The speaker needs to get a life
In the ever-deepening confoundment of the Palestinian-Israeli war, the protests now igniting on US college campuses offer little enlightenment other than to further testify to the extent to which this seemingly remote regional conflict is infiltrating much of American cultural and political life. I am rather unhopeful about campus protests, even as I strongly support students’ right and need to collectively express themselves upon issues they feel strongly about. At best they help keep an issue alive; at worse they muddy the issues and don’t finally make much happen.
All I know is that Israel suffered a brutal and criminal and murderous assault on its citizens and civic life; and Israel is now exacting a brutal and criminal and murderous assault on Palestine and Palestinians, the lion’s share of whom are not members of Hamas and have done nothing wrong. Only an immediate peace and a two-state solution will begin to address and redress these wrongs.
What will decidedly not help anything is for American politicians, intoxicated by a presidential election year, to further muddy the issues for cynical, ideological gain. This week, the embattled speaker of the US House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, declared that he means to demand the resignation of Columbia University President Minouche Shafik. Apparently he disagrees with her handling of not only the student protests but also is worried about reported incidents of anti-Semitic rhetoric among some protesters.
What, I ask you, could be more irrelevant and time-wasting than the speaker of the House reaching “down” into American academic life to exert his putative influence, but also to regain some style points in his own right-wing caucus whom he, last week, alienated by supporting urgent US aid for Ukraine? This is too much. It’s not only a shallow and purposeless gesture on the part of the speaker. But it’s also reminiscent of the McCarthyism of the US in the 1950s, when college faculties were scoured for “communists” by a federal government intoxicated by its own malign powers. There’s already enough of that scent in the air with Trump again a specter upon our hopes. Americans typically distrust history. History might, after all, advise us not to do something we want to do; thus interfering with our precious liberties and independence. God forbid.
But it’s a moment, just now – certainly for the speaker and his colleagues – to (as they say in Ireland) regain the run of themselves. Come to a better, proportionate sense about things – the way the speaker did as recently as last week, when he was said, for once, to be “one of the adults in the room.” Quit micromanaging American academic life, for Christ’s sake. Do something more important. Fix the border. Help the homeless. Assure women control of their own bodies. In other words, get a life.
Richard Ford is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “Independence Day.”
