When I was in college my freshman year in Florida, I had a young and activist type prof in one of my English classes.  He was from California, and one of the first months there he came in one morning, rather animated, and went into this very entertaining tirade.  Upon query for his faux bad mood, it turned out he was flabbergasted about Ronald Reagan – Ronald Reagan, are you kidding me???? -  winning over Governor Brown, who he’d apparently liked and worked for.  As a teacher in California, he had worked hard for the power in the union Ahnald is now trying, with some reason, to dismantle  It was a stream of consciousness rant and it was very funny, and I agreed with very little of it because I was still my father’s son at that point and very GOP.  So, this was a good thing, I thought. 

 

But the professor wouldn’t let go, and despite the humor, we had a war on in Vietnam in 1966, and this was exactly the sort of thing that set people off in those days, and after some of the class beauties – we were a college famous for our waterskiing and soccer teams and our women, frankly - started inquiring, the floor opened and we had one of the better classes in my life.  He felt bad about saying nasty things about Reagan, who he didn’t know much about other than the acting bit, and said just that, but explained why he felt that way, and also why he worried about Nixon’s resurgence and all of that. 

 

He also, I recall, dredged up Hitler, not by calling anyone a Hitler, but by emphasizing that Hitler was elected by a plurality of the voters, not even a majority, and that elections are important and we had to pay attention and not expect the gods to provide us with candidates, as if by magic, when election time came around.  We had to make sure the candidates were there by staying politically aware and active and not thinking it was someone else’s job.

 

Running through this, I suspect, was the guilt he had for not being there and voting and working for his candidates and instead being where he was: Florida, with Governor Claude Kirk and blue hair and mean spirited GOP and/or Dixiecrat racists who were indeed scared shitless of young people and ‘coloreds’ and anything that shook their world.  At the time, also with reason, we thought them ignorant and bigoted and repulsive.  Only later, in turn, could we begin to imagine that those who lived through WWII and Korea and the depression and contained millions who now would be in trauma wards – our fathers - wanted nothing so much as stability and the comfort of home and family and feared – really feared – losing it or their children not having it.  And fear made them mad, a quality honed for war.    After we came along, parents, Bill Cosby said and not for laughs, don’t want justice.   They want quiet.  In 1966, this would have been considered deep.  Very, very deep.

 

At any rate, the day passed, well remembered, and nobody – not anyone – thought about turning in the professor for indoctrination, although he certainly would like to have changed many of our minds.  He was energetic and entertaining and a good teacher and did not treat students with disdain but almost as equals.  That counts.  I agreed with little but liked him a lot.  Today, I agree with him a lot, and recall him fondly.  Just not his name, which bugs me.

 

Today, also, a high school teacher named Jay Bennish, who went off on a similar but humorless tear against Bush, has been announced to be returning to a Denver area classroom.  He had been put on suspension because his rant was recorded by a student, one who disagreed with him and whose father – I’m just guessing here – listens to Fox and Rush a lot.  The student thought he was being indoctrinated, which is a lot closer to the case than what I experienced.  The tape has been played on television and on the radio and it’s the sort of juvenile idiocy that you hear from the more extreme and uneducated members of MoveOn and the ecological movements.  It’s simplistic and essentially was the Olde Left/Noam Chomsky line about the evil America and corporations do.  This isn’t untrue, but as I say, it’s simplistic.

 

It’s also stupid to trot out the Hitler image (nobody knows enough any more to stick to facts) and to compare Bush to him.  I dislike Bush and hate the neocon Bushies, but Bush is simply an opportunist, and no more a conservative than Nixon or his own father, both of whom professed conservatism but exercised profound expediency and skill rather than stick to ill thought out party – in both cases GOP – doctrine.  If Bush and Rove thought it would be popular, they’d mandate sex education and sexual surrogacy in high school.  Don’t think they wouldn’t.  They want power and are perfectly willing to pander to get it and hold it. 

 

They made the decision to pander to the religious right early in his father’s term while professing economic conservatism, but that was bogus on its face.  Despite his often-grotesque religiosity, Bush is no more Christian in action or outlook than he is a Muslim. 

 

This makes Bush less dangerous than thought, in some ways, and more dangerous in others.  He rides on the waves of the left’s incompetence, and will continue to do so until the left or even a positioned centrist of American politics develops a public persona.  Nobody exists as such yet.  Not Clinton, not McCain.

 

And he’s not a Hitler.  Were his wars to kill a million, he still would not be.  It does not damn people to be compared with Hitler as much as it trivializes Hitler, who was unique.  Here’s why.

 

Most mass murders and Holocausts – however defined – were murders with a goal of material.  That was not the issue of THE Holocaust.  In the Balkans, for example, the genocide attempts were for the other’s lands.  The pogroms in Russia and England were to retire debts owed to moneylenders, for land, and forgiven because by coincidence, of course, the Jew killed Jesus.  If Jews in those nations gave over their riches, such as they were, and left, the authorities wouldn’t have cared absent fear of reprisals, but back then that was almost unheard of.  Unthought of.  The Jew was the ultimate Other in Europe and Russia, powerless to exert reprisal.  When you dwell on that, Israel in conception and today’s reality becomes more understandable.

 

Hitler and the Nazis were happy enough to harvest the riches, clothing, and teeth of the Jews, use them for medical experiments, but that was coincident.  The Final Solution is different.  If you have, and are, of no interest to me, you have to die simply because of what you were born.  Even if you are no burden to me or unknown to me, if your existence becomes known to me in areas I control, you have to die.  It does free up some land and wealth, but even if it does not.  To the chamber.  This was different.  This was very different.

 

Different, because Hitler – and the Kaiser before him – knowingly shoved away and then murdered patriots of great merit and intellect who would have worked for Germany, and that was fine.  Stalin would have chained them and killed their family if they did not work for him.  Hitler?  No.  They all had to die.  That’s the dif. 

 

Well.  That and the budget to accomplish it in the middle of a war.

 

Jay Bennish’s student who turned him in is defiant and proud and not returning to that school because he said he’d been threatened.  I’ll bet.  Stoolies, aspirant and not, should always be shunned, especially for such a candyass reason.  It’s what school is for, to have your values assaulted and for you to defend and consider them.  Or not.  Just think about them.   Bennish in his template narrative of events is just as ignorant and close-minded as those he scathingly valued in front of his class.   And his love of the spotlight in the days since shows him to be little more self-aware or mature than his students.  Still……

 

Youth should be able to argue with authority under the guise of speaking truth to power.  It’s how you learn.  It’s how you begin to appreciate it when you meet people from nations where it’s so restricted you get imprisoned for the mildest complaint.  Like, say, China.  Sometimes.  They’re getting better.

 

So if Bennish would receive a different view with the same energy he argues his, more power to him.

 

Bennish’s desire to be another Ward Churchill is no threat to anyone’s outlook, school district, or The Republic in their mid-teens.  His was exactly the sort of emotional half-assed rant that become important all through life, not from the conclusions drawn or made but because they were said and argued and more or less spontaneous, or at least meant to be perceived as such.   And fondly recalled.