“Grabbing the chalk” has become my expression for instances when memorable students declare intellectual independence of Confucian norms of propriety in the classroom. The chalk migrates to its true home as I give it to a student and take a seat with a class. Such moments are deeply satisfying to all concerned, spreading wonder that the mandarins are still capable of listening.
One of the greatest chalk-grabbers was a student named Peter, who veritably leaped from his seat almost every day to scrawl arcane diagrams on the board and demand from the audience entry into his interior monologue. Once he presented an intriguing model for explaining economic and political systems, a two-axis grid that clarified capitalism, socialism and communism. I dutifully copied it down, not knowing how soon it would empower me to become a chalk-grabber myself.
About a year later, I was on a sabbatical studying Spanish in a tiny Mexican village north of Puerto Vallarta. I was the only student of a woman named Mariana, sitting for two hours each day in front of a crude blackboard while she patiently brought me to a modest level of competency in her native language. Mariana, fervent and committed, was a gentle woman of about 30, who spoke very little English and had a voice I could barely hear. The blackboard was our forum of communication. As ocean waves crashed in the background, we struggled through the intricacies of verb tenses and vocabulary. She cared deeply about her teaching and took great pride in my learning.
Toward the end of our time together, Mariana began asking me to explain basic political and economic theory to her, particularly the differences between capitalism, socialism and communism. She explained that she needed to know where she stood on the “controversias grandes,” and wondered if I could help. It seemed preposterous to me, overwhelmed with shyness by the fragility of my Spanish, that I could accomplish such a task, so I shrugged off her request repeatedly.
Finally, after a week of her persistent urging, I stood up from my old wicker chair, took the chalk and stared at the decrepit blackboard. The chalk felt like lead in my hand. She was my teacher, my maestra, and here, in her village in Mexico, I had the audacity to stand up in front of her and presume to explain global economic theories in Spanish.
“Este lamina es un representacisn o modelo de la sistema econsmico y polmtico,” I began, drawing Peter’s diagram out of the dustbin of my memory and wincing at my accent.
Mariana had been questioning me closely about my impending trip to Cuba, timidly confiding her own sympathy toward communism, even though she admitted not knowing exactly what it was. She knew that poor people in Mexico were becoming increasingly restless, and she was aware of the rebellion in Chiapas and the latent unrest in Nayarit, where we were. In fact, we had passed through several military checkpoints on the way back to the village from our trip to Compostela the day before, which our driver had explained was part of an intimidation tactic by the Mexican government, intended to prevent
a popular uprising. There had been more than 200 soldiers with M-16 rifles lining the highway.
In response to the line of well-armed soldiers, Mariana told me proudly: “Many of our men have rifles.” I visualized the old single-shot, bolt-action .22′s the government allowed farmers to keep in order to kill rodents and other pests. The new Mexican revolution would be quixotic to say the least.
Mariana, pregnant and sweating in the afternoon heat, watched me at the board like her life was at stake, which it might have been for all I knew. I gripped the chalk and glanced out across the palms to the small bay that encompassed the village, the four or five palapa restaurants strung along the shore; I saw two large sailboats swaying in a light breeze, boats from El Norte, from California, probably. Not exactly an invasion, but suddenly I resented them. They looked like the outposts of an empire. There in Mexico, revolution still seemed like a real possibility — not some academic theory.
Suddenly I remembered that education is not a luxury in most of the world, and I’d damn well better know what I was talking about. Even if I hadn’t fully made up my mind about communism, what Mariana knew and thought could have a direct effect on her involvement in a real political battle. My own unresolved feelings about communism was a major reason I was going to Cuba. As Alice had said to the caterpillar, “I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly, for I can’t understand it myself to begin with.” I looked back at the blackboard, at my drawing.
“Este linea,” I said, “es la linea por sistemas econsmicos.” Mariana leaned forward intently, completely ignoring my abysmal accent and pronunciation. I reminded myself that the outcome of the next Mexican revolution probably was not at stake in this lesson. Mariana’s grandfather might have been a Zapatista for all I knew. She might only have been learning the words for what was already in her bones.
I was scheduled to return to California in a month, after the trip to Cuba. She would live here for the rest of her life. And all over Mexico people were beginning to think, again, about what there was to lose and what there was to gain from these words that sat on the blackboard like undeciphered secret codes.
I hoped that the next time a student “grabbed the chalk” from me I would sit down gracefully and remember Mariana, who reminded me of the thrill and terror of knowing something that someone else wanted to learn. And I hoped that I would remember Peter, who gave me the tool for that day’s lesson.
Yesterday, a student grabbed the chalk in my philosophy class and began explaining her “take” on reincarnation. My mind flew to Mexico before she could finish. I wondered if Mariana remembered an afternoon when the chalk migrated, again, to its natural home in the student’s hand.
David Alford lives and works on a ranch in the Sierras, near the town of Avery, CA.
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We’ve talked at times about George Orwell’s classic novel “1984,” and the amnesia that sets in when we flush events down the memory hole, leaving us at the mercy of only what we know today. Sometimes, though, the past comes back to haunt, like a ghost. It happened recently when we saw U.S. Rep. Allen West of Florida on the news.
A Republican and Tea Party favorite, he was asked at a local gathering how many of his fellow members of Congress are “card-carrying Marxists or International Socialists.”
But this time, we shook our heads in disbelief: “78 to 81 Democrats … members of the Communist Party?” That’s the moment the memory hole opened up and a ghost slithered into the room. The specter stood there, watching the screen, a snickering smile on its stubbled face. Sure enough, it was the ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin farm boy who grew up to become one of the most contemptible thugs in American politics.
Back in the early 1950s, the Cold War had begun and Americans were troubled by the Soviet Union’s rise as an atomic superpower. Looking for a campaign issue, McCarthy seized on fear and ignorance to announce his discovery of a conspiracy within: Communist subversives who had infiltrated the government.
In speech after speech, McCarthy would hold up a list of names of members of the Communist Party he said had burrowed their way into government agencies and colleges and universities. The number he claimed would vary from day to day, and when pressed to make his list public, McCarthy would stall or claim he accidentally had thrown it away.
His failure to produce much proof to back his claims never gave him pause, as he employed lies and innuendo with swaggering bravado. McCarthy, wrote historian William Manchester, “realized that he had stumbled upon a brilliant demagogic technique … others deplored treachery, McCarthy would speak of traitors.”
And so he did, in a fearsome, reckless crusade that terrorized Washington, destroyed lives, and made a shambles of due process.
Millions of Americans lapped it up, but in the end, Joe McCarthy would be done in by the medium that he had used so effectively to spread his poison: television. In 1954, the legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow bravely exposed McCarthy’s tactics on the CBS program “See It Now.”
“This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent,” Murrow declared. “We can deny our heritage and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the result. There is no way for a citizen of a Republic to abdicate his responsibilities.”
Later that same year, for 36 days on live TV, during Senate hearings on charges McCarthy had made questioning the loyalty of the U.S. Army, we saw the man raw, exposed for the lout and cowardly scoundrel he was. The climactic moment came as the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch, defending the Army, reacted with outrage when McCarthy accused Welch’s young associate Fred Fisher of communism. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” Welch said as he shook his head in anger and sadness. “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency? … If there is a God in heaven it will do neither you nor your cause any good.”
McCarthy never recovered. His tactics had been opposed from the outset by a handful of courageous Republican senators. Now they pressed their case with renewed vigor. One of them, Sen. Ralph Flanders of Vermont, introduced a motion to censure Joseph McCarthy. When it eventually passed 67 to 22, McCarthy was finished. He soon disappeared from the front pages. Three years later, he was dead.
All of this came rushing back as West summoned his foul spirits from the vast deep. The ghost stepped out of the past.
Like McCarthy, the more Allen West is challenged about his comments, the more he doubles down on them. Now he’s blaming the “corrupt liberal media” for stirring the pot against him – a trick for which McCarthy taught the master class. And the congressman’s latest fusillades continue to distort the beliefs and policies of those he smears – no surprise there, either.
To help him continue his fight for “the heart and soul” of America he’s asking his supporters for a contribution of $10 or more. There could even be a super PAC in this – with McCarthy’s ghost as its honorary chairman.
Plenty of kindred spirits are there to sign on.Like the author of the book “The Grand Jihad,” who wrote that whether Obama is Christian or not, “the faith to which Obama actually clings is neocommunism.” Or the blogger who claims Obama is running the country into the ground “by way of the same type of race-baiting and class warfare Communism cannot exist without,” and that his policies are “unbecoming to an American president.”
From there it’s only a short hop to the kind of column that popped up on the right wing website Newsmax hinting of a possible coup “as a last resort to resolve the ‘Obama problem.’” Military intervention, the author wrote, “is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for ‘fundamental change’ toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America.” The column was quickly withdrawn but not before the website Talking Points Memo exposed it.
So beware, Rep. West, beware: In the flammable pool of toxic paranoia that passes these days as patriotism in America, a single careless match can light an inferno. You would serve your country well to withdraw your remarks and apologize for them. But if not, perhaps there are members of your own party, as possessed of conscience and as courageous as that handful of Republicans who took on Joseph McCarthy, who will now abandon fear and throw cold water on your incendiary remarks.
Bill Moyers is managing editor of the new weekly public affairs program, "Moyers & Company," airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at www.BillMoyers.com.
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Michael Winship is senior writing fellow at Demos and a senior writer of the new series, Moyers & Company, airing on public television.
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“I saw you in my dream last night,” my ex-wife said, touching my arm when we happened upon each other in downtown Manhattan the other day. She spoke as if continuing a conversation only recently interrupted. In fact, the last time we’d talked intimately was two decades ago, back when the Soviet Union had crumbled to dust.
“Mm hmm, yes, I saw you in my dream,” she repeated, her Russian accent faded now to a passable American. “Very clearly I saw you. And you were dead.”
Like many intelligent Russians who came of age during the closing act of the USSR, my ex-wife was a kind of stand-up comedian in reverse. Just as the talented comic artfully sets up a punch line, so too could she expertly build toward a release of sorts. But the punch line was never a joke. It was instead an opening up of a psychic trap door, showing foolish Americans that beneath their feet was not the security of a prosperous and powerful nation, but rather the void of the impending destruction that awaits us all. When your superpower homeland has been blown apart into 15 compromised statelets it’s comforting to keep in your pocket that great transnational equalizer: death.
And yet, once upon a time I found all her moody blueness charming. We had met at a university dormitory in 1990, the final year of Soviet power. I had registered temporarily at the dorm as part of the many bureaucratic sleights-of-hand the Westerner had to execute to stay in the country. Technically I was supposed to leave the USSR when my study abroad program ended. But while I was desperate to leave I also had a hankering to stay. And so through the machinations of the many machinators of the Perestroika era, I arranged it so that I would register in the Leningrad University dorm, pay some functionary a nominal $150 and then relocate to an old lady’s flat, far out on the Prospekt Prosveshchenie where for $7 a month I would have a room of my own. All I would have to do beyond these trifling payments was to stay a single night at the dorm. A bargain it seemed, until the future ex-Mrs. Greenberg walked in.
There was much talk and a lot of weak tea during that one legally necessitated sleepover. My East German bunkie who spoke much better Russian than I seemed in full control of the evening, artfully throwing out pogovorki — proverbs that seem particularly embedded into Russian and that irritatingly keep the poor student of the language in the dark. “The peasant doesn’t cross himself until the thunder sounds,” “chicken and girls are seized with the hands.” That kind of thing. But when her visit was over, the East German found himself oddly rebuffed and it was I who was slipped a phone number and an appointment that led eventually to a foldout bed pressed up against the thin wall adjoining her parents’ room. Half-understood, rolling under cool embroidered sheets, struggling to communicate things that should have come out as easy praises, I was only able to mutter blunt, minor words: “beautiful,” “interesting,” “very.” And in the end she took a breath and arranged herself and then turned to me and asked with yet another tricky Russian idiom:
“Did you finish?”
“Finish?” I said.
“Yes, did you finish? Are you satisfied?”
“Yes, I, um, finished.”
“Nu, nu,” she said, “then it’s time to go.”
I did go. Not only out of the room and out onto the empty dawn streets of Leningrad but eventually back to New York where I brooded, alone, in the broke and semi-employed way today’s shiftless post-boom 20-somethings would likely find familiar. It was the walloping recession of the early ’90s. There was very little to do or to hope for. And so I found my thoughts drifting to the stoic, vaguely sad woman I’d left in Russia. But if she was on the sad side, “tending toward depression” as a psychiatrist like my father might say, well, that was OK with me. I liked her melancholy abruptness. I liked the whole direct-but-gentle sadness of the Soviet Union. I liked how nobody went to a shrink and how people stayed away from shrink words like “depressed,” “depressive” and “depression.” Russians somehow seemed to understand that depression was just sadness and that sadness was just a mood. One of many lenses through which you can take in life’s light. Moods colored life, sometimes darkly, but they also gave life immediacy and freshness, allowing you to react sincerely to every new thing that came your way.
As luck would have it, I was given another chance to go back to that way of thinking. A few months after my return to the United States a small-time Siberian hustler posing as a documentary maker arrived in New York and cobbled together a film crew that consisted of a Dutch producer, an American camerawoman and, for reasons I don’t understand to this day, me. All of us were flown to Moscow, put on a four-day train ride to Lake Baikal, and then told to film a documentary about, well, I really have no idea. Vague pieces of Michael Moore-esque intervention were staged where we would storm into the offices of a Soviet bureaucrat, insult him, film him and then leave. We would gather random crowds on the streets of Irkutsk and make them sing the Lake Baikal ode “Slavnoe Morye” — Glorious Sea. We slaughtered and ate a sheep. And then toward the end of our stay, just as I was trying to figure out a way to get back to that captivating woman in Leningrad, our driver walked into our hotel room, told us breakfast was ready and, also, by the way, “Snyali Gorbacheva.” They took Gorbachev.
It was the infamous hard-liner military coup attempt of August 1991, although, of course, we at the time didn’t know it would turn out to be only an attempt. For three days we drove the back roads of Siberia debating whether we should turn south and head out through Mongolia. All of our hotel reservations were mysteriously canceled as the single thread of Soviet power gathered itself together and drew tight on a million different knots. At one point on a narrow muddy road our van pulled over and two taut-tummied Russian boys with a guitar jumped in. Apparently they were known to the Russians in the group. Once they were seated, the guitar came out and one of the boys spat out a fast-paced Visotsky-style ballad that ended (for my benefit?) with an English refrain “goodbye America, hello Siberia.”
It was during these three days of political vertigo that I found I thought of her the most. At one little outpost I sent (how quaint to remember!) a telegram. “Are you all right?” I scribbled on the toilet-paper quality telegraph form (though it should be noted that the coarseness of Soviet toilet paper and the flimsiness of Soviet writing paper were a good deal closer together on the spectrum of “paper” than the American variants). But it may as well have been toilet paper. Passing it through the telegraph window to the bored, platinum blond operator seemed akin to a flush.
But, alas, it wasn’t. Miraculously the coup ended. Boris Yeltsin emerged and stood on a tank. The hard-liners were imprisoned. One shot himself. The phones worked again. I called her and the creaky Siberian lines issued forth her voice. “I got your telegram,” she said. “Very sweet.” I flew to Leningrad, which now everybody was suddenly calling St. Petersburg, and we made love again and again in a tiny apartment I’d rented for another $7. We made love on an overnight train to Moscow. We made love again in the apartment of her pioneer camp counselor. On my final day in Russia we necked on the steps of Patriarch’s Pond until a young Soviet malcontent yelled a phrase at us that must be known the world over: “Get a room!”
And of course she came to New York. And of course we were married. And of course we were divorced. And of course all of it faded away as most passions tend to. Only our most intense moments of togetherness — unlike the world-stopping moments others feel when they launch a romantic connection — occurred when the world actually stopped. When two of the greatest powers ever to occupy the globe shrugged off their mutual enmity for a fleeting moment and actually paused to look one another in the eye.
All of this came rushing back to me as she pulled her hand away from my arm on Seventh Avenue and we retreated back into the small talk that is my national tradition and that she had seemed to have mastered in the last two decades. Children (me yes, she no)? Work (not so interesting). Travel (now and again). She had seen me in her dream and I was dead. And given that I had firmly closed the Soviet chapter of my life, the chapter in which I was young and impetuous, when the thought of intense, inexplicable coupling could fill my whole mind, the chapter in which I was open to the world and where she had come to know me most intimately, I guess you could say that her dream was right on the money.
A PLA soldier instructing the citizen militia to defend against nuclear, chemical and biological attack.
To paraphrase (and vastly abbreviate) Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice Restaurant,” if just one prominent Republican politician calls the national debt a new “Red Menace” we can just dismiss him as crazy and go on about our normal business. But if two GOP rising stars do it, then it’s a movement and we’d better pay serious attention. Because before you know it, the House Un-American Activities Committee will be accusing every card-holding-Keynesian advocate of fiscal stimulus of committing foul treason, and that could get messy.
On March 24, reports The Hill, House Republican Conference Chairman Jeb Hensarling picked up the theme, but added an extra special Commie-baiting twist by bringing China directly into the conversation.
“The red menace for the 21st century is our public debt.”
Keeping with his communism theme, Hensarling implied that interest payments the U.S. is making to China alone could pose a national security threat.
“The interest we pay to China on our debt, they can essentially afford to buy a [Joint] Strike Fighter every other day,” he said, according to the Daily Progress. “Our greatest competitor in the world … we are building their armed forces with the interest we pay them on the national debt.”
Gosh, if I was a Chinese Politburo member, that kind of rhetoric would probably have me doubling-down on my military expansion plans, because everyone knows all too well what happened to the last aspiring evil empire that conservative Americans feared as the “Red Menace.” But to bring it all back home, it seems tombe that the Hensarling and Daniels have painted their party into a corner. Because if debt is the greatest threat to freedom, and China is leveraging itself up into superpower status on the back of American profligacy, then it should be every red-blooded American’s patriotic duty to bring down deficits as fast as possible. And I will further submit that the most sensible way to do that would be to cut a longterm budget deal that matches spending cuts with revenue increases.
I just think that if the richest Americans were asked nicely to pay a little more in taxes, because it would help us defeat the Red Menace, there’d really be no decent way for them to say no.
Bill O'Reilly tries to reason with Glenn Beck on Friday night's show.
On Friday night’s “O’Reilly Factor” Glenn Beck tried his best to talk Bill into how the communists and the extremists were about to take over the Middle East.
While many members of Congress elected to watch last night’s State of the Union address while seated next to a member of the opposite party, in an awkward display of bipartisanship and civility, one House member was brave enough to watch the whole thing from his office, Tweeting fevered nonsense the whole time. That hero is Rep. Paul Broun, of Georgia.
Broun previously warned that the president was showing “signs of being Marxist,” as well as doing “exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany,” so really no one should be surprised that this guy was not impressed by the president’s vision of “winning the future.”
And that’s why he wrote, as the speech wrapped up, “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution. You believe in socialism.”
While there’s not really anything in the Constitution that precludes a little light Scandinavian-style socialism, Broun is a modern-day Republican moron, and so for him the “s-word” means some scary combination of the Third Reich and the Great Purge. (If you can find the passage in Obama’s relentlessly centrist address that sounds like a proposal for a Great Leap Forward, please let me know, because all I remember is the bit about cutting corporate taxes and something about smoked salmon.)
“I already believe very firmly that it is a trap and a ruse that Democrats are proposing,” Broun said. “They don’t want civility. They want silence from the Republicans. And the sitting together being kissy-kissy is just another way to try to silence Republicans, and also to show — to keep the American people from seeing how few of them there are in the U.S. House now.”
Broun says he chose to avoid the chamber and liveblog from his office “out of respect.” Respect for whichever unlucky member was assigned to sit next to one of the dumbest members of the Republican caucus, I imagine.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Rep. Allen West, R-Fla. (Credit: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0) 
A PLA soldier instructing the citizen militia to defend against nuclear, chemical and biological attack. 
Bill O'Reilly tries to reason with Glenn Beck on Friday night's show. 
Paul Broun 
