BALTERS: David Axelrod dodged students’s tough questions

Do you ever wonder why the 1960s seem so distant? Why do the lessons learned from that era seem like quaint irrelevancies instead of active principles? Why does any PBS or History Channel documentary of that time appears less like a portrait of a period in American history and more like a fading battle cry from an ancient age?

The answer lies beyond the fact that we've learned you can't buy "peace and understanding" for $5 a dose, beyond the fact that every half-assed Woodstock knock-off these days has a corporate sponsor, and even beyond the fact that we now know war does indeed have its advantages (mainly making money).

To really understand what the baby boomers had in the 60s one must examine how the masses view the college campus. These days they are, at best, thought of as portals to a party, a place to self-service your education and then self-service your psychoactive intake. But in the days of the multi-lateral Berkeley student movement, the nationwide walkouts and our own National Guard killing students at Kent State University, colleges were (sometimes times literally) intellectual combat zones.

The college campus made political leaders's hair stand on end. These were places where the powerful feared to tread, lest they find themselves in a position where they would have to answer for their policies (a concept hard to visualize, I know). Giving a speech at a university was a commendable act of courage; defending a doctrine against a deluge of bone-picking questions was the acme of skill.

That's what has been lost. As exemplified by the Q-and-A session at the David Axelrod speech on Oct. 9, the powerful need fear no more; they are intellectually protected by the subservient complicity of "question gatekeepers", a job held on that Friday night by Michael Wagner, an assistant professor of political science. This Protector of the Powerful was seen crossing-out and editing the questions, or simply discarding them. This means that either the questions had to get filtered through the mind of Wagner first, or simply were not deemed acceptable at all.

The act of reframing and redacting the audience's questions has the innate effect of politicizing the discourse to fit one person's (i.e., a white male's, as usual) view of the "legitimate." It simultaneously eradicates academic freedom while buttressing censorship on the university campus.

The most disturbing part of all this was that instead of allowing questions dealing with social justice and human rights or racism and xenophobia in America or a host of other life and death, if potentially awkward inquiries, the President's senior adviser was handed such thought-provoking toughies as "What did the President do when he found out that he was getting the Nobel Peace Prize?"

Why not allow the audience to ask uncensored questions? For instance, "why are we building permanent bases in Iraq? Why haven't we charged Dick Cheney with war crimes? Why haven't we gotten the hell out of Afghanistan?" Hand them a microphone and grant them that rarest of gifts in this Patriot Act-plagued world: autonomy.

No one wants raging "code pinkers" or crazed "tea baggers," but that's what we have the security personnel talking into their wrists for. A police state has got to be good for something, after all.

Of course, you can't have someone screaming "Don't taze me bro," in a crowded theater, but in the final analysis, the only reason for the post of obsessive-compulsive question checker is political censorship, which is perhaps the greatest hazard to the First Amendment. 

Again, the dick-tickling reverence paid by some professional academics to the powerful—a tendency which inherently acts against the powerless—is no longer an anomaly in today's political discourse. It was, however, a sad and embarrassing event to witness in person.

Elite members of the policymaking community must be made to hear the questions of the people. Otherwise, what we get is a paid (or sometimes free) political advertisement, rather than a value-added exercise in political communication. President Lyndon B. Johnson wasn't able to go anywhere without facing a constant barrage of informed questions from college students—and some professors—condemning his Vietnam policies. He did not pursue re-election.

President Richard Nixon couldn't go out in public without facing a constant barrage of informed questions from college students—and by that time, more professors—condemning his Vietnam policies. Say what you want about Nixon (by all means say what you want), but when those "damn, dirty hippies" came to D.C., he waltzed right down to the Lincoln Memorial to engage them, and without a question-censoring executive.

Nixon, unlike Mr. Axelrod, was not afraid of being made to account for his political decisions, and what eventually happened? He ended America's lucrative, bloody though ultimately meaningless presence in Vietnam, (though not without illegally carpet bombing Cambodia, of course) proving words, questions and reasoned arguments from a concerned population have power.

So yes, our actions can make a difference, but we have to be allowed to be heard, and unfortunately, politicians learned from this. They stripped down and hopped into bed with much of the very segment of the population that is paid to know and teach about politics. Some academics were all too eager to spread their legs and give it up, and they are now happy to do the bidding of the powerful.

These collaborators will always have gainful employment, receive awards and grants from political and academic institutions alike. Surrounded by sycophants, some academics need never dine alone. Fortunately, there are some who still fight for the three slipperiest of eels in the realm of the abstract: answers, truth and justice.

Students: ask the tough questions.

Professors: let them.

Leaders: suck it up.

Citizens: resist.

Steven Balters is a sophomore Philosophy major. Reach him at stevenbalters@dailynebraskan.com.