All of that nonsense about my having perpetrated “scholarly fraud” and the like has been long since and repeatedly disproven, both in court and elsewhere—that’s a matter of record, easily accessible to anyone who cares to look—but they simply ignore such facts in favor of the convenience embodied in regurgitating the same old lies as a pretext. None of this is breaking news, of course, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s how blacklisting has always worked. Which means, among other things, that being blacklisted is in no sense an experience unique to me, either currently or historically. A lot of people have been blacklisted for one reason or another and to a greater or lesser extent over the years, and, as is readily evidenced by the examples of Norman Finkelstein and a number of others, that’s still true. It just happens that among the recent cases, mine has been especially high-profile, and is thus rather useful for illustrative purposes. So I’ve run down this aspect of it mainly to demonstrate to anyone entertaining doubts on the matter that not much has really changed in these respects since, say, 1955. All that said, however, being blacklisted by the country’s self-styled guarantors of academic freedom accounts for only part of the drop-off in the number of public lectures I’ve delivered over the past few years. For one thing, I was already growing increasing weary of the lecture circuit before the Great Controversy commenced in 2005. I mean, I’d been speaking twice a week on average for nearly 20 years at that point, and was frankly sick of airports, motel rooms, and lecture halls. Literally so. Correspondingly, there’s a sense in which I’ve actually welcomed the drop-off. I’d undoubtedly have started cutting back on the number of speaking gigs I accepted, even without the Controversy and resulting blacklist. I’m getting’ on in years, and the sentiment has grown steadily more pronounced. At this point, I absolutely will not set foot on an airplane in anything other than extraordinary circumstances—getting to Pine Ridge from Atlanta last October when I received word that Russ Means probably had no more than a day or two to live, for example. This is not because I’ve lately developed a fear of flying, but because I refuse to accept the dehumanizing treatment accorded passengers these days by the airlines. If I can’t drive my old pickup to wherever I’m going, well, chances are good that I just won’t go. True, The Authorities are doing their level best to make driving a miserable experience as well—them, and the oil companies and chain restaurants—but it’s still vastly preferable to flying. Or even entering an airport. Hard to do a lot of events on the west coast under those circumstances when you live in Georgia, soooo… The truth is that I’m basically doing as many speaking gigs as I want these days, and that allows me to be rather selective about which invitations I accept. I participated in a symposium honoring Russ at the University of Colorado/Denver in October, then drove on out to LA to deliver a lecture at Scripps College a week later. I’ll be delivering the annual Walter Rodney lecture at Atlanta University in February, and presenting at a conference at Oxford via Skype a few days after that. Last spring, I drove all the way up to Buffalo to give a talk at Burning Books a little infoshop, simply because I like what the people running it are into and wanted to support their effort. In November I gave a talk at the anarchist book fair in LA. I might be inclined to do more speaking at political events, but I’ve been targeted for a bit of bad-jacketing on that front over the past couple of years. I can go into some of that a bit later, if you’d like.Get the Story:
In Search of Ward Churchill (Counterpunch 2/3)
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