Critical Mass

Voting in Venezuela

I don't usually post on non-academic political matters, but this morning I am making an exception. This Wall Street Journal piece on the recent "election" in Venezuela is a must read. I'll post the opening few paragraphs to give to a taste of what follows:

CARACAS, Venezuela -- On Monday afternoon, dozens of people assembled in the Altamira Plaza, a public square in a residential neighborhood here that has come to symbolize nonviolent dissent in Venezuela. The crowd was there to question the accuracy of the results that announced a triumph for President Hugo Chavez in Sunday's recall referendum.

Within one hour of the gathering, just over 100 of Lt. Col. Chavez's supporters, many of them brandishing his trademark army parachutist beret, began moving down the main avenue towards the crowd in the square. Encouraged by their leader's victory, this bully-boy group had been marching through opposition neighborhoods all day. They were led by men on motorcycles with two-way radios. From afar they began to taunt the crowd in the square, chanting, "We own this country now," and ordering the people in the opposition crowd to return to their homes. All of this was transmitted live by the local news station. The Chavez group threw bottles and rocks at the crowd. Moments later a young woman in the square screamed for the crowd to get down as three of the men with walkie-talkies, wearing red T-shirts with the insignia of the government-funded "Bolivarian Circle," revealed their firearms. They began shooting indiscriminately into the multitude.

A 61-year-old grandmother was shot in the back as she ran for cover. The bullet ripped through her aorta, kidney and stomach. She later bled to death in the emergency room. An opposition congressman was shot in the shoulder and remains in critical care. Eight others suffered severe gunshot wounds. Hilda Mendoza Denham, a British subject visiting Caracas for her mother's 80th birthday, was shot at close range with hollow-point bullets from a high-caliber pistol. She now lies sedated in a hospital bed after a long and complicated operation. She is my mother.

I spoke with her minutes before the doctors cut open her wounds. She looked at me, frightened and traumatized, and sobbed: "I was sure they were going to kill me, they just kept shooting at me."

In a jarringly similar attack that took place three years ago, the killers were caught on tape and identified as government officials and employees. They were briefly detained -- only to be released and later praised by Col. Chavez in his weekly radio show. Their identities are no secret and they walk the streets as free men, despite having shot unarmed civilian demonstrators in cold blood.

I was not in the square on Monday. I was preparing a complaint for the National Electoral Council regarding the fact that I had been mysteriously erased from the voter rolls and was prevented from casting a vote on Sunday. In indescribable agony I watched the television as my mother and my elderly grandparents -- who were both trampled and bruised in the panic -- became casualties in Venezuela's ongoing political crisis.

The author of the piece will be well known to people who care about the state of civil liberties in academe: He is Thor Halvorssen, former CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Thor was until last winter the caffeine, the will, the voice, and much of the creative genius behind FIRE. He's now branching out and moving on--always fighting for freedom (those who know Thor know that will never change), but doing so on a larger, far more dangerous, and far more urgent stage than a college campus.

Good luck, Thor. Your work in higher education is sorely missed--but it is clearly also sorely needed elsewhere.

FIRE turns up the heat on UNC

University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Chancellor James Moeser has responded to FIRE's letter advising him that his school violated the constitutional rights of a Christian men's fraternity when it "de-recognized" the group for requiring that its members be Christian. And FIRE has fired back. The media and a North Carolina congressman are taking notice of this increasingly public showdown between UNC's interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and FIRE's interpretation of the First Amendment. It should be an interesting fight--not only because Moeser has reversed his position from the one he took when FIRE approached him about an analogous issue two years ago, but also because in doing so he is backing an administrator who has more than once abused his position to engage in vigilante politics at conservative and religious students' expense (Jonathan Curtis has not only repeatedly threatened to derecognize campus Christian groups, but has also facilitated the theft by liberal students of conservative student publications--scroll down here for more).

Reading Andersonville, contd.

Here lies part three of my series on Andersonville, genealogy, reading, and remembering.

Historically-minded readers may balk at the notion of turning to fiction to try to gain access to historical truth. They may particularly balk at the notion that this might be a good thing to do when the facts are too few to produce a viable, verifiable account. I myself balk at those notions, despite, or perhaps because of, my genuine love for historical fiction. But abstract methodological balking didn't stop me from approaching Andersonville with the frank intention of using the novel to try to grasp what being an Andersonville prisoner might "really" have been like for David Sells. I knew that, from a "scholarly" perspective, I was doing bad history, not to mention illegitimate literary analysis. But I didn't particularly care, and I went ahead and went looking for David Sells in Kantor's novel anyhow. It was a good thing I did.

No matter how much documented information you have, you can't ever fully or definitely recreate--accurately, affectively--the feel of the past. But you can try, and this is what MacKinlay Kantor did with his novel. A lifelong Civil War buff who grew up surrounded by the stories of that conflict's aging veterans, Kantor read toward Andersonville for forty years, and wrote it for twenty-five. Andersonville wasn't Kantor's only work and it was not his first work, but it was his great synthesis, the result of a lifetime spent not only studying the Civil War and the Andersonville camp, but making the tremendous effort to imagine them.

Studying and imagining are two different things, though they do overlap at points, and Kantor's novel illustrates this beautifully. Kantor could conceivably have attempted a Shelby Foote-like historical opus. His research had prepared him to undertake such a project. But he did not. His decision to do his historical synthesis from within the framework of fiction was not an accident but a choice--one well worth careful consideration (worth noting, too, but beyond the scope of this post: Foote's writing about the Civil War began as fiction; the massive multi-volume history for which he is best known grew out of his creative writing, and was begun at almost precisely the moment that Kantor published Andersonville).

As a genre, historical fiction operates under the assumption that history, and especially history's intangibles (the moral how of things, the affective tone of things, the subjective feel of things), can be, and perhaps had better be, handled through openly creative, if responsibly researched, narrative. This idea informed Walter Scott when he wrote Waverley, an early nineteenth-century tale about the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion that is generally credited with being the first historical novel. Enormously popular and influential throughout the nineteenth century, Scott had much to do with shaping the emerging genre of historical fiction both in Britain and abroad--if Dickens and George Eliot were each inspired, in their different ways, to write historical novels after the tradition of Scott, so were Balzac, Hugo, and Tolstoy.

The sort of influence Scott had on authors and readers was necessarily much deeper than a discussion of mere literary influence can indicate, though. Certainly he shaped aesthetic expectations about fiction; Scott's decision to meld historical thinking with storytelling was one of the most important moments in the notoriously troubled novel's acquisition of respectability as a literary genre. But in creating a public taste for historical narrative, Scott was also making it possible for people to live their lives as if they were themselves characters in historical novels. Mark Twain, for example, once wrote that the Civil War owed much to Southerners' collective effort to shape their society after Scott's fiction:

It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.

Twain's comment is as instructive as it is fanciful: I'd go so far as to say that its instructiveness lies in its readiness to acknowledge how absolutely crucial fanciful, even flighty, notions can be to the shaping of worlds. The most serious and lasting things can arise from the most nonsensical notions; the term "peculiar institution," coined to describe the slave-holding South, speaks aptly to the region's intimate familiarity with this phenomenon.

Scott wanted people to remember a complicated and decisive moment in Scottish history that was, half a century later, quickly fading from collective memory even as it continued to define its descendants. Likewise Eliot (Middlemarch contemplates the period of England's First Reform Bill, forty years before), Dickens (A Tale of Two Cities uses the French Revolution as a means of reflecting on whether revolution would come to Victorian England), Tolstoy (War and Peace places the Russian aristocracy against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars), and MacKinlay Kantor, who very much belongs in this distinguished company. All believed that the way to get at something like an understanding of the pivotal moments of the past was to recognize that those moments both create and are created by those who lived them. As Tolstoy puts it in War and Peace,

In historical events great men - so-called - are but labels serving to give a name to the event, and like labels they have the least possible connection with the event itself. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own free will, is in an historical sense not free at all, but in bondage to the whole course of previous history, and predestined from all eternity.

The tensions between the largeness of the Civil War and the smallness of the largely forgotten lives that were given to it, between the horror of Andersonville and the mundane--Hannah Arendt would say "banal"--bureaucratic reasons for that horror, between the symbolic historic importance given to the camp and the sheer historical anonymity of the majority of the men who lived and died there: These form the framework for Andersonville, which is as deeply concerned with how important events can obliterate personality as it is with how these events tend to be remembered in terms of the individualistic short hand of "great men." As such, Andersonville was a remarkable work for me to happen across when my own particular mission was to try to find, somehow, someway, some trace of a man who had been obliterated, body and soul, by the place Kantor took for his subject.

to be continued

Two strikes and you're ...

Two years ago, administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrated their ignorance of the First Amendment when they ordered the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to strike wording from its constitution stipulating that the group's leaders be Christian. Such wording, the administrators argued, was discriminatory; when the IVF refused to cooperate, administrators threatened to withdraw the IVCF's school funding and to "de-recognize" the group. In a letter to IVCF, Jonathan E. Curtis, UNC's assistant director for student activities and organizations, told IVCF to “modify the wording of your charter or I will have no choice but to revoke your University recognition.”

FIRE successfully defended the group, explaining to UNC administrators how freedom of association works, and pointing out that the only discrimination in the case was their own discrimination against the IVCF. After the embarrassment of FIRE-instituted media exposure, UNC backed down and restored the group's rights. “While the University continues to seek to ensure that our facilities and resources are not used in any way that fosters illegal discrimination, we also wish to uphold the principles of freedom of expression," Chancellor James Moeser said in a statement. "Thus I have asked our staff to allow IVCF to continue to operate as an official recognized student organization.”

That should have been a clear, unforgettable lesson. But apparently it was not. The very same administrator who made trouble for the IVCF in 2002, Jonathan E. Curtis, is now making the exact same trouble for another campus Christian organization, the Alpha Omega Iota Christian fraternity. AOI has a clause in its constitution similar to the one in IVCF's that required group leaders to be Christians. And last fall, Curtis pulled the same prank with AOI that he had pulled less than a year before with IVCF, informing AOI leaders that unless they reworded their constitution, they would lose their funding as well as their status as a recognized student group.

Curtis' threat initially led AOI members to decide against submitting the required annual application for recognition (AOI had been a recognized student group since 1999, and had not encountered problems until Curtis got involved in 2003). But now AOI is fighting back. FIRE wrote a letter to Moeser remonstrating with him last month. Having received no response, they are going public with the story of UNC's continued arrogant unwillingness to accord religious students their associational rights.

I think FIRE will win this one, just like it won the last one, and just like it has won a number of analogous cases at colleges and universities across the country. My question is, how many times does Jonathan Curtis get to flout the law, abuse students, and embarrass his employers before he is relieved of his job? In 2002, when he violated the IVCF's rights, he could plead ignorance--but he can't do that this time.