Ward Churchill vs ordinary people

By Seamus Heffernan | 8 February 2005

The American press and much of the blogosphere has been abuzz regarding University of Colorado's controversial professor Ward Churchill (pictured) and the decision by Hamilton College to cancel his appearance there for security reasons. No stranger to notoriety, Churchill is a Marxist author and a committed advocate for Native American rights (including being central to a protest that prevented Columbus Day celebrations). What interests us is his idea that WTC victims were somehow guilty people for supporting capitalism:

As to those in the World Trade Centre... Well, really. Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire - the mighty 'engine of profit' to which the military dimension of U.S. policy as always been enslaved - and they did so both willingly and knowingly... To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs of what they were involved in - and in many cases, excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin Towers, I'd really by interested in hearing about it.

You can just imagine the average victim's family exploding every time that passage is read. Churchill has subsequently distanced himself from that particular paragraph, saying he was not referring to, say, janitors or children killed that day but the corporate higher-ups, but you hardly get that impression from his writing. Part of the reason he has upset so many people is his snide style, in full evidence here and also on display as he mocks U.S. soccer moms and their trendily named children, or when he sneers at the FBI and CIA's intelligence failures. The other, and much more inflammatory, reason is his comparing people who died in the towers to a man who helped engineer the Nazi holocaust.

The truly insufferable aspect of Churchill's piece is his callous dismissal of the people in those building, who, while talking on their phones and planning lunch, were doing what most of us have to do every day: work.

The WTC was targeted as a symbol of American success and global capitalism, but the majority of people inside were just ordinary people. They had kids and mortgages and real lives that may seem mundane and even stupid to people like Churchill. After all, what right do these people have to chase their little slice of normal life when there's untold suffering going on, somewhere, sometime? In the whole big picture, it's not like Timmy's soccer game is all that important, and it's not like you should have the right to get excited about a pitcher of beer and chicken wings with your friends on a Friday.

As 99% of us feel, these things are important - and it doesn't put blood on our hands. Churchill is not just defending terrorists, he is attacking the basic principle of capitalist life: get up and go to work. In that sense, these people were part of the vast globalization conspiracy the Churchills, Moores and Chomskys continuously warn us about. They wanted to make a living and provide for themselves.

Professor Churchill is not merely anti-American, he sneers at the reality most of us face as we fight for a seat on the Tube, or when we have to stay late at the office. In Ward Churchill's eyes, we shouldn't be so wrapped up in our narrow, pathetic little consumerist lives. Certainly, we should stop and appreciate what we have worked for occasionally - and remember that not all of us have it so easy as to get tenure. But it is the work of ordinary people living the sort of lives that Ward Churchill despises that has helped create the prosperity that America enjoys.