In 1984, commenting on the Reagan presidential campaign with its "morning in America" theme and its portrayal of the President greeting happy white and mostly blond suburban people in a happy America, CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall said that there was a "whiff of fascism" in the campaign.
In 2000, the term popped up again in progressive circles in response to the storm troop tactics that rightwing Republicans used to shut down the Miami-Dade county recount as Bush and his Florida henchman stole the presidential election with a 5-4 blessing from the Supreme Court.
I thought of that term when I read about what is happening right now in Arizona. Except, "stink" is a better term then whiff.
First, the source was a story in the March 19, 2012 issue of the New York Times, a publication which routinely gets rid of those journalists who go beyond its very moderate liberal limits(especially on foreign affairs) Only the far right sees it as a part of "liberal media."
School officials in the Tucson district, faced with the threat of a 15 million dollar penalty, are going into classrooms and school libraries to remove a series of textbooks and novels for youth. This has been an ongoing "battle" in Arizona connected to the attempts to drive out racially profile people of Latino background to drive out undocumented workers, and use vigilante tactics to police the Mexican-American border(demilitarized largely by the orders of the U.S. in the treaty ending the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the annexation of Arizona along with the rest of the contemporary U.S. Southwest from the Republic of Mexico).
In 2010, a Republican governor and legislature passed a law "prohibitting classes that advocate overthrowing the government, are designed for individuals of one ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating pupils as individuals." Wow. The old Smith and McCarran Act language thrown together with a ban on various ethnic studies programs. But the target was Mexian-American studies, particularly in the Tucson district where the student body is 60% Latino. It wasn't those classes who teach "100 percent Americanism" "the American Dream" as "free enteprise," or the superiority of the Protestant Ethic.
Nazis in 1933 burned books of Marxist, Jewish, and other "subversive" writers in public ceremonies. Arizona had the attorney general send in "investigators" with subpeonas for reading lists, exams, even power point presentations and work that teachers had written themselves in college. A number of distinguished works, including "Chicano: A History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement" By F. Arturo Rosales, which became the basis of an acclaimed PBS documentary, were banned. The late Paulo Freire, the world famous Brazilian educational theorist, had his classic "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" removed. The Nazis burning the books of some of the greatest minds of history or McCarthyites taking the books of WEB Dubois and other world famous American scholars out of U.S.I.A. libraries comes to mind or shoud come to mind.
These two were among seven textbooks that the administrators "removed" searching them out classroom to classroom. The NYT article points to a popular novel written for youth, "Mexican White boy," which was also targetted. Here, the hero does not speak Spanish, wants to got to college to play basketball, and live out the "American dream" of success and celebrity. I guess it was the title that got them going; after all, HUAC in its early days pointed to a petition that child star Shirley Temple had signed to portray her as a Communist decades before she was an unsuccessful Republican candidate for Congress in California.
The Tucson school district didn't want to do this but they were forced to by the threat of a 15 million dollar fine. It would be nice to see the federal government intervene on the side of the district and turn the tables on these crude enemies of intellectual freedom and civil liberties---threaten Arizona with economic sanctions aimed at its upper classes if these policies are not rescinded, invoking the fourteenth to the constitution, who initial purpose was to stop the former slave states from denying the citisenship rights of former slaves.
The NYT report shows John Huppenthal, State Superindentant of Schools of Arizona, making the following surreal statement cocerning the polic: "When we encountered this situation, we did what Hannibal did to the Romans. This is the eternal battle, the eternal battle of all time, the forces of collectivism vs. the forces of individuality."
In my 42 years of university teaching, I have had students(mostly those who did not do any reading or attend classes) come up with the wildest statements on examinations, but I have never seen anyone come close to that. Hannibal crossing the Alps to be eventually defeated by the Roman forces and the Carthage that he represented destroyed. An "eternal battle of all time," centered around a ban on Mexican-American history and progressive pedagogy enforced with Gestapo tactics.
Educated people through the world are used to laughing at people like Huppenthal. But it really isn't funny and we all should act and act now to demand that the Department of Education and the federal government move to make it clear to the state of Arizona that this assault on intellectual freedom, and the civil rights and civil liberties of U.S. citizens will not be tolerated in the United States of America.
