It Is Not America Without Dissent
Christmas Eve, 2016
On Christmas Eve, 2016, three grandmothers made a late afternoon pilgrimage to a small pizza place on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. On previous visits, they had walked with their grandchildren down the Avenue to eat pizza and pasta there. Now their visit had a different purpose: For unfathomable reasons, the quiet and friendly restaurant had become the object of a vile conspiracy theory called Pizzagate, which baselessly alleged that children were being held in the basement of Comet. After the conspiracy spread across the Internet, a man showed up with a gun. Fortunately no one was killed, and the owners, unbowed, had insisted on staying open for the community. The grandmothers wanted to thank the owners and staff of Comet Ping Pong for having survived the onslaught of disinformation and the assault by an armed vigilante.
I was one of the grandmothers. The transition from President Obama to President-elect Trump had unsettled all three of us. Both onslaught and assault were baleful warning signs of a recrudescence of past dangers and future dangers to come. As such, they offended my patriotism. They still do.
My patriotism has deep roots. I was a child during World War II. In my small hometown in the Pacific Northwest, we grew silent when we passed a Gold Star Mother banner in a window. We wept, cheered, and threw confetti in 1945 when America and the Allies won. My father came home alive. America was beautiful and majestic and justly powerful.
Since 1945, I have had an immense amount to unlearn about “my” America. Genuine inquiry corrodes naivete. I have had to dive into the American wreck and, in the words of Adrienne Rich, “see the damage that was done/ and the treasures that prevail.” 1 America has an awful history. Even before the Great Acceleration began in 1945, much of the economy of my home was based on the extraction of natural resources: timber and fish. A vicious anti-Semite, Henry Ford, had manufactured the old Model T car that sat in my own grandmother’s garage. My town had had an active chapter of the Ku Klux Klan---until a local Catholic businessman led efforts to disarm it. The “Indians” on a reservation about ten miles away were survivors of my country’s need to corral and exterminate Indigenous peoples.
And yet, what treasures, many unsung, did prevail? After 1945, as I matured, I lived in an America that -- with the most immense effort, bloodshed, sacrifice, and grit -- was building on history to create greater possibilities for human rights, equality, and the sustainability of life.
I keep a mental timeline of these post-World War II activities. A few markers: 1945, the United Nations is established; many of its members will represent post-colonial countries. 1947, President Harry Truman creates a visionary Commission on Higher Education, which urges the establishment of public community colleges. 1948, President Truman desegregates the military. 1962, Rachel Carson publishes Silent Spring with its opening “fable” of a town that destroys its natural ecology. 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a Civil Rights Act. 1967, Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court declares that laws banning interracial marriage are unconstitutional.
The 1960s: that decade of violence. Johnson is president because John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. During the protests at Columbia University against the war in Vietnam, my sub-sized role is to help form a human chain around buildings to protect them from anti-protestors and the police. And yet, it was increasingly possible to design change. I was teaching at Barnard College; among my courses were the first in Women and Literature and in Black Literature. One of my early articles was about the mistakes a white teacher can make about Black culture and about my gratitude to Black students who were themselves my teachers.
Essential to the stability of such designs for change was the transmutation of activism into institutional norms and law: in 1972, the passage of Title IX, legalizing gender equity in education; in 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to reproductive freedom, now so painfully wrenched away. In 1974, Richard Nixon resigns as U.S. president. The holders of that office, we believed, were not above the law.
In subsequent years, global societies became computer literate. Some of us joked that babies were now born with a mouse in one hand. In 2004, Facebook (briefly known as The Facebook) opens for business. Educators had to learn what great differences screens made to the classroom: the shifts in attention spans, the power of the visual over the text, the consequences of this for reading. My class about universities--what they were, what they are, what they should be--now began with vivid images of rousing university marching bands. Yet, information was far, far more accessible. “Google it” replaces a trip, perhaps impossibly distant or expensive, to the library. The iPhone became commercially available in 2007.
“Professor,” a Pakistani student at New York University Abu Dhabi said to me, very courteously, ten years later, “you must realize that these phones are our nervous system.”
Then, in 2015, the Supreme Court grants same-sex couples the same right to marry as heterosexual couples. In 2018, Elizabeth Wood, another of the three grandmothers on that pilgrimage marries me in the democratic venue of New York City Hall. Of course, nearly everyone there carries cell phones.
Yes, by Christmas Eve of 2016, history and experience had diluted my childish patriotism. Seeing other destructive changes--such as the shuttered factories in the Midwest and Northeast--had tested any lingering belief in economic fairness. In 2003, President George W. Bush had launched the Global War on Terror (GWOT), the massively muscular and deceptively defended response to the 9/11 attacks on America. With others, I went to the streets to protest the March 20, 2003, invasion of Iraq. Years later, while GWOT was still being waged, the boot-licking by some American conservatives of Victor Orbán and his authoritarian “illiberal democracy” in Hungary was nauseating. These politics kept their promise of being a poisonous import. Export violence, import authoritarianism.
Yet, my patriotism remained – skeptically but stubbornly so. Feeding and fueling it was the vibrant, personal experience of those creative changes after 1945 in a more or less working democracy with a historic Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Moreover, despite GWOT and the contradictory currents of isolationism, America had the capacity to share the globe usefully with other sovereign nations, 195 of them in 2016. The Comet itself was an example of the complexities, size, persistence, and frequent benefits of the more benign global transmissions of people, money, and culture. Ping pong began as “table tennis” in Victorian England. Though pizza may now seem to be an “American” food, this contribution of Italian immigrants became ubiquitous after World War II when American soldiers “brought it home” from their wartime experience in Italy.
America Firsters often seem to exhibit a curious habit: they can appropriate other cultures and think of them as “American Originals.” Yet, when they must confront a real American original--for example, our system of chattel slavery--they put the pedal to the metal in denial.
The Importance of the Comet
The Comet was a harbinger. For its trials combined two phenomena that are now destructively commonplace. One is the global accessibility of technologies that easily transmit disinformation, boundary-breaking carnivals of deceit; the second is the American version of vigilantism, America’s self-appointed soldiers and domestic terrorists.2
Pizzagate was a dank narrative: a “citizens” alleged discovery and investigation of pedophilia and child-trafficking by members of the global elite—be they in government, academia, finance, the media, the military, business, and philanthropy. According to the narrative, these people are very powerful and will seek to silence any voice that might dare to tell the truth about their power. Their pleasure exists in abusing children in satanic and demonic rituals, which include murder. The children are hidden in the basement and tunnels of the seemingly innocuous Comet Ping Pong Restaurant.
As I read about “Pizzagate” and its disinformation-spilling narrative, I – like others – found it all absurd, ludicrous, raw material for an analysis of America’s repressed desires and fears. Posts on 4chan and Reddit, where the conspiracy first emerged, could be redolent of adolescent humor and insults, with a heap of anal imagery. 3 The signatures could be boastful, “ThorTheWonderful,” or, in contrast, comic, “Mumbleberry” or “Anonmoose.” Moreover, what was the source of such conspiracy narratives? It all seems dangerously opaque. Was some would-be fictioneer playing a game? Was a cynical troller seeking to disrupt an election or public trust? Or was someone digging a rabbit hole and luring others to follow down, down, down?
Perhaps to compensate for this uncertainty, as well as for the bleak risibility of the Pizzagate narrative itself, I found some of its citizen investigators earnestly promising credibility. All details were to be investigated; all codes were to be closely read and interpreted; all doubts were to be resolved; all puzzle pieces were eventually to fit together. There were never any coincidences. No berobed servant of the Inquisition investigating heresy could have been more meticulous.
The purveyors of Pizzagate deployed a hodge-podge of political and cultural references, which were inseparable from the mish-mash of crude, performative self-aggrandizements, hokey-jokey cracks, trolling, and pseudo-scholarly obsessions. No doubt, both mish-mash and hodge-podge must be one result of the additive nature of the Internet production of information.
Some of their allusions were explicit, particularly those to the Clintons, her campaign for the presidency, the Clinton Foundation, and liberals. The misogynistic demonization of Hillary Clinton makes the cries of “Lock her up” that emanated from the 2016 Trump campaign feel like an invitation to an ice cream party. Other allusions carried some history, at least implicitly. Some might have been to the ability of a privileged, self-anointed few to gain access to hidden knowledge. Echoes of the anti-Semitic “blood libel,” which alleges that Jews murder Christian children in order to obtain blood for Jewish ceremonies, were here. The legendary figure of the lone detective, the “private eye,” who sees much more than the often-corrupt law officer, seemed to be lighting up. Far more sinister, more underground, was the despicable figure of “the homosexual,” with his methods of grooming boys and signaling his desires. Watch out for the flashing of colorful handkerchiefs in back pockets.
Cutting across the hodge-podge and mish-mash was the injunction to protect children, to keep them safe, to hold them harmless. The believers in Pizzagate had the temerity to lecture that the highest responsibilities of a good citizen was to nurture the citizens of the future. In this imperative, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists sought common ground with other virtuous citizens. Who, among us, condones child abuse? Who, among us, wishes to violate the innocent?
The Assault on the Comet: The Domestic Terrorist
A domestic terrorist had absorbed the onslaught of Pizzagate disinformation and injunctions. He was a 28-year-old man from North Carolina, Edgar Maddison Welch, with blonde hair and a beard. He had two daughters, an estranged wife, and a job in a warehouse. He had a troublesome record, but his parents praised him as good-hearted. After an earthquake in Haiti, he went to aid the victims.
Now, Welch wanted to investigate this pizza parlor, this center of evil, for himself. His idea was to shoot his way into the basement and tunnels and free the abused children imprisoned there. He would be a warrior-savior. On his back he had tattooed Bible verses, “Young men may grow weary and faint/ even in their prime they may stumble and fall; but those who look to the LORD will win new strength…” 4 His very skin bore witness to one influential version of Christian manhood: militarized, shrewd enough to be suspicious, patriarchal at heart, and God’s winning vigilante.
On December 4, 2016, Welch loaded his car with three guns and a knife and drove to Washington, DC. It is only too obvious that domestic terrorism thrives on America’s gun culture and lax, ideological interpretations of the Second Amendment. He parked near the Comet, which had already been subjected to hate mail and harassment. Then, carrying an assault rifle, he walked into the restaurant, where families were eating and playing, went to the back, and fired. An employee who had fled called the police. They soon arrived, and Welch surrendered. He was arrested, and held without bail. In 2017, he was found guilty and given a four-year prison sentence. In a historical correlation, the conspiracy theories of QAnon emerged in the same year.
Ironically, after Welch’s arrest, Pizzagate enthusiasts on the Internet accused him of being a False Flag, a plant, a fake warrior on the wrong side. If he had been a “real” warrior, the accusation went, he would have let off more than one puny little shot. The owners of Comet, this next chapter of the Pizzagate narrative luridly stated, knew he was coming. They had cleaned up the basement and tunnels. When cops came to arrest Welch, they would find nothing. People could then accuse the Alt Right of dispatching a nut job to threaten a nice neighborhood gathering place. Paranoia feeds most ravenously on itself.
What The Three Grandmothers Found
The three grandmothers arrived at the Comet on Christmas Eve to give their thanks. They found the staff closing up for the day. Though wary and weary, the staff permitted the women to come inside and look at the messages of love and support that had arrived after the assault. St. Paul’s Lutheran Church had sent one. So had Temple Sinai. A big poster read, in blue and red letters, “WE STAND WITH COMET.” It had gathered hundreds, perhaps thousands, of signatures and messages.
This poster illustrates a truth about the deep struggle of our moment between authoritarianism and democracy. It is a struggle between a community contaminated by a psychology of fear and a community that strives for a psychology of love, or, at the least, of respect and amiability. The former can distort patriotism into well-documented rituals of obeisance, the violence of vigilantes, or the raiders/invaders of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. The latter asks that patriotism be a genuine connective tissue of feelings of equanimity and equality among citizens.
When the three grandmothers visited the Comet, I was then earning my living as an academic. I am not only a patriot about my country, no matter how skeptically and stubbornly, but an advocate for education in general and colleges and universities in particular. Indeed, my patriotism and advocacy are looped and intertwined in a big circle in my John Deweyite soul. A mind-full, care-full education, in all the disciplines, does prepare students for democracy. It hones critical thinking and shaves off the roughness of philistinism and parochialism. The good classroom blends availability of reliable information, training in the ability to spot disinformation, and encouragement of independent thinking and discoveries. An unexamined patriotism is one of the features of an unexamined life. Pizzagate would be a superb case study in such a classroom.
I can list the faults of American education as glibly as I can list those of my country. However, colleges and universities will survive me and my critical love. In past, present, and future, they are our indispensable sites of incessant learning – for faculty, students, staff, and the communities in which they are embedded. Unlike many sources of “information” on social media, the sources of learning in education must be openly known. Teachers must say who they are. Authors of papers must sign their names and be held accountable for their work: they cannot lurk behind aliases. Enabling that incessant learning is freedom of expression and, for the faculty, academic freedom with its responsibilities.
After 1945, as I was maturing, America was the creator of colleges and universities that were magnetic global leaders in part because of the 20th-century belief in university autonomy and academic freedom; in part because of the science and technologies that were developed to support World War II and then adapted to civilian life; in part because of the brilliance and skills of refuge scholars, now from continents other than Europe; in part because institutions were both public and private, a complexity that could enable resistance to centralized state control; in part because of a service ethic, which the land-grant colleges exemplified; and, in part, because of pressures to desegregate and become more inclusive.
As a young feminist critic, I was the beneficiary of this reforming social and institutional creativity. It was also a source of pride in my country. I gave lectures about the historic importance of American colleges and universities. However, since my professional career began in the 1960s, the questions people have asked about higher education have shifted. In the beginning, many were about the new curricula that Black Studies and Women’s Studies were evolving. “Kate, what is this feminist criticism stuff? Doesn’t Shakespeare write about women?”
Then more questions, many legitimate, emerged about costs and the return on investment that higher education might provide. Students would worry, often because of parental pressure, that a degree in women’s studies or gender studies or the humanities would not lead to economic mobility. I could address these anxieties, but, obviously, could not alone brake the costs of student loans. Nor could I alone respond to the growing unwillingness of people (in state legislatures, for example) to support the system of higher education that America had engineered. The need for reform is a constant in human institutions, but this system was at its roots a marvel.
Then, as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) became more common on campuses and, subsequently, a political whipping post, questions arose about it. What was it? Were standards slipping? “Kate, is anybody reading Shakespeare anymore?” I often feared that the question, consciously or unconsciously, encoded racism. If overt, it would have been, “Kate, can those Black students read Shakespeare? Can they read?” The blunt answer is, of course, yes, yes, and yes. As a teacher, I worried about any student who resisted an introduction to Shakespeare. I also argued ardently and legitimately that diversity among the people in higher education leads to greater fairness, creativity, opportunities, and capacities for citizenship.
In 2018, Viktor Orbán arrived in America on the wings of some conservative commentators and in the person of Ron DeSantis, a Congressman elected Governor of Florida. When authoritarians and dictators thirst for power and drink from its chalices, they seek to control education and the arts. DeSantis did so. American defenders of academic freedom now had to expand their energies to include the home front both nationally and in the individual states, as Florida’s stripping away of intellectual excellence became a model. Simultaneously, DEI defenders have had to struggle even to keep the concept alive. In public libraries and schools, book bans flourish like little plastic flags in a corny 4th of July celebration.
Such a barrage of demands for state-sponsored conformity damage the reforms of post-1945 America that enabled me to be a skeptical but stubborn patriot. I have trusted that enough Americans will resist this barrage. My mantra has been hope, trust, and verify. Hope, trust, and work.
However, after the horrific events of October 7, 2023, and the protests over the war in Gaza, I have heard new questions about education and dissent. One has been rhetorical. Because I had formally retired from New York University, the question is: “Aren’t you glad you are out of academia?” And the honest answer is, “Yes, but I miss the people. I miss an institution that I cherish.” The next queries, linked to the first, are both provocative and anxious. Their source is the post-October 7 protests. “Would you like to be back there now? What would you be doing if you were still a dean?”5
“No,” I answer to the first question. I would not like to be back. “I don’t know,” I answer to the second hypothetical question about what I might do if I were still a dean. Any self-delusion that I could be “doing it right” is cloying and cloddish. Yet, as I talk with others, six general if tentative rules of engagement have emerged.
— Despite it being a cliché, all politics are local. University politics are no exception. In times of crisis – and the protests of 2023-4 are indeed a crisis – any leader and their advisers must know their institutions. Which trustees know how to be calm and carry on? When does the faculty govern most wisely? What gaps are there in anti-bias work? How active and well-equipped are student journalists? Time can breed that knowledge.
— Second, remember that the historic, always renewable, purpose of a college or university is: research, teaching, and service. Students are one’s students. Repeat that, and never, never bleach it out. Colleges and universities are places of systematic inquiry, intellectual questions and doubts, and good information. They must, systematically, fight disinformation, especially now, as AI enables counterfeit information to be produced so easily. Protests will seem to involve the unteachable. One must maneuver around and navigate through high-minded inflexibilities as well as babyish show-offs of all ages, threats, political manipulations, and confusion. The principles that one serves must remain inviolate. 6
— Third, rules about protest and disciplinary processes must be in place before a crisis erupts. But awful things will still happen. They are impossible to avoid. How psychologically prepared is one for contingencies and one’s own mistakes?
— Fourth, the college or university should model protest. Academic protests value a non-violent but vigorous freedom of expression that eschews harassment and bullying; seek negotiations where possible; and, because of a belief in negotiation, bring in state authority and the police as a last resort. For example, if protestors are harming the facilities staff in a university building.
— Fifth, and perhaps most importantly, what is one’s own voice? The major academic leaders I have known have had a personal voice, some measured, some more free-flowing, some crisp, some warmer, some plain-speaking, some fonder of irony and wit. They have included men and women. They have all had the audibility of authenticity.
— Sixth and finally, do forgive advice and coaching like this from the bleachers.
January 21, 2017
On January 21, 2017, we three grandmothers were again in Washington, DC. We were joined by a grandfather and by my sister. She is also a grandmother. We were participating in the immense, non-violent Women’s March, an affirmation of women’s dignities and rights, a protest against Donald J. Trump, who had been inaugurated as president the previous day. Two granddaughters came with us, and with the agilities of youth, found openings for us all to move crocodile-style through the huge crowds.
I often evoke that 2017 women’s march. For any skeptical but stubborn patriot, it is an inspiring example of one form of dissent, available when the authoritarian distempers of the times render it compelling. Another march will surely come around, calling us to assemble in the exercise of our Constitutional rights. I predict that at least one of its organizers will have learned their skills at a volatile, but non-violent, moment at an American campus.
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