Homeland Elegies(105)
Free Speech: A Coda
When the theatricality, the entertainment value, the marketing of life is complete, we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries, and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.
—Toni Morrison
The trouble on campus began before I got there: someone at the college’s Muslim student union had a cousin who had had what he called a “run-in” with me. I recalled the episode well: on a cigarette break during an afternoon seminar on my work at a community college in Southern California, a young Pakistani-American man shared with me his recent forays into online activism. He and a cohort had used Reddit to crowdfund the production of a porn scene in which a well-endowed Pakistani-American male—played by a fellow student whose member fit the bill—had graphic sex with a blond white bombshell. (They’d been able to raise enough money to hire a professional porn star for the shoot.) The video was their counterattack on a group of 4chan bullies who were well known for mocking South Asians about their penis sizes on that anonymous internet image board. The video turned out to be a great success. It went viral, and the resulting deluge of outraged 4chan threads, the young man explained to me—not only without a hint of irony but also, apparently, with every expectation I would find all this admirable—had been truly “life-changing.” Which is to say: I had more than an inkling he might not take well to my asking just why it was he cared what anyone thought about his penis size.
The young man in question didn’t come back to class after the break, and a few days later, while rummaging about through the 4chan threads surrounding his video, I came across a thread he’d written describing his encounter with me, in which he called me an “arrogant asshole who apparently thinks writing stories about Muslims beating white women instead of giving them a good fuck” was “original.” He went on to say that he hoped, on my next trip back to Pakistan, somebody finally gave me what I deserved, namely, a “bullet in the head.” The thread ended with three face-with-tears-of-joy emojis followed by a half dozen exclamation points. My heart raced as I read it, but not because I was worried. It wasn’t the first time I’d encountered this sentiment about me online. I doubted it would be the last.
The young pornographer in training had a cousin who was a student at the liberal arts college in Iowa where Mary Moroni was now teaching—having left my alma mater a few years after I’d graduated for a position that gave both her and her partner tenure-track jobs. I’d been to visit her there amid the cornfields twice before, once for dinner while driving through, once at her invitation to give a reading. She’d invited me to campus again, this time to spend a day with her spring seminar students. After I accepted, she reached out to the religion department, a student theater group, and the Muslim student union. Two days later, the latter’s student president wrote her an email explaining that the Muslim students on campus found my work offensive and demeaning, and, as far as their organization was concerned, I would be considered an “unsafe” presence on campus. The email encouraged Mary to rescind the invitation and ended by threatening protests of any and all events associated with me if she didn’t.
In the four years since I’d seen her last, Mary’s feelings about teaching had changed. Back then, she spoke of her students with a frustration that surprised me. She had just come off a semester of trouble with her course on social issues in the nineteenth-century American novel when, for the first time in her career as a teacher, a group of students refused an assignment. Objecting to the presence on the syllabus of the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, they refused to read The Gilded Age. It was only the most outrageous example of a new self-righteousness in the classroom Mary had been dealing with for some time. She’d had some trouble with the matter of the third-person pronoun being used for an individual—she was an English teacher, after all, she tried to explain—but eventually got used to it. Then there was the semester she came under attack for teaching Emerson and Whitman. A pair of students did their presentations on both writers’ racist views, culling racist comments both made in lesser-known writings. A larger group canvassed her to replace upcoming readings in both authors’ work with other, less objectionable authors. She was reluctant to go that far, explaining that she knew Whitman had racist views; Abraham Lincoln did, too. One needed to be cautious about applying today’s standards to the past. Even the most progressive white abolitionists of that time had opinions about race anyone today would consider racist. When Mary refused to drop the writers from the syllabus, four of her students dropped the class in protest.
I remember sitting with her in her office shortly after the ruckus about Twain, listening to her complain about the students’ growing intolerance for difficult ideas. “It’s feeling more and more to me like cover for their laziness,” she said; there was more gray in her hair and a few more pounds to her, but even anxious, she still looked like an angel in a Renaissance fresco. “They take the class because they want to be writers, but they don’t want to read. Instead of owning it, they slap you with moral rhetoric about why you’re wrong to make them do something they don’t want to do. And don’t get me started on grades. If you don’t give them grades they think they deserve, you get reported.” She paused. “The worst part of it? I can’t give them the best of what I have. They don’t even know if they have the interest, because they’re not willing to know what they’re made of. I think back on some of what we did together. The work on your dreams? Suggesting something like that these days is career suicide. It’s disheartening enough to make me wonder if I shouldn’t be doing something else with myself entirely.”