the better part of a century. Our institutions, particularly the Presidency, are built around it. It’s going to take some time to change the face of those institutions and what informed people call their “raison d’etre”. What we can change today, however, is our personal attitude toward those institutions.
In short, we put too much into our Presidents.
So I say, instead of “kill the president”, let’s kill the Presidency….in our hearts and in our minds. No more team captains, or “Sun Kings” or celebrity culture. Putting this man as the apex of our society is a projection of our own elitist attitudes anyway which wouldn’t happen in a truly democratic society. It’s clear to me now that boring presidents who don’t appear on the evening news very often is probably a good indicator of the degree of democracy in a society.
And if we want to go in that direction, we don’t need to wait for our institutions to “get it”. It takes two to tango and either dancer can stop the dance.
11. And finally, as to the charge that I’m incompetent? I’ll let the quality and persuasiveness of my argument speak for itself. I went from a simple life a week ago to a baptism by fire with the government, my college administrators, the media, CNN and Fox Hannity vs. Colmes. I’m ready to face anyone in a debate….. so as George W. put it “bring ‘em on”.
Thomas Jefferson said: “What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.” In today’s environment in this country, Mr. Jefferson would be accused of “extremely poor judgment” in his choice of words, too incendiary even for a college campus.
Michael H. Ballou,
Political Science Instructor
Santa Rosa Junior College
Thank you for visiting my page.
Send email and comments to mbsrjc@comcast.net
