While reading about the ASUO resolution to ban the Pacifica Forum from campus, I was struck by a central element, one which seems to have been utterly ignored in your coverage. This whole fight has been a clash between imaginary “rights.” Those who favor ejecting the Pacifica Forum demand an imaginary right to not feel unsafe. Really? A “right” to have a feeling? I would welcome a link to the document that spells out the details and implications of that imagined right.
The defenders of the Pacifica Forum, on the other hand, are laboring under a more insidious imaginary right. That the individuals who are impotent and dull-witted enough to belong to this group have a right to free speech is clear. That right is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. However, the notion that this real right has as its correlatives the “right” to use your fees and my tax dollars, to reserve and use real estate of which we are co-conservators and to borrow the light of the University’s reputation to promulgate and dignify their middle-brow muddle of hate and pseudo-history is nonsensical.
I have reasonably good bona fides when it comes to free speech. I was the founder, and for five years the director, of the first non-profit group to advocate for the free speech rights of bloggers worldwide, the Committee to Protect Bloggers. Our central premise was simple and strong: Everyone, everywhere has the right to express their ideas and beliefs without being punished by their government. This right was asserted in Article 19 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Because this right is clearly spelled out, internally coherent, was passed unanimously and has become a global standard, we were the beneficiaries of a broad spectrum of support, from Iraqi Islamists to American military officers, from Egyptian heretics to conservative Christians. The Pacifica Forum has not been arrested by the government or its agents.
Unlike a 19-year-old Iranian student who wrote us, and for whom we found an attorney at Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel-prize-winning law firm, they have not been given 120 lashes. They have not been put upon or had their computers stolen by militia members backed by the government.
They are free to gibber witlessly on a blog, rant frothily on the sidewalk in front of Taylor’s, parade in Nazi drag up and down Willamette. But they have no right to demand the support of students, faculty and staff, no right to demand they be provided with rooms to meet in, no right to the legitimacy that comes from a presence in the mainstream of intellectual debate.
In other words, each of you at the University individually, have not the right, but the power, to eject these babblers if you choose, to withdraw your realty and cash from their dirty fingers and make them sell their cant in the marketplace of ideas.
To the editors and reporters of the Emerald, I say: Stop buying the terms the parties in this case are using without examining their validity.
To the student body and employees of the University, I say: Stop confusing this fight for a conflict between “rights.”
The Pacifica Forum’s opponents, if they wish to “feel safe,” should make themselves safe. It is nothing that can be demanded of others.
The Pacifica Forum, on the other hand, already has the right to free speech. What you, the students, faculty and staff of the University, have is a duty to either stamp their vileness with the imprimatur of the University or to deny it to them. In other words, it’s time to vote, not for a “resolution” but for the rightness or wrongness of the Pacifica Forum as an instrument of legitimate argumentation. If you believe theirs is a legitimate organization, with a legitimate point of view, allow them to speak on your campus.
If you believe them to be intellectual frauds, show them the door.
Slideshow from the Prefontaine Classic
7 comments
Of course this semi-coprophilic malcontent hasn't been active in school policy or politics now for what 25 years or so? Professed to be a preternatural poet at one point. A self-proclaimed 'pirate of prose', endlessly haranguing patrons of Max's and Taylor's (or at an earlier time, Lenny's Nosh Bar), with his boorish and patently tiresome odes to his own obstreperousness. More often than not, driving that evening's patrons, one by one, out into the street.But his is an all too familiar refrain. I remember well how vociferously, and often, he's used it
in the past. Feminists rallying to call on then-President Reagan to include more women in his cabinet? Nazis. Members of the Sacred Heart Hospital planning board? Nazis. The 'long-haired' street merchants that used to be found in large numbers congregating around Saturday Market. "Nazis". And you were called the same if you didn't bring him his omelette, coffee or beer on time, or worse, ask him for financial compensation for that privilege.And now he's effectually calling members of the Pacifica Forum this? Ironically from what I hear, these people may have their own, decidedly different, idea of who the 'Nazis' are. Big surprise. Not even all that stunning that he chides us now to not even share our chairs or light-fixtures with them. No, he is the sort of man-child who perennially wants to dictate the rules of the game, and if you don't he will take his ball and go home. [Never mind the fact that it's not ever remotely 'his' ball.]No, Hopkins is not a fascist. He's a bully. He's always been a bully. Think a repulsive ogre of a man in the Don Rickels/Roger Ailes mode, perpetually denigrating all those around him, but without ever one quarter of an ounce of humor.
And mutual acquaintances inform me he's spent the last quarter-century systematically emptying West Coast taverns of their contents and their customers in an ever-more ludicrous attempt to better weather and bear his vesicatory failings, as well as his over-bearing ultra-Zionist wife. Not surprised.And one could say he gets what he deserves. He does. And one could urge all readers and listeners to turn away from his ever-foul and feckless fomenting. They (and we) should. But every so often one also must simply, and straight-forwardly, turn around and just say, 'Curt, Cram It'. For unfortunately like the similarly fated Ubu Roi, he will ever-insist upon yet dragging all around down unto his own self-begotten misery. Shame on you, Curt Hopkins for attempting to dispossess others of their voice. The Pacifica Forum, no matter what censor-filled impressions you have of them, still deserve an opportunity to be heard. Would you similarly and so utterly intolerantly object if there were yet another neo-conservative pro-Zionist 'think' tank appearing here to propagandize in their stead? No, I thought not.