A New School Student Questions U.S. Senator’s Politics,
The Wall Street Journal Questions Her Upbringing
By M.P. Prabhakaran
A young college graduate criticizes a U.S. senator for his continuing defense of the Iraq war and waffling on other issues facing the country. The Wall Street Journal questions her upbringing for doing it. (See “Days of Rage,” editorial, May 22, 2006.) And this is the same paper that never tires of telling its readers the importance of bringing democracy to Iraq, which has belatedly been touted as the goal of the war. It’s a laudable goal, indeed. But should it be pursued at the cost of undermining democracy at home? Doesn’t The Journal know that the right to criticize those in power is a basic democratic right of a citizen?
Jean Sara Rohe, from Nutley, New Jersey, was one of the 2,630 students whom The New School, New York, graduated this spring. She was also one of two students selected by the deans of the university to speak at this year’s commencement. The keynote speaker was John McCain, the Republican Senator from Arizona. And McCain’s being the keynote speaker turned the commencement, held at Madison Square Garden on May19, 2006, into a protest demonstration.
Murmurs of protest had already been heard among the students and faculty of The New School when they came to know, sometime in January, that Bob Kerrey, president of the university, had decided to invite Mr. McCain as the keynote speaker at the commencement. They were unhappy about welcoming to their campus a senator who has been a staunch supporter of the Iraq war and steadily moving from his once-centrist position in the Republican Party toward extreme right. Their protests later became loud and strong when they learned that Mr. McCain had also agreed to be the keynote speaker at the commencement at Liberty University, Lynchburg, Virginia. Naturally, they had problem with a person who would treat The New School and Liberty University equally.
People around the country associate Liberty University with the values espoused and disseminated by its founder-president, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. What are those values? Just a couple of his numerous diabolical pronouncements would give an idea of what they are.
"AIDS,” he once said, “is the wrath of a just God against homosexuals. To oppose it would be like an Israelite jumping in the Red Sea to save one of Pharaoh's charioteers.”
And who will ever forget what he said about the 9/11 terrorist attacks? “I really believe,” he said, “that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way – all of them who have tried to secularize America – I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’” He went on to say, "God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve." In what way is this different from the justification for 9/11 which Osama bin Laden gave? Members of the New School community, like many in the rest of the country, were appalled that Senator McCain had no qualms about cozying up to a man capable of spewing such venom.
The ideals on which The New School was founded are as different from those of Jerry Falwell as day and night. They are rooted in progressivism and liberalism. The school came into being in 1919, when “a small band of unconventional thinkers” – including historian Charles Beard, philosopher John Dewey, and economists Thorstein Veblen and James Harvey Robinson – felt the need for “an educational venue where they could freely present and discuss their ideas without censure, and where dialogue could take place between intellectuals and the general public.” To this day, as the New School Web site says, the institution they founded “has remained a fountainhead of social change, artistic daring, intellectual freedom, and educational innovation.” As a proud alumnus of this institution – I completed my Ph.D. in Political Science in 1988 – I fully endorse that claim.
Mr. McCain tried to explain away his decision to go to Liberty University as a respectful gesture toward the fine young men and women graduating from that university this year. Others don’t see it that way. They see it as an attempt on his part to curry favor with the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, which played a key role in getting President Bush reelected in 2004. He made a careful calculation that the best way to improve his own presidential prospects – he has been working hard, though not openly, to be the Republican Party candidate in the 2008 election – was to win over to his side the loudest and fattest of all evangelicals in America, the Rev. Jerry Falwell. He greedily grabbed Falwell’s invitation to speak at Liberty University.
Petition to Disinvite McCain
The students and faculty at The New School found it disgusting. They were further incensed when, in his speech at Liberty, just six days before he was to deliver the same at The New School (he had let it be known that his speech would be the same at all commencements at which he was keynote speaker this year), Mr. McCain had once again defended the Iraq war. He did it, in spite of the fact that an overwhelming majority in the country is now against the war and that even those who started it are looking for a face-saving way of getting out of it. About 1,200 members of the New School community petitioned to Mr. Kerrey to withdraw the invitation sent to Mr. McCain. But to no avail.
Maybe Mr. Kerrey was returning a favor Mr. McCain did him over five years ago. In 2001, Time magazine came out with an article revealing that, during the infamous Vietnam War, Mr. Kerrey had led a Navy Seals unit that killed nearly 20 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, most of them women and children. The article and the controversy it stirred made many New School students call for his resignation as president and for a Congressional investigation. Somehow Kerrey survived the controversy. Among those who came to his defense at the time was Senator John McCain.
Mr. Kerrey’s stubborn refusal to disinvite Mr. McCain turned this year’s graduation ceremony at The New School into an ugly spectacle. Both he and his guest got an earful – and eyeful – from the gathering. They booed and jeered at them. Mr. McCain was greeted with banners like “Our commencement is not your platform” and shouts like “We’re graduating, not voting.” As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times said in her May 20, 2006, column, “It was a remarkable tableau to see the two iconoclastic vets, their bodies beneath the black gowns still bearing broken pieces from Vietnam, being pilloried by kids angry about another endless war, faceless enemy and feckless defense secretary [Donald Rumsfeld].”
When it was Ms. Rohe’s turn to speak, she cast aside her prepared speech and said, to thunderous applause from the audience, “The senator does not reflect the ideals upon which this university was founded. This invitation was a top-down decision that did not take into account the desires and interests of the student body on an occasion that is supposed to honor us above all.”
The Journal editorial rips up her remarks and selectively picks the first sentence to hurl this insult at her: “which makes us wonder what ideals, and manners, she learned at home.” That’s a very low blow and The Journal should be ashamed of it. The courage of conviction the young graduate displayed bears ample testimony to the fact that she did learn a lot of ideals and good manners at home. She is only 21. The maturity she showed in saying what she said is far beyond her age. She didn’t care that, in saying it, she could be offending the powers that be and even jeopardizing her career prospects.
The paleocon pen pusher at The Journal who wrote the insulting words about her may be ‘99 Not Out,’ to borrow an expression from the game of cricket. How many times has he changed what he wrote to accommodate the wishes of his superiors? He and his superiors know the answer. My advice to him: “Do some soul-searching before you question someone’s upbringing."
Goebbelsian Tactic
This is what Ms. Rohe said about the Iraq war: “I am young, and though I don’t profess to possess the wisdom that time affords us, I do know that preemptive war is dangerous and wrong. And I know that despite all the havoc that my country has wrought overseas in my name, Osama bin Laden still has not been found, nor have those weapons of mass destruction.”
And this is how the Journal editorial responds to it: “Speaking of ‘havoc,’ Ms. Rohe spoke only blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center.” The implication here is that Iraq had something to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. That was one of the three lies that the Bush administration used to justify its invasion of Iraq (the other two being that Iraq dad stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and that it had ties to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda). It has since been established, and the Bush administration itself has admitted, that Iraq had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center. But The Wall Street Journal refuses to accept it.
To repeat a lie in the hope of getting it ultimately accepted as truth is a Goebbelsian tactic. Does The Journal want to be associated with the name Goebbels?
[First published on June 4, 2006. It has since been slightly edited.]
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Reader's Response
Interesting Article
The article is very interesting.
Nancy Shealy, New York, New York, USA
June 19, 2006