Month: August 2021

Today I learned that my town made The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro’s reactionary online rag, because teachers signed a pledge the Zinn Education Project wrote to give educators an opportunity to express their opposition to laws attempting to stifle the teaching of anything to do with the country’s sordid history regarding race, under the guise of stifling only the teaching of critical race theory, which the people writing these bills don’t understand or care to understand, because it’s not the point.

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This summer, The Daily Wire did humanity the service of breaking down the signers of this pledge by state and by town so that its readers could look up their town and, if they were lucky, storm their school board meetings armed, like Johnny Iselin with his 57 card-carrying communists, with Names. They proudly published this list–taken from the carefully hidden Zinn website–as if it were an exposé.

The truth is that legislators and attorneys general in states like mine (blessed with the estimable AG Eric Schmitt, who never met a frivolous, career-boosting lawsuit he didn’t like, whether it was about curriculum, public health measures, or insurrection) and helper-hacks like Shapiro know what they’re doing. They are using fear to run things and to run for things. They know what their base is afraid of, and they’re afraid too. They are afraid that there are more of us than them, and more all the time–more people who believe that the truth will set us free, or at least will set the children who are taught it free, more people who understand that it’s not weakness but strength to admit the truth of the past, more people who recognize that things need to change, and, most frightening to these people, more and more people of color. And just like the men in power 150 years ago, a hundred years ago, even fifty years ago, they don’t want to lose that power. So they try to make their constituents afraid of their own children’s teachers.

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I’m proud of those teachers. Put them on a list if you want to, Daily Wire. I’m on that list too, even though I teach in a university, not a high school, because I wanted to express my opposition to these efforts to bully our teachers out of teaching the truth. I’m not the target of the people who scream at school board meetings, but I damn well stand with them, and you should too.

The other day I received an email from my employer inviting me to attend a ceremony described as being held “in recognition of the 20th anniversary of Patriot Day.” This is not the first email of this kind I’ve received from the university, but it’s the first time I’ve noticed this curious wording. The twentieth anniversary of Patriot Day?

I’ve never liked the use of the term Patriot Day for the anniversary for the 2001 attacks. I’ve never been comfortable with 9/11 as the term to use to refer to the day itself: I think making it easier to refer to that day, giving it a short, catchy brand name, makes it easier to instrumentalize it, to use it whip up nationalist fervor. It stands in the way of understanding the events of the day, their causes, and the way they were used as an excuse to institute improper policies and start wars. And I’ve never been comfortable remembering the day simply. It was a bad day for me as a New Yorker and as a person–my sister lost her husband in the north tower, I spent the day trying to get back downtown from the Bronx and then going around to local hospitals looking for and not finding my brother-in-law–and along with those memories of that bad day and the days after, I have the memories of everything people have done in its name since then. (I wrote something for the local paper about this on the anniversary in 2011.)

Calling the anniversary of that day Patriot Day proudly reprises the Bush administration’s approach to the events of that day, and it’s why I’ve never liked it. Referring to the day itself as Patriot Day in this announcement just strikes me as perverse. It was a day. People got out of bed, had breakfast, got coffee, got on planes, went to work, died for reasons and for no reason. My brother-in-law was patriotic; that’s not why he died. He died because he went to work. He didn’t die so neocons could get their wars and oil profiteers could get their profits. He didn’t die for Halliburton or for Blackwater or for the other people who make money off of war. Two decades later, these two wars prosecuted in patriotism’s name are finally over. As we watch the evacuation unfold and the blame be misassigned, as we hear the lies about who and what we care about and why we were there, maybe for once we can stop pretending.