The planned Bush library that would be created, along with an explicitly partisan think tank, at SMU would be controlled by devoted Bush loyalists and there is no precedent for attaching such a blatantly biased institution, purporting to represent the legacy of an American presidential administration but obviously dedicated to a heavily slanted political agenda, to a major university.
In the end the effort seems to be part of a gathering trend, in the GOP, to prioritize partisan politics over truth.
Scholarly Archive or Ideological Center? asks the title of a Dec. 18, 2006 story, from Inside Higher Education, about the planned Bush Administration library Bush supporters hope will be located at Southern Methodist University, as a part of a largely autonomous entity also involving a partisan think tank, unless opposition to the effort derails the scheme. [note: for more overview, see these stories by Andrew Weaver and Bill Berkowitz]
How has the American Christian right, and the extreme right-wing, come to exert what may be a disproportionate influence in American politics ? Well, the movement organizes on a continual basis, through electoral cycles, and it also pays attention at several levels - both to immediate electoral politics and to depth politics. This story concerns the sort of longer range political effort that's representative of an approach that has, slowly and incrementally but steadily, blindsided the left over the last two or three decades.
If supporters of George W. Bush prevail in their goal of establishing a proposed George W. Bush presidential library / partisan think-tank at Texas-based Southern Methodist University, funded to the tune of 500 million dollars, they will have won a battle that concerns more than the control and possible revision of George W. Bush's presidential record.
But first, before you even have a chance to read my long explanation that puts this into a deep context, here's the action plan ! -
WHAT YOU CAN DO
DWG wrote a superb, little noticed post earlier today, The fight to keep the G. W. Bush library off the SMU campus, on this issue and I have to defer to that superior presentation of this issue. As DWG's post noted, there most certainly has been opposition to the planned library from the SMU faculty - just not enough. Here's an excerpt, beginning with a statement from some of the SMU faculty:
We count ourselves among those who would regret to see SMU enshrine attitudes and actions widely deemed as ethically egregious: degradation of habeas corpus, outright denial of global warming, flagrant disregard for international treaties, alienation of long-term U.S. allies, environmental predation, shameful disrespect for gay persons and their rights, a pre-emptive war based on false and misleading premises, and a host of other erosions of respect for the global human community and for this good Earth on which our flourishing depends
[T]hese violations are antithetical to the teaching, scholarship, and ethical thinking that best represents Southern Methodist University.
Did I mention that the SMU trustees include Laura Bush and Bush-Cheney pioneers? Although Laura, the First Lie-berrian, has offered to recuse herself, the number of SMU trustees with Bush financial ties would mean excusing the entire board of trustees for potential conflicts of interest.
The SMU Board of Trustees is a study in the appearance of conflicts of interests, at a minimum. It is dominated by individuals who have long-standing relationships with George W. Bush and his family which raises serious questions about their impartiality and therefore how they fulfill their fiduciary duty to the university (Weaver, Sprague, Hicks, and Yeakel, 2007). At least 25 of the 41 trustees (61 percent) have personal, financial, and/or political relationships with Bush, and many have been major fundraisers and contributors to his political campaigns. Furthermore, one of the three United Methodist bishops who serve as SMU trustees, Scott Jones, publicly endorsed the Bush project months before a formal proposal was even presented to the Board (Tooley, 2007).
Twenty-two of the trustees have donated to one or more of the Bush political campaigns and/or the Republican National Committee in support of Bush, including SMU President R. Gerald Turner, Board Chair Carl Sewell, Ruth Altshuler, Michael M. Boone, Bradley W. Brookshire, Donald J. Carty, Jeanne Tower Cox, Gary T. Crum, Linda Pitts Custard, Robert H. Dedman, Jr., Frank M. Dunlevy, Thomas J. Engibous, Alan D. Feld, James R. Gibbs, Frederick B. Hegi, Jr., Ray L. Hunt, Robert A. Leach, Jeanne L. Phillips, Caren H. Prothro, John C. Tolleson, and Richard Ware (Campaign Finance in American Politics, 2007; Fundrace, 2007; NewsMeat, 2007; Public Citizen's Congress Watch, 2004, 2007).
The SMU president and trustees were clearly interested in the 500 million; the faculty are concerned with intregity and ethics. The university, however, is owned by South Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church, which has ultimate veto power.
The Bush Foundation gives the finger to 1.8 million Methodists
All decisions by any Methodist jurisdiction is supposed to be submitted to a vote to the annual conference meeting. The Southern Juridictional Conference, with 290 delegates voting on the matter is scheduled for July, 2008, in Dallas. Since only 35% of the delegates represent conservative congregations, there is an excellent chance the vote would go against the Bush Foundation. Being strongly opposed to democratic processes, the Bushies are attempting an end-around the Jurisdictional Conference where they are likely to lose. The prez and his mongrel hoarde have called up the eleven active bishops and asking them to pre-emptively approve the use of SMU land before the conference. The vote of the delegates is final and binding, which means if the Bushies lose, then they have to find somewhere esle to plant the Bush LieBerry and Turd Blossom Institute. I am sure Regent or Bob Jones would welcome 500 million to sell lies, wars, greed, human degradation, and authoritianism.
The delegates represent 1.83 million United Methodists living in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Louisiana. If a majority vote against leasing university property for a partisan Bush institute, it cannot be built at SMU. The Foundation hopes to rely on the bishops’ interpretation in order to break ground for the institute before the delegates meet this summer.
The trouble for the Bush Administration among Methodists began two years ago when the news broke that SMU was being considered by the Bush Foundation. A petition began to circulate among Methodist clergy and congregants opposing the move. The efforts to publicize the issue have gained momentum and the fight has moved to the delegates of upcoming Southern Jurisdictional Conference.
Rev. Bill McElvaney, professor emeritus of preaching and worship and a former president of the United Methodist Seminary in Kansas City, Mo., first raised questions about the library in an op-ed article in the student paper, The Daily Campus. The Reverend was primarily concerned about the ethical issues associated with the Bush presidency and how that will ultimate reflect on a prominent Methodist university.
What does it mean ethically to say that regardless of an administration's record and its consequences, it makes no difference when considering a bid for the library? What does it mean ethically for SMU to say a war violating international law makes no difference? That a pre-emptive war based on false premises, misleading the American public, and destined to cost more American lives in Iraq than the 9-11 terrorist attack makes no difference? That the death of thousands of innocent Iraqis by our "shock and awe" bombing in the name of democracy , verified by international organizations and Iraqi doctors, is of no consequence?
These realities are not about partisan politics. Rather we are concerned with deep ethical issues which transcend politics. Do we want SMU to benefit financially from a legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death brought about by the Bush presidency in dismissal of broad international opinion?
What moral justification supports SMU's providing a haven for a legacy of environmental predation and denial of global warming, shameful exploitation of gay rights, and the most critical erosion of habeas corpus in memory?
Given the secrecy of the Bush administration and its virtual refusal to engage with those holding contrary opinions, what confidence could be had in the selection of presidential papers made available to the library? Unless the Bush library philosophy is radically different from the already proven track record of insolation, the library will be little more than a center for the preservation and protection of privileged presidential papers. What would that mean for academic integrity based on open inquiry?
What can you do to help stop the Bush LieBerry and Turd Blossom Institute?
- Sign the petition. We need people of conscience to step forward and express their concern.
- If you happen to be a Methodist, urge your regional delegates to get involved or (pdf warning) contact the delegates from the South Central Jurisdiction.
- The media has covered the controversy, but not the attempt to circumvent the South Central Jurisdictional Conference by the G. W. Bush Foundation. Anything we can do to get this on the radar will prevent the Bushies from operating in secret. Suggestions would be most welcome.
But there's a much wider context for the struggle over the Bush Library. As Karl Rove surely knows, those who control the past control the future and the effort to place the historical record, of George W. Bush's two wildly controversial terms in office, under heavily partisan control seems part of an evolving postmodernist Republican preference for political gain over historical and scientific truth that can be seen as part of a widespread pattern - in which science, history and even the American consensus about baseline realities are being intentionally and systematically debased, degraded and undermined.
As journalist Ron Suskind, in the October 17, 2004 issue of the New York Times Magazine quoted an unnamed aid to President George W. Bush, on the Bush Administration's apparently post-modernist approach to reality, "...when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality--judiciously, as you will--we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.". From startlingly blatant attempts to rewrite the recent historical record on White House claims about Iraq's prewar WMD capability and the erasure of millions of White House emails to highly creative interpretations of the US Constitution and International Law regarding torture, George W. Bush's Presidential Administration has been marked by a level of mendacity and historical revisionism with little recent, or long term even, historical precedent.
As the clock ticks and each passing second brings us closer to the end of George W. Bush's neo-imperial reign, won't we soon see history, and historians, rightly pass judgment on Bush's eight years of "unitary executive" rule, perhaps deeming it the worst US presidential administration in history ? Well, not if Karl Rove gets his way...
Taken in its state and local context, the controversy and fight to oppose a push to locate an explicitly partisan, 1/2 billion dollar George W. Bush presidential library and think tank at Southern Methodist University, with the proposed name of the "Bush Freedom Institute", concerns, for SMU, a possible threat to the University's academic integrity to the extent that partisan control would result in preferential access to, and the sanitizing of, the historical record of George W. Bush's two terms in office.
What agency will control and regulate access to writings, memos and other historical documents from what has turned out to be one of the most singularly contentious presidencies in American history ? Will actual scholars and historians be able to scrutinize those records or will fellows hired by the think tank grafted to the Bush library, hack, partisan ideologues the caliber of Anne Coulter and Dinesh D'souza, get preferred access ?
There is no precedent for the proposed Bush Library/Think Tank, which would be attached to and affiliated with Southern Methodist university but not be under SMU control. As SMU History Professor Alexis McCrossen advised the SMU faculty, "There are 12 presidential libraries, all of which are administered and run by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Only three of them are associated with universities: the LBJ Library and Museum (University of Texas), the Gerald Ford Library (University of Michigan), and the George H.W. Bush Library and Museum (Texas A & M). None have associated institutes, although public policy schools are attached to the two presidential libraries in Texas."
As activist and SMU graduate Andrew Weaver, who opposes the planned George Bush presidential library and calls the project the "Fantastic Failure Institute" notes, beyond the question of whether George W. Bush's Administration even deserves its own presidential library-- which is a legitimate question given that George W. Bush's poll ratings have in the last year or two sometimes dipped below those of Richard Nixon during the depths of the Watergate scandal -- '[t]he partisan mission and independent structure of the proposed institute, which has been obscured in the debate, is a bona fide threat to the academic integrity of SMU.
How do we know the shape the institute will take? According to a Bush Foundation document signed by the president's brother, Marvin Bush, the institute's mission is "to further the Bush Administration's domestic and international goals," which precisely defines partisanship."
The closest analogy to the proposed arrangement would be if the Paul Weyrich-orchestrated, far right wing Coors Family-funded Heritage Institute, or perhaps the American Enterprise Institute, were to somehow manage to graft itself onto Harvard or Yale, The University of Chicago or Stanford, and that raises the question on why any university would choose to attach its reputation to an explicitly partisan effort that would be, according to a US News and World report, probably run by Karl Rove.
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Should federal or state governments help, in any way, the poor or unfortunate ? Is Global Warming actually a satanic hoax designed to foist, on an unsuspecting public, a satanic One-World-Order ? Should explicitly Christian educational accrediting agencies get US government recognition if they certify Creationist schools ? Should we turn back the clock to the pre-New Deal status quo ? Is the Bible the source of all knowledge, both worldly and spiritual ? Is the US a Christian nation, did the founders intend it as such, and if so - why not establish Biblical Law ?
From a wider perspective the SMU controversy is only one fight in a larger struggle over control of American history, science and public understanding of reality - over the definition of mass public preconceptions and assumptions, and basic understandings, that underly political belief and shape voting patterns: and key to that struggle is history.
The writing of history is, at best, not inherently partisan but the enterprise can certainly be subverted to political ends. The control and accreditation of academic institutions that help shape our understandings of history, science and reality itself is not, or should not be, inherently political but can be made so by those who believe politics should trump truth and empirical fact.
The modern American conservative movement has come to be infected with a corrosive post-modernist ethos holding that truth does not matter, that only political gain matters, and that what matters above all is the acquisition of political power from which "truth", or at least the perception of what is true and real, can be mandated from above.
This temptation has plagued humanity throughout most of known history from the time of 20th Century secular western authoritarian regimes which rewrote textbooks and airbrushed assassinated politicians from official government photographs, through the age of the Roman Empire and its Damnatio Memoriae, which erased the names of disfavored emperors and politicians from monuments, and past the age when a revolt of religious and palace elites against an attempt to bring monotheistic religion to Egypt led to the murder of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and the subsequent methodical erasure of almost his every trace. The impulse can even lead to genocide; sometimes it is not enough to erase historical records and physical traces because human memories remain.
So, damnatio memoriae is the ultimate political totalitarian impulse and the two decades of George W. Bush's presidential administration have seen more widespread and concerted expression of it than, arguably, any US Presidency in history. Indeed, in terms of the Bush Administration's refusal to accept the mainstream scientific consensus on Global Warming, its general disdain for scientific opinion and its appointment to high level federal social agency positions activists holding fringe, conspiratorial and crank views on human reproductive health issues one would have to look far afield and relatively far back in history to find such concerted hostility to the scientific method and to empirically determined fact.
Soviet endorsed Lysenkoist scientific programs, research and agricultural policies, based on a pseudoscientific, or Lamarckian, understanding of genetics and favored by under Stalin because Lysenkoism happened to mesh very well with communist ideology, may well have led to mass famine or starvation. Lynsekoism stands stand out as one point of comparison for the Bush Administration abject disdain for science but, as compared to the historic disaster that was Lysenkoism, the Bush Administration's intransigence regarding US action on Global Warming may well have dramatically greater consequences. Beyond that comparison, historical analogs to the Administration's rejection of mainstream science would be somewhat thin going back, probably, to the Enlightenment. In Sailing Alone Around the World, the turn of the century narrative classic by former Whaling ship captain Joshua Slocum who circumnavigated the globe, 1895-1898 in his tiny boat the "Spray", Slocum describes encountering Boers who presented him with a pamphlet asserting the world was flat, and later Slocum met with the president of the Boer Transvaal Republic, of what was later to be conquered as British colonial South Africa who remarked, upon Slocum's suggestion that he was sailing around the world, "You don't mean round the world, it is impossible! You mean in the world. Impossible!".
The Boer "flat Earth" retrograde tendency Slocum encountered, very likely an outgrowth of Boer religious fundamentalism, has resurfaced in a contemporary America analog, called Geocentrism, which rejects the Copernican Model of the Solar System and lies at the core of one of the main theological tendencies feeding the American religious right but it's also expressed more broadly, an outgrowth of Biblical literalist, fundamentalist readings of the Bible and arising from the conviction that Biblical truth (however determined) precede all human knowledge and belief, as presuppositionalism which asserts that believers, true Christians that is, must hold all truth, scientific, religious, legal and otherwise, to be found in the Bible, which is proposed as a literal template for all human society and human knowledge: not just for religion, but for science and history, law and government.
There's sharp disagreement among American fundamentalists over whether presuppositionalist readings of the Bible must lead inevitably to flat-Earth cosmological views or to a rejection of the Copernican model of the solar system, and most think not. But, there's wide agreement among those camps that the Earth and all creatures on it were created, by divine fiat as described in Genesis, about six thousand years ago; thus, the Theory of Evolution is obviously false but the outlook can call into question a range of scientific disciplines relating not just to the age of rocks or the Earth but also on tectonic movement and even the tracing of the human genetic lineage.
It's easy for non-fundamentalists to mock such viewpoints except that they are becoming increasingly common, their adherents are winding up as US Senators, presidential primary candidates and high level US government officials and schools advancing "Creationist" views have been granted, since 1991 when US Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander granted, against his advisory panel's recommendations, federal Department of Education recognition of a fundamentalist academic accreditation body called TRACS, the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools. Some institutions certified by TRACS, whose official standards appear to prioritize adherence to fundamentalist doctrine over academic scholarship integrity, espouse "Young Earth" (6,000 year old) Creationism and Alexander's choice to grant federal recognition of TRACS has meant that the most notorious institute devoted to advancing Creationism pseudo-science, The Institute For Creation Research, now boasts its own accredited PhD program.
Many Americans, even across the political spectrum, have become disturbed and even appalled by anti-science US policies and actions under George W. Bush but that rejection of science is part of a larger war, against previously accepted knowledge and fact, in which American history is also being overwritten.
Last December, in the US House of Representatives, GOP State Rep. Randy Forbes introduced a non-binding resolution which contains a long series of factual assertions about US history, which all support the claim that the US was founded as a "Christian nation" and almost all which [see link for detailed debunking] are improperly taken out of context or heavily distorted in some way, or simply incorrect and even fraudulent. It is easy, perhaps, to think that such a resolution is trivial but should it pass, partisans of a movement seeking to erase distinctions between church and state will be able to claim their choice falsehoods, as enshrined in the Congressional record and endorsed by Congressional and Senate majority vote, as "fact", are therefore true.
Does history matter ? Yes it does ; House Resolution 888 is the latest effort in a broad campaign to advance Christian nationalism in the United States, and American history has become the ideological pivot that has come to drive the entire religious right movement as, in the past several decades revisionist, falsified versions of US History, fabricated by Christian Reconstructionist Wallbuilders founder David Barton, and a host of other American history revisionists, have convinced an entire generation of Christian conservatives that the United States was founded expressly as a "Christian nation".
According to a 2007 poll, 65% of Americans now believe that and 55% believe the US Constitution specifically makes the US a "Christian nation". As journalist Frederick Clarkson notes, Why the Christian Right Distorts History and Why it Matters, history matters (to politics) and the likely motivation of Bush supporters pushing the proposed SMU-based Bush Administration library/think tank is not merely 'historical' but should concern all American, Republican or Democratic, collectivist or Libertarian, religious or secular - either there exist scientific and historical facts that Americans, as a society, can somehow together determine, objectively and publicly, in a transparent collective process that relies on reason and logic... or else scientific and historical facts can be warped and changed at will by those who are most determined to do so, those who have a preponderance of political power or military force, the best connections or just the most money.