I'm
happy to see so many letters
responding to Patrick
Hurley's criticism of John Kerry. I agree with
his rebuttal that
those who reject The Blanket's airing of
what Hurley waves as Kerry's dirty laundry fail
to notice the subtitle of The Blanket:
'a journal of protest and dissent'. The
right to shout that the emperor or his challenger
struts sartorially challenged needs to be made by
those with whom, I gather, a majority of our journals
readers disagree. Otherwise, we are failing to listen
to all voices within the community through which
The Blanket speaks. Not all those published
here are doctrinaire republicans, and the joining
of these two words, as many of us have often insisted,
is itself a dangerous combination.
My
delight at seeing these contentions has everything
to do with my own, often iconoclastic, personal
opinions. My own take on the election can be expressed
when and where I wish. I vehemently support hearing
voices of anarchists, Greens, Loyalists, Sinn Féiners,
SDLP, IRSP, RSF and 32CSMers. Eamon McCann, Bernadette
Devlin McAliskey, and the Price sisters have all
been granted their own non-aligned socialist statements
here. Fionnbarra Ó Dochartaigh and Liam Ó
Comain battle within these bytes. I learn from all
with whom I share this public space. I teach, and
in my classroom I fight for the right of myself
and my students to speak our minds--critically,
logically, and sensibly. I do not promote my own
political agenda, although it slips out like any
of ours do! Freedoms within the academy, the press,
and on the street, we all know, are parlous and
precious. I cannot dominate my students' discussion
any more than they should by half-baked, gut-reaction,
rants. Patrick Hurley made his case carefully. Acceptance
or denial of it must rest on an equally deliberative
examination of his use of rhetoric and facts, and
an understanding of how emotion, logic, and reason
underlie his case. If Hurley fails to make his claims
stick, then his critics need to show this through
their own thoughtful rebuttals, not through blurting
'throw the bum out, he's not one of us!' Shades
of the Cyclops in Joyce's Ulysses.
Many
may say, of course, that my very assertion of an
open forum betrays itself my ideological stance.
I'm insufficiently Freireian or Marxian or class-conscious
in not dismantling my role as a moderator. After
all, why should any view be privileged? If so, why
continue The Blanket? Scuttle the republican
agenda, and let the two-century protracted debate
end. Decommission the keyboard, dump the disks.
These
musings arise too since Jacques Derrida died today.
His eulogy should be a cautionary tale. The glee
with which his own fanatical followers (who tried
to dominate many a seminar in my studies, all the
while doing their damnedest to get published while
preaching the death of the authorially centered
text) upended cohesive analysis. Sure, it's exciting
to see the rise of a new Critical Revolution. Its
manifestoes were just as hard to read as the soberly
jacketed volumes issuing from International Publishers,
Moscow, but we were insufficiently cosmopolitan
to be fluent in their dense dialect of miasmatically
rendered French. Like adepts to many a cult, we
too had to rely upon our own mandarin interpreters--gurus
of the post-Maoist generation. During the 1980s,
many from this securely tenured, well-paid, but
nonetheless radical vanguard insisted that no lasting
truth can be found within texts.
Authors
are not to be praised but to be blamed for their
own statements--critics condemned clarity and sneered
at simplicity. This dismantling with often abstrusely
argued if Maoist-like revolutionary zeal of past
dogmas led to a problem. Late in that decade, Algerian-born
Jewish-born Derrida, by now trapped in his own theoretical
construction, defended two of deconstructionism's
idols. Paul De Man's antisemitic propaganda for
a Belgian fascist paper and Martin Heidegger's wartime
Nazi affiliation both received convoluted Derridean
excuses. What after all, does an author have to
do with a text? Connolly and Labour in Irish
History? 1916's rebels and their Proclamation?
Mao and his red book? Hitler and Mein Kampf?
As if all textually built versions of our lives
have equal or no validity. And all texts, released
into the world, assert nothing but their own confusion.
Well, this is where it led: no certainty, unless
totalitarian apologia were advanced. Following Derridean
denial of any logical consistency within the realm
of print, no lasting effect emerges from an anti-Jewish
or a pro-Reich text to the Germany or Belgium where
its educated writers and sophisticated readers lived.
My version of WWII as heard from survivors and recorded
by historians apparently was poisoned by liberal
bias. How could those who participated in the war
testify in any but personally suspect reports? These
veterans, victims, bystanders, and refugees should
have let the perpetrators, the philosopher-kings,
rule.
How
does this relate to freedom to create our own versions
of the Irish and wider worlds in The Blanket?
I leave it to credentialed philosophers and political
scientists, who have also enriched our pages, to
chastise my naive humanism. My own opponents might
counter that Derrida's moral warns us that we need
to be aware that those with whom we dissent within
the pages of The Blanket deserve to be eliminated
from its contents. Their texts invite destruction,
for at their core gapes only a void. Therefore,
their negations will not infect our own republican,
socialist, and left-wing purity.
However,
I remember fondly a student (after grades were due!)
with quite different principles than mine who contrasted
me with a former teacher. Our difference, he told
me, was that I didn't tell him what to think, but
how to think. We must display this tolerance, in
whose name so many on the left claim to advance
what may be a narrow-minded groupthink rather than
a forum for all informed viewpoints to be discussed
with respect and dignity. Surely, so many who read,
and disagree within, The Blanket can agree
to this liberty.
