All last week I was out of contact with the larger world. No Internet, no newspapers, nada.
I was on a cruise in the Caribbean and was mostly in the middle of the ocean, and I loved it! I could just relax and enjoy my vacation. The outside world would still be there when I got back.
But when I arrived back in Florida and docked last Saturday morning, I connected to the Internet again and caught up on the news via my iPhone. I was hit with the usual tragedy which the newspaper brings.
I read first of all that my acquaintance Carmen Ramirez has been struck and killed by a car while walking in a crosswalk in Oxnard. I knew Carmen from having served on the board for the Center for Civic Education, as we were both appointed to it at the same time. Her life’s mission when I knew her was to serve and try to improve the community where she worked and lived, Oxnard. When I would bring up the unpleasant aspects of the place in conversation with Carmen – the poverty, the lack of education, the gang violence – she would shrug her shoulders and say, “I love being by the beach here. I love Oxnard.” You couldn’t argue with that.
Carmen, who was a lawyer, would speak in the pretentious and careful self-important cant of the politician in board meetings, in my experience – self-promoting and pompous. But that is how all politicians seem to speak, it seems to me, and how most board members spoke when we were there. (My inability to do so — speaking bluntly and to the point, or remaining silent otherwise — highlighted why I was unsuited to be a board member.) Carmen was in her element there. The lack of candor and the speaking out of both sides of one’s mouth, while a negative for me, would seem to be a requisite for those seeking political office. Carmen later went on to become a Ventura County Board Supervisor. I was not surprised.
At any rate, I will not say anything negative about the late Carmen Ruiz. She was a lady who tried to help others, cared about her family and community, and was tragically killed while performing a perfectly innocuous task: crossing the street. A totally unnecessary death. Rest in peace, Carmen. I enjoyed knowing you and teaching your niece. I even forgive you for being a lawyer and a politician.
That same morning I read that a former student of mine, Trey Barber, had also been killed the day before. He was in Rio de Janeiro when a local gang member reportedly fired a gun at a bus, and a stray bullet passed beyond the scene and traveled through a window in the apartment Trey was in, struck him in the neck, and took his life. Maybe Trey was not murdered, but he was the victim of voluntary manslaughter, at the very least. Trey’s death is even more tragic and unnecessary than that of Carmen because: his shooting was less of an accident than the Oxnard crosswalk collision, and Trey was much younger than Carmen. Trey was only 28 years old when he died.
I remember Trey from back in 2007/8 when he was 14 and in my freshman English class. Trey was a nice enough kid, although far from a standout scholar. He graduated from high school in 2012 and seemed to languish for awhile, which is not unusual, from what I read in his obituary. It took Trey four years to amass the community college units to transfer to a four-year school. I suspect this was the turning point in his life; Trey seemed to find direction and purpose through the study of the Portuguese language. He went on to earn an undergraduate degree in Portuguese from UCSB and later earned his Master’s Degree from UCLA in the study of that language. He planned on working towards a PhD. Trey seemed to have fallen in love with the nation of Brazil and its language. He was well launched into adult life. And then Trey’s person just happens to be in the path of an errant bullet fired recklessly by a street criminal, and his life is over.
By coincidence, one of the books I was reading while in the Caribbean Sea was “Gangster Warlords: Drug Dollars, Killing Fields, and the New Politics of Latin America,” by Ioan Grillo. I read an entire chapter about the Red Commando (CV) and Primer Comando Capital (PCC) gangs which largely control many of the favelas of Brazil. Would it surprise me that a street gang member in Rio de Janeiro – probably barely able to read and write his own name – fired a gun at a bus without paying much mind to what was behind his target, and thereby killed an innocent bystander with a stray bullet? That such a thing could happen?
No, it does not surprise me at all. Having just read all about it, such a thing does not surprise me in the least.
But it does surprise me that such a killing in Brazil would touch someone known to me from the United States.
Rest in peace, Trey. You did not deserve to die this way. Many of my former students impress me greatly in how as adults they find their place in the world and achieve success. I am often amazed at where they end up and the unusual roads they traveled to get there. Persons like Trey achieve so much, travel so far, learn so impressively, and lead such interesting lives. The opposite is also equally true. Some former students do little with their lives, travel next to nowhere, and impress nobody. They languish – or worse.
Finally, there is the last death I read about on my iPhone when I docked in Orlando, Florida, this Saturday morning. I saw how the volatile actress Anne Heche had that week crashed her car into someone’s home in Mar Vista, California. The house almost burned down, and Heche was horribly burned while trapped in her car. It was later reported that Heche had cocaine and fentanyl in her system, and was driving impaired when the accident happened. Kept alive on machines, she was brain dead. They unplugged Heche from life support machines a week later. All I have to say about that is: Good riddance.
It can be painful to read the news. That is for sure. Is ignorance of the latest misery in the wider world a boon? Is almost all news fit to print bad news in practice? Is ignorance of breaking news bliss? Should I go back to the Caribbean and ignore the rest of the world?
At any rate, the biggest news for me last Saturday while emerging from vacation back into the “real world” was the brutal stabbing of author Salman Rushdie. A wide-eyed zealot of Shia Islam, apparently radicalized by a trip to Lebanon and operating on his own, rushed the stage where Rushdie was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY and viciously stabbed him several times before members of the crowd stopped him.
Rushie will survive the attack. But he reportedly will lose an eye, suffer liver injuries, as well as nerve damage to his arm.
This was quite the shock because Salman Rushdie and the Iranian’s government’s fatwa urging Muslims to assassinate Rushdie had long receded into the background. Most had forgotten about it, and Rushdie traveled internationally and spoke publicly without bodyguards.
The stats on my webpage dealing with Rushdie exploded. The past was back!
For many year I had a copy of “The Satanic Verses” prominently displayed in my library. The idea that you would kill a person for a book they had written seemed to me almost the most barbaric action a person could do – worse than burning a book, which was pretty bad, too. Book burnings by the Nazis or Catholic Inquisitors, or targeted killings of persons for giving offense to Islam – I thought the first buried in the pages of history books, and the latter receding in its fever. My pages dealing with the Salman Rushdie controversy increased in traffic after the attack on him last week. You might have thought Rushdie and the fatwa were ancient history. Not so.
In some ways freedom of expression has never been more in danger than it is today.
After his attack I attempted to find my copy of “The Satanic Verses” but could not find it after a cursory search. But it might still be somewhere, as my library is large and unwieldy; I occasionally fail to find books I know I own and buy another copy. But I want that copy of “The Satanic Verses” back to put someplace prominently again and to show my support fur Rushdie and the idea that an author’s freedom to write is paramount. So I bought another copy of “The Satanic Verses” today, and I was happy to see it was back-ordered; many others seemed to have the same idea as me to support Rushdie after his attack by buying the controversial book –
You have to stand up to the enemies of free speech.
I felt exactly the same way when “The Passion of Christ” became a movie. Orthodox Christians protested his blasphemous book when they made it into a movie. I never saw that movie. But I loved the book, and the fact that some Christians would protest an artistic creation for blaspheming their faith shows their small-mindedness, in my opinion. In obsessing on doctrinal disagreements on the life of Jesus and overlooking the larger message of the redemptive power of Jesus in that book, they mistake the trees for the forest.
I support “The Satanic Verses,” although I did not enjoy reading it – and Salman Rushdie’s literary approach was never simpatico with my own, which is fine. But I loved “The Passion of Christ.”
There are plenty of books and ideas which offend me to my very core. But I have managed to coexist in the same world with them without problems for five and a half decades. The idea that your sacred cow could be gored by a comment, or a book, or a film, or a song – and that you, like a petulant toddler, will insist it be removed from you – well, that is the very height of self-important narcissism. I can live even with the speech I hate, and I can hardly believe such calls for censoring and subsequent ostracism have gotten the traction they have.
Because it is one thing to decry militant Islam when it becomes murderously insistent that some topics are off limits – when gunmen murder five at the Charlie Hebdo office in 2015 which claimed the lives of 17 victims because they had published satirical cartoons of the prophet Mohammad, or when French school teacher Samuel Paty had his head cut off by the same in 2019 for talking about and showing those same cartoons – cartoons! Mind you – or when other religious fundamentalists talk or do the same in other instances in other times and places. I don’t care two figs about Islam either way. But I care enormously about the right of free expression.
The threats to free expression have moved to the United States recently, with authoritarians off the Left (“cancel culture” coming out of American universities) and in response, more recently, from the Right (Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida). I have even had some local members of the dogmatic cultural left object to this, my website – the local language police had arrived. Yes, the political toxins of a polarized country are trying to declare each other “beyond the pale,” and to push the other side into the political wilderness. (Memo to such: the other side is going nowhere, at least not peaceably.) Bottom line: I would not be surprised if almost everyone in the United States is very careful about anything they say in this context. Self-censorship is everywhere. People are afraid they will be targeted, by either the extreme left or the extreme right – and they are right to be afraid.
How sick a culture is that?
I see so many average everyday people make their social media accounts “private” just to stay out of the line of fire. I don’t blame them. The leader of my teacher’s union has repeatedly told us teachers to make all our accounts private to prevent us from being targeted. But I will go in the other direction with this website, being as transparent as possible, not so much as a teacher but as a human being.
Yes, the “culture wars” rage on in America. But neither the right or the left, Republicans or Democrats, are going anywhere. The bitter fights about the unsuitability of “the other” will resolve little. I like how David French summed it up: “We will not censor our way to a politically healthy culture.”
As for me, I am going to pretend as if this is not going on.
I am unwilling to pass my days living in fear. I will think and write as I please, as the law permits me in the United States.
Enough of the language police.
Enough of the outrage culture and “politics wars.”
Enough already.
I quit.
Everyone can rant and pull at their hair about this cause or that issue, but I will pay very partial attention to politics, at best.
I am out.
I will focus my mind on other things.
The morning light is clear today.
What shall I write about today?
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
Go buy a copy of “The Satanic Verses.” It is not necessary to actually read it.
“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
by Ray Bradbury
