Acting just like a vicious human (some notes on Free Will)

A peculiarity of our language—or of our thinking—is that, when we find someone’s behavior to be especially heinous, we often call him or her an animal. “He’s no more than an animal,” we’ll say. Or he’s a “beast” or a “brute”—more words meaning “animal.”

Usually, the “beastly” behavior we are condemning cannot be found among animals—i.e., among nonhuman animals, for, obviously, humans are animals too. Isn’t it clear that human beings do terrible things that are never done by animals? Think of torture, genocide, parking one's car on the lawn.

How come we don’t accuse Dick Cheney of behaving like some kind of goddam human?

Another peculiarity is our tendency to speak of “vicious” animal attacks. Well, the one thing that an animal attack cannot be is vicious. My Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “vicious” as “having the nature or quality of vice or immorality….” The word “vicious,” of course, comes from the word “vice.”

Consider the case of a cougar attacking a hiker. In the cougar’s mind, the hiker invaded her territory. So she attacked the invader. Was the cougar behaving immorally? Did the cougar exhibit vice?

Of course not. She did not do these things because cougars are not (as we say in philosophy) moral agents. That is, they are not beings who are capable of moral or immoral behavior. For one thing, they have no understanding of right and wrong.

Human infants are not moral agents either. They matter morally—it would be murder to kill an infant. But they are not moral agents, for they are incapable of right or wrong actions.

I know a man who routinely attributes moral agency to nonhuman animals. For thirty years, he has carried on a war with gophers on his land. He hates the little buggers. Sometimes, he’ll explain how a gopher could have dug in direction A, but instead he dug in direction B, evidently for the sole purpose of antagonizing him. He oozes contempt for these gophers. Do you know such people?

Sometimes I kid him. I say, "Well, those gophers were here before you were. If an all-out war breaks out here, I'm sorry, but I've gotta take the gophers' side."

There seem to be many TV programs devoted to describing animal attacks on humans. Invariably, the victim of the attack will at some point explain, “I don’t blame the bear (or weasel or jackalope). She was just protecting her young.”

But what if the bear was just hungry? I guess they’d condemn the bear in that case. “Goddam bear.”

But to do so is to engage in anthropomorphism, “the attribution of human characteristics or behavior to a god, animal, or object” (according to my Mac’s dictionary). Bears know no morality. They are not the kinds of beings who can be immoral or blameworthy. If a bear eats someone because she’s hungry, she isn’t vicious. She’s just doing what bears do because they’re built that way.

I recall an episode of a TV legal drama in which a gentle man becomes violent and starts to hurt people. He’s arrested. Eventually, doctors discover that he has a brain tumor that has somehow altered his personality and caused him to be violent and erratic. I thought, “yes, I get it. This tumor changed the guy into someone who could not help having uncontrollable violent impulses.” And so he was violent.

I figured, “great, they’ll just remove the tumor and send him home.” But no. In this drama, the case became a real puzzler. People debated the man’s responsibility for his attacks. In the end, a judge decided to convict the man of his crimes and send him to prison. As I recall, she said something like, “if we don’t hold this man responsible for his actions, how can we hold others responsible for theirs?”

To me, this just seems confused. In the story, we were led to believe that anyone who had such a tumor would be caused to do what this man did. Suppose that’s true. Then it wasn’t the man but the tumor that accounted for his violent behavior. Indeed, in the story, the man had a long history of being moral and nonviolent. So, if we need to subtract the tumor from the man, we can do that, and when we do, we have a man, a moral agent, who is not violent or immoral.

It seems to me that many people refuse to reflect about when people are or are not responsible for their actions. Often, they seem to gravitate to a very simple picture: you have a man and you have his action. He is responsible for his action. End of story.

I’m amazed that such people don’t regard gophers and bears and infants in the same light.

Maybe they do. Good Lord.

"Goddam brat!"

• • • •

I have never understood the concept of free will. I want to understand it. I want to believe in it. But what sort of thing is it supposed to be?

Among those who believe that we humans are "free agents" and that we possess a will that is free, some will insist that their conscious decisions are the occasion and the phenomena of freedom.

If so, then a recent study should give them something to fret about. Several months ago, the journal Nature Neuroscience published a German study that involved people performing actions while hooked up to some kind of MRI. The study seems to show that, several seconds before subjects make a conscious decision, the "brain" has already made one.

From the Boston Globe (Free will? Not as much as you think):

"It seems that your brain starts to trigger your decision before you make up your mind," said the study's lead author, John-Dylan Haynes of the Max Planck Institute ... in Germany. "We can't rule out free will, but I think it's very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made?"
...
Employing both functional magnetic resonance imaging and pattern recognition statistical techniques, the researchers were able to predict which button people would choose before they made their conscious decisions—as much as 10 seconds early, "an eternity," Haynes said.

Haynes believes that delay suggests the absence of free will as most people define it.

The physical brain apparently starts shaping the decision long before the conscious mind does. He speculated that the frontopolar cortex encodes the decision, while a section of the parietal cortex stores it and coordinates the decision's timing.

The study does not settle the issue of whether there is free will. But, for those who suppose that their conscious decisions are the captain of their ship, things aren't looking very good right now.

• • • •

If Haynes is right, then conscious decisions are epiphenomena—that is, each is "a secondary effect or byproduct that arises from but does not causally influence a process" (as my Mac dictionary would have it).

Think of a futuristic robot (Ralph) that seems and behaves exactly like a human being. Ralph is a deterministic mechanism—that is, like my Mac (more or less), Ralph is a system in which nothing happens by chance; everything is programed and caused.

Ralph is not, however, sentient (i.e., he has no mental life).

Suppose that a clever engineer finds a way to modify Ralph so that he does have a mental life. Thus, now, he no longer only seems to think and feel; he really does think and feel.

But Ralph's new feature amounts to a series of epiphenomena. That is, the thoughts and feelings and decisions of Ralph's "mind" do not cause anything. In fact, the older mechanism within Ralph causes his thoughts. And so Ralph imagines that his decision to lift his hand caused him to lift his hand, when, in fact, his mechanism caused both the lifting of his hand and his "decision" to do so.

Does Ralph have a free will?

Blade Runner: "I've seen things"


Aristotle argued that we are responsible for our character because our character forms through habit. A young person who continually "does as the courageous person does" will grow accustomed to behaving in that way; he will develop a firm disposition to stand his ground. But it works for vice, too. A young person who is allowed to (and allows himself to) run away whenever something fearful arises will form a disposition to run away. His cowardice—his disposition to run away—will be of his own making.

As far as it goes, this makes a great deal of sense and is, I think, insightful.

For those who are inclined to press the question of how it is that a person is responsible for his actions, this account promises some answers. If John runs away like a coward, we can attribute that to his cowardice (his disposition to run away), and since he chose the actions that, repeatedly performed (owing to his choices), led to the formation of that disposition, he is responsible for his cowardice.

But this does seem to raise a puzzle. We have asked, why is John responsible for his cowardice? The answer: he chose the actions that led to his cowardly character.

OK. But what is the nature of the "self"—the John—who chose those actions that are now at the bottom of our explanatory scheme? We cannot refer to character, since we've already appealed to these actions to explain character.

So just what is this self then? Isn't it something that reveals character by its choices (of actions)? How could it be otherwise? But now we're just going in circles, for we are appealing to character to explain actions that explain character.

Suppose that one ends one's efforts to explain moral responsibility there. If so, then I suppose that one must regards the "self" that makes the choices (that develop the character that issue in actions for which one is responsible) as a kind of "character" that just comes into being: a given, a brute fact. The self is not responsible for the "character" of this original self. It just is what it is.

Does it make sense to view responsibility in this stark way? If someone is born bad, does it make sense to hold him responsible for being bad? (Surely not, unless we have an account of how this entity that is born is the way it is because of some process that occurred previously [now we're getting metaphysical!] that includes some way that the self is responsible for how he ends up being. We seem to be in an infinite regress here.)

We do seem to think in that stark way sometimes. We are told that child molesters are almost always the product of child molestation. When I hear this, a part of me thinks: it is not at all clear to me that we can hold someone responsible for their pedophilia if that aspect of their personality is virtually guaranteed by their having been molested as a child.

And yet we seem not in the slightest bit reserved about condemning and loathing pedophiles.

Same goes for sociopaths. If they are born that way (as we seem to be told), how are they responsible for their sociopathic ways? How does this work exactly?

And if we are willing to hold Dexter responsible for just arriving in this world a sociopath, why not hold animals responsible for what they are and what they do? And infants?

(Compare with G. Strawson: Living without ultimate moral responsibility.)
'

My 15 minutes, part 2

December, 1998:

(Again, this is a tale (part of a much larger saga) about corrupt politicians and corrupt faculty.)

During yesterday’s episode, our hero (moi), the author of a satirical newsletter (Dissent) that criticized Irvine Valley College President Mathur, our district’s corrupt union, and the district trustee board majority, was informed that, via distribution of said newsletter, he was violating the district’s “workplace violence” and it’s “anti-discrimination” policies. Further, he was ordered to receive anger management counseling!

This was communicated to me in letter and in person by Chancellor Cedric Sampson, but the material and ideas behind all of this came from IVC’s president, Raghu Mathur—who, of course, was the board majority’s darling toady.

By then, despite his staunch Republicanism, Raghu already had a long history of playin’ the “race” card, when convenient. At various times, dating back to long before my entrance into district politics, Mathur claimed to receive threatening and racist email, voicemail, and snail mail. (It is worth noting, however, that, during a 1999 deposition, he acknowledged his inability to document any of these alleged “threats.” I’m certain that he never received a one.)

The notion that I was tormenting Christians stemmed from Mathur and Co.’s amazing ignorance. When later deposed, Mathur and Sampson acknowledged unfamiliarity with Pat Robertson’s right-wing political organization “Christian Coalition.” So, since I have never criticized Christians or Christianity (in the newsletters or anywhere else), I could only surmise that the Ignorami Twins had mistaken Dissent’s one or two snide references to this right-wing political organization for a criticism of Christianity and Christians.

My so-called racist term for Mathur was “Mr. Goo,” which, according to me, was an allusion to the cartoon character Mr. Magoo, but, according to Sampson, was a reference to the racist term “gook.”

Mathur hails from India where Hindi is spoken. It turns out that, in Hindi, “guh” (or “goo”) means “excrement,” a fact that, months later, district lawyers gleefully seized upon. It was news to me.

In the lawyers’ view, I guess, if you call a guy “Mr. Shit,” you’re a racist. I don’t get it.

El Ced’s (i.e., Sampson’s) disciplinary action was based specifically on six newsletter elements, the most celebrated of which appeared in a piece about a 1998 trustee candidates’ debate:

[The political debate] started with a reading of a prepared statement by [the absent Nancy] Padberg in which she offered the usual bland campaign promises … Padberg also spoke—er, wrote—of the need to bridge the “gap” between the warring sides in the district. Evidently, she believes that the sides can come together and be pals again—perhaps by means of a carefully planned Halloween party. I don’t think so. I, for one, have etched the name of [union president] Sherry “Realpolitik” Miller-White and others of her ilk on my permanent shit list, a two-ton slate of polished granite, which I hope someday to drop on Raghu Mathur’s head. (Dissent, 11/2/98)

I figured that was funny, not threatening. Another element was some laughably lurid “crime fiction” artwork, depicting a hatchet murderer and sporting the words: “Crime: Tales of the Back Door Gooster”—i.e., tales of Mathur’s crimes. Another was the acronym MAIM (“Mathur-Milosevic Academic Integrity Matrix”), used by Dissent contributor Red Emma to liken Mathur to the Yugoslavian dictator. Yet another was a still from an old science-fiction movie concerning “downsizers.” This, said Ced, was evidence of my “obsession with weaponry.”

The Chancellor ordered me to meet with him in his office, where he informed me of my “violations.” (The letters were already in my file, contrary to district policy.)

After the meeting, my then-lawyer, Bill S., who had accompanied me, was stunned by El Ced’s stupidity and unreasonableness. Bill wasn’t sure what I should do. He looked at me and asked, “Would you be willing to go to the counselor?” I looked skeptical. He added: “Don’t be buyin’ a Ferrari or anything. Save your money.”

So I got help from Carol Sobel, a well-known Santa Monica-based First Amendment attorney (suggested by Rebel Girl). Carol and I immediately sued the Chancellor on First Amendment grounds. I alerted the media, initiating yet another PR nightmare for the Board Majority, which now comprised Frogue, Williams, Fortune, Wagner, and Padberg. (Get this: our corrupt union had gotten Wagner and Padberg elected [in ‘98], despite W&P’s membership in a group that had written that year’s union-busting proposition! No, I’m not making this up.)

Probably, the Dark Side expected me just to soften Dissent. In truth, a week or so before I received the letter, I had told friends that I was abandoning the newsletter, not out of fear, but out of a sense of the unseemliness of assuming personal risks when my colleagues, judging by their persistent silence and inaction, were, with a few exceptions, unwilling to assume even the slightest risk in combating the Dark Side. I found a towel and threw it in.

But now I was a First Amendment poster boy. The Dissent continued. There was no turning back.

Our strategy: to win a “summary judgment.” Essentially, you win a summary judgment when the judge thinks a trial is unnecessary cuz your opponents have bupkis.

I suppose the district just expected me to cave, ‘cause, when we sued them, they seemed to recognize that they had nothing, and so the district’s lawyers commenced sniffing around for anything they could find. Using declarations solicited from Raghu’s unsavory Old Guard and classified allies, the district concocted a case for my being the district bully, the cause of all recent districtular difficulties, including the Accrediting warning.

There was no one who believed these things. The district was just playing hard ball.

The flim-flam flopped. In March of ‘99, Federal Judge Nora Manella, calling the Chancellor’s action against me “Orwellian,” issued a preliminary injunction, declaring the six newsletter items to be “protected speech” and enjoining the district from wielding the two policies to restrict speech and from enforcing the counseling order.

Manella next set to work on her ruling regarding the summary judgment.

The case was then handed off to Federal Judge Gary Feess (of subsequent DNC and Ramparts fame), who, finally, in October of ‘99, granted the summary judgment in my favor, arguing that my speech was “protected” and that the counseling order was improper. In Feess’ view, both district policies were unconstitutional “as applied,” but the workplace violence policy was also unconstitutional on its face (i.e., it was intrinsically unconstitutional). We had not expected—and, frankly, did not need—the latter “facial” ruling.

In court, Feess ridiculed Ced’s “threat” malarkey. “No reasonable person,” declared Feess, “could have concluded that [Bauer’s] written words … constituted a serious expression of an intent to harm or assault.” He especially derided Ced and Goo’s granite slab worries.

According to Feess, it was “hard to understand what administration was thinking” when they took the action against me. He opined that Mathur’s direction to me (in an evaluation) to “make things nicer” seemed to him to be a possible violation of the First Amendment all by itself. “It’s a college campus.” If you can’t “speak your mind” there, he asked, then where?

Contrary to the district’s lawyers, said Feess, there was no evidence that I was responsible for the district’s problems.

In response, the district’s lawyer, David Larsen, insisted that some faculty (Sherry Miller-White, et al.) feared voicing their opinions because of me, but Feess judged those fears to be “beyond reason.”

“But,” said Larsen, “this is an individual who has been involved in face-to-face threats”! He was referring to the hilarious and hysterical Old Guard declarations, which were mostly fabricated, partly paranoia.

Feess wasn’t buying it. Said he, “That was never a basis which was given in 1998 and that is an after-the-fact attempt to shore up what was a plainly inadequate basis for the discipline.” He added:

I understand that a lot of people would like to do business behind closed doors, that they would like to make decisions that they don’t have to explain, that they would like to come to conclusions and judgments and issue policy without having anyone present to listen and hear and to understand and therefore to make rational, powerful, criticisms of them. That’s just too bad under our system…And if people are afraid of going to meetings and speaking up because … they’re going to be the subject of criticism in a publication, that’s…just life under the First Amendment… I just think this is a case where that concept, a legitimate concept [“workplace violence”], is being stretched for the purpose of taking a vigorous critic of the administration and the board of trustees and trying to keep [him] quiet.

Carol was awarded $127,00.

Next thing I knew, the Board filed an appeal, which meant, among other things, that Carol wouldn’t be getting paid any time soon—and the letters would remain in my file for the time being. (These letters are crucial to any firing action.)

A year and a half passed. The appellate hearing—at the 4th Court of Appeals, in Pasadena, with Rymer, Hawkins, and Gould presiding—finally occurred in May of 2001. The judges heard oral arguments; they then conferred and produced their opinion.

The hearing was frustrating. Larsen, evidently driven to desperation by the poverty of his case, distorted and invented facts.

The discussion largely focused on the constitutional status of the district’s workplace violence policy in particular, which, again, Feess judged to be unconstitutional, not only “as applied,” but facially. Right away, Judge Rymer objected to the vagueness and oddness of the policy insofar as it referred to “violence overtones.” On the other hand, she could not see, she said, how the policy was unconstitutional on its face: why not just delete the problematic phrase?

Larsen struggled to defend the relevance of the district’s highly convenient after-the-fact declarations. He argued that the six elements needed to be viewed “in context”—namely, my angry and violent conduct, as revealed in Woody and Glenn’s [laughable] declarations and Larsen’s impromptu courtroom fabrications. I had caused district employees—Sherry—to be “very frightened,” said Larsen. (For what it’s worth, that’s just not so. And, today, I don’t think you’d be able to scrape up anybody who would testify to this.)

Carol, always at her best in such settings, noted that, to qualify as truly threatening, an instance of speech must be unequivocal and immediate, threatwise. My speech, she argued, did not come “within a mile” of that standard. Concerning the six elements, the judges seemed to agree. But, asked Rymer, hadn’t I actually gone to individuals and threatened them?

“What are you referring to?” responded Carol. Carol knew that Larsen was distorting and exaggerating what appeared in the briefs and declarations.

Rymer seemed willing to concede that my expressions had been satirical and not violent. But, she asked, how can the whole “workplace violence” policy be unconstitutional on its face? “I just don’t get it,” she said.

Judge Gould spoke; he seemed to have his doubts even about the policy’s unconstitutionality as applied. Maybe the “college” needs its day in court, he said.

Things seemed to be going badly, I thought, but then Judge Hawkins, who had said nothing, ended the hearing by asking Larsen a series of revealing questions:

Were any of these alleged threatening incidents cited in the original disciplinary actions?

No, admitted Larsen, but they were “the backdrop” of the action.

“Really?” asked Hawkins. No references to these incidents were made in the disciplinary letters?

No, admitted Larsen, but, he added, you’ve got to consider “context.”

Hawkins then asked if I had done anything physically to anyone.

Well, no.

Had I brought a weapon to school?

No.

Did I have any history of violence, of shoving, anything like that?

No.

Did I have any history of arrests or confrontations?

Nope.

The judges issued their judgment in August. Hawkins, representing Rymer and himself (i.e., a majority), wrote the ruling.

Essentially, I prevailed: Judge Feess’ judgments were upheld, with one exception: though the district’s policies are both unconstitutional as applied, in the appellate court’s judgment, the district’s workplace violence policy is facially unconstitutional only in part. Wrote the court:

[Bauer’s] writings and illustrations were prepared during a traumatic time for IVC and the District…The Accrediting Commission attributed the turmoil partially to OC’s financial troubles and primarily to a four-to-three split on the District’s Board of Trustees… [Bauer] voiced his disapproval in a campus newspaper called “Dissent.”….

We agree with [Feess’] analysis that the policies were unconstitutionally applied to Bauer because “though at times adolescent, insulting, crude and uncivil, [Hey!] Bauer’s publication focuses directly on issues of public interest and importance.” We also agree with [Feess] that Bauer’s statements were not “true threats” and that the District’s rights as an employer were not impermissibly burdened by Bauer’s expression….

We agree with [Feess’] holding that although Bauer’s writings have some violent content, they “are hyperbole of the sort found in non-mainstream political invective and in context…are patently not true threats.”

Within the larger context of the turbulent IVC campus community, the conduct alleged by Sampson does not transform Bauer’s expression into “true threats.” We agree with [Feess] that there is simply no way a reasonable reader would have construed [Bauer’s] writings and illustrations to be “true threats,” even if that reader were aware of all of the other conduct alleged by Sampson [my emphasis]….

In light of the Accrediting Commission’s report…, it can hardly be said that Bauer was the source of the disharmony on IVC’s campus. IVC and the District were going through a contentious period—Bauer’s commentary on these troubles may have raised awareness, but the expression certainly did not cause them…[A]nyone who has spent time on college campuses knows that the vigorous exchange of ideas and resulting tension between an administration and its faculty is as much a part of college life as homecoming and final exams….

[Judge Feess] correctly ruled that [the district’s workplace violence policy] is unconstitutional on its face because it prohibits speech with violent ‘overtones’ that falls short of being threatening. However, the…court erred in holding that the entire workplace violence policy is facially unconstitutional…The…court correctly ruled that the Board’s policies on racial discrimination…and workplace violence are unconstitutional as applied to Bauer.

Carol was awarded about $200,000 in fees, to be paid by the district. No doubt the district has already spent much more than that for their unsuccessful defense.

The press took some interest in the victory:

The Times, August 16, 2001:
College District Loses Appeal in Discipline Case

A federal appeals court Wednesday upheld a lower court decision that the South Orange County Community College District chancellor acted unconstitutionally when he disciplined a professor for criticizing the administration in satirical newsletters.

“It’s a victory for free speech and for those willing to report honestly about the incompetence and misbehavior of people in positions of power,” said philosophy professor Roy Bauer. “I certainly hope the chancellor and the board learned a lesson, but judging on past behavior . . . they will continue to run the district into the ground.”

But the court ruled that U.S. District Judge Gary Fees went too far in ruling the community college district’s workplace violence policy unconstitutional. Bauer sued after Chancellor Cedric Sampson in December 1998 ordered him to seek anger management counseling and placed a disciplinary letter in his file. Sampson also said Bauer violated the district’s antidiscrimination policy.

Bauer sued, and Fees ruled in his favor in October 1999. He awarded Bauer’s attorney, Carol Sobel, $127,000 in fees and costs. With interest and the fees from the appeal, that figure has grown to around $200,000, Sobel said.

David Larsen, the district’s attorney, said the board of trustees will have to decide whether to appeal the case to the U.S. Supreme Court.

I don’t think part 3 will be necessary. Maybe a quick wrap-up. We prevailed, of course. Carol got paid and I saved my job. The Dissent continued, went on hiatus for a while, and then returned as Dissent the Blog, again, with Rebel Girl.

Then there was the time that Mathur sued me! —Well, that can wait.
'

My 15 minutes, part 1

This is a story about right-wing Neanderthals, greedy and petty faculty, and the harm they can do.

I was hired as Irvine Valley College's sole full-time philosopher in 1986, just about when Attila the Pup died. For a long time, I stayed out of campus politics, including the politics of the district (the South Orange County Community College District). At the time, the SOCCCD had a sterling reputation.

Things changed in late 1996. In November, our corrupt faculty union had used deceptive and homophobic fliers to secure the election victories of "fiscally conservative" trustees Steve Frogue and John Williams, as well as challenger Dorothy Fortune. A fourth trustee (out of seven) was also in their pocket, but she was not then up for election. Thus it was that a group of corrupt and ruthless faculty gained control over the board of trustees, and, consequently, over the entire district.

(The following account was written in 2001. I edited it slightly:)

...During this early period [i.e., 1997], I produced and distributed several satirical newsletters at IVC. By early ’97, my chief publication was called the ‘Vine. By mid-1998, the ‘Vine had been largely replaced by Dissent, distributed unevenly, district-wide. By then, Rebel Girl (Lisa Alvarez) was my partner in crime. (An English teacher, she was and still is my office mate.)

By design, the newsletters, to which several writers contributed intermittently, emphasized one overriding district truth: that a gang of greedy and disgruntled faculty had made a pact with four opportunistic little devils—the Board [of trustees] Four—and, together, this crew was razing everything worthwhile that had been built.

It was difficult keeping up with the Dark Side’s crimes, hijinks, and peccadillos, but we gave it the old college try. Some people thought we were makin’ things up, what with tales of pants-droppings, loogie assaults, neo-Nazi rallies, gay-bashing, secret bank accounts, secret trustee discussions, Holocaust denial, and all the rest. In reality, we were tonin’ down the facts, worried no one would believe them in unmitigated form.

‘Vine/Dissent was a hit. Early on, readers sent me “thank you” notes, cash, writings, and suggestions.

In ‘97, for PIO, the district hired Pam Zanelli, who functioned as a political consultant and flack for the Four, or so said the Three [i.e., the board minority]. Zanelli was the “professional” who, only months earlier, urged her then-clients, the faculty union Old Guard, to use the “same-sex domestic partners” gambit to get Frogue, Williams, and Fortune elected and protect “life as we know it.”

She has a haystack on her head (big hair).

Naturally, what with the addition of a full-time Board Majority propagandist, some of us began talking to the press more often, givin’ ‘em the skinny. By early ’97, I (along with a few other rebels) had become adept at puttin’ local news hounds on the scent of stories that, invariably, embarrassed the Four, the union Old Guard, and Mr. Goo [IVC President Raghu Mathur, a key member of the corrupt faculty union]. Zanelli’s transparent spinnage was a weak force in this universe.

Mostly, all we had to do was point reporters in a certain direction. We didn’t have to add anything; they’d make their own sauce.

Our success with the press had nothing to do with bias. Hey, if, over time, you never lie or exaggerate or cry wolf, people start trusting you. That’s the secret, but it only works if you’re on the side of the angels. Rat Bastards need to hire people like Zanelli.

But Dark Siders naturally assume that everybody’s a lyin’, manipulatin’ piece o’ sh*t. Inevitably, to such people, if you get your side, your story, across to the public via the news media, you must be pullin’ a fast one somehow.

• • • •

“Oh, get out of here!…You couldn’t find ... more embarrassing conspiracists in America. Even among conspiracy theorists, these people represent the outer limits.”

—Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, commenting on trustee Frogue's “experts”

• • • •
Some truths really ought to be revealed, especially when they concern the fate of hundred million dollar chunks of taxpayer cash. The Board Four’s breathtaking intellectual incompetence was such a truth.

On the morning of the August 18, 1997, board meeting, a colleague alerted me to board agenda item 13. It said

Several speakers have been invited to participate in [board president Frogue’s Fall] forum on the JFK Assassination. Expenses for travel, accommodation and/or honoraria are estimated below:

Sherman Skolnick: Not to exceed $1,500.00
Dave Emory: Not to exceed $1,000.00
John Judge: Not to exceed $1,000.00
Michael Collins Piper: Not to exceed $1,000.00

“Hmmm,” thought I. “Isn’t Piper the boy reporter for Spotlight?”

I made a heads up call to the ADL’s Joyce Greenspan, telling her what I knew about Piper, namely, that he worked for Spotlight, the nation’s #1 anti-Semitic newspaper, published by the nation’s #1 anti-Semite, Willis Carto. I advised her to look into Frogue’s other speakers too.

That night, Joyce addressed the board, informing them about Carto, Spotlight, and Piper. She explained that Skolnick, another Frogueian guest, was on Spotlight’s advisory board. Joyce urged the board not to approve item 13.

Frogue responded by explaining Piper’s theory—how the CIA and the Israelis conspired to kill JFK, etc. Piper’s theory, like dozens of similar yarns, is based on poor scholarship and dreadful reasoning. That is why it is not taken seriously by scholars. That is why Frogue’s “forum” was wrong for SOCCCD. Colleges should have standards.

The anti-intellectual Four understood none of this. They happily approved item 13, thereby demonstrating their utter incompetence.

The next morning, I phoned the Times’ Michael Granberry. Two days after that, the front page of the Times roared: “O.C. College Course Claims JFK Conspiracy.” Granberry’s article, which was picked up across the country, revealed that Frogue’s “experts” were pots so cracked that they even embarrassed world crackpottery. Thus it was that, for a day or two, our board and district became a national joke, an object of fun and frettage among Arianna Huffington, George Will, and the rest of American political blabbermouthery.

For the Featherbrained Four, it was an embarrassment of Biblical proportions. They had no one to blame but themselves.

While the “JFK Assassination” fiasco—and resultant recall effort—raged, our Brown Act lawsuits (Anthro professor Wendy Phillips, now Wendy Gabriella, was one of the attorneys) moved through the courts. [The board had repeatedly violated the "open meetings" law, and we asked them to cut it out. Nothing doing.] Late in ’97, Superior Court Judge Macdonald ruled in my favor in “Bauer I,” as it was called. By late ’98, it became clear that Judge Seymour would do the same in “Bauer II.” Despite Zanelli’s endless haystack spinnage, the Four were getting slaughtered, PR-wise.

A coupla weeks after the trustee election of November 1998, I published a lengthy guest column in the Sunday OC Register, revealing anew the ugly truth about our swine and their union piglets. Despite its relatively high profile, the article probably did more to catch parakeet droppings than to win hearts and minds. Still, it must have infuriated the Four.


Maybe it was just a coincidence, but, a few days after the column appeared, without a hint of warning (contra board policy), I received a letter from Chancellor Cedric Sampson informing me that, in his opinion, I had violated the district’s “workplace violence” and “discrimination/harassment” policies.

Evidently instigated by Mathur, the letter, which (contra the contract) was already in my personnel file, claimed that I had been (a) making life miserable for faculty of the “Christian religious experience,” (b) using a racist term to refer to Mathur, and (c) publishing violent and threatening things in my newsletters.

In a follow-up letter, I was ordered to seek counseling.

“Good grief,” I said.

In part 2: my federal court battle, more Brown Act battles, students sue the district, the Prince of Darkness arrives, etc.

SEE My 15 minutes, part 2
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