The Campus Un-American Activities Committee

Berlin Book Burning (1933)

Considerable controversy was generated by President Obama’s recent deployment of the N word in a radio interview. It’s lucky that he’s the president and also happens to be black. “It’s good to be the king,” Mel Brooks famously intoned in The History of the World Part I. But the language police are everywhere. Even though it’s already 2015; it’s clearly a form of the Newspeak which George Orwell envisioned when he wrote l984 back in l948. Curiously much of this policing emanates on campuses which had previously been considered to be bastions of humanism. Remember Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech movement? As David Brooks comments in a recent Times Op- Ed piece, “The Campus Crusaders,” (NYT, 6/2/15), “Today’s campus activists are not only going after actual acts of discrimination—which is admirable. They are also going after incorrect thought—impiety and blasphemy. They are going after people for simply failing to show sufficient deference to and respect for the etiquette they hold dear. They sometimes conflate ideas with actions and regard controversial ideas as forms of violence.” Triggering is the word that’s used by today’s thought police who are intent on protecting a series of rather fragile sensibilities, at the expense of free expression. What is fueling all this sensitivity? Why have words taken on a such a power that that certain epithets and expletives cannot even be used contextually, say in a work of fiction like Joseph Conrad’s The Nigger of the Narcissus without causing the situation that Ray Bradbury envisioned in Fahrenheit 451. Huckleberry Finn has also run into problems (“"Huckleberry Finn" and the N-Word Debate,” CBS, 6/12/11) with one publisher offering a sanitized edition for use in schools. Campus activists should remember that it was the German Student Union that advocated the burning of the books back in l933.

Vietnam Journal IV: Hue Citadel

Photograph by Hallie Cohen

Hanoi became the first capital of Vietnam in in 938, but in 1802, the capital was moved to Hue which is more centrally located, just below the l7th parallel (which separated the old South from the North). The reason for the move lay in part to recuse Vietnamese rulers from the powerful Chinese presence to the North. Hue Citadel was the palace that was built to house the Nguyen Dynasty which would rule from center of the country. Despite the extensive damage incurred by the bombings that followed the Tet offensive in l968, it’s now been preserved as a Unesco site. When you walk through the red and yellow painted walls where the King’s throne still stands, you can almost imagine the mandarins, eunuchs and other functionaries who were once as much as part of the architecture as the building itself.  “It’s good to be the king,” Mel Brooks famously intoned in The History of the World Part 1 and Minh Mang the second Nguyen emperor, who had 400 concubines and 145 children, proved the point. Bao Dai, the last descendent of the dynasty, who died in l997, may have inherited some of his illustrious ancestor’s genes to the extent that he abdicated his divine powers to live the life of a playboy in Paris. The Hue Citadel is Vietnam’s Versailles, but as you walk through its version of antiquity, you think of Shelley’s famous lines, “"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" The grounds of Hue Citadel are also what travel agents term a very special property.