The DASB Elections Committee meeting last Wednesday (hereafter referred to as MudFest 2000) consisted of three-and-a-half hours of the worst ugliness I have seen at De Anza College. In my seven-year sentence/career/adventure (depends on my mood) here, nothing-not even the hate-mail flyer passed around campus 5-6 years ago, the more recent G.E. debacle, or the obscure bigoted man periodically pretending to be a minister in the quad-comes even close to the pettiness and active disrespect I witnessed at MudFest 2000.
No single column-not even a full issue-could do justice to the tensions, conflicts, and clashing perspectives which hovered on the edge of meltdown at the meeting last week. I leave it to the readers to sift through the hysteria, the necessarily limited articles, and the deeply conflicting spoken accounts. Here is my version … throw it in with the rest of the rubble and smoking embers left from last week’s fallout.
In a nutshell, the members of the DASB Election Committee were compelled (as part of their official duties) to sit through hours of rabid pretense. Various candidates and their respective allies grit their teeth through a pile of allegations of campaign violations, with the heavy subtitle of “let’s all pretend this is about procedure and the Election Code rules instead of our deep differences of opinion” hanging in the air.
The richest pretense (among the many) was the allegation of failure to be “impartial” leveled against the Elections Committee. Can we get a reality check, here? Anyone who tells you they are neutral is lying at least to you and very likely to themselves as well.
Instead of bickering over “neutrality” and “impartiality” (both of which are phantoms drawn from Objectivist mythology and similar superstitions) the De Anza community has a rare gift on its hands; it has an election in progress in which there are three very clearly conflicting visions of what both the ends and means of formal student government should be. We have the rare opportunity to choose among truly different views instead of “choosing” among different heads of the same beast.
At least MudFest 2000 had some silver linings. The repressed opinions of some previously reserved candidates were revealed, including Barrington J. Dyer’s particularly quaint take on identity politics: “I’m black. My dad’s black. I can use the ‘N’ word if I want to.” That’s a pretty big one, and I believe the students of De Anza deserve (and now might actually get) a serious explanation for it, just as I believe Dyer deserves a chance to make that explanation. Finally, MudFest 2000 highlighted a larger decision before the De Anza community. Do we:
A) Continue to be complicit in rule-by-pretense, in which ritual and procedure take precedent over the reasons which led to their creation in the first place (and in which we risk “catching up” to the kind of venom, spectacle, and dishonesty that characterizes city, state, and federal U.S. electoral politics)?
Or do we:
B) Support those who stick their necks out by living and working in the minefield of genuine, OPEN disagreement and political struggle (and in which we risk trading our comfort for the sake of gaining our freedom)?
I say we’re long overdue; it’s time to get uncomfortable. Freedom is not safe or cozy or polite or convenient. It involves uncertainty, constant risk, and a whole lot of conflict. It is also, however, the only clear route to fully enjoying our own humanity and working through the messes we make for each other.
