“Speaker disrupts…graduation” read the
improbable headline in the Rockford Register Star. And
yet, that was pretty much how it went down. Invited to give the
commencement address last month at Rockford College, in Rockford,
Illinois, longtime New York Times war correspondent Chris
Hedges delivered an anti-war
speech instead.
Without so much as a “Hi, thanks for coming out,” Hedges
launched into it. Though the hostilities in Iraq were done for now,
he warned, “blood will continue to spill.” He predicted occupation
will be “as damaging to our souls as it will be to our prestige,
power, and security.” Americans would soon, rightly, be viewed as
bullies — isolated from the whole world by our, oh, I don’t know,
ignorance, hubris, arrogance, racism: Take your pick.
And so it went: Terrorists, usually desperate people from the
“almost 50 percent of the planet [who] struggles on less than two
dollars a day,” will provoke over-reactions from the U.S.
government, which will send in the troops, mostly poor kids from
the South who joined the armed services because they couldn’t land
decent jobs or afford health insurance. America has formed a
“troika” with Russia and Israel, nations which do not shrink “from
carrying out…gratuitous and senseless acts of violence.”
Americans supported the war on terror, in part, because they want
to recover the camaraderie that they felt immediately after
September 11. Hedges spoke in a slow, deliberate schoolmarmish
voice and peppered the address with allusions to Thucydides,
Reinhold Niebuhr, and William Butler Yeats. The speech, in short,
was one long New York Times editorial, with some arts
coverage thrown in.
School officials were surprised by the visceral, negative
reaction, but is it any wonder that many in the crowd booed, let
off air horns, and turned their backs to the speaker? Several
students weighed four years of hard work against having to listen
to another minute of this (“Fear engenders cruelty; cruelty, fear,
insanity, and then paralysis. In the center of Dante’s circle the
damned remained motionless”), and split. One protester tossed his
cap and gown onto the stage on the way out. An unknown saboteur
twice cut Hedges’ mike, and the school president appealed to the
crowd to please keep it down. Police whisked Hedges away from the
event when he was done speaking, for his own protection. (It was
widely reported that the chanters were able to silence him. Hedges
told the radio show
Democracy Now that he trimmed it a bit but got the bulk of it
out: “I was determined not let them determine when I was finished
speaking.”)
Civil libertarians were appalled at the image of a mob attempting
to drown out a respected speaker, and yet, that may have been the
image Hedges was shooting for. I’m a free speech absolutist and by
no means a warmonger but after listening to the first five minutes
of the address I wanted to throw a tomato at someone. It’s almost
as if Hedges, with his condescension, his stridency, his grating
delivery, and his refusal to make any attempt to connect with the
crowd as Americans or human beings, was trying to bait them into
rioting.
Whatever Hedges’ motivation, the upshot of the whole event was
outrage in the press and a much wider distribution of his speech
than would otherwise have occurred. This happened right before the
release of his new book on the horrors of war (What Every
Person Should Know About War; I’d have more to say about it
but I reviewed for a forthcoming issue of the Weekly
Standard). Now the book has the extra selling point of
striking a blow for free speech against stifling small town
conformity. It reminds me of the old cynical publishing insight
that censorship in the U.S. can be berry, berry good for
business.
