On Politics| From Oklahoma With Love, Dear President Obama…
erin elise|cartoonist
An Editor’s Long Goodbye.
I’m sorry, Mr. President, but the easiest way to make myself clear is to tell you a story.
Upon graduation from Southwestern Oklahoma State University in Weatherford, Okla., Jerrell Chesney taught history at Anadarko High School where he coached basketball for two years in 1956 and 1957. From there, Chesney moved to Shawnee where, after coaching basketball for ten years at Shawnee High School, the school promoted him to athletic director and, soon after, assistant principal.
Until 1974, he served for eight years as assistant superintendent of schools in Shawnee before working as assistant business manager for Cameron University in Lawton, Okla.
Only four months later, Chesney received an offer from the Oklahoma State University Board of Regents to work briefly at Langston University, the state’s only historically black college. A year later in September 1975, the OSU Regents asked Mr. Chesney to join them on the board.
In February 1976, the OSU Board of Regents named Chesney its chief executive officer.
That history, however, and the accomplishments therein, will forever reside in the shadows of later events that would come to define Chesney’s final moments as the Regents’ CEO.
In September 1989, the OSU Board of Regents decided to suspend a scheduled Student Union Activities Board screening of director Martin Scorsese’s provocative film “The Last Temptation of Christ.”
According to “The Federal Reporter,” which documents decisions of the Federal Courts of Appeals, the Regents “temporarily suspended the prospective showing of the film ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’ until they could receive answers to legal questions they had submitted to the Oklahoma State University ‘(OSU)’ President.”
At issue was whether or not SUAB’s planned screening of the film in the campus’ Student Union and its accompanying advertisements announcing an off-campus panel discussion following the film at the United Methodist Student Center would implicate OSU as sponsoring the film through SUAB.
“The Regents questioned whether the film should be shown because, in part, of concerns about excessive entanglement between a state university and religion, as highlighted by the religious overtones and implications of sponsorship in this advertisement,” reads the Reporter.
“More specifically, the Regents’ concern about entanglement stemmed from the fact that SUAB was an agent of OSU because OSU sponsored SUAB through OSU funds, personnel, and office and theater use.”
Of course, the kabuki show soon came to an end.
Before long, according to the Reporter, a federal district court “strongly intimated that judicial resolution of the issue would not favor Regents’ suspension.” And, by Oct. 13, the Regents voted 6-2-1 to end the suspension and allow the students to show the film.
“But it cost the Board of Regents for Oklahoma A&M Colleges a chief executive officer,” noted the cover story of the weekend edition of The Daily O’Collegian in the immediate aftermath of the vote.
“H. Jerrell Chesney resigned after the vote at Friday’s special meeting,” wrote O’Colly Senior Staff Writer Todd Knott.
In casting his dissenting vote, Chesney explained that while he believed the board has made the right decision, he noted that he’d seen the film, adding, “I do not support and, in fact, renounce the film and its promotion.”
In an emotional response to Chesney’s resignation, Regent Robert Robbins argued, “You people may have won the war but you lost a great man on this board. You people shot yourself in the foot.”
Far from alone in his objections to “The Last Temptation of Christ,” Chesney’s voice was but one in a chorus of religious right animosity aimed at Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel about spirituality, a fictionalized account of Christ’s crucifixion.
That year, religious right darling Pat Buchanan took to the pages of the “Philadelphia Inquirer,” writing, “The battle over ‘Last Temptation’ is one more skirmish in the century’s struggle over whose values, whose beliefs shall be exalted in American culture, and whose may be derided and disparaged.”
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In his book “Movie Censorship and American Culture,” author Francis Couvares details the religious right’s protests surrounding the film’s release.
As Couvares notes, “The United Artists chain, which owned 2,000 screens across the country in 1988, and General Cinema Corporation, which owned 1,339 screens, also announced their refusal to show ‘Last Temptation.’”
“James Edwards, Jr., owner of 150 Edwards Theaters across the nation, warned that unless ‘certain changes’ were made to ‘Last Temptation,’ which he heard was a film ‘demeaning to Christ,’ he would not show the film in any of his theaters.”
“In Hazelton, Pennsylvania, the City Council voted unanimously to oppose the film on grounds that it was blasphemous.”
Savannah, Georgia officially banned the film, a distinction it shares only with OSU.
I’m not sure exactly what Mr. Chesney, Mr. Edwards and Rev. Donald Wildmon “renounced” in their opposition to “The Last Temptation of Christ.” I doubt most who revile the film have actually seen it.
I watched the film this morning before I wrote this letter, my final column as The Daily O’Collegian’s opinion editor, to clear up my confusion and, I must confess, I remain terribly baffled.
Since the film begins with a disclaimer explaining, “This film is not based upon the Gospels but upon this fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict,” charges that “Temptation” distorts the word of God are hysterical at best.
Maybe then, it’s the Sermon on the Mound scene where Jesus (Willem Dafeo) explains to those gathered around him, “You’re thirsty for justice, for people to treat you fairly, for people to treat you with respect.”
“What I’m telling you is, whoever’s hungry for justice, they’re the ones who will be blessed. They’ll be filled with bread; they’ll never go hungry again. They’ll have the real value, the value of love, to love, share and comfort. They’ll have the courage to do the good.”
Turning to an older woman, Jesus places his hands on her shoulders and tells her, “And you, you’re mourning. Mourners will be blessed. You’ll have God to comfort you; you won’t need men to do it.”
“And the meek, they’re the ones who will be blessed. And the suffering, they’ll be blessed, too. And the peacemakers, and the merciful, and the sick and the poor and the outcasts, you’ll all be blessed because Heaven is yours.”
Laughter erupts from three men watching from the crowd.
“And believe me, those who are laughing now will be crying later,” he continues. “Those whose stomachs are filled now will be hungry later, and the rich will be poor forever.”
The stuff of philosophical beauty, to be sure. Of course, some onlookers mistake Jesus’ sermon for an excuse for violence against the rich in what is likely the first and very last time anyone has ever misinterpreted the word of God.
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Actually, this last point is precisely the reason for this letter.
I grew up here in Oklahoma. And, whether I liked it or not, I’ve been baptized by conservatism and religion; it sort of comes with the Oklahoma territory.
My progressivism and my love of Keynesian capitalism come against this particular backdrop, the backdrop of the most conservative state in the country (as of your presidential election!). Here, words such as “progressive” are caricatures, things not necessarily known but certainly ready for demonization.
Growing up here, I’ve heard neighbors tell me that God wants them to be rich; not successful, but rich. I promise you, Mr. President, this belief that God wants you to be rich informs much Republican thinking (particularly in this state) in regards to taxes.
That said, I’ve never quite understood how my conservative friends square this nonsense with the actual teachings of Jesus.
More than anything else then, and especially since you’ve signed off on extending the Bush Tax Cuts for the next two years for the wealthiest of millionaires and billionaires, I’m eager to hear you redefine the myth of trickle down economics that Reagan propagated since the start of his presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., the one that says cutting taxes for the rich means Heaven on Earth for everyone else.
I’m eager to hear you explain to the American people, with the Oval Office as your backdrop, precisely how the lower and middle class got to this awful, awful economic place. It took Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders precisely ten minutes to do just that this weekend when he took to the Senate floor for nearly nine hours to oppose your tax “compromise” with Republicans.
You’re the president, and I’m told you’re as great a communicator as Reagan, FDR and JFK; why, why, why then is this so difficult a task?
If you believe the 2012 political battle ahead favors you, I’d only point you to how the Republicans cleverly made so many of the 95 percent of Americans making less than $200,000 a year believe that raising taxes on the wealthiest five percent (or, heck, even one percent) meant their taxes, too, were going up and socialism was at their doors.
It’s amazing what people will believe when they never check the facts for themselves and choose demagoguery and make-believe over fact and reality, something the battle over “The Last Temptation of Christ” nearly 20 years ago on this campus illustrates clearly.
Mr. President, I leave you with Stephen Colbert, who last week reported on the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in Washington and its recent decision to pull artist David Wojnarowicz’ video piece, “A Fire in My Belly,” which briefly features a moment where ants swarm a crucifix to, as Colbert notes, “equate the lonely suffering of Christ with the lonely suffering of AIDS patients.”
Wojnarowicz died of AIDS in 1992.
Once incoming Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor threatened the Smithsonian’s funding, so went Wojnarowicz’ piece.
In a Nov. 30 statement, Cantor explains, “This is … an obvious attempt to offend Christians during the Christmas season. The museum should pull the exhibit and be prepared for serious questions come budget time.”
That Wojnarowicz’ piece has zero to do with Christmas or offending Christians. That Cantor, a Jew, would launch this absurd argument is offensive at best.
Of course, like those who didn’t understand “The Last Temptation of Christ” and those who do not understand “A Fire in My Belly” today, it’s possible I just don’t understand.
Or, as Colbert explained, maybe I just “don’t get Cantor’s work.”
“This defunding threat isn’t some cheap exercise in mindless censorship. It’s an anti-paradigmatic revolutionary work of conceptual art banning. And while its point of departure may be Sen. Jesse Helms’ admittedly groundbreaking defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts over Andre Serrano’s ‘Piss Christ,’ it’s not a derivative, ‘Ohh, I’m a Christian, I’m so offended’ because as the only Jewish Republican in Congress, Cantor’s outrage on behalf of Christians and Christmas is a limnal journey into the cultural ur-wound, exploding our narrow preconceptions of what it means to pander.”
“He posits: in a post-metaphysical world is there recourse to intersubjective meaning? Sans artifice, each identity is just a senselessly differentiated iteration of routinized tropes. But Cantor’s meta-reification mirrors our own incontrovertible passivity, which is thrust back upon us, reframed, and, in a Habermassian twist, we realize the final affirmative gesture of his solipsistic negation.”
“Thus, Cantor’s art is about the art that isn’t there, making the inaccessible literally inaccessible. Or, maybe he’s just too hip for the room.”
So, welcome to Oklahoma, Mr. President, and welcome to post-modernity, Oklahoma.
And with that, I yield my time as this paper’s opinion editor.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.
