Job Discussion Forums

[moonraven]

This is NOT about telling jokes. It's about walking one's talk, telling one's truth.

Some of us are absolutely willing to take on the role that Alan Watts called "The Joker" in order to bring students to consciousness. (Or to do so on this forum....)

The recent neo-conservative flap about Ward Churchill has also produced some pretty good articles about the role of the teacher.

This is one of them:

Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
Ward Churchill, Alan Watts, and The Joker
by David L. Rick

Ward Churchill's post-9/11 essay, "Some People Push Back", has lately been the cause of fulmination and frothing on the political right, discomforted squirming on the left, and a new-found affection among "centrist" politicians for the rhetoric of the McCarthy era. Observers of all stripes seem to be asking some of the same questions:

How could Professor Churchill say such things?

How dare he offend the memory of those who died on 9/11?

Why should we let him teach impressionable students?

Hasn't he gone completely beyond the bounds of reasoned and polite discourse?

Indeed, he has. Ward Churchill is truly a man for our times. And what times these are: Each day, while we shed tears for 3000 victims of an event now over three years in the past, eight times as many die of malnutrition. Each day. We tally the toll of our brave soldiers who've died "bringing freedom to Iraq", but we can't be bothered about those who died when "freedom" landed on them. Our military leaders "don't do body counts"; Neither, apparently, do our religious leaders. It's a time when I feel I should be rereading George Orwell, but a few minutes of listening to the day's "sound bites" reminds me that reality beggars fiction.

So instead of Orwell, I've been thinking about Alan Watts. Watts, who died in 1973, was a philosopher and scholar of comparative religion. He is probably best known as an interpreter of Zen philosophy for Western lay-people, and many of his lectures from the 1960's are still broadcast on my local community radio station.

One of these lectures is titled "The Joker", and in it Watts discusses that archetypical character also known as "The Jester" or "The Fool". The role of this personage is to say what none dare say, to laugh at kings, sneer at nobles, break taboos, and offend polite society. Who would want such a person around? Nobody -- and everybody! So he persists, from Shakespeare, clear through to the Comedy Channel. Because without someone to parody them, our societies become parodies of themselves, freezing into some kind of brittle ice sculpture which we must all circle on tiptoe. The Joker smashes this fragile edifice. Thus he proves, by our laughter, tears, or outrage, that we are still genuine people, not merely automatons.

The Joker mocks all, and defers to no one. The rules and roles of convention do not apply to him. He is beyond it all, but he can play any role, for he is the Wild Card.

Alan Watts often quoted an Eastern aphorism: �When two Zen Masters meet on the road, they need no introduction; thieves and rogues recognize one another immediately.� Watts, who had as much rogue in him as scholar, would have recognized Professor Churchill right away. It took me a bit longer.

I met Ward Churchill several weeks before he became the subject of irate editorials and self-righteous radio talk shows. We had a certain issue in common, and he was kind enough join me in addressing a meeting of my local City Council. I spoke first, choosing my words and arguments carefully, wanting to sound logical, conciliatory and firm. When Churchill strode to the podium, and the atmosphere changed. He towered over the podium, some strange cross between evangelical preacher and Cherokee warrior. His words were forceful, angry, accusatory. He made his point, but he was not polite. I was afraid that one or two of the council members might melt under his stare and leave us short of a quorum. But I soon stopped worrying about the Council�s impression of me: I could have done anything short of dropping my pants and still been considered a moderate. (We won the issue.)

It�s clear to me now that Ward Churchill was playing a Role. I can almost imagine him pulling on a Shakespearean cloak as he walked those few steps to the podium. I don�t suggest for a moment that Churchill isn�t genuinely outraged by the cruelty he has meticulously documented in our nation�s history. Certainly he is. But he makes that outrage a visceral thing, incapable of being ignored. I think his lectures at the University of Colorado must be memorable indeed.

They have to be memorable. Consider what he�s up against: His students have absorbed roughly twenty years of American television. They are steeped in a consensus mythology in which the Cowboy is always good, and America is always the Cowboy. A committee of Texas moralists wrote their high school textbooks. (Remember the Alamo!) So if they remember anything at all from their high school history courses, it probably wasn�t true to begin with. It�s not exaggerating to say that what they know about U.S. foreign policy is roughly equivalent to a Superman comic book: The good guys always win, and we�re always the good guys. The credulous among them believe these things. The more sophisticated believe nothing, and aren�t prepared to believe anything new. History? It�s just something to be endured until tonight�s pledge party.

How does one reach such students? What does it take to jolt them off their pedestals of privilege and complacency? It takes the academic equivalent of a flying tackle. Will they remember a lecture filled with sad statistics about Native American death rates in the eighteenth century? Probably not. Will they remember the professor who told them they were complicit in genocide and probably deserved to be hanged? You bet they will. Sure, they�ll try to squirm out from beneath that withering gaze. Flushed with denial, they�ll distrust the statistics and decide to verify them independently. So they�ll add up the numbers themselves, and follow a footnote or two back to the primary source. Against all instinct, they�ll find themselves doing actual history.

So, too, with us who read Ward Churchill�s now-famous essay, and the book it developed into (On the Justice of Roosting Chickens). We�re outraged by the callousness with which he flouts social and academic convention. We want to revile not only the text, but the author. But we have to come to grip with those footnotes. To complain only about the inflammatory language is to fail in our effort to win the moral high ground. Professor Churchill already stands astride it, The Joker, smirking from behind his dark glasses.

David Rick is an activist and member of Longmont Citizens for Justice and Democracy, www.longmont-citizens.org . Longmont, Colorado is just down the road from Boulder and Colorado State University.

[Glenski]

In my opinion, moonraven has slipped in a socio-political statement with a quasi-educational post. It treads delicately on the boundaries of what this forum has recently tried to avoid.

I know nothing about either Watts or Churchill, and at this moment I don't think I want to, so I will confine my remarks to these statements, which seem to be the only ones related to teaching English (despite neither Watts nor Churchill seeming to do that). Even then, they thinly hit the target.

[Mr. Kalgukshi]

This thread will remain active to the extent it continues to relate to teaching and ESL job related matters. Should it start to become something else, it will be removed from the board.

[denise]

To make students conscious, or to burden them with guilt?

I include political discussions in class, but I would never get up on a pedestal and make my students squirm. Deliberately trying to make students feel uncomfortable (from the "enlightened?" viewpoint that such discomfort will jolt them into... ah, yes, consciousness) goes against my most fundamental beliefs as a teacher. Besides, although my political beliefs are the correct beliefs from my perspective, other people's differing opinions are equally correct from their perspectives.

My students are not personally responsible for whatever wrongs Japan has committed in its past, and even if they were, I would look for a more diplomatic way of telling them.

d

[moonraven]

When I said some of us are willing, I included myself.

I feel that academic freedom is not only a right, but an obligation. That academic freedom--like other freedoms--appears to be an endangered species, I find reprehensible.

I wonder ow many folks on this forum even relate to the concept of acaemic freedom--which to my mind, is a key issue in teaching. Or have we slouched toward being mechanics of language?

[Glenski]

Academic freedom is such a huge, general term.
What exactly does this mean to you in the classroom, Joker Moonraven?
Just how far do you go when expressing "academic freedom"?
And, how do you balance that with teaching the necessary English that your students need?