This is a link to an essay that Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado professor, wrote on the evening of September 11th 2001. He is now getting a considerable amount of heat for the essay and there are mounting political pressures for him to be fired. Have a read at some point.
Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
http://passionbomb.com/words/push_roost.htm
Thursday, February 03, 2005
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5 comments:
If the man wants to be a man, he might say "plese let me know if you are considering firing me: because, IF you are, I'd like to say fuck you, and I quit. I quit because I don't want to work with sucks like you, and I say fuck you because, well, it is such a good word and I must admit to a humility at my being able to improve upon it.
As to the nature of his essay
1) He seems to exclude himself: why, in Colorado, should he not be sought out and killed. He wasn't at the right place at the right time, but, what the fuck, that's not reason not to kill him now. Anyone, you really don't have to have a specific reason, I mean, he has demonstrated that for any killing, there is a superabundance of reason
2) He encouraged his own killing my his rudeness: when he stepped from the global view of chickens down to the man selling flowers, the woman working to get herself through college: did these kind people "bray" into phones. Nope, he could be killed for just being so rude at another's funeral. Again, we have the problem of distance and time, but that is no inhibitor: there he is in Colorado, far from the time and place of 9/11 and he is fully engaged.
The man should have been able to speak. He should have been able to be given the opportunity to repeat his message (that the chickens came home to roost) and that he was full of remorse for being so unfeeling toward those innocents, those poor cogs in the wheel, that were killed. THEY perse did NOT "have it coming": it was a global reaction and there were pawns taken out. Sweet, loving, connected pawns.
However, if he failed to convince the audience that he had learned, and if he failed to instruct them on how to take some responsibility themselves, and if he had not demonstrated both humilty and scholarship, then the audience should have been able, by 2/3 majority, to order his execution on the spot one of a prespecified range of options: from swift and painless to delayed and painful in say some 3 or 4 gradations from bottom to top. All profits would go to the Jimmy Carter fund for world peace, or to Nelson Mandella for distrubution as he saw fit.
Actually, this would be a great opportunity for him to learn and or to pay. Unless he is an asshole, as which case back to the top: kill the fuck :-)
Ooops, you missed an absolutely vital point: the man is a native American. He has first hand knowledge of the gift to the world from the White West. As a professor, the rules still stand. His people got fucked last year. His people got fucked this year. His people are getting fucked right now. Whatever-time-it-is-on-your-watch right now.
But as a person: he needs to be cut some slack. He is from a line of people who have themselves been murdered by Americans and he has a right to speak, and a duty. That he did it less than perfectly ("badly" would be one way), doesn't matter.
So a Native American can say this but a white man cannot. Interesting.
A person with experience can speak from that experience. There is nothing new in that at all.
You wannt talk about the conditions in China, it helps a lot if you've been there.
You wanna talk about being screwed by Americans: it is hard to do that as a White upper middle class Christian if you havent' done something to earn some credentials. Of course, you can be a safe upper middle class Jew and talk about ancient mistreatment of the Jews, or try to occupy some Palestinians land because, well, God gave it to you... that doesn't cut it for me, and I'm sure that doesn't cut it for you.
Next time to call on the phone, use a spanish accent or an Amreican Indian accent and name and see what service you get. Or put some blackface on go jogging in a white neighborhood.
Yes, an Amreican Indian can say things that most white people cannot. They paid in advance.
Funny, to me, the written content either has merit or it doesn't. If it's bullshit from a white man then it's bullshit from a Native American (I'm not claiming this essay to be bullshit).
If we allow the red man to have a different level of outrage, then the white man will never be allowed to be outraged at himself. I’d MUCH rather have read this screed (and yes, to me it was an angry screed, but one with content) be written by a white man since that would tell me that, at least some whites, get it.
Churchill, BTW, is visibly and audibly white, does that change how we should judge his writing?
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