Hit & Run links to an attack ripe with cinematic references as it fits their bad movie weekend meme. The meme of Victor Davis Hanson’s rant is pink heterosexual pride and he slaps Ward Churchill all sorts of ambiguous ugly for claiming to be Native American (no matter who says it’s okay if he does) because the point is no one has a prayer of being tenured in liberal academe unless they’re willing to draw a bow on white-man’s capitalism and riddle it with poisoned-tipped arrows. I’m disappointed he didn’t do a review of his troops. Ironic that not once in this jeremiad is Churchill’s essay on the purging of Native Americans from all aspects of American film making ever mentioned.
I wasn’t aware the UC Regents had released their preliminary report or that Churchill had become the poster child for everything wrong with American universities. This plagiarism charge looks valid, this one seems contrived, but neither are as incendiary as Paul Krassner’s recent decision to simply publish, without question, this charge that he was a snitch during his college days.
This brings up a phone call I got from a friend of 30 years. I’ll call her Atria. She attended Bradley University in Peoria at the same time Ward Churchill did.
“He’s a phony radical from way back,” she said. “He snitched me out to the police in 1970. He came over to my house one time and—the very first pound of pot that I ever bought—I sold him an ounce. I didn’t get arrested, but I had to suffer the wrath of my parents. They just went nuts. It’s one of the reasons I moved away from Peoria.”
“What do you think was Churchill’s motivation?”
“My guess is he’s been arrested before, and his fingerprints are probably still in existence. He may have had it expunged. I think obviously they had him on something else. He might’ve had a felony conviction. And he went around and ratted everybody out. And I wasn’t the only one. He was the campus snitch. I’d love for him to be able to say anything he damn well wants, but he’s not the authentic article.”
A pound of pot and all she suffered was a stern lecture from the parents? Maybe she was the snitch and that’s why she hot-footed it out of Peoria! Who knows? Does Krassner? Does he know when Bradley University became a school attended by Churchill? When Gunny Bob of Clear Channel Radio “exposed” his military records he linked to Churchill’s resume and that institution isn’t listed on it.
Oh well, as a famous actor once remarked, “Facts are stupid things.”