Student Protest

And the protest against the protest and how we are losing our minds.

Goldberg’s column about protests in recent newspapers was essentially correct, but perhaps more inciteful than intended.  He makes the case, not a particularly difficult one, that protest is performative.  It is a staged event, more often improvised than scripted, with all the clichés of modern tolerance.  And so are the responses to protest.  Such as his. The protests against protest. 

Long ago there was a TV show called Point-Counterpoint.  Two people yelling at each other with occasional flourishes of clever rhetoric.  SNL satirized the show with an episode with Jane Curtin and Chevy Chase in a skit with the memorial line, “Jane you ignorant ….  Most of us today, enlightened times, will probably see the skit as offensive for its abuse of women.  It is.  It is also, though, a telling critique of the rancor of “polite speech,” that masquerades as informed comment.

Modern writers, and comics, have learned to negotiate landmines in the field of ideas.  Their dance is choregraphed to only set off sly innuendos of attack.  Not deadly, perhaps, to onlookers, but achieving a deadening of ideas.  

One technique is to dance several feet above the field.  Engage, that is, with arguments that are meant to imprint a kind of reassuring absence of judgement.  The trick is to say rather little and leave the impression that you have had the last world.    

Is this piece of mine, itself too “clever?” just another example of why we should avoid blogs and read longer pieces of serious analysis?  Perhaps.  But let me cut to the chase.  (1) These are serious times and there are mass deaths and the unraveling of a nation, Israel, that many of us treasured as a new beginning for a group of people who suffered more than any other in the long history of injustice.  The cause is real and the inability of governments to do more than talk is inexcusable.  Of course, there are protests and of course their fringes activities are offensive to many…and illegal, although somewhat minor.    

And (2), yes, it does lead to finger pointing.  We have not learned much from Pogo, the Possum, “that we have meet the enemy and it is us.”  In this instance, those who “protest the protest” aim at universities and at the activist idea of citizenship.  There is even a sniff or two at the democratic idea that it’s better when more people become involved. 

Let me try to set one thing straight and leave it at that.  Our great universities are indeed hotbeds of destabilization.  I suppose to some that makes them radical.  They produce, in fact for many their very purpose is to produce, new ideas.  They support “research” at its most fundamental and most far-reaching level.  Governments support them, corporations support them, the sick, and hungry and dying support them because without new ideas we cannot survive under rapidly and radically changing conditions.  (And there is still some hope that we are not destined to only play defense against the challenges reality throws at us.)

Are we overdramatizing “the protests.”  Of course.  Are we letting them take up the oxygen in the room that must be used to address “real” problems?  Of course.  Are we pointing fingers in the wrong directions?  When, alas, has that not been true. 

Let me know if you think I am wrong. I’ll try to stand behind this column.