Vince Foster, Race, and Davidson College Snowflakes
It
seemed like a good idea. President Bill
Clinton’s deputy White House Counsel, Vincent W. Foster, Jr., was a member of
Davidson College’s graduating class of 1967.
He is listed among the college’s notable alumni on its Wikipedia page. He died mysteriously, as you may recall, six
months to the day after Clinton’s presidential inauguration, his body having
been discovered lying behind a berm deep in a Civil War relic, Fort Marcy Park,
off the George Washington Parkway across the Potomac River from the capital in
Virginia. My article, “Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol
Quillen on Corruption” deals
primarily with that case.
One
would think that the article might be of interest to my fellow graduates of the
college. In fact, when I completed it in
late November of last year, I had sent it, in addition to its title character,
to a 1965 classmate mailing list that I had compiled from our 50th
anniversary yearbook and to a selected current Davidson College faculty email
list, which includes the entire history faculty, less the one who told me not
to send her anything more after I had sent out “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke.” I’m not sure
how the more recent article was received, because I don’t recall getting a
single response to it, not even a request to be taken off the mailing list.
I’m not
sure how long the Fall/Winter 2020 edition of the Davidson Journal, our alumni magazine, had been lying on the end table by our
family-room sofa before it finally caught my attention (My wife handles our
mail.). When it did, a couple of weeks
ago, I did what I usually do, which is to go straight to the class notes for 1965
to see what any classmates might have been up to. I seldom read anything else. At that point, I happened to notice the
email address of our class secretary, and a light bulb flashed in my head. There’s an email address beside almost every
class secretary’s name. Just like that,
a new Davidson College mailing list was born.
What I
did not reckon with is the great cultural transformation that has taken place
at the college and across American higher education generally—entirely for the
worse, I believe—since I was a participant in it. That goes back to 1978 when I left the
teaching of economics in college for the practice of it. These days, points of view that challenge
those that are prevailing at the moment on the campus seem to be worse than
unwelcome; they seem to be almost traumatizing.
This is not a healthy state of affairs.
As
Exhibit A, I offer this email, which was the last of several that I received
after I sent my article out, with no explanation, and then responded to the
alumni coordinator (AC), who had received complaints:
Mr. Martin,
Thank you for your interest in "shedding light" to those
of us who serve as Class Secretaries for Davidson. Please do not take offense
to this, but your original email had all the telltale signs of a cybersecurity
risk. Those of us who still work have been taught by the IT departments in
every organization for which we have worked, not to access links we do not
recognize in an email from an address we do not recognize. Additionally,
contacting Class Secretaries with such a suspect email does, in fact,
constitute abuse of our personal emails.
Further, your reaction to the warning from the Alumni office
demonstrates the inflammatory nature of your original message:
"I had heard something about the "snowflake"
problem on college campuses these days, but I could hardly believe it.
But now I see you prostrating yourself apologizing for some imagined
"inconvenience and distress" that I might have caused by my
pedagogical effort, and you have practically rubbed the snowflake problem in my
face."
For your edification, the word "snowflake" has a very
negative connotation in political circles, whether you are Republican or
Democrat. Given the historic, legal, and necessary 2nd Impeachment of former
President Trump for "Inciting Insurrection," now is the worst time to
be using inflammatory messages and language while duly elected President Biden
is trying to unify the country.
Again, thank you for your love of Davidson and your desire to
"enlighten" us. I would suggest you use other more appropriate means
to do so. Perhaps you could write a letter to the editor of the Davidson
Journal and request it’s [sic] appropriate publication in an issue.
Please stay safe and I hope you have gotten your COVID vaccination
for your safety and that of your family, friends, and neighbors.
Here is the message to the alumni coordinator which I had titled
rather provocatively, “Abuse, Inconvenience, and Distress,” to which that
person was responding, appended to the bottom of his email:
Hi “AC,”
I am absolutely astonished to read such words as these from an
institution of higher education:
We do not condone this abuse of the class secretary list or any
other alumni data; and we will be contacting him.
Again, I am sorry for any inconvenience and distress David’s
letter has caused.
All I did was to send https://heresycentral.is/dcdave/open-letter-to-davidson-college-president-carol-quillen/ to all the class secretaries whose
email addresses I found in my latest Davidson
Journal. Where's the abuse? The article is very educational, I
think. It sheds light. Remember Alenda Lux Ubi Orta
Libertas?
I had heard something about the "snowflake" problem on
college campuses these days, but I could hardly believe it. But now I see
you prostrating yourself apologizing for some imagined "inconvenience and
distress" that I might have caused by my pedagogical effort, and you have
practically rubbed the snowflake problem in my face. If you or anyone to
whom I have sent the article finds things in the article with which you would
like to take issue, I am more than eager to hear you out. That's how
learning takes place.
You might like to know that I have already received some grateful
responses for my having sent the article. What would you have to say to
those people?
Dave
For the
record, I did not receive any warning from the alumni coordinator. Two class secretaries had quickly responded
favorably to my email. I think they both
took me, from just reading the first couple of paragraphs in the article, as a
garden variety conservative critic of President Quillen, of whom I know there
are very many, particularly among the older alumni. One of them alerted me to
what the coordinator had sent around to the secretaries and, upon my urging,
shared it with me. The complainers had
really put the alumni coordinator in an awkward position. I don’t know what they thought she could
do. Probably with a better feeling than
I for the prevailing mentality these days, she wrote something to placate them,
postponing the unpleasant task of delivering on her promise that she would
scold me. I let her off the hook by
beating her to the punch.
My quick
response to my critic was as follows:
Hi XXX,
It is apparent to me that, for personal security reasons, you have
carefully refrained from reading the article of mine that I sent and from
making any effort to discover who I am and what I stand for.
And isn’t running to complain to authorities rather than
addressing the issues raised how a snowflake would behave? When President
Quillen sent around her thoroughly objectionable “systemic racism” message to
all alumni, it would never have occurred to me, say, to complain to the Board
of Trustees. That’s for idea-fearing snowflakes. Rather, I
responded, sharing my response with my Class of ‘65 mailing list. She
responded to me and I rebutted her response. At that point, she retired
from the scene, a clear loser, I believe, in the debate. It’s all laid
out in the article, “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke,” linked to in the
Open Letter. If you would like to join in that debate, please feel free
to have at it.
For your information, I am a liberal of the old school who
treasures the free and open exchange of ideas and information rather than
fearing them. I dare say that no student spent more time at the student
union jousting with or picking the brains of visiting speakers at Davidson than
I did.
I am utterly appalled at the growing illiberal attitude that I
have seen throughout academia, not least at my dear old alma mater, and now I
see among its alumni.
Dave
p.s. It’s “Dr. Martin” if you want to use
an honorific, but consistent with standard email usage, a “Hi Dave” is fine.
President
Quillen had made the same honorific error when responding to my complaint about
her “systemic racism” message, even with all the alumni records at her
fingertips, but I didn’t bother her with that.
There were much worse things in her response to deal with.
A week
has now passed, and that last secretary to write me has not responded, so it
doesn’t look like he’s going to. He and
President Quillen, it would appear, are pretty much peas in a pod, much
preferring safety and comfort and the approval of peers to exposure to any sort
of disquieting truth.
My
sympathy for AC is somewhat reduced when I go back and look at what she sent
out to the class secretaries. It’s
really quite nasty, certainly not the sort of thing that she thought I would
ever see:
From: “AC”
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021
11:39 AM
To: “AC”
Subject: Inappropriate Email from Alumnus
Importance: High
Good
afternoon,
Several
of you have informed us that you have received an email from David Martin ’65.
I apologize for this unsettling intrusion. If you have not yet received
or opened the message, I advise you to simply delete it.
David
very likely used the class secretary contact list on the website or in the
Davidson Journal to gather your email addresses. Your contact information is
provided so that your classmates can easily reach you in your role as class
secretary. While we rarely have an issue, today proves that it can be an issue.
If you would like have [sic] your contact information
removed from the list, please let me know and I’ll work with you to ensure
classmates can reach you.
We
do not condone this abuse of the class secretary list or any other alumni
data; and we will be contacting him.
Again,
I am sorry for any inconvenience and distress David’s letter has
caused. (bolding of words added)
Respectfully,
“AC”
You’d think they’d encountered a naked man in the women’s locker
room—although I gather that’s not supposed to be much of a big deal these
days. Perhaps we should say her response
was as if I had sent around pornography, or some sort of threat. Well, obviously, “several” people did
consider my email sufficiently threatening that they were quickly moved to
alert the alumni coordinator and cry for action.
Because
there was some lapse of time before my informant on the list told me about AC’s
red alert, I did not realize how hastily it had been sent out. The time on my email is 10:58. The time on
AC’s “high importance” email to the group about the “Inappropriate Email” from
yours truly, as you see, was just 41 minutes later. She apparently was so flustered that she
addressed the group, “Good afternoon,” when the afternoon was still more than a
quarter of an hour away.
DC Dave’s Awful Stink Bomb
Seeing
my email described in such an if-you-see-something-say-something fashion, it is
incumbent upon me at this point to share this little grenade, just as I sent
it:
From: David Martin
Sent: Friday, January 29, 2021 10:58 AM
To: David Martin
Subject: Open Letter to Davidson College President Carol
Quillen on Corruption
https://heresycentral.is/dcdave/open-letter-to-davidson-college-president-carol-quillen/
There it is. Now, I ask you, ladies and gentlemen of the
jury, are they snowflakes or what?
Well, you might respond, it depends on
what’s in that article. It really
shouldn’t, but I can assure you that it contains no foul language. But you, as they were, are free to read it
for yourself. You will see that I do not
suggest that the college or its president is corrupt, that is, in any commonly
understood personal sense for the latter. The corruption that the article describes in
great detail is of the American history profession. President Quillen’s education is in history
and she was a professor of the subject before she moved over into the generally
more lucrative side of higher education, administration. But neither she nor any of the members of
Davidson’s history faculty nor any of my classmates who belong to that
profession took the first exception to the article when I sent it to them back
in November of last year.
You really have to wonder what in the
world is going on with this fevered response this time. It was so swift that you can be virtually
certain that none of the complainers had actually bothered to read the article
before reacting, and that most assuredly includes AC, considering the time
required for her to compose her red alert and the fact that she would not have
seen the article until it was forwarded to her by a complainer. Would not the proper responsible, adult
reaction to have been to have a serious look at the article before
characterizing it as an “unsettling intrusion” and advising everyone to delete
it even before they opened the email?
I’m sorry, but such behavior from an
institution of higher learning is utterly foreign to me. And speaking of “distressing,” it is
particularly distressing to me that such behavior is coming from my own alma
mater.
As for the quick complainers, my guess is
that they might have glanced at the article, but didn’t make it past the first
four sentences, making up their minds about it, and flipping their lids:
On June 1 of this
year, you sent out a message to the Davidson College community in which you
said “systemic racism” was a big problem in the country. On June 10,
a substantial number of others at Davidson went even further along those lines
with their “Faculty Statement of Systemic Racism and
Injustice.”
I believe that I
have effectively rebutted those claims as laid out in my October 15 article, “Vince Foster’s College Goes Full Woke.” But the recent presidential
election has brought to a head a much more serious and demonstrable systemic
malady that infects the country, and that is corruption.
It is altogether
fitting in this context that the article should have been published on the
Heresy Central web site, because, if you read that faculty statement, it is
really nothing short of heresy at Davidson these days and, from all
indications, at colleges around the country, to take issue with the ridiculous assertion,
as I see it, that the United States going into the third decade of the 21st
century is a hopelessly systemically racist country.
It’s All about White Racism
An exchange that
I had with one of the more recent graduates (“RG”) over my two emails, the one
touting my article and my response to AC, which I blind copied to the class
secretaries, is illuminating in that regard.
He wrote me shortly after AC had sent out her red alert, but before I
had responded to her and shared my response with the group:
Hi Dave,
I’m wondering what your intentions with sending this out were, and
what sort of reaction you were anticipating.
It was a rather peculiar response, I thought. Doesn’t the article speak for itself? Remember, I was unaware at that point of
the hysteria that it had produced, not having yet seen what AC had sent to the
group. He seemed civil enough, though,
appearing to want to begin a dialogue, and I responded immediately:
Hi “RG,”
I think you can chalk it up to a very strong urge to scratch my
pedagogical itch, with our common connection to Davidson playing an important
role. If you use the "Look Inside" feature on the Amazon page
for The Murder of Vince Foster:
America's Would-Be Dreyfus Affair, you will find by scrolling a few pages
that I was the secretary of the Young Democrats Club my senior year and the
sophomore, Vince Foster, was a member. You can see the photographic
evidence from Quips and
Cranks.
Gary
Quips and Cranks is the name of the Davidson yearbook, in which I am identified by
either my full name, “Gary David Martin,” or just my first and last names. I began using my middle name for my political
writing in the early 1990s and was anointed, “DC Dave,” by Cleveland radio talk
show host, Jaz McKay, as explained on my home page.
As you can see, I was trying to draw RG into the pressing
subject of my article, as I saw it. So
focused was I upon that that I completely overlooked his second question. And I had no idea at that point what a
strange hornet’s nest I had stirred up.
Upon reflection, I think RG is too young and lightly educated
ever to have even heard of Vince Foster before hearing his name from me. I suppose I would have heard nothing more
from him, because he didn’t respond. Three
days later, though, I had dredged up an old article of mine that I had invoked,
with some effect, I think, with another of the class secretaries who had
corresponded with me over my unwelcome communication. I thought I might draw RG out with it:
Hi “RG,”
I think you can understand where I'm coming from a bit better by
reading Beth George's story.
Perhaps I've just learned too much for my own good. It was naïve
of me to believe that actually reading and reflecting upon the validity and
import of the article I sent around would be the absolutely last option for
quite a few of my fellow would-be educated Davidson graduates.
That did the trick. He
responded only a couple of hours later:
Hi Dave,
I can only imagine your frustration.
I’m sure you’ll agree that as you’ve asked me to do some reading,
it’s only fair that I can ask you to do some reading as well. I’d love to hear
your thoughts on this full piece:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/
Looking forward to your reflections,
“RG”
He had avoided my topic and had steered me into his favored one,
but at least we had a dialogue going. I
quickly offered my reflections, a little less than three hours later, hoping to
demonstrate to him that my experience with the race question might be somewhat
broader and deeper than he might have formed in his mental picture of me when
he saw that I had questioned the “systemic racism” assertion:
Hi “RG,”
There's very little in the Coates piece that I did not already
know. If you haven't done so, you might want to read All God's Dangers. One line that stood out to me in the book is Nate Shaw's
observation that he never knew a white landowner who didn't try to cheat a
black man at every opportunity.
My father was the liberal school principal in a farm community
where the overall population in the district was probably majority black.
He was good friends with the most liberal of the landlords (the
landlord-tenant system dominated the society), who only had white tenants and
treated them so well that they were virtually middle class. He once told
my father that he thought there would be more landlords in hell than any group
of people that he knew. It was almost taken as a given that the main
reason for having black tenants was so you could take advantage of them.
There were a lot of really lowly white families that got screwed over,
too, by unscrupulous landlords. Blacks, though, were also intimidated
into not voting, which meant that they had no political power and then racial
demagogues like Jesse Helms could appeal to white racism to gain political
power. Since my parents were from a very different part of the state, we
could look at the situation objectively, as I explain in the partly
autobiographical piece, "The Carolinas, Jews, and China."
I don't know how old you are (I didn’t at the time I wrote the
email. ed.), but the racial progress that I have seen in my lifetime has been
truly remarkable, and I think that it is something that we should celebrate.
I also think I have a broader perspective on the racial issue than the
average person. My wife is Korean. The best friend of my three sons
was the younger of two sons of the only black family in our generally rootless
neighborhood in a Virginia suburb of DC. The kid's parents were from
Florida, the father an engineer and the mother a schoolteacher. Our
common Southernness and shared socioeconomic and
education level gave us more in common than we had with anyone else in the
neighborhood. The kid practically lived in our house. I think his
parents would have been pretty roundly offended at the suggestion of the need
for reparations. It's a really patronizing notion.
Most of my professional career was spent working with the
government of Puerto Rico. Race relations there are similar to those in
Brazil, where there is no color line. It is very similar to the situation
in Brazil, as explained in Carl Degler's Neither Black Nor White:
Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States.
My time spent in the Caribbean has also given me a greater
acquaintance with the English-speaking Caribbean than the average person has.
Even though their slave history is very similar to that of the United
States, blacks there generally don't have the same racial chip on the shoulder
that is so common among American blacks.
At this point, permit me to digress a bit. In the winter of
1967-68 I was the coach of the Eighth Army Support Command basketball team in
Korea. As you can imagine, most of my players were black. The only
one that I noticed exhibiting that chip-on-the-shoulder attitude was from
Detroit. I don't think that it's a big leap to conclude that it is much
more common among Northern urban blacks like Coates and the Rev. Al Sharpton,
although it's pretty bad among Southern city blacks as well. I had the
closest rapport with my point guard, who was from the small town of Rayville,
Louisiana, where he was a friend of the slightly younger future NBA great,
Elvin Hayes. He had played for Grambling and had a graduate degree from
Iowa State. At one point he prevailed upon me to move a white backup into
the backcourt beside him instead of the black guy I had there. It proved
to be the correct move. The white guy had been a starter at Chico State
in California and was actually a friend of mine before the team was formed
because we were in the same headquarters company and played pick-up ball
against one another. I was starting the black guy ahead of him because
the black guy was a better defender, and I am a defense-first minded coach, but
the white guy was a better ball-handler, and that was what we were in greater
need of at the time we made the switch. At any rate, my rapport with the point
guard was based on the fact that the "coach on the floor" and the
coach on the bench need to be on the same wavelength, but also upon the fact of
our similar Southern background and socioeconomic level. I think he would
be offended at the reparations notion, as well, or at least I would be offended
for him.
I don't think rural American blacks, almost all of whom still live
in the South, have much of the shoulder-chip problem. Charles Barkley,
from Alabama, is a good example. Candace Owens, the author of Blackout, recounts that she was heavily influenced
by her grandfather, who grew up on an Eastern North Carolina tobacco farm as a
sharecropper. I'd like to hear Coates debate with her or Burgess Owens over reparations.
I think the main reason for the shoulder chip has been
ruling-elite exploitation of racial division as a divide-and-conquer strategy.
That is something that I get into in considerable detail in "The Charlottesville Operation." Those who are most
vulnerable to the increasingly pernicious NOMA (national opinion-holding
apparatus), as I call it, are more likely to have that dangerous shoulder chip,
I believe.
As a final note, the article that I sent around actually has
virtually nothing to do with American race relations. That's only the
jump-off point. It's about systemic corruption, and that's a subject upon which
I think I can claim virtually paramount expertise. Check out my latest
article, "Kavanaugh Stabbed Supporters,
Nation in the Back,"
on that problem.
Dave
A day went by and I heard nothing more from RG, so I followed up
with this, hitting him from his left flank:
Hi “RG,”
I have a little more reflection to offer upon your assignment for
me. I notice from his Wikipedia page that the author of that Atlantic piece, Ta-Nehisi
Coates, is the son of a Black Panther. If he were motivated as I am, I
think he would have written at some time about the outrageous FBI frame-up of
California Black Panther leader, Geronimo Pratt. I have scoured the Internet,
though, and I can't find any example of it. I think there's a very good
explanation for that. He knows where his bread is buttered. Rather
than promoting his career, it would probably be ruinous to it. As
Aristarchus Patrinos explains in "Why the Left Loves Ta-Nehisi
Coates," the man has
done very well for himself by sticking to the lane that has been carved out for
black intellectuals by what Patrinos calls the
Eastern Establishment, but what I think is better termed in corrupt 21st
century America our Controlling Criminal Elite.
Now I have reflected upon your reading assignment for me, but
other than to say that you understand my frustration you have offered nothing
on my original article nor upon my reaction to your assignment. I hope
you're not like those college students that I used to try to teach economics
to: Apprentice Careerists.
That shook RG out of his silence, but not with regard to
anything of substance:
Hi David,
I’d underestimated the distance between our worldviews and ways of
approaching discussion in my last email. I thought there may be some room for exchange but I am no longer convinced that is true. The
speed with which you jump to paint me or others with whom you disagree as
careerists, corrupt, etc., while you understand yourself as holding an unseen
truth, all makes me think that we will not have a productive exchange. Further,
while I appreciate that you have spent a great deal of time writing, I am not sure
from what I have seen that there is anything there for me to engage with.
I wish you the best, and unless you’re willing to deeply rework
how you approach exchange, that you not reach out again.
“RG”
“With minds made up and closed, they turn from
truth exposed.” From “The
Lies.” I suppose it’s a “worldview,” of sorts. He’s finally running away, having actually
said nothing to that point. I really
couldn’t leave what he had said unchallenged, so I responded an hour later with
this:
Hi “RG,”
Looks like you're leaping to an excuse to bail out. I didn't
accuse you of anything, nor leap to any sort of conclusion. Do I detect a
bit of psychological projection here? I said that I hoped you were
not the "apprentice careerist" sort. I would offer that you don't seem to have
taken anything that I have presented in good faith, because you have not
addressed a single point that I have made nor fact that I have presented.
You mention your worldview, but you have left me clueless as to what it
is. I don't even know what "deeply rework how you approach
exchange" means. And I don't deal in "unseen truths."
I think that I am about as heavy as it gets on facts and evidence.
The fact is that our wonderful FBI sent Geronimo Pratt to prison for 27
years for a crime that they knew full well that he did not commit. I call
that corruption.
As Gastonia native, Thomas Sowell, has written about the red marks
he used to put on his students' papers, specify, don't characterize. If you
were just a tiny bit open minded, you might have noticed that I have a great
deal of experience and education from which you might gain some benefit.
If you bothered to read the article that I described as partly
autobiographical, you would see that my views have changed quite a great deal
as I have lived and learned, as they say.
Dave
At that point, RG finally showed me about all there is to see of
RG and turned tail with finality. About an hour and a half later I got
this from him, showing that he was thoroughly miffed, and this time there
wasn't even a “Hi Dave” to start it off:
What’s wrong with looking to an excuse to bail out?
To be frank, I take issue with your assumption that just sending
others very long works is substantive engagement, and that it is their problem
if they don’t want to read it. I had hoped my request for you to read the
Coates piece would make clear that issue; it did not, and I regret that way of
approaching things. Repeatedly emailing with requests to read things when the
person has displayed no interest in talking to you is borderline harassment,
and I had hoped my request would make clear to you how absurd that is.
Substantively -
I cannot figure out what the hell is going on in the first open
letter you sent us.
I don’t want to read 10 articles every email.
I think it’s ridiculous to argue against the presence of
systematic racism at davidson.[sic] Chambers is named after a slave owner. There are
still places where slaves lived on campus. Come on.
I am in a literal sense unsure of what you expect to get. I say
unseen truth because you seem to be convinced you’ve hit upon some very
significant patterns and conspiracies in the world and I simply cannot track
them, and I don’t know how to engage with them. I am aware that you think there
is evidence for your assertions; but you seem to believe you are the only
person who sees the patterns you do.
I am no fan of the FBI, or anything involving the United State
government, but a large part of that is because of the racism that institution
embodies.
I think a lot of how you speak about black people is
objectionable.
Overall, you seem to be appealing to a value of open discussion
that is simply incompatible with how I understand it. I highly value free
speech, but I am very skeptical that your way of approaching conversation will
gel with mine.
As for your projection note - I notice that you constantly come up
with explanations and insults to potentially explain why your interlocutor is
simply not as interested in pursuing the truth as you are. Maybe that’s not
leaping to conclusions, but is unquestionably making
assumptions. Pretending those are neutral observations and not moves to tilt
the discussion in your favor is ridiculous and about as bad faith as it comes.
This is my biggest concern, because I suspect whatever I say
or do you will link me to an article or poem that explains why I am one of the
many uncultured masses that fail to appreciate your wisdom.
I could have engaged you in better faith. I hope you can forgive
me for being wary of an article that I cannot make heads or tails of, which
starts with an assertion I disagree with completely unrelated to the rest of
the text, emailed to me by a stranger with no context who has harvested my
email and responds when people complain about this by calling them snowflakes.
None of that, to me, contains an ounce of good faith.
I imagine it is now clear to you why I am “looking for an excuse
to bail”; or, more charitably, why I don’t think our engagement will be
productive.
If I can offer some words of advice: if you want to engage with
other people, you should make them want to talk to you, not harass them into
it. Further, you should probably try and be respectful of boundaries and
interpret your interlocutors charitably rather than throwing various kinds of
explanations for how uninterested in truth they are. I am interested in truth.
I simply doubt you have anything worth offering in that department. Your
writings have not convinced me otherwise.
I think it’s been a mistake for me to engage with you this much
for the reasons above, so again I ask, unless you are willing to approach me
differently, please do not contact me again (ignoring that request is a really
good example of not respecting boundaries). You can take that as a victory for
your worldview and a demonstration of my small mindedness if you want, no skin
off my back.
If you respond again and interpret my hesitancy to engage in an
uncharitable manner I will block you.
“RG”
There you have it. Everything is about race, race, race, don’t
you know? No, actually, I gather that
his “worldview” is that it’s all about white racism toward blacks. Nothing else really matters; he can’t make
heads or tails of my initial terse email for that reason. But he speaks of my sending articles that he
didn’t “want to read,” which says pretty clearly that he didn’t read even the
first one. He saw that it was not going
in his favored racial direction, and he just quit at that point. But even when I had accepted his challenge,
shifting into his chosen topic and read his assigned article, responding, I
believe, thoughtfully, he just punted.
Our exchange would hardly be worth
sharing, but if you read that faculty statement or at anything coming from
President Quillen these days or have a look at the latest Davidson Journal what
you see from RG is apparently what a current Davidson education is designed to
produce, indoctrinated young people who are completely incapable of handling
facts and opinions that challenge what has been inculcated into them in their
four years at the college.
I really would like to think that I am
wrong about that, and one short response I got from a female class secretary
who graduated from Davidson in this century provides a ray of hope: “Thanks for article. Very interesting. I need to reread
it.”
I thanked her profusely for it.
DC Dave, the
Horrible
Going back to the overlooked second
question in RG’s initial email, that was the reaction that I was hoping for,
whether stated or not, because I so seldom get feedback from anything I send
out. I can’t say that I anticipated it,
but I certainly can’t say that I anticipated the hornet’s nest that I stirred
up. Here are some more examples of the
latter:
Well,
you didn’t ask me, David, before sending your unrequested comments. I’m sure
there are people who appreciate conspiracy theories based on tortured logic,
unfounded assumptions and blind leaps of faith and who would welcome discussing
them with you, but not me. Perhaps you should send it to Donald Trump; I’m
pretty sure he could use some cheering up these days.
Please
do not contact me again.
How’s
that for a hit and run attack? And this
comes from an old-timer, a product of the era when Walter Cronkite was the
“most trusted man in America,” and the guy apparently hasn’t learned anything
since. I would invite him to point out
examples of “tortured logic,” “unfounded assumptions” or “blind leaps of faith”
in the article that I sent, but he’s already run for cover. Not only has he shown himself to be ignorant
and stupid, but a miserable coward, as well.
I’ll bet he was also the last
child in his cohort to stop
believing in Santa Claus.
Here’s
another:
Dave,
For what it’s worth, I think you’re being rude and not
representing Davidson in a positive light, neither your original email blast
with no explanation nor your follow-up to “AC.”
If you want to educate people, that is your right but find other
means.
The description of the original message as
an “email blast with no explanation” pretty much says it all. The article, as I have explained, is its own
explanation, and it is abundantly evident that this person, like the previous
one, has resisted reading it.
This one is hardly complimentary, and it
was the shortest, but, as you will see, it was not the worst:
Mr. Martin,
I'll answer for myself. I think you're a nut.
One reason it was not the worst is that it
was not accompanied by the message to the effect, “Please don’t reply to my
insult,” giving me the opportunity to reply as follows:
Hi XXX,
It's pretty clear, though, that you haven't given it much thought.
I am aware that there are lots of your benighted sort out there, but,
fortunately, there are still lots of others.
I’m sure he was among the great majority
who never read the article I sent, but I hope he at least clicked on the link
at the “Dave.” If not, c’est la guerre.
This one, I think you will agree, is the
champion of the lot, combining, as it does, a blizzard of insults, insults that
really bear no relationship to my “offense” of sending out an article that
demonstrates in meticulous detail the complicity of a pillar of respectability
of the American history profession in the cover-up of the murder of a notable
Davidson graduate, with an order not to disturb her anymore by defending myself
against her insults:
David,
Your email was offensive, deeply disturbing, beyond the pale, and
I felt embarrassed for you.
Please do not include me on any of your future emails, thoughts,
musings or opinions. They are unsolicited, unwarranted, unwanted and patently
ridiculous.
You are a deeply troubled person. I will pray that you find
mental stability.
Please find other outlets for your emotional needs.
I will block your email address going forward and hope to never
hear from you again.
Seek help.
Snowflakes, indeed! And not one of them ever breathed a word
about the subject of my article, the cover-up of the murder of their fellow
Davidson graduate, Vincent W. Foster, Jr. ’67, of Hope, Arkansas.
I really didn’t start out to write about
race, but seeing the reaction to my education attempt, I can’t help but be
reminded of a favorite Mark Twain quote of mine, and it involves his view of
Americans of African origin. “There are
so few people that are any damned good,” he said, “it would be a shame to rule
out a whole group of people on account of their skin color.”
What he observed about people in general
applies to the sub-group of the alumni of my alma mater as well, it would seem.
David Martin
February 12, 2021
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