The Public Professor

By 1971, President Richard Nixon’s name was mud on most American college campuses.  The Watergate scandal that would prove his ultimate undoing was still a year away from its early rumblings.  Rather, it was Nixon’s Vietnam policies that had rendered him persona non grata among students. Nixon tried to ease domestic unrest over Vietnam by greatly reducing U.S. ground forces, down from over half-a-million when he took office in 1969 to only 69,000 by the end of 1972.  But he also wanted to win the war, so he countered the troop reduction with a massive increase in bombings and other clandestine and special operations.  Thus, while fewer Americans were now dying in Vietnam, the bombings, assassination programs, etc. only highlighted the barbarity of American violence on a relatively tiny nation that had committed the “crime” of fighting off French colonial rule to achieve independence and establishing a leftist government. So despite the lessening of the draft during Nixon’s tenure, student protests only increased.  As the “Law and Order” president he was displeased.  In May of 1970, he called student protestors “bums.” Two days later, 4 students on the campus of Kent State University were murdered by the Ohio State National Guard.  On May 15, Mississippi police murdered another 2 students at Jackson State University in Mississippi. By 1971, there were few campuses where Nixon could go without facing massive demonstrations.  He had to pick carefully. 

It doesn’t take much.  A small piece of gravel, spit out by a truck’s wheel, ricochets off the windshield, taking a tiny chip of glass with it.  A microscopic divot and discreet little lines, like crow’s feet at the corner of an eye.  Barely noticed for months, the accordion of heat and cold compress and expand, adding and relieving pressure.  Then finally, the scratches spread out across the glass like an avant garde spider web. The windshield has not fractured into zagged plates or smashed into a thousand glass pebbles.  Perhaps that is its future, but for now it is merely degraded and slightly obscurant.  Yet it was never true.  Tinted, laminated, curved, and often dirty, the windshield always presented a slightly skewed image of the outside world.  Not grotesquely wrong, but fundamentally distorted in minor ways difficult to detect from inside the car.  Now, however, the little cracks have suddenly made you aware that the image it upon the glass is subtly warped. * As in many countries, if not most, American school children are indoctrinated with nationalistic history that incorporates heroic narratives and stirring interpretations.  From kindergarten through high school, state sanctioned curricula present a range of facts and viewpoints that coalesce into what can fairly be called imperial mythology.  Most of it is technically correct, but the total image produced is often heavy on the rah-rah and short on critical self-examination.