The brouhaha surrounding University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill's Sept. 12, 2001, essay, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," has devolved into a festival of lunacy.

Churchill, whose essay managed to float for more than three years all but unnoticed — and, I would note, harming no one — now says that those who have issued death threats against him are "terrorists." Fools and reactionaries, yes. But it's hard to feel sorry for Churchill when he still hesitates to use the "t-word" to describe the perpetrators of 9/11: They were "combat teams" notable for "patience and restraint."

During a Wednesday protest on the CU campus, Churchill supporters hilariously segued from chants of "free speech, free speech" to trying to hoot down a member of the College Republicans trying to read a statement from Gov. Bill Owens (who revealed his own weak grasp of free speech).

On the other side, anti-Churchill demonstrators and Owens claimed that, while the professor is free to speak as a citizen, his status as a public employee neuters his First Amendment rights. By logical extension, the Bill of Rights is null and void for all government employees, no?

The Rocky Mountain News, which in a 1999 editorial defended a how-to book on assassination — "The reason the First Amendment guarantees a blanket protection is precisely so government doesn't end up determining for the rest of us what is acceptable content." — now calls for the government to fire Churchill based on ... his "unacceptable" content and "incitement to violence."

And CU Regent Steve Bosley thinks Churchill's sin was spouting "anti-American and anti-capitalist rhetoric." Huh. I must have missed the memo about Soviet-style suppression of "incorrect" ideas.

Worst of all, it's apparent that few people actually read Churchill's essay in its entirety before spouting off.

Well, I have read it, and some of its underlying assertions are not as outrageous as the mindless "they-hate-us-for-our-freedoms" crowd would have us believe. Churchill's basic point, it seems to me, is that Americans have for decades blindly supported a foreign policy that has caused suffering and death around the globe, so it's no surprise that someone would strike back (though his approval of such mass murder is repellent to me). Our fantasies of invulnerability and divine rectitude are the same as those dearly held — and always shattered — by empires and "superpowers" throughout history.

But the essay's arrogance, hypocrisy and poisonous condemnation of whole groups of people, including snotty rips like that on Americans who "(see) to it that little 'Tiffany' and 'Ashley' had just the right roll-neck sweaters to go with their new cords," undermines it. Churchill even blasts (yet again) peaceful activists who protested the 10-year sanctions on Iraq that killed 500,000 children, which his quick-draw essay offers as the main reason for the 9/11 attacks. Guess if you ain't shooting, boy, you ain't s**t.

Churchill suffers from an elitist myopia little different from the stereotyping of the racists and imperialists he so often excoriates. Like so many political "purists" in history, including Hitler and those who slaughtered unarmed American Indians at Sand Creek, he condemns people he's never met, and applauds their deaths, all to justify his ivory-tower ideology. Churchill is all political, no personal.

Yet the professor has a personal life, too, just like the "little Eichmanns" (to quote his insidious diminution of the brutality of the Holocaust) who died on Sept. 11. Like them, he's enmeshed in the "empire" by simple virtue of living in our privileged, overconsuming society. He may think he's "purer" than the rest of us, but he's not exactly living "off the grid" in the Idaho panhandle, either:

Churchill works for "the man," accepting more than $100,000 a year — he's rich, in my book — from us sheep-like taxpayers and, presumably, paying taxes that support "America's global financial empire." Though he claims otherwise, I'd wager my 401(k) he's not wholly divested from pensions invested in stocks and bonds.

Public records show he owns a three-bedroom house in Boulder(capitalist swine!) and has bought at least five motor vehicles, including two pickup trucks (to bolster his dubious "Indian" credentials?) since 1995; perhaps he buys his petroleum from an anarchist collective on the moon. He incessantly smokes tobacco, contributing, at least indirectly, to an industry that is busily striving to addict new cancer candidates in Third World countries every day.

In other words, his life has an impact — just like those of 9/11 victims whom he says received "penalty befitting their participation" in the same system. But, like others blinded by ego and a transparently pathetic need to feel superior, he barks stereotypes and invective through a bullhorn of phony virtue, cursing people who, in his mind, committed the "crime" of trying to live and feed families from within a system that some surely found flawed, too.

Churchill no doubt believes that, by degrees, he's more virtuous than most Americans; people like him always do. But it's a fair bet that his terrorist heroes would slit his throat as quickly as those of any other American. And carried to logical extremes, the only way for the professor, or anyone, to achieve perfect "purity" is not a move to Idaho, but a "noble" act of suicide.

Churchill was right to surrender the Ethnic Studies Department chair (will he miss that filthy $18,000?). But if the regents try to revoke his tenure, it's hello, McCarthyism.

Because Ward Churchill has a right to speak, and he does speak some truth. If he wants more willing listeners, he should resist mixing it up with rancid ego, blind hatred and sorry hypocrisy.

© 2005 Daily Camera

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