Jean Trounstine : Censoring What Prisoners Read

Werewolf erotica: Too sexy for prisoners? Image from The Atlantic Wire.

'Werewolf erotica' too 'sexy'?
Censoring what prisoners read

The truth is that prisons want to control behavior. They want to 'reform' prisoners, which usually means they want to turn out people who are as conformist as possible.

By Jean Trounstine / The Rag Blog / June 25, 2013

Some astute judges are standing up and challenging prisons which think they have the right to tell prisoners what they can and cannot read.

Just after I wrote a blog about the wonders of Changing Lives Through Literature, a program begun in Massachusetts where a judge, probation officer, and facilitator discuss books together in a “democratic” reading group, offering those on probation a chance at rehabilitation (see "What You Need to Know About Changing Lives Through Literature"), I came across an article at the Christian Science Monitor (CSM) titled "Should prison inmates be allowed to read whatever they choose?"

We know prisons only let in certain kinds of material, sent in certain packages and provided in certain formats. At least that is what Framingham Women's Prison told me some years ago when they rejected my hardback book Shakespeare Behind Bars being housed in the prison library. Forget that I had worked there, directing plays and teaching college classes for almost 10 years. They also don't want books critical of their practices in any way. Apparently, my book raised their hackles.

Now prisons are going even farther: they don’t want books that have subjects someone deems unfit.

Madden work 'Problematic'?

Husna Haq, in his CSM, article mentions that recently the 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco overturned a previous ruling barring a prisoner from receiving a book he requested deemed "problematic" by prison officials. The book in question was The Silver Crown by Mathilde Madden "which has widely become known as 'werewolf erotica,' and was considered too sexual by corrections officers."

What? Corrections Officers are deciding that a book is too sexual for prisoners to read?

Get a load of this other recent news article posted in Business Insider. Called "America's Prison Guards Are The 'Ugly Stepchildren' Of The Criminal Justice System," the article reveals how guards "allegedly snuck cell phones and other contraband to Black Guerrilla Family (BGF) prison gangsters." They allowed them to do whatever they wanted apparently, having the run of the prison, and now BGF leader Tavon White is accused of impregnating four guards, two of whom got tattoos with his name.

Thankfully, as Salon reported, the Court found that the prison had overstepped its bounds in the case, engaging in an “arbitrary and capricious application of the regulation.” The judge declared that "The Silver Crown did not meet the famous 'three-pronged' standard by which American courts have determined obscenity since the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision on Miller v. California in 1973."

A 2011 suit by the American Civil Liberties Union charged a South Carolina prison with denying its prisoners all reading material other than the Bible. Other cases include an Alabama prison that barred a prisoner from reading the Pulitzer Prize-winning Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon.

Hurston 'too racial'?

Why? Because it was too controversial? That's another problem prisons have with texts. And also what I was told at Framingham, when I wanted to teach a June Jordan essay and direct a version of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. Way before Oprah produced a movie of this novel, I had planned a production. But the prison said that involving my theatre troupe in such an effort was "too racial." And I quote.

The truth is that prisons want to control behavior. They want to "reform" prisoners, which usually means they want to turn out people who are as conformist as possible. Read, write, paint, and draw? Only as long as prisoners don't overstep their boundaries.

The idea that a prisoner can’t vote, can’t write, and can’t read what he or she wants are different kinds of “crime against person.” Restricting such freedoms could be considered unconstitutional if not illegal. But the idea that a prison will ever honor such rights for prisoners without a judge intervening -- considering that a prison’s aim is to “correct” -- is pure illusion.

[Jean Trounstine is an author/editor of five published books and many articles, professor at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts, and a prison activist. For 10 years, she worked at Framingham Women's Prison and directed eight plays, publishing Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women's Prison about that work. She blogs for Boston Magazine and takes apart the criminal justice system brick by brick at jeantrounstine.com where she blogs weekly at "Justice with Jean." Find her contributions to The Rag Blog here.]

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INTERVIEW / Jonah Raskin : Documentary Filmmakers Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar Dish on 'Junk Food News'

Documentary filmmakers Christopher Oscar, left, and Doug Hecker.

Doug Hecker and Christopher Oscar:
Documentary filmmakers on media,
civil liberties, and 'Project Censored'

“The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.” -- Doug Hecker, Co-Producer, Co-Director, Co-Writer, 'Project Censored: The Movie'

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2013

Filmmaker, Doug Hecker, 47, was born and raised in San Francisco, California. His pal and cinematic collaborator, Christopher Oscar, 42, hails from Montclair, New Jersey.

Six years ago, they met in the town of Sonoma, California, and ever since then -- with time off for good behavior -- they’ve worked on a documentary about the media watchdog group, Project Censored, founded by Carl Jensen in the wake of Watergate.

Hecker and Oscar are both college grads and they’re both the kinds of grads that teachers will practically die for -- which means they’re committed to critical thinking, life-long learning, and social responsibility.

When they graduated from college -- Oscar from C.W. Post University on Long Island, New York, Hecker from Sonoma State University in California -- their studies just began.

Their new 60-minute documentary, Project Censored: The Movie, Ending the Reign of Junk Food News, informs, entertains, and riles up citizen activists, too, about the loss of civil liberties in the United States today and the rise of what they regard as a police state.

The talking heads who speak in the movie -- historian Howard Zinn, all-around gadfly Noam Chomsky, poet Amiri Baraka, UCLA Professor Nora Barrows-Freeman, and more -- make far more sense than the talking heads on ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.

“Human consciousness,” Zinn says “is hard to fathom, but every so often it breaks to the surface.” Hecker and Oscar know that the media puts humanity to sleep all day and all night, and that the media can also wake humanity from its slumber.

Mickey Huff, the current director of Project Censored, points out that there’s more information available these days thanks to the Internet, but that, paradoxically, there’s also greater misinformation. Movie producer, director, and cinematographer Haskell Wexler suggests that in our peculiar form of democracy, Americans may not want to known the truth. Hecker and Oscar hope that’s not true.

Their rousing picture about Project Censored and the state of the media in America today is also a wake-up call to viewers sickened by the steady diet of junk food news dished out by corporate media.

The interview with both Hecker and Oscar took place two days after I saw their movie.

 

Jonah Raskin: Can you say something about an exact moment when the proverbial light went on in your head?

Doug Hecker: The light went on for me when I was enrolled in communications classes. As a student in Project Censored, we constantly discussed the spin that corporate media uses when reporting the news.

Christopher Oscar: For me, it was when I was an investigative journalism major and writing a story about the fact that crime was down 30%, but crime coverage increased 70%.

In your own life have you noticed a strong urge to censor?

Hecker: I choose my words wisely, but I tend not to censor myself. I could lose some business as a realtor because of the movie. If a client chooses not to work with me because I believe the press should be free and should present news that lead to social change, I’d rather not work with that person.

As a father with children, what kinds of limits if any do you set for them about TV and the Internet?

Hecker: I prefer to discuss topics on TV and the Internet and to help create awareness and media literacy in my children. However, I do limit violence, foul language, and sexual content.

Oscar: It’s very rare that we find a program that is suitable for my children to watch. My kids don't use the Internet. They are eight and five years old. If and when we find a child-friendly program, we limit viewing.

Your documentary shows that when there's war there's censorship and when there's censorship there's war.

Hecker: Censorship leads to war. War doesn’t benefit anyone except those in power. It’s corrupt and it’s brought about by power, money, greed, religion, politics, ignorance, and stupidity.

Doug, you grew up in a small California town. Did you buy into the official story disseminated by the media?

Hecker: I did for years. I began reading newspapers in high school and believed what I read. However, once I got to college I realized that a majority of U.S. news is designed to control the population, shape public policy, and instill fear into citizens.

Oscar, what about you?

Oscar: What I witnessed was that my parents watched tons of fear. I could never understand why they were so hypnotized by it. As I grew older, I found that I enjoyed investigative news shows like 60 Minutes. It wasn't until college that I became a critic of corporate media.

Looking at the global picture, would you say censorship is better or worse in the U.S. than in say, China, Russia, or Iran?

Hecker: I would say it's not better or worse, but different. U.S. censorship is subtle -- not the dictatorship-style where the consequences are prison or death. However, the attack on journalists and the First Amendment is increasing in the U.S. Under the guise of protecting us against terrorism, we’re losing civil liberties.

Oscar: The majority of people don't even know censorship is there. Next thing you know, America will be back in another illegal war.

In the U.S. if you want to play the corporate media game I guess you have to play by the corporate rules -- or get out.

Hecker: The corporate rules are simple: tell the news the way you're told to tell the news or ratings will decline and you'll be out of a job.

Oscar: Reporters should investigate the owners of their own stations.

Where you live in California, what local stories and truths do you think are hidden from citizens now?

Hecker: GMOs, pesticides, farm animal abuse, the ever-increasing rise of health care, petroleum products, pollution, lobbyists, government corruption, etc.

Fear is a big factor in our society isn't it? Reporters are afraid and citizens are afraid. How do we overcome fear?

Hecker: Fear-based news leads to higher ratings, which leads to increased ad revenue. To change fear-based news you need to start at the grassroots with programs like Project Censored and other alternative media sources that have validated news and fact-based reporting.

Oscar: People glued to the nightly news are bombarded and besieged with violence and destruction. The message you get is that people are out to get you so you better watch out. We need a media system that shines light on the good that people are doing in the world to create a more harmonious planet.

There still are people who are courageous, such as the Australian, Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, who released on the Internet confidential U.S. documents. Did he go too far?

Hecker: We need more people like Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, Bradley Manning who realize that sacrifice may be necessary to expose human rights abuses, corruption, and environmental damage.

Oscar: Hopefully, governments will think twice about their actions now that there is a Julian Assange out there. It's surprising, though, how little attention it's really gotten. You would think more people would be upset about the failure of the news to dig for truth.

What gives you hope for a world in which your kids are grown up?

Hecker: Without hope no future is possible. We made this film to help future generations and to point out that social change is needed and that the people of the world need to put an end to complacency and become active and involved citizens both politically and socially in order to end the human and environmental atrocities that plague our world.

[Jonah Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, is  a long-time journalist and author. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Thorne Dreyer / James McEnteer : Dallas Underground Icon Stoney Burns Dead at 68

Stoney Burns is arrested by Dallas Police officers at Lee Park on April 12, 1970, after what The Dallas Morning News called "a clash between law officers and young people" that "occurred when police tried to arrest several hippie-types" at the park. Image from The Dallas Morning News.
Stoney Burns dies at 68:
Crusading underground journalist
was incessantly harassed by Dallas officials

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011

See "Stoney Burns used a gentle wit to fight injustice in Dallas," by James McEnteer, Below.

Sixties icon Stoney Burns passed away Thursday morning, April 28, 2011, in Dallas. Our mutual friend, Angus Wynne, informed us that Stoney died at Baylor Medical Center “of a sudden, massive heart attack.” Burns, 68, was buried on Sunday at the Shearith Israel Cemetery on Dolphin Road in Dallas.

Stoney, who was born Brent LaSalle Stein, was a Sixties activist/journalist and pioneer of the underground press in Texas. When we were publishing The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, he edited a series of publications in Dallas, including Dallas Notes and the Iconoclast -- and later the music magazine, Buddy. In its notice about Burns' death, Pegasus News referred to Stoney as the "King of the Hippies."

In an April 29 article, The Dallas Morning News said that Burns' Dallas Notes "decried war, intolerance and hypocrisy with a playful aggression and a cutting edge."

In his 1992 book Fighting Words, in which he profiled five independent Texas journalists, James McEnteer wrote, "Powered by an anarchic energy and a highly developed sense of the absurd, Stoney personified everything official Dallas loathed." [See McEnteer's reflections on Stoney Burns, written for The Rag Blog, below.]

Stoney was incessantly harassed by the Dallas authorities, who charged him with obscenity, beat him mercilessly, tore up his offices, and confiscated his equipment.

Burns' obscenity case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Justice William O. Douglas commented on the cops' ransacking of the Dallas Notes offices: “It would be difficult to find in our books a more lawless search-and-destroy raid.”

Stoney had trouble finding anyone in Dallas to print his newspapers, and, according to Austin's Steve Speir, a potential printer in Fort Worth backed out after someone threatened to burn down his shop. So Steve set Stoney up with a printer in Waco, “and on the way back to Dallas we’d be stopped by the cops and harassed. They’d throw all the papers on the ground and search the truck.”

According to The Rag Blog’s David P. Hamilton, four Dallas police cars followed him for several miles after one visit to Stoney’s home.

In 1974, Time Magazine wrote, "The law in Dallas, from all appearances, had been bent on getting Stoney Burns for years" when they "found in the glove compartment a tiny stash of marijuana. It was barely enough for one or two joints." But it was enough to get Stoney a sentence of 10 years and one day -- time he never served thanks to Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe who commuted the sentence.

Angus Wynne told the Dallas Observer that Stoney Burns had "gone through so much, between his public battles and private ones, and turned into a sweetheart. He'd had [an earlier] heart attack and cancer and whipped all those... He was just a great guy, one of the generalissimos of the so-called revolution back then. There was something real special about Stoney..."

[Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer was a colleague of Stoney Burns in the Sixties underground press.]

Stoney Burns. Photo courtesy of Angus Wynne.
Fighting words:
Stoney Burns used a gentle wit
to fight injustice in Dallas

By James McEnteer / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011

“Maybe that’s why we’re hated. We tell the truth; we’ve got nothing to lose. We do have something to gain, however. It’s our self-respect. Yeah, we tell the truth. It’s about time some newspaper did.”

-- Stoney Burns, Dallas Notes [From James McEnteer: Fighting Words, Independent Journalists in Texas, UT Press, 1992.]

Stoney was not just a brave man -- facing down the rigid Dallas Establishment in large part all by his lonesome -- but a funny one. He used his gentle wit and sense of the ridiculous as effective weapons for social justice in 1960s Dallas, just about the unfriendliest territory imaginable for stoned longhairs looking to have a good time.

Stoney loved a good time -- good music, friends, and laughter. But his easy-going sense of the absurd enraged the humorless conservatives in the Dallas Police Department who considered his satire of local laws and his criticism of usually unmentioned overbearing police tactics as unacceptable threats to their sense of law and order.

Stoney became a cause and a crusader almost by accident, as the sole occupant of the void left by jackboot censorship of all but the most orthodox right-wing cant in the Dallas media.

Stoney Burns in the Iconoclast office, 1972. Photo courtesy of Stoney Burns from Fighting Words: Independent Journalists in Texas, by James McEnteer, University of Texas Press, 1992.
His Notes from Underground started on the SMU campus and was quickly banned. He was the only journalist to describe and photograph police harassment of peaceful long-haired young people in Dallas parks. His various newspapers took different names over the years, but were always an eclectic mix of music reviews, social commentary, and jokes at the expense of local officials, reflecting Stoney's own sensibilities.

His papers featured outrageous cartoons, guaranteed to offend the white bread, church-bred Folks who Mattered in Dallas. Stoney always professed bewilderment at the passionate hatred his dopey humor aroused among otherwise rather staid, affectless citizens. The brief, final incarnation of Stoney's journalistic ambitions was a paper he called The Iconoclast, in homage to the Waco rabblerouser, William Brann.

The police harassed Stoney Burns for years, wrecked his newspaper offices, stole his equipment, planted dope on him, and tried every which way to shut him up, finally hounding him into prison for 10 years and a day on a trumped-up charge of marijuana possession, which the governor later quietly dismissed.

But Stoney's abbreviated prison term ended up accomplishing its goal of silencing a genuine independent voice of Dallas journalism. Stoney went on to publish Buddy, about the local music scene, but made only occasional, rather vague political comments in subsequent years.

Stoney Burns brought light and fresh air into Dallas public discourse of the 1960s. Despite the strange (to him) resistance his journalism conjured in the authorities, Stoney had the courage to continue telling the truth as he saw it for seven years.

He served as an inspiration to many in his own community and beyond, revealing the cowardice of a system ruled by intimidation, not by public assent. He opened up the acceptable limits of free speech in 1960s Dallas. And he paid a price for it.

Dallas and Texas and the country are in Stoney's debt, now as then. Stoney's courage and humor are needed today as much as ever. His spirit will always be worth remembering.

[Rag Blog contributor James McEnteer is the author of Fighting Words: Independent journalists in Texas, published by the University of Texas Press. He lives near Durban, South Africa.]

Also see:

• Stoney Burns, Co-Founder of Underground Paper Dallas Notes and Buddy, Has Died by Robert Wilonsky / Dallas Observer / April 29, 2011
• Ernest McMillan and Stoney Burns : Dallas 60s Activists Revisited by Roy Appleton / The Rag Blog / November 3, 2008

Brent Stein (aka Stoney Burns) in the 1962 Hillcrest High yearbook, Dallas. Image from Dallas Observer Blogs.
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Lamar W. Hankins : The Bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

Huck and Jim. Image from Teachers.ash.org.
The bowdlerizing of Huckleberry Finn

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / January 19, 2011

A recent commentary by Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald explained a significant problem with publication of a new edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The new edition removes all use of the words “nigger” and “Injun,” substituting less offensive words.

In Pitts’s view, the scrubbing of these words robbed the novel of its authenticity by ignoring Twain’s purpose in using the language that he chose and ignoring the social, cultural, and historical context in which the novel takes place.

Pitts explains, “Huck Finn is a funny, subversive story about a runaway white boy who comes to locate the humanity in a runaway black man and, in the process, vindicates his own.” I’ve always had a similar view of the novel, but it never occurred to me until reading Pitts’s words that I had had an experience similar to Huck’s, of becoming aware of another’s humanity, an experience shared by many others and one that may be universal.

I lived in Vidor, Texas, a rural community with a well-deserved reputation for racism, until I was four years old, when my family moved to the oil refinery town of Port Arthur. When I was seven, my parents, both of whom worked at refineries (my father as a machinist, my mother as an RN), hired a black woman to look after me and my younger brother. During the summer that I was 10 years old, I had many serious discussions with her about the ways of the world, especially about race relations and how African-Americans had been treated throughout the South since the beginning of this country.

My guess is that Lutricia Valore was about 25 years old in 1955. We called her by her nickname, Lou. The culture at that time in the south permitted even young children to address black women by their first name or whatever other informal name might apply. Lou cooked our food, cleaned our house, supervised our play, and took care of us when we had an accident or were sick.

She was my first sociology and history teacher. She told me about slavery. About having to sit in the back of the bus. About “separate but equal” schools. About being mistreated and disrespected by many whites. About segregation. About the slums in which she and her two children and husband lived. About the frequent humiliation she felt.

After reading Leonard Pitts’s words, I realized that Lou had transformed herself in my child’s eyes from the hired help to a person with fears, concerns, problems, and joys common to all human beings. She was my caretaker and became my friend. When she told me about how she was treated, I reacted first with disbelief that such a kind, decent person would be treated so badly. Then it made me angry. I wanted to do something about it, not recognizing that 10-year-old children can’t rectify society’s wrongs. I started looking around to see if I could find any of the circumstances she had described. I did not have to look far.

When I observed the city buses going down the street, I saw that all the blacks were in the back and the whites were in the front. When I went to the Weingarten grocery store with my mother, I saw the water fountains, side by side, one marked “Whites only,” and the other marked “Colored.”

In my first public rebellion against the established order, I decided to drink from the “Colored” fountain to see if the water tasted different from that in the “Whites only” fountain. I knew that my action violated accepted custom, but I did it anyway, and no one complained. I continued drinking from that fountain as long as my family shopped at that store. Later, when I rode the city buses to junior high school, I purposely sat in the back.

As a result of what I had learned from Lou, I continued my rebellion through the years by arguing about the nature of slavery with a junior high school history teacher and about job discrimination with a Sunday school teacher who did not want blacks working at the refinery because they would compete with him for jobs, an unrecognized acknowledgment that blacks could be as qualified as he to do the same work.

Huck Finn recognized Jim as a person of value because he came to know him at a basic human level. He saw that Jim had to make decisions about right and wrong, good and bad, fair and unfair, just as he did.

Both Jim and Huck were seeking freedom. To each one, freedom meant something slightly different, just as it means different things for different people all over the globe. And the novel deals with other human problems as well, including lying, deceit, cruelty, moral values, the role of family in a person’s life (Did Huck and Jim become a family?), selfishness, and hypocrisy.

All of these human issues are important for both children and adults to figure out for themselves. If a novel set shortly before the Civil War can help us discuss these issues, it has to be of value. If we take away from it its context, we rob it of some of that value as an educational tool. If some people are offended by the words common to the period and those words are censored, what does that take from the novel? For one thing, it blunts the razor-sharp edge of Twain’s depiction of racism in America.

We haven’t been able to have a broad, serious discussion about race and race relations in the 125 years since Huckleberry Finn was published. After all, we are still arguing about the reasons for the Civil War, in the face of documentary evidence that slavery and race were at its heart.

Now, we learn that a production of the play Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by the late, widely respected African-American playwright August Wilson is being forbidden by the superintendent of schools in Waterbury, Connecticut, because it contains the word “nigger” in several places.

Removing offensive words from the pages of Huckleberry Finn or any other literary work will make that important discussion about race less likely, and if our children read such works in a bowdlerized form, there will be no reason for them to even confront what such language is all about.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins.]

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Dave Lindorff : The Strange Case of Interpol's Red Alert

A supporter of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange holds up a placard outside the City of Westminster Magistrates Court in London. Photo from The Hindu / AP.

UPDATE: A British judge granted bail to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday, saying he must abide by strict bail conditions as he fights extradition to Sweden in a sex-crimes investigation...

Supporters outside City of Westminster Magistrates' Court erupted in cheers when they heard news of the judge's ruling. -- AP / NPR / December 14, 2010

Something is rotten:
The strange case of Interpol's Red Alert
on Julian Assange

By Dave Lindorff / December 13, 2010

The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.

Far be it from me to minimize the issue of rape, but to borrow from the Bard, in the case of the “rape” case being alleged against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (technically, Swedish prosecutors say it's not rape, it's "sex by surprise"), currently being held in a British jail without bail pending an extradition request from Stockholm: “Something is rotten in Sweden.”

As I wrote earlier, the alleged sexual crimes that Assange is currently being sought for by a Swedish prosecutor are:

1. Allegedly failing to halt an act of consensual sexual intercourse when his sex partner and host, Anna Ardin, claims she somehow became aware that the condom he was using had “split” and,

2. Having consensual sex with a second woman a few days later without informing her that he had just been with Ardin, and then, a day later, allegedly refusing to return a phone call on his cell phone, when she tried to call him to ask him to take an STD test.

(Assange says he had turned off and was not using his phone for fear he was being traced through it, not that refusing to take a call from a woman one recently slept with should be considered criminal. Cold or even cruel, maybe, but not justification for a rape charge!)

In most countries, including the U.S. and UK, these would not pass the test to be considered a crime, much less qualify as a category of “rape," but Swedish authorities, who in all of this year have only submitted one other request to Interpol for assistance in capturing a sex crimes suspect, asked the international police agency to issue a so-called Red Alert for Assange, who was subsquently asked by police in the UK, where he was staying, to turn himself in or face arrest.

(The other Interpol Red Alert sought by Swedish prosecutors this year was for Jan Christer Wallenkurtz, a 58-year-old Swedish national wanted on multiple charges of alleged sex crimes and sex crimes against children.)

You have to ask, given that Sweden has the highest per-capital number of reported rape cases in Europe, how it can be that only these two suspects -- Wallenkurtz and Assange -- are brought to Interpol.

You also have to wonder how it is that Assange -- charged only with consensual sex “offenses” -- is denied bail by a British court magistrate, despite having several people at his arraignment hearing, including a well-known British filmmaker, ready to post whatever bail might be required to assure his return to court for an extradition hearing, while even people charged with aggressive rape are apparently routinely released on bail in both the UK and Sweden.

Here’s an interesting letter that ran in The Guardian in England, authored by Katrin Axelsson, of the British organization Women Against Rape:

Many women in both Sweden and Britain will wonder at the unusual zeal with which Julian Assange is being pursued for rape allegations. Women in Sweden don't fare better than we do in Britain when it comes to rape. Though Sweden has the highest per capita number of reported rapes in Europe and these have quadrupled in the last 20 years, conviction rates have decreased.

On 23 April 2010 Carina Hägg and Nalin Pekgul (respectively MP and chairwoman of Social Democratic Women in Sweden) wrote in the Göteborgs-Posten that "up to 90% of all reported rapes never get to court. In 2006 six people were convicted of rape though almost 4,000 people were reported." They endorsed Amnesty International's call for an independent inquiry to examine the rape cases that had been closed and the quality of the original investigations.



Assange, who it seems has no criminal convictions, was refused bail in England despite sureties of more than £120,000. Yet bail following rape allegations is routine. For two years we have been supporting a woman who suffered rape and domestic violence from a man previously convicted after attempting to murder an ex-partner and her children -- he was granted bail while police investigated.



There is a long tradition of the use of rape and sexual assault for political agendas that have nothing to do with women's safety. In the south of the U.S., the lynching of black men was often justified on grounds that they had raped or even looked at a white woman. Women don't take kindly to our demand for safety being misused, while rape continues to be neglected at best or protected at worst.

The long arm of the U.S. in this case is hard to miss here.

Especially in view of one of the latest WikiLeaks State Department cables to be disclosed in The New York Times, which in an article on Thursday laid out how the U.S. had strong-armed even the powerful German government into blocking German prosecutors from indicting and requesting the extradition to Germany of 13 CIA agents involved in the illegal kidnapping and renditioning to Bagram prison in Afghanistan of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen wrongly thought by the CIA to be a terrorist.

El-Masri was kidnapped by these agents in 2003, stripped, bound, placed in an adult diaper with a plug in his rectum, and flown by the CIA to Bagram, where he was repeatedly tortured, sodomized, injected with mind-altering drugs, and held for months, before being simply dropped off by the CIA on an Albanian roadside, after it was determined by the U.S. that a “mistake” had been made.

The U.S. did not want its rendition program and its policy of officially-sanctioned torture disclosed and so it pressed German authorities to drop all prosecution of the agency kidnappers, threatening “the implications for relations with the U.S.” (El-Masri has been barred from suing the U.S. government for damages.)

It strains credulity to believe that the same U.S. government that put such pressure on Germany, a NATO ally, is not behind Swedish prosecutors’ sudden intense interest in this preposterous case of consensual sex and a broken condom -- particularly as the initial prosecutor in the case dropped it after learning that the two women, far from being upset following their nights with Assange, had in one case thrown a party for him following the alleged incident, and in the other, left him in her bed while she went out to buy him breakfast.

(Both women reportedly sent twitters to friends bragging about their conquests, messages they later tried to have expunged from the Twitter system).

It also strains credulity to believe that the denial of bail to this particular suspect by a British court -- particularly given that he is not charged with any violent act, and has no criminal record -- is not the result of behind-the-scenes U.S. pressure.

Indeed, it appears that the U.S. is busy trumping up more serious charges against Assange, with his lawyers saying they are anticipating that the U.S. Justice Department (already reportedly in discussions with Swedish authorities about getting their hands on Assange), is planning soon to charge him under the 1917 Espionage statute, the same law that the Nixon Justice Department tried to use unsuccessfully against Daniel Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers case. That could explain why efforts are being made to try to keep Assange held in a cell.

It could also explain why Assange is challenging the Swedish extradition request.

Opposition to the Afghan and Irag Wars is intense in the UK and is supported by the overwhelming majority of British citizens, which makes Assange something of a hero in Britain for his WikiLeaks exposes of the ongoing crimes by U.S. and UK forces in those conflicts. British government acquiescence to an extradition order from the U.S. on espionage charges would likely lead to massive opposition by British citizens.

Sweden, on the other hand, which is not a member of NATO, but which has some 500 troops participating in the "NATO" war in Afghanistan, does not face the same kind of popular opposition to its role, and Assange may fear that Sweden, a very small country, could be pressured much more easily to hand Assange over to U.S. authorities, with little resulting fuss from the Swedish public.

Back in the U.S., there has been no move by news organizations to come to Assange’s defense. In fact, the corporate media reaction to this whole issue has been the opposite. For the most part, the Swedish charges, and his arrest in Britain on the basis of the Interpol Red Alert, are reported as being about “rape,” without any explanation of the actual “violations,” which would not even rise to the level of a crime in the U.S.

Meanwhile, most editorial pages are condemning the violation of diplomatic secrecy, not the government’s efforts to shut down a source of important news about government ineptness, malfeasance, and deceit.

Yet if it turns out, as I’m confident it will, that the U.S. government has been the driving force behind both the arrest and imprisonment of Assange, and his extradition to Sweden, and if it turns out, as appears increasingly likely, that the U.S. government has also been behind simultaneous decisions by Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, and several Swiss banks to refuse to handle donations to WikiLeaks, as well as by Amazon, which withdrew Wikileak's access to its cloud data storage system, and a DNS registry which de-registered WikiLeak's URL, publishers and broadcasters, and journalists themselves, should be up in arms defending him.

As I wrote earlier, this kind of attack on a news source for purely political reasons is a threat to the First Amendment as profound as the Nixonian attack on Daniel Ellsberg, and the attempt to block The New York Times from publishing his purloined documents about the origins of the Vietnam War.

Andreas Fink, CEO of DataCell ehf, the Swiss company that has been accepting donations on behalf of Wikileaks via Visa, had this to say about the Dec. 8 decision by Visa to cease processing Wikileaks donations:

The suspension of payments towards Wikileaks is a violation of the agreements with their customers. Visa users have explicitly expressed their will to send their donations to Wikileaks and Visa is not fulfilling this wish. It will probably hurt their brand much much more to block payments towards Wikileaks than to have them occur.

Visa customers are contacting us in masses to confirm that they really donate and they are not happy about Visa rejecting them. It is obvious that Visa is under political pressure to close us down. We strongly believe a world class company such as Visa should not get involved by politics and just simply do their business where they are good at. Transferring money.

They have no problem transferring money for other businesses such as gambling sites, pornography services and the like so why a donation to a Website which is holding up for human rights should be morally any worse than that is outside of my understanding.

Contributions can still be made to Wikileaks and to Assange’s defense by wire transfer and by check and ordinary mail. To find out how to contribute, go here.

By the way, if there is anyone out there working for Visa, MasterCard, Paypal, or any banking organization, or in a government office, who can provide me with evidence that the U.S. has been behind the decision of any of those organizations to freeze out WikiLeaks and destroy it financially, I will guarantee your anonymity at all costs. Please contact me or send me documentation.

[Dave Lindorff is a regular columnist for Counterpunch and has also written for such diverse and seemingly mutually exclusive publications as BusinessWeek, The Nation, Extra!, Treasury & Risk, and Rolling Stone. This article first appeared in This Can't Be Happening and was distributed by Truthout.]

Also see:

• J'Accuse: Sweden, Britain, and Interpol Insult Rape Victims Worldwide by Naomi Wolf / Huffington Post / December 13, 2010
• What the Assange case reveals about rape in America by Jessica Valenti / The Washington Post / December 10, 2010

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Marc Estrin : Into the Flames

"Paulus in Ephesus" by Gustave Doré, circa 1883. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
INTO THE FLAMES

By Marc Estrin / The Rag Blog / October 19, 2010

Late last month, Pentagon officials stood around supervising the scene as St Martin’s Press destroyed the entire first run of Anthony Schaffer's new book on spycraft and special operations in Afghanistan.

Was there a good old bonfire -- as with the Nazis, or the anti-Harry Potterites? Somewhere in the center pentagon of the Pentagon? Or was there a festive scene roped off over at Madison Square Park with folks peering down from the Flatiron Building?

I queried my editor about how publishers "pulp" books, and he, in his innocence, never having pulped one, suggested that perhaps they feed the books into a large machine which turns the shreds into packing material, new paper and jiffy bags.

I suspect publishers don't actually burn books these carbon-conscious days, but offer them up as sacrifice to the chemical companies to deal with. And for a hardback book, that's a multi-step process, tearing off the covers, and dealing with them separately, cloth, cardboard, glue, and possibly plastic.

But whatever the process, "book-burning" is a description more accurate than an anodyne "recycling of printed material," and 9,600 copies met their maker as brass looked on, checking to make sure the deed was done.

Interesting, too, was the price we taxpayers forked up for the party. The book retails at $25.99, and Amazon sells it for $14.21 plus $3.99 shipping. The Department of Defense twisted St. Martin's arm to sell them the first run -- none to bookstores or Amazon -- for only $47,000. If you do the math, that's only $4.90 a copy. What a buy we got!

Not to be accused of censorship, our Freedom Fighters allowed St. Martins to publish a heavily redacted copy of the second edition. The great Russian writers had to deal with this all the time, so who are we to complain?

I once tried to burn a book. New in grad school, I thought I could make the world a better place with a ritual burning of Kafka's The Trial. I went out and splurged on a new, hardcover, Modern Library edition, along with a hefty tin pail in which to make the fire. With the LA Times for kindling, and some good Los Angeles brush and sticks, I had a nice blaze going, said an anti-blessing, and consigned the book to the flames.

Kafka smothered the blaze in billows of smoke with no significant damage to self, and unhip neighbors upstairs called the fire department -- which didn't quite get the issue. Also I melted a hole in the floor's shellac. So you see it was a good idea for our defenders to check to see that the job was done, and done right.

Why am I telling you all this? Most commentators have deplored the censorship aspect of this chapter of national-security mania. But I want to use these events to draw your attention to a story by that dark spirit of Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne, a tale frequently left out of anthologies -- "Earth's Holocaust" -- an incisive cautionary to would-be reformers, radicals, or revolutionaries like me, or possibly you.

Once upon a time, the inhabitants of the world determined to rid themselves of the evil accumulation of “worn-out trumpery," by heaving it all into an enormous bonfire. Into the flames went

coats of armor, nobility
sceptres of emperors and kings
hogsheads of liquor
bank notes
enamored sonnets
diplomas
weapons and ammunition
machinery to inflict the punishment of death
marriage certificates
daybooks and ledgers
statute books and printed paper in general
priestly garments
the Bible


Interesting list.

As the fire burns down, and the satisfied reformers leave to go to bed to wake to their new world, a little party -- convivial, but despondent -- is left hanging around the fire. It is the last murderer, the last thief, the last drunkard and the hangman.


"The best counsel for all of us is," thought the hangman, "that, as soon as we have finished the last drop of liquor, I help you, my three friends, to a comfortable end upon the nearest tree, and then hang myself on the same bough. This is no world for us any longer."


The despair of the wicked at the new-created world.

"Poh, poh, my good fellows!" said a dark-complexioned personage, who now joined the group -- his complexion was indeed truly dark, and his eyes glowed with a redder light than that of the bonfire; "be not so cast down, my dear friends; you shall see good days yet. There's one thing that these wiseacres have forgotten to throw into the fire, and with which all the rest of the conflagration is just nothing at all; yes, though they had burned the earth itself into a cinder."


"And what may that be?" eagerly demanded the last murderer.


"What but the human heart itself?" said the dark-visaged stranger, with a portentous grin. "And, unless they hit upon some method of purifying that foul cavern, forth from it will reissue all the shapes of wrong and misery -- the same old shapes or worse ones -- which they have taken such a vast deal of trouble to consume to ashes. I have stood by this livelong night and laughed in my sleeve at the whole business. Oh, take my word for it, it will be the old world yet!"

You can see, perhaps, why this is rarely anthologized.


Call it depraved or misguided, but it is this "foul cavern" -- foul, if often sublime -- that continues to attract and orient my attention. It's why I write novels.

Oh, btw, the title of the book the DoD recently burned was Operation Dark Heart.

[Marc Estrin is a writer and activist, living in Burlington, Vermont. His novels, Insect Dreams, The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, The Education of Arnold Hitler, Golem Song, and The Lamentations of Julius Marantz have won critical acclaim. His memoir, Rehearsing With Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread & Puppet Theater (with Ron Simon, photographer) won a 2004 theater book of the year award. He is currently working on a novel about the dead Tchaikovsky.]

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Paul Krassner : Censorship at Facebook

Unfriending the control freaks:
Censorship at Facebook

By Paul Krassner / The Rag Blog / August 31, 2010

Those control freaks who run Facebook are doing it again. This time, as you probably know, they're not allowing the image of a marijuana leaf -- because it's "illegal content" -- to appear in ads from the "Just Say Now" campaign for the legalization of pot, which is sponsored by Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. It's not the first time Facebook has indulged in chickenshit censorship. Below is my piece about it that was published in the May issue of High Times.

Mikal Gilmore, one of the best journalists covering the counterculture, is the author of Stories Done: Writings On the 1960s and Its Discontents. “For more than half of the subjects here,” he states, “including Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary and the Haight-Ashbury, psychedelics were a major factor in their lives…” But recently Gilmore himself had a bad trip, resulting from an overdose of the modern drug, Facebook.

Like so many others, his account was shut down, and they wouldn’t tell him why he was kicked off the island, so that he had no way of knowing what he did wrong or how to avoid doing it again. A Facebook friend who attempted to contact him with no success informed me that, “after numerous tries, I got this horrible warning that covered the screen screaming ‘DANGEROUS.’ Holy shit! To say it was disconcerting is an understatement.”

Gilmore explained the situation to me:

I was booted, I’m told, because of an image I posted. I was listening one night a few months ago to an early 1970s pop album by Joey Heatherton, and I was struck by her voice, how good it could be when she worked at it. I posted something to that effect, and I also posted the album cover, which I always try to do when I mention some music or music artist (or a book or movie).

This particular album has a photo of Heatherton baring her breasts. Last week, I couldn’t access my account and was told I’d been dropped for violating Facebook policy, but they couldn’t tell me what the specific offense was because, "for security reasons," they just can’t do that.

Since I'd acquired several friends at Facebook, and because my wife loves to take matters in hand, several people there raised a ruckus. I didn't ask anybody to. In fact, I thought my deactivation was just some fluke mistake, but Facebook refused to answer any of my inquiries, and also refused to answer anybody else's protests.

I was going to give up any idea of rejoining. Then, the same day I came to that conclusion, Facebook restored me, and told me they had deleted the offensive image. They never told me what the image was, but a Facebook member who has a relative at the place finally learned that it was the Heatherton album cover, and that Facebook had taken the action because another Facebook member had complained about the image.

Meanwhile, attorney Brian Cuban was fighting his own battle with Facebook, trying to get them to remove pages for Holocaust denial groups. He agreed with me that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private companies, but he added, “I think you have to look at the way free speech is evolving in historical context. We have come into an age where, with the advent of the Internet and unchecked values out there in the blogosphere, mere words have in fact driven people to commit violent acts.”

I asked, “When you spoke to Facebook about why they don’t tell people why they were dropped, how did they justify that?”

It was a justification of cost/benefit. I think they would love to give everyone a detailed explanation of why they’ve been dropped to prove there is no conspiracy there, as many people believe. In my battle with Facebook over Holocaust denial groups, I have been hit with countless e-mails asking me to ask them why there’s a Jewish conspiracy at Facebook -- to get rid of Jewish activists and to get rid of Jews in general -- because we’re raising all this fuss about Holocaust denial. In reality, I think it’s just cost/benefit. They don’t have the intrastructure to give everyone an explanation.

Perhaps Mikal Gilmore should have covered Joey Heatherton’s nipples with swastikas.

[Paul Krassner, for decades one of the country's foremost social critics, edited The Realist, America's premier journal of cutting edge social and political satire. He was also a founder of the Yippies. And speaking of censorship, Krassner defies it by publishing the Disneyland Memorial Orgy poster. See it at paulkrassner.com.]

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Jonah Raskin : Sex on Campus and Ulysses Un-Seen

Censored image from Ulysses Seen. Graphic from Literature R Us.
Girls Lean Back:
Sex on campus,
And the ongoing appeal of pornography

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / June 15, 2010

Don’t the censors of sexually explicit materials get it? Well, apparently not. Not even in this day and age.

Apple has forced the authors of Ulysses "seen" -- a web comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s magnificent novel, to remove images of a woman’s breasts for a version to be used with its iPad app.

Can you believe it? I thought that the issue of obscenity had been settled long ago; in the 1920’s, Joyce’s Ulysses was found to be artistic and that it could not be legally censored. But pornography is apparently an intractable problem. It just won’t go away; every time there’s a new technology it comes back.

In his big, thorough book about pornography, which he entitled Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius, Edward De Grazia, argued, among other things, that sex was irrepressible and unstoppable. An expert on sex in literature and film, De Grazia argued some of the toughest obscenity cases of the 20th-century and won against the state again and again. The censors at Apple ought to read his book and learn a thing or two.

Every semester for the past 20 years, I’ve used his book in the law class I teach -- there’s a week on pornography -- and every time I teach the class I can’t help but think about his book and its apt title. I look out at the students, usually 60 or so of them, all seniors, and I notice every time that the girls and the women in the class do lean back. They also lean forward and to the side. They lean every which way, and almost every way they lean, they reveal a part or parts of their bodies -- legs, necks, ankles, and breasts.

Sometimes they come to class in slips and negligees, with push-up bras or no bras, and class is a kind of striptease, though nobody disrobes completely. The men in the class lean back too; they lean forward and to the side, and they can be as sexual as the women. They’re all -- these students -- in their early twenties, and they drink and smoke and have sex. Big surprise!

Isn’t that what college students have been doing for eons? I think so. The students today belong to a post-60’s, post-70’s, post-80’s, post-90’s, post-first decade of the 21st century generation. They have lived with pornography all their lives, pornography on TV and the Internet, and they have come to accept pornography as a part of life, as much a part of life as driving a car, and making calls from a cell phone.

They eat and sleep and dream pornography and the idea that someone, anyone in authority, would try to stop or prevent them from having access to pornography seems ludicrous to them. Because, at this point in time, there’s no way to stop it, though the dinosaurs of the 21st century -- college teachers -- would like to do just that.

Faculty members, mostly male, are often made uncomfortable by the leaning back and the leaning forward of the students, mostly female, and sometimes they even tell students to dress more appropriately -- whatever that means -- and not to wriggle about as often or as dramatically as they do. Welcome to the new generation gap!

The faculty members -- now in their 40’s and 50’s and 60’s -- were once young themselves and did a lot of leaning on their own, and resented members of the older generation who tried to police their bodies. Now, the shoe, the slip, or the negligee is on another body, a younger body, a beautiful body, and the professors don’t like it. They have turned prudish. They’d like the students to cover up.

Now, I can imagine that someone might ask, well, do you teach at a university connected to a church? No, I do not. I teach at one of the 25 campuses in the statewide California State University (CSU) system. This is California, and in California when the sun shines, students take off their clothes, as many different layers and items as they can take off, and not be arrested for indecency. They walk around campus as though they’re in the Garden of Eden -- without shame, and without guilt.

Now, the faculty thinks -- this is what faculty members have actually said to me -- that the students have sex on their minds all the time, and that it’s the job of the teacher to encourage the student not to think about sex. And -- so the argument goes -- that can best be accomplished if the teacher doesn’t talk about sex or even mention the word “sex.”

Not long ago, a group of faculty members came to my office to request that I remove a photo I had on my wall of Marilyn Monroe. In the photo, Marilyn holds two roses against her breasts so that one can’t see her breasts at all. That photo, I was told, would encourage students to think about sex; it would validate their own thoughts and it would encourage them to go with their sexual daydreams. I was a role model, whether I wanted to be or not, I was told, and I had an obligation to take down the photo.

If I didn’t... well... there was a committee on issues of sexual harassment. So, I took down the photo and brought it home. Marilyn is on the wall in my dining room now. I didn’t want to fight that battle at that time.

One of the things I’ve learned, not surprisingly, is that students have continued to think and talk about sex; the removal of that photo of Marilyn had no influence on them whatsoever because they swim in a media sea of sexuality. Sex is all around them, and inside, too, and faculty members on my campus have the ludicrous notion that the best way to deal with the situation is just to ignore it -- not to talk about it. Bury their heads in the sand.

At a meeting recently to talk about a book that will be assigned reading for entering freshman next semester, the issue of sex came up again. The title of the book is Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, Pulitzer Prize winner. Now, I suggested that someone deliver a lecture to the students about sex -- because, well, “sex” is in the very title of the book. The faculty members were shocked that someone would even suggest the idea, and it was swept under the table.

It’s a sad day for academia. A sad comment on a generation that once believed in sexual freedom, sexual liberation and that resented their elders telling them to resist the temptations of sex. I do think that sex ought to be discussed -- and not just in the sex education class that they are required to take in which they learn about sexualy transmitted diseases and HIV and AIDS.

I think it might be healthy if the students were to read pornographic books and watch pornographic movies, and talk about them openly. If we did that, it might help to break the unhealthy cycle of Puritanism that comes back again and again no matter how many generations rebel against it -- for a time.

At the end of the meeting to discuss Middlesex one faculty member suggested that students would be made uncomfortable if there was an open discussion about sex and sexuality. “Our students don’t think of us as sexual beings,” he said. And without missing a beat, I said, “Speak for yourself, sir.” I hope that my students think of me as a sexual being, much as I think of them as sexual beings because I am and they are sexual, and sex won’t go away and especially if we pretend it’s not there.

So, damn the censors. The girls will lean back and the boys will lean back; it’s part of the mating game, part of being human, and at the age of 19, 20, and 21 leaning back is going to happen no matter what. Maybe some of the teachers should lean back too.

Celibacy isn’t for this generation. Sex is. And that’s on the whole a good thing. I’m happy to say that sex is still with us. I even think it’s here to stay. Case in point: a woman student came to my office on the last day of the semester to tell me that she attended what she called a “private swingers club in San Francisco,” and that if she had not attended she “never would have learned as much as I know about myself today!”

Students are going to “sex clubs.” On their own, because they are one of the few places where they can learn about sex. It might make sense, it might help them, if more of them could and would talk openly on campuses about their own sexual experiences. Sex ought to be far more openly discussed on campuses than it is today.

We have to believe and to recognize too that talking about sex is not the same thing as having sex. In the landmark Ulysses case from the 1930s, Justice John Woolsey ruled that people would read Joyce’s book, have a vicarious experience, and not want to actually go out and have sex. That idea was revolutionary in the 1930s; I guess it’s still revolutionary today.

[Jonah Raskin was a member of the Yippies; he teaches law at Sonoma State University.]

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Bill Ayers : Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming

Doublespeak at the University of Wyoming

"President Tom Buchanan's self-satisfied bromides do nothing to disguise the fact that the principle of free and open intellectual exchange has suffered a defeat at the University of Wyoming. As the AAUP has argued since 1915, it is precisely prevailing public opinion that must not shape what views get heard on campus." -- Cary Nelson, national president of the American Association of University Professors

By Bill Ayers / The Rag Blog / April 6, 2010

On March 30, 2010, officials at the University of Wyoming, citing “security threats” and “controversy,” canceled two talks I was invited to give in early April, one a public lecture entitled “Trudge Toward Freedom: Moral Commitment and Ethical Action,” and the other, a talk to faculty and graduate students called “Teaching and Research in the Public Interest: Solidarity and Identity.” I’d been invited in August 2009, but one week before I was to travel to Laramie, I was told I had been “disinvited.”

In February, as the University began to publicize my scheduled visit, a campaign to rescind the invitation was initiated on right-wing blogs, accelerating quickly to a wider space where a demonizing and dishonest narrative dominated all discussion. A wave of hateful messages and death threats hit the University, and was joined soon enough by a few political leaders and wealthy donors instructing officials in ominous tones to cancel my visit to the campus.

On March 28 an administrator wrote to tell me that the University was receiving vicious e-mails and threatening letters, as well as promises of physical disruption were I to show up. This is becoming drearily familiar to me, as I’ll explain.

A particularly despicable note from Frank Smith who lives in Cheyenne and is active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance, said, “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard (sic) Commerative (sic) Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican candidate for Governor Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to all members of the University of Wyoming Board of Trustees asking them to rescind the invitation. Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said through a press release that while he is a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” that still allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I sympathized with the University, and told the folks I was in touch with how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them. I also said that I thought it was a bit of a tempest in a tea pot, and that it would surely pass. Certainly no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I said, I thought that Wyoming law enforcement could get me to the podium, and I would handle myself from there, as I do elsewhere. I said I thought we should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize someone and suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue.

After all a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors are not permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a small mob gathers with torches at the gates.

I wouldn’t force myself on the University, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be another step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

President Tom Buchanan, University of Wyoming.
No good. On March 30, 2010 the University posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan. He begins with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the University, but quickly adds that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought “in concert with mutual respect.”

Nothing that I did or said in this matter was disrespectful or irresponsible, and yet, in the absence of specific references, readers are led to imagine all kinds of offenses.

The announcement is punctuated with a deep defensiveness: anyone who thinks the University “caved in to external pressure,” Buchanan writes, would be “incorrect.” Anticipating what any casual observer would conclude, he builds a strained and somewhat desperate counter-narrative. Buchanan pleads that UW is “one of the few institutions remaining in today’s environment that garners the confidence of the public,” and that a speech by me would somehow undermine that confidence.

He concludes that “this episode illustrated an opportunity to hear and critically evaluate a variety of ideas thoughtfully, through open, reasoned, and civil debate, it also demonstrates that we must be mindful of the real consequences our actions and decisions have on others.”

That’s some sentence, and while it’s impossible to know definitively what he’s referring to as the “episode” (it might be the public lecture itself, but then it could be the cancellation of the lecture, or even the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down, or withhold funds, that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters).

It has an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we canceled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it’s eerily similar to the classics: we destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement is a hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. The reason is familiar to me as noted: in the 1960’s I was a leader of the militant anti-war group, Students for a Democratic Society, and then a founder of the Weather Underground, an organization that carried out dramatic symbolic attacks against several monuments to war and racism, crossed lines of legality, of propriety, and perhaps even of common sense.

And then during the 2008 presidential election I was unwittingly and unwillingly thrust upon the stage because I had known -- like thousands of others -- Barack Obama in Chicago. The infamous charge that the candidate was “pallin around with terrorists,” designed to injure Obama, also demonized me.

I’ve been an educator and professor for decades, but the hard right has accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks -- activists and artists, academics and theorists, outspoken radical thinkers -- and wherever possible mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming.

Often university officials stand up on principle and resist the howling mob, as they did recently at St. Mary’s in California; sometimes -- as at a student-run conference at the University of Pittsburgh in March -- they compromise, restricting access to talks and surrounding a speaker with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; sometimes, as in this case, the university turns and runs. It’s a sad sight.

Of course I wasn’t invited to speak about any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without the active campaigning and noisy thunder from the relatively tiny group that is the ultra-right.

I would have focused my talk on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. Education engages dynamic questions of morality and ethics, identity and location, agency and action.

We want to know more, to see more, to experience more in order to do more -- to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide-awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives, and to wonder how they might be otherwise, is to deny democracy itself.

It’s reasonable to assume that education in a democracy is distinct from education under a dictatorship or a monarchy; surely school leaders in fascist Germany or Albania or Saudi Arabia or apartheid South Africa all agreed, for example, that students should behave well, stay away from drugs and crime, do their homework, study hard, and master the subject matter; they also graduated fine scientists and musicians and athletes, so none of those things differentiate a democratic education from any other.

What makes education in a democracy, at least theoretically, distinct is a commitment to a particularly precious and fragile ideal: every human being is of infinite and incalculable value, each a unique intellectual, emotional, physical, spiritual, and creative force. Every human being is born free and equal in dignity and rights; each is endowed with reason and conscience, and deserves, then, a sense of solidarity, brotherhood and sisterhood, recognition and respect.

Democracy is geared toward participation and engagement, and that points to an educational system in which the fullest development of all is seen as the necessary condition for the full development of each, and conversely, that the fullest development of each is necessary for the full development of all.

In a vibrant and participatory democracy, we might conclude that whatever the wisest and most privileged parents want for their children is precisely the baseline and standard for what the wider community wants for all of its children. If children of privilege get to have small classes, abundant resources, and a curriculum based on opportunities to experiment and explore, ask questions and pursue answers to the furthest limit -- if the Obama kids, for example, attend such a school, one where they also find a respected and unionized teacher corps -- shouldn’t that be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere?

Any other ideal for our schools, in John Dewey’s words, “is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy.”

We want our students to be able to think for themselves, to make judgments based on evidence and argument, to develop minds of their own. We want them to ask fundamental questions -- who in the world am I? How did I get here and where am I going? What in the world are my choices? How in the world shall I proceed? -- and to pursue answers wherever they might take them. Our efforts focus not on the production of things so much as on the production of fully developed human beings who are capable of controlling and transforming their own lives, citizens who can participate fully in civic life.

Professor William Ayers appears during an interview on ABC’s Good Morning America. Photo from AP.
Teaching in a democracy encourages students to develop initiative and imagination, the capacity to name the world, to identify the obstacles to their full humanity, and the courage to act upon whatever the known demands. Education in a democracy is always about opening doors and opening minds as students forge their own pathways into a wider world.

How do our schools at every level -- K-16 -- measure up to the democratic ideal?

Much of what we call schooling forecloses or shuts down or walls off meaningful choice-making. Much of it is based on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime. Much of it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, hides the unpleasant. There’s no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt.

While many long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, we find ourselves too-often locked in situations that reduce schooling to a kind of glorified clerking that passes along a curriculum of received wisdom and predigested and often false bits of information. This is a recipe for disaster in the long run.

Educators, students, and citizens must press for an education worthy of a democracy, including an end to sorting people into winners and losers through expensive standardized tests which act as pseudo-scientific forms of surveillance; an end to starving public schools -- including public higher education -- of needed resources and then blaming teachers for dismal outcomes; and an end to the rapidly accumulating “educational debt,” the resources due to communities historically segregated, under-funded and under-served.

All children and youth in a democracy, regardless of economic circumstance, deserve full access to richly-resourced classrooms led by caring, qualified, and generously compensated teachers.

We might try now to create open spaces in our schools and our various communities where we expect fresh and startling winds to blow, unaccustomed winds that are sure to electrify and confound and fascinate us. We begin by throwing open the windows. We declare that in this corner of this place -- in this open space we are constructing together -- people will begin to experience themselves as powerful authors of their own narratives, actors in their own dramas, the essential architects and creators of their own lives, participants in a dynamic and inter-connected community-in-the-making.

Here they will discover a zillion ways to articulate their own desires and demands and questions. Here everyone will live in search of rather than in accordance with or in accommodation to. Here we will join one another and our democratic futures can be born.

A primary job of teachers and scholars and journalists, and a responsibility of all engaged citizens, is to challenge orthodoxy, dogma, and mindless complacency, to be skeptical of all authoritative claims, to interrogate and trouble the given and the taken-for-granted. The growth of knowledge, insight, and understanding depends on that kind of effort, and the inevitable clash of ideas that follows must be nourished and not crushed.

As campuses contract and constrain, the main victims become truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, freedom itself. When college campuses fall silent, other victims include the high school history teacher on the west side of Chicago or in Laramie or Cheyenne, the English literature teacher in Detroit, or the math teacher in an Oakland middle school. They and countless others immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head covered.

In Brecht’s play Galileo the great astronomer set forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declared recklessly.

Intoxicated with his own insights, Galileo found himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did his radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that received truth insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we, too, are embarked on a great voyage, that we are free and without the easy support that dogma provides.

Here Galileo raised the stakes and risked taking on the establishment in the realm of its own authority, and it struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, he denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity -- by his own word.

A former student confronted him in the street then: “Many on all sides followed you... believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching -- in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.”

This is surely in play today: the right to talk to whomever you please, the right to read and wonder, the right to pursue an argument into uncharted spaces, the right to challenge the state or the church and its orthodoxy in the public square. The right to think at all.

This is some of what I would have discussed in Wyoming, but that will not happen, at least not this week. Canceling this talk underlines the urgency of having multiple and far-ranging speeches, dialogue, and discussions at every level and throughout the public square.

[William Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago.]

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