When E.L. Doctorow urged graduates at Hofstra University to
question authority, he didn’t expect them to question his. The
fiction writer accused George Bush of launching a fictitious war in
Iraq and was heckled into silence. In a moment the liberal elite
must regard as an alarming illustration of the Red-Blue divisions
of America now even bleeding into academia, students and parents
booed Doctorow while the liberal faculty stood to cheer at the end
of his speech. Booing a speaker into silence wasn’t the vigorous
free speech and activism Doctorow had in mind when he extolled
agitation earlier in his speech. How dare the mob turn on its
visionaries. Notice the suggestion (in the Newsday story
about Doctorow’s speech) that peasants were responsible for the
heckling — the booing “came mainly from the crowd in the stands.”
This is reminiscent of self-appointed populist Michael Moore
blaming boos at the Oscars two years ago on lowly stage hands and
hooligans in the cheap seats.
The distinction between civility and incivility in the liberal
mind is very fine indeed: If a liberal commencement speaker calls
the president of the United States a liar, that’s civility; if the
crowd boos the speaker calling their president a liar, that’s
incivility.
Doctorow once helped Americans navigate these careful
distinctions as a member of a “civility” commission in the 1990s
after the troubling Republican takeover of Congress. Called the
“Penn Commission on Society, Culture and Community,” it gathered at
the University of Pennsylvania to address the “explosion of
incivility” in American life. Such experts on civility as Paul
Begala were asked to mull “the rising tide of rudeness and — if
possible — how to stem it,” reported the press.
Doctorow had tried to keep the rudeness of the Reagan years at
bay. But to no avail. The mob needed further conditioning.
Reactionary parents, for example, shook their heads in dismay at a
1989 Brandeis University commencement address Doctorow delivered in
which he accused Ronald Reagan of lying and nurturing a
“gangsterdom of the spirit.”
“Mr. Reagan’s advocacy of self-reliance caused him to scorn or
forget other truths of community,” Doctorow said in that address.
“And so he was moved at various times in his Administration to take
away school lunches from needy children and tuition loans from
students, and to deny legal services to poor people and
psychological counseling to Vietnam veterans, and Social Security
payments to handicapped people…The philosophical conservative is
someone willing to pay the price of other people’s suffering for
his principles. And so we now have hundreds of thousands, perhaps
millions, of our citizens lying around in the streets of our
cities, sleeping in doorways, begging with styrofoam cups. We
didn’t have a class of permanent beggars in this country — in the
United States of America — fifteen or twenty years ago. We didn’t
have kids selling crack in their grade schools, or businessmen
magnifying their fortunes into megafortunes by stock manipulation
and thievery — I don’t remember such epidemics of major corporate
fraud. A decade ago you did not have college students scrawling
racial epithets or anti-Semitic graffiti on the room doors of their
fellow students. You did not have cops strangling teen-age boys to
death or shooting elderly deranged women in their own homes. You
did not have scientists falsifying the results of experiments, or
preachers committing the sins against which they so thunderously
preached. A generation or so back, you didn’t have every class of
society, and every occupation, widely, ruggedly practicing its own
characteristic form of crime.”
It must be maddening to Doctorow that conservatives see such
talk as uncivil, deserving of jeers. Clearly his old civility
commission needs to reconvene to teach Americans that conservative
thought itself is “uncivil” and liberalism, even when its
proponents are accusing conservatives of lying and killing, is
civility’s most reliable friend. Don’t students know that civility
is conformity to liberalism? Liberals aren’t supposed to be heckled
at commencement ceremonies; they are supposed to do the
heckling.(Just like they did to Jeane Kirkpatrick at U.C. Berkeley
in 1983 when liberals routinely accused her of lying about the evil
of communism, as they now accuse Bush of lying about Saddam
Hussein’s ties to terrorists.)
Conservatives are supposed to be heckled, not contributors to
the Nation magazine like Doctorow. Or newspaper
publishers. Recall Janis Heaphy, publisher of the Sacramento
Bee, who had her remarks about civil liberties drowned out at
the 2001 commencement at Cal State Sacramento. John Ashcroft and
George Bush were threatening their rights, she told them.
“Specifically, to what degree are we willing to compromise our
civil liberties in the name of security?” The graduates then
exercised their civil liberties so loudly Heaphy had to sit
down.
These are stories of campus radicalism that won’t make it into
Doctorow’s radical novels, and examples of rudeness Doctorow likes
to reserve to himself.
