Dispatches from the present
In the hall outside my office this morning, I saw a student wearing a blue t-shirt that said MASS DEPORTATION NOW. I caught the text at a glance while unlocking my office door, then raised my eyes for a second look as the boy drew nearer, because I was sure I’d read it wrong. Even when I’d confirmed that the shirt said what I thought it said, I spent another moment trying to figure out what ironic gesture could possibly be at work here. Perhaps the shirt’s manifest rhetorical content revealed some cheeky contradictory meaning, like my burgundy t-shirt that says ΣΜΦ on the breast pocket.
With no such latent content to be found, and with the boy having by now passed my office door, I found myself in the final instants of the temporal window when I might have said something to him—for instance, “Hey, can I ask you a quick question,” which is my usual way of wedging open the door of conversation with a stranger in a public place.
I knew, however, that if I spoke to him I would lose my cool. A few weeks earlier, the University of Virginia’s provost had emailed faculty and staff some “Election Day Reminders” of our “special obligation to protect the free speech rights of every student, regardless of their political opinion.” This reminder, delivered as if through gritted teeth, followed a September 16th announcement by UVA President Jim Ryan’s “Committee on Institutional Statements” that the president should “only consider issuing statements on national and international events when those events directly affect the university.” The university’s press office described this policy as a “Position of Neutrality” and recommended applying it to all official units of the university. “The aim,” Ryan is quoted as saying, “is to be apolitical, not cold.”
I would lose my cool, I was sure, not only due to my own countervailing “political opinion,” as the provost’s letter had put it, but also on behalf of a student I’ll call Flores, who’d come to class on the morning of Wednesday, November 6th with tears in her eyes. It broke my brain a little, to say nothing of my heart, that the remit of my “special obligation” to protect this boy’s “political opinion” might now encompass a tacit endorsement of his right to advertise a hateful slogan—an opinion that has no content except hatred, but which has lately been laundered with the modifier “political” by virtue of its association with the president-elect and, by extension, the “mainstream” of American politics.
The public conversation about institutional neutrality has already strained past a breaking point at UVA, ever since the president invited Virginia state troopers onto campus in May to pepper-spray and arrest peaceful pro-Palestinian protesters exercising their free-speech rights. Whereas in advance of the 2017 Unite the Right rally, a crowd of torch-bearing neo-Nazis marched through the university with police coordination, granted to them in the name of “free speech.”
The goal of being “above politics” has a sordid history. In a September essay for Harper’s, Hari Kunzru wrote of the 1933 PEN International Congress held in Dubrovnik shortly after the German chapter had expelled its Jewish and leftist writers; the Germans agreed to attend only if “no mention of politics be made.” H.G. Wells, PEN International’s president at the time, agreed to this condition, but some of the expelled members attended the congress as “writers at large” at the invitation of their hosts. One of them, the radical Jewish writer Ernst Toller, addressed the assembly (minus the Germans, who walked out when he took the stage). “Insanity dominates our age, and barbarity drives humans,” he said. “The air around us is becoming thinner. Let us not fool ourselves. The voice of the spirit, the voice of humanity, will only become powerful if it serves a larger political agenda.” “Contemporaries,” Kunzru writes, “considered Toller’s speech a turning point, exposing one version of the ‘apolitical’ as a capitulation to forces that were on a trajectory toward genocide.”
These sorts of analogies are not as efficacious as they might once have been. Many of us have been using them since 2016 or earlier, to little effect, or worse: I have come around to the depressive suspicion that these labels lose their adhesiveness the more they’re used, becoming easier and easier to peel off and flick away. I doubted, naturally, whether any of this would sway the boy in the MASS DEPORTATION NOW shirt. But I felt pretty confident that saying anything would attract the great eye, which I imagine to be lidless and wreathed in flame, of the conservative alumni group that has spent the past academic year doxing and harassing UVA professors they suspect of teaching “divisive concepts.”
It seemed only a matter of time before President Ryan’s stated values of being both “apolitical” and “not cold” collided with a velocity and force I could only begin to imagine. I thought then of a moment from Chris Knapp’s excellent new novel States of Emergency, which takes place in the year leading up to Trump’s first victory, the one where some of us could still be astonished by these incursions of racism and xenophobia into the public square. At one point, by way of illustrating the mounting dread of that election cycle, a character makes wry reference to the opening moments of Mathieu Kassovitz’s film La haine, which contains “the parable of a man in free fall from a height of fifty stories, who keeps reassuring himself: Jusqu’ici tout va bien—so far, so good.”
Which was more or less what I’d been telling myself, I realized, through the strange free fall of the past week, after this horrifying, unsurprising electoral outcome that doesn’t seem to have materially changed my life just yet—except, of course, for the sight of Flores on the morning of November 6th, sitting across the room with that shine in her eyes.
I let the boy walk away and stepped inside my office, still doubtful of what to say, or to whom.
On the morning after the election, as I had prepared to leave my house, I was at a loss for how to speak to my students. I decided to bring in donuts and a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the last paragraph of the book, where Calvino posits that “the inferno of the living is not something that will be,” but is precisely where we live even now. “There are two ways to escape suffering it,” I had read aloud. “The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
It occurred to me afterward that I had perhaps made some unfounded assumptions about the political opinions of my students. But by then it was too late.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (Flickr, CC / BY-SA 2.0)