Cheryl Young

Per usual, the target of the satirical cartoon was informed of the blog entry. Will she respond? It is likely she will not. Most citizens hate unexpected and unauthorized criticism, cannot deal with it, reject it viscerally, refuse to deal with the possible truths therewithin, and do not favor vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy. Sorry, that's been my experience.

Letter Sent (12/29/10) to Cheryl Young, Executive Director, MacDowell Colony:
It will be highly unlikely for you to fathom anything written in this email. In fact, the sad state of art, literature, and higher education in America today would make me believe that it would be equally unlikely for most college students of art and literature to fathom anything in it. In any case, I just read the NU magazine snippet on you… almost enough to make me vomit… almost. But your ilk—smiley-faced, moneyed artist or poet in tie and jacket—has become so banal in America today, I just couldn’t heave. It is people like you, former commodities traders turned CEO artists and poets, who have become the gatekeepers, permitting voice exclusively to bourgeois-friendly art and bourgeois-friendly literature. If only you could see the damage being done. Yes, “the marketplace,” as you stipulate. That says it all. But do we really need more ladder-climbing CEO “midwives” in the milieu or do we need more hardcore rude-truth tellers with balls? Well, I know your response… and you know mine. Women in power have proven no less corrupt then men in power. The old Sixties thought that if women ran things, things would be much better, turned out to be a pipedream load of horseshit. I’ve collided with your ilk frequently over the years. Just recently, the Cape Cod Cultural marm in power and director of Sturgis Library proved her dictatorial nature by refusing anything she deemed not to be “family friendly,” which of course is just another term for MacDowell-friendly or Chamber-of-Commerce friendly. You note that your Colony is a “starstruck place.” Yes, that too says it all. But I’d rather refer to it as a starblind place instead. That’s art today: icon worship. So, you’ve got a BA in Economics. Yes, I’m sure that’s helped you determine what art and literature to allow through the Chamber of Commerce gates and what art to prevent. Whoopee, your endowment has quintupled! That too says it all—MONEY as your artistic goal. How sad that you cannot see. How truly sad for you. So, your Colony received the highest award from the US government, which is really a reflection of the US Chamber of Commerce. When artists and poets shake the hands of businessmen, business women, and politicians, something has really gone awry in the milieu. These things said, how about inviting me to speak at your colony? I live in Massachusetts, so could easily make the trip to NH. Or how about subscribing to The American Dissident (only $20). Yes, you could leave the journal on a coffee table in an effort to expose your art fellows to an alternative point of view. SILENCE is golden, goes the old Chinese proverb. Well, I don’t agree with it. BTW, I’m class of ’72. Yes, I should do a cartoon on you. As you know, I’ve already done one on your Colony.

No response was recieved.

Denis Dutton

Professor Denis Dutton created “Arts & Letters Daily” on The Chronicle of Higher Education website and died recently. "I think that he has been an incredibly passionate advocate for ideas and truth,” noted his son. Yet Dutton refused to permit the ideas and truth of The American Dissident on that website, despite my requests. Dutton was a little-caesar gatekeeper, keeping the doors closed to ideas and truths that he did not like. Should we mourn his death? Not in the least.

Does the following, on the Arts & Letters Daily website, represent passionate advocate for ideas and truth... or business-as-usual in the established-order literary milieu? "Allen Ginsberg had a serene air about him, like Yoda, but with bigger ears. At least that’s what Tyler Stoddard Smith remembers about him. Oh, and that Ginsberg peed on his shoes..."

The cartoon above is a satire of Dutton's book.

Scott McLemee

Censored! If Henry Could See THEM Now!

The following comment, “Pipe Dream,” was written in response to Ithaca College professor Michael Smith’s Inside Higher Ed article, “If Henry Could See Us Now” (see http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/11/02/smith). Sadly and unsurprisingly censored by Inside Higher Ed, which exists to propagate PC and the academic established order. Mention of the censorship incident was sent to History/Ecology professor Michael Smith of Ithaca College. Smith, as good academic, chose to accept the censorship incident and remain silent. Mention was also sent to Ithaca College’s student newspaper and members of Smith’s history department, as well as college president. It is particularly reprehensible that my comment was censored because my comment simply sought to present another side of Thoreau, a side that was not happy-face PC-friendly. Was the truth in my comment rude? Well, isn’t truth always rude when spoken to power?

Pipe DreamThe project to build a replica Thoreau shack on Ithaca College’s campus, as noted in Professor Michael Smith’s article, “If Henry Could See Us Now,” is diversionary. In fact, would Henry really be happy to see college students working with professors to build a replica of his shack? Thoreau was mostly a loner, not a team player. “The gregariousness of men is their most contemptible & discouraging aspect,” he stated. “See how they follow each other like sheep not knowing why.” Individualism is hardly a valued trait on college campuses today.
The president of Ithaca College selected Walden as required reading because the book is entirely “safe” from his perspective. Any number of quotes from Thoreau’s journal entries would have proven far more provocative and thus apt to instigate vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, though evidently not of academe. How about this quote, for example: “It suggests that the one great rule of composition — and if I were a professor of rhetoric I should insist on this — is to speak the truth.” Imagine if an English professor at Ithaca College, or better yet the president himself, actually encouraged that on campus! It would set the PC myrmidons aflame! It would free the student newspaper!
Emerson noted, regarding Thoreau: “Such dangerous frankness was in his dealing that his admirers, called him ‘that terrible Thoreau’.” Clearly, Thoreau was not the kind of fellow apt to get tenure today. After all, imagine such frankness before the ruling tenured professors and administrators. Thoreau had written: “A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric man, a silent, a man who does not drill well,—of him there is some hope. Your gentlemen, they are all alike. They utter their opinions as if it was not a man that uttered them.”
That quote evokes the civility mantra suffocating free speech at so many institutions of purported higher learning today.
Imagine, instead of another replica shack—Yes, there’s one at Walden Pond too. I was threatened by a state trooper for leaving my free-speech flyers in it.—, if professors like Michael Smith actually stepped out from the comfortable academic herd to actively test the waters of democracy on their particular campuses by performing experiments in free speech, that is, by daring to speak what in their hearts they damn well know will get them not more carrots, but rather the ire of the reigning academic established order. Imagine, if we could get them to heed Thoreau’s famous dictum: “Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” The result would surely be not continued academic censorship and corporatization of higher education, but rather fortified democracy and true appreciation for the First Amendment. Then one might truly and proudly ask: “if Henry could see us now.”

Scott McLemee

The following is the comment I attempted to post. It was, however, censored by Scott McLemee and/or his boss Doug Lederman, editor of Inside Higher Education. The comment pertained to McLemee's article, oddly enough called "Rude Democracy" (see http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee311). Note that McLemee boasts of not even holding a college degree. Yet, somehow, he's become a board member and regular columnist at Inside Higher Ed, an online newspaper devoted to matters of higher education. Only the Left could encourage a debate on the topic "Rude Democracy," while simultaneously censoring opinions it doesn't like. Should organs of purported higher education be in the censoring business? It is my humble opinion, as editor of The American Dissident and long-time professor, that they should not be. It is, however, the opinion of the president of the Association of American University Professors, Cary Nelson, that they should be. The Left clamors ad nauseum for civility. But is censorship civil?
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Scott McLemee finally comes out of the PC-socialist closet. Bravo! He admits, though only indirectly, that he is not at all an independent journalist, but rather a doctrinaire socialist journalist who marches with the “Socialist Contingent.” “Full disclosure: I was part of this, and joined in chanting ‘We're gonna make Glen Beck cry!’,” he notes. Demonization of the likes of Beck or O’Reilly or Obama, for that matter, is a form of ad hominem which tends to be the way of the indoctrinated—left or right wing. The battle is clear today in America: free speech vs. PC civility (and accompanying censorship). Fox, at least, reports on that battle. And, yes, I tend to watch Fox more than CNN because CNN oozes PC.

These things said, just like McLemee, I’m definitely for “higher taxes for the rich and an end to the wars,” but unlike him I’m also for an end to facile demonization of those who are not for those things, for the creation of work programs for those getting free government housing and money (welfare), including Obama’s African aunt in Boston, and an end to PC tenure in the Humanities.

The problem with CIVILIY that is not mentioned in this article is its fundamental SUBJECTIVITY. Civil for you, McLemee, Herbst, and Lederman, might not be civil for me… and vice versa. That is why democracy demands a First Amendment and why perhaps Inside Higher Ed (IHE), though a private money-making organization, ought to embrace it. Sadly, it does not… or if it does, that embrace is highly superficial.

Susan Herbst is quite right, whereas IHE wrong: “Creating a culture of argument, and the thick skin that goes along with it, are long-term projects that will serve democracy well.” Her stats are of course quite frightening, though not at all surprising to me as a long-time professor: “72 percent of students agreed that it was very important for them always to feel comfortable in class.”

The thought I had the other day would be deemed sexist and thus dismissed… and probably censored. But I’ll evoke it here anyhow in the name of the FIRST Amendment: Have the soccer-mom tenured professors in power today in the Humanities, those women in purple, succeeded over the past several decades to coddle and otherwise cocoon student adults with their Safe Zones et al? Where are they hiding when right-wing student newspapers are burned and speakers heckled off the stage at college campuses across the nation? “Feeling comfortable and unthreatened intellectually is a value many students share,” notes Herbst. But is that really a value? What it does is foster cliquishness and lack of outside opinion and input. It fosters the knee-jerk, anti-Fox mentality.

McLemee has it right here and this is why he despises Beck: “Hence pursuing an argument is taken as very nearly an act of aggression.” BTW, I’m an out-of-the-closet atheist and even watch Beck now and then. Well, uh, I do tend to turn the channel to CNN when he starts spouting his god inanity. Oops, that’s an un-PC statement that might OFFEND and get this comment censored into oblivion in our so-called democracy.

McLemee notes: “The attitude that it's better to stay cool and amused than to risk making arguments or expressing too much ardor—this is not civility. It’s timidity.” But is he not being a grand hypocrite when those like me do express ardor, then are censored by his boss, while he remains silent with regards that censorship?

Finally, my comment regarding Herbst’s IHE essay on civility was censored by IHE. I brought that to Herbst’s attention in an email. Herbst, unsurprisingly or rather hypocritically, did not respond. Since it is perhaps likely that this comment will be censored to spare Herbst the embarrassment, it will be posted on my weblog. Thank you for your attention.

On "Removing Incompetent Faculty"

Open Letter to Professor Glenn Petersen:Bravo for not writing anonymously. So many professors seem to choose that road today… at the expense of their own dignity. Anyhow, “Removing Incompetent Faculty,” the brief opinion piece you wrote in NEA Higher Education Advocate, struck a little nerve. Of course, by writing such an article, unquestioning and unchallenging academic readers will automatically assume that you must be competent. Yet you fail to even mention a working definition of the term “competent.” From my perspective, as an untenured rude-truth speaking individual, “competent” faculty tend, more than anything else, to be faculty who have learned to turn a blind eye, behave obsequiously (and collegially and without spine), never speak the rude truth, and cleverly rationalize these professional traits. Your 33 years at Bernard Baruch College surely indicate a large measure of such “competence.” By the way, Advocate and Inside Higher Ed censor opinions like mine. Editor John Rosales would likely never permit this opinion to appear in his pages. Are you also an advocate of censorship… from hippie to tenured professor advocate of censorship? Well, you certainly wouldn’t be the only one! Thank you for your attention. BTW, why not get BBC to subscribe to The American Dissident. Students would likely appreciate it, though I don't think faculty would.

Harris Gardner

Harris Gardner, Another Little Caesar CensorAbout a decade ago I met Harris Gardner at the Jack Kerouac Festival in Lowell. I was manning a table for The American Dissident in the small press area. Gardner and Jack Powers were the bosses of that area. I recall Gardner sneering down at a book I had on the table: FUCK MASSACHUSETTS. He chatted with Powers. Both questioned me as to whether they should permit me to keep the book there because, well, it might anger their puppet masters. Gardner is one of thousands of little caesar censors in the literary world. His principle concern is obtaining cash from the state politicos so he can dole it out to his literary cronies.

What of course viscerally disgusts me about Gardner, besides his evident disdain for vigorous debate and democracy, are his hypocritical statements. “The poets are today’s prophets,” he blathers. “Poets should be examples of social consciousness, and awareness.” But awareness of what? The viewpoint discrimination effected by the likes of Harris? And what is social consciousness, being conscious of PC and its nefarious campaign of censorship and indoctrination?

“Poets are social critics, and social criticism is one part of the art,” he states, while excluding me from his National Poetry Month because of my evident rude-truth social criticism. But for Harris some social criticism is clearly taboo because it inevitably denounces his ilk.

“Political poetry is only a problem when it becomes a rant,” he continues. Rant, of course, is key! Anything apt to expose Gardner's hypocrisy would have to be dismissed as RANT!

“If it is done well, it still is poetry,” he states. Done well? But according to whom? The real-estate-broker, friend-of-the-Chamber-of-Commerce Gardner?

“You can have political poetry that uses metaphor without shaking a fist in someone’s face,” he argues. But how not to “shake a fist” in his face? And who would want to hide the fist behind metaphor?

To be invited to read at the Boston National Poetry Month Festival, one has to actually pass Gardner’s “audition,” as he terms it! Am I fucking dreaming? How did it ever get so rotten in the world of poetry? Where the fuck are the other barbarians? With flaccid bagel-bards like Gardner at the helm, the barbarians should be storming the gates in hoards!