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Home  Community Voices What We Do, And Say, Matters!
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What We Do, And Say, Matters! |
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Written by Slobodan Dimitrov
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Friday, 20 March 2009 |
Dr. Erwin Chemerinsky, founding Dean of the Irvine School of Law, UCI, was the keynote presenter at the second annual “President’s Forum on International Rights,” at Cal State Long Beach, held on March 4-6, 2009. This year’s forum was named “Exploring Challenges to Free Expression and Belief,” and true to form, took its lead from the UN’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the US Constitution’s First Amendment. Both documents were drafted out of historical crucibles, which left their indelible marks on the consciousness of the American and the world public, respectively.
The ability to articulate how a society should be ordered, in response to such world-changing struggles, rests not just on the struggles themselves, but also on the public’s access to the literary, and visual forms, as vehicles for addressing and digesting such transformative events. Speakers who came to the podium were chosen as real life examples of where and how the process has continued to work, and more pointedly where it has not.
According Chemerinsky, a noted constitutional scholar, the framers of the Constitution left the language somewhat vague—a continuous challenge to succeeding generations. His presentation, “Free Speech in an Internet World,” and the following audience Q&A, addressed concerns over the disappearance of newspapers who themselves had historically been engaged in some of the battles over what constituted free speech. The Internet, yet to face such a similar test of fire, has yet to prove its resolve in continuing this earlier tradition of concern.
Over recent issues on Internet privacy, the reaction by service providers has often been piecemeal. It is compounded by the fact that these very same providers are termed as service businesses, and not necessarily publications. It makes the terminology of the corporate public face, and identity, an important element on how they will define their own role in the coming battles over the public’s expressed, and assumed freedoms.
The expressing of opinions, according to Chemerinsky, requires the ability to engage in an investigative process. Some audience members saw that process as severely hampered by the post 9/11 notion of what constitutes the security needs of the State. Another historical example, the early Cold War, was experienced by Norma Barzman, a blacklisted member of the Hollywood 23, who spoke to the audience of her own life experience as it came under intense governmental pressure.
Norma Barzman’s own life, and that of her late husband Ben Barzman, became so untenable in the country of her birth, the United States, that she moved to Paris, France. There, she joined a flood of Cold War political refugees, many of them from the creative community. Previously, for a period of 5 years, she and her husband were forced to move every three months, as the FBI doggedly “investigated” them. Investigation in those years often meant harassing one’s friends, employers, and community.
Even in France, according to Norma Barzman, the reach of the FBI drove the French Sûreté, the French National Police as it was called then, to maintain a close eye on her. This in itself is not too surprising, as the Sûreté, and Interpol, never went though a rigorous process of de-Nazification after the Second World War. Old habits, especially within state security apparatuses, proved very hard to break.
In one case, she was called to the US Embassy, while in France, on a pretext that her papers were out of order. As she handed her passport to a desk officer, it was made clear to her that she just had her passport taken away from. In effect, she became a stateless American national, without a right of return. All of this happened as an outcome of her practicing a protected right to free speech, a right available to any person living on US soil, irrespective of their status, immigrant, native born, or naturalized.
This manner of presentation is a familiar one to many of us in the two harbors. The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, ILWU, has long used history as a pedagogic vehicle for organizing. The pivotal event of Bloody Thursday is one example that has been successfully maintained as a relevant event in the collective memory of all who work in the harbors.
It’s an intimately potent format that lends itself to reflection. A reflection, that then often drives community and union organizing with responding action. Which is the forum’s expressed function, and intent. This forum has a possibility of providing yet another dialogical framework for uniting the two clamshell sides that we call the Harbor Area.
The speakers, movies, and events chosen for this session, which reflected these poles, were then not a surprise. They complemented each other quite well. As it is only the second year, it is a telling mark on the care of selection, and of the quality of the speakers in the chosen subject matter, i.e. free expression and belief.
The forum gives a sense that the Harbors are no longer LA’s cultural backwater, but a space where what we do, and say, matters.
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