Robert Watson
        English

            Professor Robert Watson has been, for the majority of his academic career, a fairly indistinguishable part of the English department faculty.  In fact, a bare-bones review of his academic record shows nothing questionable.  In fact, Watson’s role as a long-term Shakespeare scholar makes him as an unfashionable retrograde in a field that increasingly disregards the Bard’s centrality.

            But to paraphrase the movie title, there’s something about Bush.  Specifically, President George W. Bush.  In a brief two-year eruption from 2001-2002, Watson became one of UCLA’s most ardent Daily Bruin correspondents (counting both students and faculty) with hyperbolic attacks seemingly drawn straight from MoveOn.org’s anti-Bush talking points.

            Watson, in two of his letters to the editor, inadvertently revealed the true source of his partisan rage: the experiences of his sainted father, whose name, for unknown reasons, Watson carefully omitted.  Comparing the respective histories of Robert Watson and his father Goodwin Watson, the reader is struck by their common psychological and political radicalism.  Some of that radicalism is heard in Robert Watson’s recollection of his father’s long-ago torment at the hands of Republicans: 

“McCarthyism and the American Legion hounded my World War I veteran father out of his jobs when I was a child, deeming him a subversive because he did things like helping establish Consumer Reports magazine (which made it too hard for corporations to cheat people) and standing up early for the Scottsboro Boys (which made legalized lynching too awkward).  By the time he was unanimously vindicated by the U.S. Supreme Court, he was making his living as a college professor…” 

            When Robert Watson’s own patriotism was questioned in a student’s November 16, 2001 Daily Bruin letter to the editor, he huffed that his “father’s ancestors fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. My father was no less a patriot in fighting a wave of right-wing hysteria fifty years ago.”             

            Watson’s recollections have more than a faint whiff of self-interested mythologizing: David vs. Goliath, us vs. them; really, the perpetual passion play of the political radical.  The truth is far more complex than Watson’s own gloss.  As history shows, Goodwin Watson was very much a radical, and if not a Communist in fact, then very much so in spirit.

            According to a 1952 American Legion Magazine article, Watson was agitating for politicization of the classroom (a familiar idea today) as early as a 1933 teachers’ conference.  During a discussion on how schools could help create a new social order, Watson suggested linking the schools “with socialist or communist agitators.” 

            In that same early 1930’s period, Watson and a number of other academics had formed a so-called Committee for Progressive Education Association on Social and Economic Problems.  In 1933 the Committee issued a “Call to the Teachers of the Nation,” which stated “Cumulative evidence supports the conclusion that, in the United States as in other countries, the age of individualism and laissez faire in economy and government is closing and a new age of collectivism is emerging.”  The “Call” urged teachers, in short, to promote the idea of collectivization.

            Just three years later in 1936, Watson helped form the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI).  According to one scholarly history, “The Politics of Scientific Social Reform, 1936-1960: Goodwin Watson and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues,” 

“Watson and many of his SPSSI colleagues endeavored to expose…the capitalist economy of the United States. Having surveyed the American social and economic landscape, Watson was convinced that America’s economic organization was grossly unjust.  Capitalism was a system of “scarcity” and “exploitation of the many by and for the few.”  What kept it in place despite its many failings was a powerful ideological framework that prevented ordinary people from seeing the “true” nature of social and economic relations.  The task of the politically enlightened psychologist as Watson saw it was to penetrate this veil of false consciousness. He called upon psychologists to “help the average citizen see through the efforts to misconstrue our economic and political predicament” on the assumption that working class awareness of the shortcomings of capitalism would precipitate significant political change.”

Along these same lines, a 1937 issue of Social Frontier reported Watson’s urging of psychologists to become “participant observers at the most strategic points of [social] reconstruction.”  Speaking presciently of a dismal future of politicized classrooms (soon to be in full bloom under the professors of his son’s generation), Watson proclaimed:

“Research should be thought of not as hewing rocks of ages to be laid in foundations of towers which rise ever higher, but as giving a brief push or steer to ongoing currents.  What really matters is not a publication embalmed in archives, but an influence on the flow of thought and action.”

A June 29, 1938 New York Herald article about the ongoing National Education Association convention being held in New York City noted, “Dr. Goodwin Watson, Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, begged the teachers of the nation to use their profession to indoctrinate children to overthrow “conservative reactionaries” directing American government and industry. . . . (He) declared that Soviet Russia was one of the most notable international achievements of our generation.”  

            Four years later in 1941, Watson was chosen Chief of the Section on Analysis in the Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service (FBMS) of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  Despite the position being a part of the current war effort, Watson had no use for the conflict, having declared in a 1940 issue of American Teacher that war “was not, in itself the crisis, but only a symptom of our deeper problems,” chief among them, the existence of the “capitalistic world.”

            It was this war-time appointment which drew the attention of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (more commonly known as House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC), then chaired by Congressman Martin Dies of Texas.  A fascinating side-note, and one that Robert Watson conveniently omits in his self-righteous tirades against conservatives, is that his father’s tormentor Dies was actually a Democrat.  Moreover, Dies’ chief investigator, Joseph Brown Matthews, was at one point in the early 1930s a leftist of national reputation, boasting associations with over sixty radical organizations.  The Scientific Scholarly Reform paper attributes Matthews’ subsequent journey over to political conservatism as the outgrowth of his role as an executive member of the group's board, in resisting a unionization effort by employees at the Consumers Research organization.  According to the SSR’s cited source, this sparked Matthews’ realization that he was, at heart, a “political and economic conservative.”  In response to Matthews’ opposition, the Consumers Research employees left the group and, with Watson’s help, formed the rival Consumers Union, best known today for its long-running publication Consumer Reports. 

            Watson would later claim in his 1968-recorded oral history that his role in sinking Matthews’ Consumers Research venture was part of the reason for the HCUA’s immediate interest in Watson’s appointment to the relatively unimportant FCC post.  As proof of this, Watson recalled a conversation with one of his home-state Wisconsin Congressmen, who claimed that the HCUA’s interest was really an elaborate end-game to embarrass President Roosevelt’s newly appointed FCC head James Lawrence Fly by casting Fly’s underlings as Communists.  It’s a conspiracy that, if true, would rival Douglas Kellner’s wild-eyed tales of Bush Family-Nazi connections.  

If the HCUA’s case against Watson was indeed a combination of elaborate anti-FDR conspiracy and personal vendetta, Watson would have to admit, at minimum, to having given his enemies more than enough ammunition.  Having aired anti-capitalist, anti-war, pro-indoctrination, pro-activism ideas, not simply to friends and neighbors, but also in print and in public forums, Watson was, at the time of the HCUA’s scrutiny, a Communist in thought and deed, if (presumably) not on any official party roster.  Moreover, Watson’s political commitments could not be cast as collegiate excesses or the wild words of youth, given that the first cited examples of his political radicalism began at the not-so-tender age of 37.

As it happened, despite Robert Watson’s melodramatic recollection of the issue, the HCUA in the end took no action on Watson.  However, his name and 38 others were passed along to the newly created standing subcommittee of the House Committee on Appropriations.  This Kerr Subcommittee, as it was dubbed, was tasked with hearing charges of government employee subversion.  And it was the Kerr Committee that called for Watson’s testimony, one of the first six out of the 39 total on the list.

Watson’s resultant testimony is almost comical in its fawning nature, especially given his defiant attitude of no more than six years before.  At the Kerr Committee, Watson testified, “I think [the United States] is the best government the world has ever seen.  I think it is the best country the world has ever seen.”  Disavowing his previous commitments to radical social change, Watson also stated, “I do not [now] believe in any such sweeping substitution of one economic order for another. Now it looks to me as though any change we have in this country is likely to be a normal process of growth and modification of existing institutions.”  Despite the sudden and complete turnabout (or perhaps because of its wholesale nature) the Kerr Committee was unmoved, and declared Watson, on the grounds of his previous activities and statements, a subversive and therefore not fit for government employment.  Note here that the order was not for Watson to be driven out of Washington on a rail, for him to be tarred-and-feathered, or that he be sent to the U.S.S.R., only that he be barred from government employment.  

            Compare this proper history with Robert Watson’s tendentious version in which McCarthyites “deem[ed Goodwin Watson] a subversive because he did things like helping establish Consumer Reports magazine (which made it too hard for corporations to cheat people) and standing up early for the Scottsboro Boys (which made legalized lynching too awkward).” 

 Even the SSR paper, though wholly sympathetic, gives no indication that the Kerr Committee was concerned with Watson’s role with the Consumers Union, or the Scottsboro Boys.  The Committee was focused, and rightly so, on his more substantive and direct opposition to the capitalist bedrock which underlies American democracy; it was concerned by his campaign for classroom indoctrination, and yes, even a professed admiration for the Soviet Union.  Full transcript of Watson’s appearance at the Kerr Committee may well show that these two relatively minor factors were a point of concern for the Committee.  But given Watson’s far more blatant positions, it appears that it was unnecessary for the Committee to read tea leaves on whether support for the Scottsboro Boys was a subversive activity, or whether the Consumers Union had radical sympathies or goals. 

At any rate, the very American democracy that Robert Watson scorns today eventually saved his father.  As it happened, after the Kerr Committee’s decision, a rider was attached to a $134 million deficiency appropriation bill passed in the House.  The rider stated, in short, that no part of any Congressional funding could be used to pay the salary of one Goodwin Watson.  While the bill was passed quickly, it was rejected unanimously by the Senate on substantive procedural grounds.  This back-and-forth in which the House passed the bill, only to see it rejected by the Senate, then occurred four more times, until the Senate, dismayed at the prospect of financially punishing thousands of federal employees to protect one, acquiesced and passed the bill.  President Roosevelt, while denouncing the bill as “unconstitutional,” took the same pragmatic approach and signed it into law.  But on June 3, 1946, the Supreme Court, in United States vs. Lovett, unanimously vindicated both Roosevelt’s view and Watson’s personal fight, finding that the firing constituted an unconstitutional bill of attainder and awarded Watson back pay.

Goodwin Watson’s experience, quite obviously, made a huge impression on his son.  Regardless of HCUA scrutiny, Robert Watson would have grown up in a radical household.  Watching his father’s political difficulties filled Watson with an almost unquenchable rage, a perpetual sense of being the victim, the outsider, trodden down by those in power. 

For a period of at least six years leading up to 2000, all was quiet with Robert Watson.  Nary a political comment passed his lips; his metaphorical poison pen never touched paper. Not coincidentally, the 1994-2000 Daily Bruin archives which contain no Watson missives were also years in which Bill Clinton served as president.  While Clinton was not a hard-core political radical, neither did his politics provoke Watson into foam-flecked partisan rants.  It took the election of George W. Bush to really set him loose.  On January 8, 2001, under the headline “Inauguration spells doom for democratic principles,” Watson let loose with a five-point condemnation of, well, just about everything that had happened, alleging:

Watson’s clarion call for an effort to “turn our anger and disgust into determination and hope” was indeed a success.  The January 22, 2001 Daily Bruin reported that Watson, along with Film and Television Professor Fabian Wagmister, met with around thirty students to observe…well, not observing the Inauguration.  If Seinfeld was the show about nothing, this meeting was apparently the gathering about nothing.  Watson, in fine form, snapped, “Something truly outrageous and destructive ha[s] happened, and the Bush handlers [are] cynically counting on everybody wanting to forget about it.”  Then, trying to put a deeper, intellectual meaning to what was essentially a sour-grapes conclave, Watson proclaimed, “People acknowledge the limits on what they could do, but weren’t willing to give up.  They managed to be emotionally involved and rationally analytic at the same time.  That does a professor’s heart good.”  “Rationally analytic”?  Those words certainly wouldn’t apply to Watson’s own broad-strokes Viewpoint submission, or even his snappish comments at the event.

Whether it was the anger over Bush’s election, the thrill of seeing his name in newsprint, or even the “emotional involvement” of the anti-Inauguration event, it seemed as though the January 2001 articles opened floodgates that had previously been holding back Watson’s politically-oriented output.  Over the fifteen months (including three quiet months of summer), Watson would spew forth no less than eleven Viewpoint submissions or letters to the editor.  Of particular note was his habit of rebutting negative reactions to his submissions (if you’re following along at home, that’s Watson – Response – Watson’s Response to Response).  Unknown are the exact number of Watson’s submissions or responses that weren’t printed.  As it was, Watson was showing up almost as often as Viewpoint columnists themselves were.  That’s no exaggeration, either: on three different occasions, two of Watson’s submissions were printed within a one-month period, the same frequency as the bi-monthly output of staff columnists.

On February 21, 2001, Watson fired the first salvo with a letter against Ben Shapiro’s Daily Bruin column, “Tolerance Makes for False Gods.”  This marked the start of what would eventually be a long and (on Shapiro’s part, at least) cogent battle of political views.  Watson's long-winded political denunciation was so chock-full of wild accusations and libelous allusions that it almost defies summary.  Watson mocked “Saint Reagan [who] took over 10 times the parting gifts that Clinton took,” “George the Father [who] pardoned many big contributors,” and threw out the non-sequitur that Clinton “has always spent a lot more time in “congregations of God” than either Reagan or Bush.”  Slashing forward to the current day, Watson accused Bush’s “biggest contributors [of] making billions in just the first few weeks of his administration by jacking up energy prices.”  Watson then derided both Dr. Laura and John Ashcroft as liars, and, in an oddly digressive response to Shapiro’s assertion that Ashcroft’s views on affirmative action are Biblically-based, snapped that Ashcroft’s policies are un-Christian because they were supposedly creating a “widening gap between rich and poor.”  When and where Shapiro’s assertions were overbroad, there was an undeniable opportunity for clarification or thoughtful dispute.  But while Watson claims to disavow any “unified ethos – fascist, communist, Christian, Islam, whatever,” he evidences a clear devotion to the god of wild, fact-free denunciations. 

Following his initial salvo at Shapiro, Watson went mercifully silent until, inspired by political revelations in mid-2001, he launched another broadside attempting to pin the hypocrite tail on the Republican Party.  His May 10, 2001 submission argued that “the people quickest to make excuses for the mass killings of helpless innocents by Sen. Kerrey and his team of Navy SEALs are the conservatives who relentlessly bash the left for “moral relativism.””  Oddly enough, as the historical record shows, Sen. Kerrey was a Nebraska Democrat and was apparently later found politically simpatico enough to run the self-described “progressive” New School University in New York City.  It’s a weird contention, to say the least: that Republicans were so eager to defend the Vietnam War in general that they’d both expose themselves as hypocrites and defend a Democratic holding a vulnerable, valuable Senate seat.  Watson’s conspiracy theory must be borne aloft on pure faith, because as history notes, the Vietnam War was the war created and expanded by two Democrat administrations, and ended by, drumroll please, a Republican. 

Never mind factually-based history or argumentative continuity – Watson had a point to make.  And that point, simply, was that conservatives “are suddenly invoking context to excuse crimes which surely, in isolation, are more obviously and grievously “wrong” than most of the things the left has tried to explain.”  Specifically, “the same conservatives who cling to that shadow [of doubt as to Kerrey’s guilt] would have blithely thrown away the key on any ghetto kid whom a notorious jailhouse “informant” claimed to have seen near a crack vial.”  It is here that Watson showed the first flash of his rare talent for combining a tendentious argument with a exaggerated redirection.  Presto, he says, I have won my argument.

 The reader can tell what, given its premises, Watson’s argument should have been: that conservatives will consider context in a war zone but not in the instance of a drug case in an impoverished area.  That argument would be lame and rather unconvincing, predicated on the idea that the most impoverished American ghetto could somehow compare to the horror and stress of a real war-zone.  But Watson wouldn’t even argue his point normally.  Instead, he redirected that argument into such an exaggeration of his original assertion that it became nothing less than a loaded deck.  The argument shifted from an instance of probable guilt in a ghetto drug possession case that might be explained by context, into an absurd hypothetical in which a “notorious” (by implication lying) jailhouse informant helped convict an innocent ghetto youth who had merely been near a vial of crack.  Watson would do well to remember that destroying straw-man arguments doesn’t make anyone a champion debater.

  Unfortunately for all concerned, Watson’s absurd argument continues apace.  Returning to his original subject, Watson expresses amazement over the public’s supposed “sententious worship of the U.S. military,” in light of their “reckless blunders in which our hot shot pilots and captains have killed innocent skiers and fishermen and gone free.”  But Watson doesn't confine himself to an oddball allusion to aeronautic accidents and a truly vague reference to military incidents involving “fishermen.”  He then sneers, “In recent wars, our soldiers have mostly been killed by each other, resulting in a hail of medals and parade streamers.”  Whether a byproduct of word limits, or a false belief in shared reference points with the reader, Watson’s allusions here and elsewhere are truly inscrutable.  The most “recent wars,” as of Watson’s writing in 2001, were the Persian Gulf War of 1991 that resulted in 147 battle-related fatalities and 325 non-battle-related deaths, and the disastrous Somalia operation of 1993 resulted in 29 killed in action and 44 total dead.  To anyone else, a low number of casualties in recent U.S. conflicts is proof that the military is doing something right.  To Watson, both high and low casualties are targets for his condescension.

Watson then compounds the head-scratching nature of his criticism by claiming that those who died in friendly-fire accidents received a “hail of medals and parade streamers.”  Did these medals of which he speaks go to those who accidentally killed a fellow service member?  And does Watson believe that parades are held for those who kill, or are killed, in friendly-fire accidents?  As with the bizarre allusions to the military killing skiers and fishermen, the reader is again left scratching his head.  What is Watson referring to?  It’s better, frankly, not to ask such a question when reading his missives.  Watson’s writing is little but hyperbole, vicious in its own heavy-handed way. 

Watson's public writings swing like a metronome between non-judgmentalism and firm opinion.  Even more confusing are the instances in which Watson takes a doctrinaire line about his supposed ecumenicism.  Such an example is found in his October 22, 2001 response to a previous letter-to-the-editor, which in turn was an initial response to a full Viewpoint column.  In Watson’s letter, he corrects a student’s misapprehension that it was the Founding Fathers who made “In God We Trust” our national motto.  To the contrary, Watson notes, the motto “wasn’t placed on our currency until 1956 at the height of McCarthyism, when right-wingers used the threat of Communism to impose all kinds of cultural conformity.”  Cultural conformity that required, for example, that Watson’s father abandon his plans to inculcate in his and other students the manifold wonders of “collectivism.” 

Having made this strong point, Watson swings the other way into moral equivocation, insisting that in real, substantive ways, Americans are no better than the 9/11 hijackers.  Why?  Well, each side trusts “in their version of God.”  By Watson’s standard, if two people end up in a fistfight that each firmly believes the other provoked, there’s no use in trying to make in independent, objective decision about who’s really at fault.  Do Muslim terrorists have God on their side?  The reasonable person says definitely not.  Watson says essentially, ‘Who knows?’ 

Recalling Goodwin Watson’s ardor for classroom indoctrination, it’s not surprising to find that his son Robert Watson gives it his own vigorous approval.  In a November 8, 2001 Viewpoint submission to the Daily Bruin, Watson challenged the issues of faculty political imbalance raised in my own column, “Campus suppresses ‘right’ education.”  After melodramatically recalling his father’s political troubles, Watson made the claim that, because he “graduated in the top 1 percent of [his] class at Yale” he had a strong chance at getting into a “good business or law school and earn[ing] a big salary.” If you didn’t know Watson’s family history, this might sound reasonable.  But Watson was not just the son of professor – his grandfather Walter Starr Watson was a biology professor at the Whitewater, Wisconsin Normal School.  Frankly, being professors is what the Watson men do.  So while it might well be true that the average top-ranking Yale student chooses among a wide variety of options, Watson was never in that category, and was never, as he claims, likely to end up in a corporate boardroom.

Undeterred, Watson uses his personal story as ‘evidence’ to sustain the argument that “you will find a lot more staunch conservatives among the tenured faculty at UCLA than you will leftist radicals among the managing partners at major financial institutions.”  Watson then asks whether “is there perhaps again a more organic explanation” for the enormously imbalanced Democrat/Republican ratios?  There in fact is a reason, but it is not one that concede Watson’s “natural imbalance” thesis. 

Addressing Watson’s challenge, we can safely say that there is nothing unique to Democrats, liberals or radicals that would make them ideal for a liberal arts professorship, nor is there anything that would make the average radical a better candidate than the average conservative.  That is, unless, you make a candidate’s agreement with radical precepts a condition of hiring, which is exactly what has happened.  If the deck were not ideologically stacked, the imbalance would subside to more natural levels. 

And, in addressing the other half of Watson’s argument, there is in fact a rather obvious, and natural ideological requirement for employees of “financial institutions.”  The typical brokerage house or venture capital fund employee must accept the existence and necessity of capitalism (which alone is a challenge for many radicals) and must concern himself solely with numbers.  This is a reasonable requirement that spans the entire industry.  The only similar area of conservative unsuitability in academia might come in a conservative teaching Chicano Studies, which is predicated upon a radical view of social order and personal/group identity, which most conservatives would simply not accept.  Note, however, that the ideological precepts implicit to the vast majority of academic jobs do not conflict significantly with any conservative ideals.

            Following his initial response to my column, the Bruin published a countervailing letter to the editor, spurring Watson to, once again, pick up his pen and resume the battle.  The frequency with which Watson engaged in such editorial tit-for-tat gives the impression that he mistook the Bruin, from at least 2001-2003, as the newsprint equivalent of a Socratic dialogue.  Those with whom he disagreed would play the role of Plato’s questioners, the responses to whom Plato used as a means of expounding philosophically for entire pages.  Returning to the question of faculty political bias, Watson casts radical professors as innocent folks simply trying to “ask hard questions about the things society has been most comfortable assuming.” 

 Watson could ask hard questions about why the sky is blue or why waves crash on the seashore, perhaps even rejecting the current explanations.  But simply asking these questions wouldn’t make him smart.  The same goes for the colleagues that Watson defends. 

Watson then picks up the bloody flag of totalitarianism and begins waving it…in his defense, claiming, “Communist and Nazi governments alike hated and even systematically exterminated professors for failing to cheerlead for the party’s policies and leaders.”  Suffice it to say that watching a radical like Watson wrap himself in the flag of political martyrdom is comic gold.  Watson then floats the whopper that “you don’t need universities to assure Americans that their nation is always and entirely virtuous, and that the laws are fair and fairly applied – the government will do that.”  Watson is apparently under the warped impression that the UC’s mission is hire professors who will provide a deafening Greek chorus of criticism.

            Watson, having dubbed himself one of the brave radical thinkers willing to ask the “hard questions,” proceeded to use a January 25, 2002 Daily Bruin broadside to deliver the easy insult and the unsupportable contention.  Responding again to a Ben Shapiro column, Watson was virtually beside himself with vituperation for the Republican Party.  Playing the game of gotcha as if he had personally invented it the night before, Watson snarked that Newt Gingrich had “dumped various wives, including one on whom he pressed divorce papers in the hospital bed where she was recovering from cancer surgery.”  This insult out of the way, Watson finally builds up a head of steam and goes on a tear by calling out (in order) Gingrich for “having an affair with an aide, Callista Bisek,” Henry Hyde, whose “affair shattered” another couple’s marriage, President George H.W. Bush “who was generally known in Washington to be having an affair with his appointments secretary Jennifer Fitzgerald,” Bob Packwood for “serial unwanted sexual pressuring of his employees,” Dwight Eisenhower for having an “extramarital affair with his Army driver, Kay Summersby,” and, last, Ronald Reagan, “whose own children testify to his disgraceful family behavior.” 

 Lest you think the current Republican president is getting off easy, Watson takes another deep breath and accuses his daughters of “breaking the law and then using the Secret Service to spring them and their drinking buddies out of jail.”  Laura Bush, Watson crows, “killed a man by running a stop sign at 50 mph and never got so much as a traffic ticket because the powerful family shielded her.”  And Bush himself?  Watson declares that he used “his own family power to dodge Vietnam and not even show up for his alternative service,” then “spent years snorting cocaine, a crime for which he gloatingly locked up countless fellow-Texans and threw away the key.”

Reading Watson’s broad, shamelessly unsubstantiated attacks, one can’t help but think of him as the bastard child of Maureen Dowd and UCLA professor (and resident Bush conspiracist) Douglas Kellner, forever on the attack, completely unafraid of throwing around wild accusations pulled straight from the web pages of Counterpunch or Buzzflash.  Better yet, Watson tries to soften the harsh indictment (and put an intellectual face on his rabid partisanship), disclaiming that he’s “no admirer of the personal ethics of major politicians in either major party.”  This, before launching into a virtual 95 Theses of condemnation for one party, with the evident sole purpose of moving the spotlight off of Bill Clinton’s manifold faults.  After all, Watson points out, we need to move past the “snide remarks about the consensual sex-life of a president from the previous millennium.”

Watson, given his hatred of the Bush family and each of its members individually, was only too happy to jump to the defense of Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (GSEIS) students Tara Watford and Estela Zarate.  The two had a brief moment of infamy for their leading role in a student protest against the invitation of Laura Bush as the 2002 GSEIS commencement speaker.  As it happened, Bush was unlikely to accept the invitation anyway, but the protest by a rump group of students certainly sealed the decision.  The story of Watford and Zarate’s protest broke in the Daily Bruin on February 20, 2002, airing their criticisms of Bush’s “shallow credentials,” and their distress over a lack of “student input” in the selection process.  Watford, a doctoral student, charged that Laura Bush “was selected for her political celebrity” and argued that she “has no merit,” in the field of education.  Zarate added that students “will not stand by and allow her presence to go uncontested.”

The story was linked on DrudgeReport.com that same day, and unleashed an epic public relations nightmare for UCLA.  Literally hundreds of emails poured in to the Daily Bruin office, while the administration struggled to reiterate the fact that UCLA itself was not rescinding its invitation, and that this was solely the rightful free speech of students.  Needless to say, the story captured the political zeitgeist, a national exasperation with radical faculty and students.  The letters, a small portion of which were published by the Bruin in an unprecedented full page of letters to the editor, poured abuse on the students and on UCLA.  Five days later on February 25^th, Watson came riding to the rescue with a submission that cherry-picked the most intemperate of published criticism (which may itself have already been cherry-picked for immoderation by a Bruin staff grown impatient with the hundreds of emails on the topic).  Setting up straw men left and right, Watson unleashed a few real doozies,  mocking one letter-writer’s assertion that the students’ objections “is not free speech!  It is worse than McCarthyism.  It is Stalinism.”  No doubt rubbing his hands with gleeful anticipation, Watson dismisses the idea with the zinger, “This is just another example of the fair-minded historical perspective that students twisted by UCLA’s liberal professors can never hope to achieve.”

Making lazy arguments almost as fast as the eye can see, Watson answers one letter-writer’s charge that the “public educational system has been…a dismal failure in teaching our children to read, write and think objectively,” with the rhetorical question, “Isn’t the main problem that teachers are paid miniscule salaries to work under miserable conditions in unsafe buildings without even basic supplies to teach masses of unparented children who’ve been force-fed commercial video trash their whole lives?”  Whew.  This is pure Watson, setting up a straw man so comically detailed that the answer presupposes itself – provided his hypothetical were actually somewhat reflective of the actual working conditions of teachers.  Do some teachers receive small salaries?  Do some not have basic supplies, have to teach poorly parented children, in unsafe buildings?  Certainly there are teachers who fall into each of those categories.  But Watson acts as if every teacher suffers under every one of those conditions.  In fact, economists looking at the hourly wage of schoolteachers find that they earn better average pay than firemen, policemen, and many other occupations, with earnings per hour that come close to that of highly trained engineers or accountants.  Watson doesn’t know, or doesn’t care to know, any of that though.  What he does know is incredibly lazy argumentation.  Much like his “ghetto child” hypothetical, Watson sets up a situation so extreme that he answers his own question.  Perhaps this sort of stuff flies in the academic output of the UCLA English department, but it wouldn’t pass muster even in a basic high school debate class.

Before closing out his submission on the Laura Bush controversy, Watson reels off a few more closing insults, arguing that “her husband stole the election, plunged the economy into recession, shredded half the Bill of Rights, aggravated world tensions, and shoveled our budget surplus and natural environment over to his corporate pals, all this beginning before the 9/11 atrocities.”  How does one even begin to address this kind of wild, spray-and-pray brand of argumentation?  Watson seems convinced that the only way he’ll win the argument is to bury his opposition in an avalanche of broad claims.  “Plunged the economy into recession”?  If in February 2002 (Watson’s date of writing), our country was in a recession, it proved remarkably brief, given that the United States’ gross domestic product has seen only positive growth since that year.  “Shredded half the Bill of Rights”?  This is a groundless assertion bandied about by radicals with such frequency that it fits the Hitlerian maxim of the “big lie.”  Considering Watson’s intemperate, fact-free rhetoric, the statement is an apt description of his own political declamations.

Besides his bete noire Ben Shapiro, Watson also conducted a long-running Daily Bruin Viewpoint tussle with Anderson School Professor Theodore Andersen.  Perhaps the most enjoyable part of the whole running debate was that Watson was engaging a business professor on the topic of economic history, not exactly home turf for a Shakespearean English professor.  Given the way Watson charged heedlessly forward, it was clear that he felt The Nation and Mother Jones gave him all the background he needed.  In a March 1^st rejoinder to Andersen’s February 27, 2002 letter to the editor (addressing Watson’s original February 25, 2002 Laura Bush column), Watson conceded that, contrary to his original assertion about when the (then-)current economic slump began, perhaps “the first hints of recession did indeed emerge in [Clinton’s] final lame-duck months.”  Unwilling to totally retreat though, Watson snapped that the economic problems “became worse when Bush was appointed as successor [did you catch the 2000 election-related dig there?] and much worse again in the months after Bush took office.” 

On March 7^th, Watson sallied forth again to do factual battle with Andersen, disputing an assertion of Andersen about the economic expansion of 1982-2000.  Deriding the statement as “Reagan-worship,” Watson claimed that during the Reagan-Bush era, “the super-rich got super-richer, [while] the economy as a whole was suffering badly.”  Only during the Clinton years did the economy really succeed.  Lest the reader focus too long on this incredibly crude recitation of modern economic history, Watson let loose with some radical verbal diarrhea, spewing his anger at

“right-wing politicians – including the current Bush – who justify relentless incursions on the health of our environment and the survival of our wilderness, massive transfers of public wealth to weapons makers, limiting social services in order to provide tax-breaks for the already wealthy, and disempowerment of ordinary workers, all on the grounds that their “business-friendly” policies provide a rising tide that lifts all boats.”

Anyone attempting to engage Watson’s ideas is again left shuddering at the sheer impossibility of addressing so many wild, mile-wide accusations crammed into a single sentence.  Compounding that problem is Watson’s familiar habit of making odd allusions, like his vague reference to “massive transfers of public wealth to weapons makers.”  Watson’s world-view is so divorced from reality that he considers social services for the poor to be a right, while remaining convinced that the money that funds these programs (from those dastardly folks who are “already wealthy”) was never the actual property of those who earned it.  If you accept that as a rational argument, then scorning a policy of returning some of people’s own money with the label of “tax breaks” can seem entirely logical.  Truth be told, “tax breaks” (as the normal person understands them) is the granting of a special exemption to a narrowly targeted group of taxpayers.  By that standard, the Bush administration’s multiple rounds of across-the-board tax rate cuts are the worst executed “tax break” for the poor ever executed.  Because even after all the supposed cosseting of fat-cats, it is still poor Americans, not those who Watson derides as the “super-rich,” who most often pay little to no taxes.  Therefore, if Watson won’t speak of “tax breaks” for the poor (as he obviously will not), it is only fair to expect that he clam up about those for the more fortunate. 

While Watson’s tete-a-tete with Professor Andersen was memorable in its own way, it was Ben Shapiro who would repay Watson’s constant radical diatribes in a most practical way: reprinting them to a wide national audience in his book expose titled “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth.”  Watson took deep offense at the spotlight, and, after the Daily Bruin solicited his comment for their own hit piece (which suffered from a major factual error), Watson submitted a letter to the editor.  In it, Watson slurred Shapiro’s book as “just bait, and sloppy bait at that,” and called the publisher WorldNetDaily Books “a sideline of a conspiracy-crazed right-wing Web site.”  Most telling is that Watson’s only substantive objection to Shapiro’s narrative was a minor instance of artistic license.  As already noted above, Watson convened an anti-Bush inauguration event on January 20, 2001 with another professor and about 30 students – and his wife.  The Bruin noted that as “tears welled in [the] eyes” of Dana Carns-Watson, she stated “I don’t believe in God. The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are narratives to me of how the world should work, and what happened in the last election destroyed that.”  In the Watson household, political hysteria is apparently contagious. 

Shapiro recounted this pathetic interlude in his book, animating the quote with the introduction, “Watson then dragged out his sobbing wife who managed to say…”  While Watson adroitly noted in his 2003 Daily Bruin letter that “nothing remotely like that happened,” one suspects that his self-righteous fury over this trifling instance of artistic license in the work of a first-time author has less to do with the invention of “belittling details” than with Shapiro’s belittling comment that Watson’s wife is “brainless.”  The invention of details is no doubt a mistake, but it looms small indeed in comparison to Dana (and Robert) Watson’s hysterical predictions of political disaster.

Watson’s teaching, by comparison to the high drama of his public letters, is a dry business indeed, focused up until recently on Shakespeare and English Renaissance poetry.  However, since 2000, Watson has been one of four class coordinators for the General Education Cluster class “The United States, 1960-74: History, Politics and Culture.”  Incredibly, the course takes a full three quarters (an entire academic year) to cover this mere 14-year span of time.  With such luxuries of time, it might seem natural that the era could be covered in all its nuance, radical and liberal, conservative and patriotic.  If only this were true.  The readings for Watson’s Fall 2005 presentations are a grim, one-sided lot.  One such title is Thomas Pinchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49,” a book described by one reviewer as an “anarchistic satire of the military-industrial-government complex.”  Watson’s second class contribution is a lecture on the Vietnam War.  If you’ve read Watson’s May 2001 Daily Bruin diatribe, you already know he dismisses the conflict as an attempt to “impose a corrupt, unpopular right-wing puppet government on a poor and fiercely independent people, in contradiction of both our treaties and our democratic principles, driving them into the hands of increasingly radicalized communists.”  The lecture, it can be fairly predicted, is likely to be directed from that playbook.

In keeping with his own virulently anti-war views, Watson directs students (via assigned readings in the syllabus) to read the Toledo Blade expose on “Tiger Force, an elite fighting unit in Vietnam [which] left a trail of atrocities in that country that have been concealed from the public for three decades.”  Watson also assigns Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” which carries the message that Vietnam soldiers “carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die....They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice.... Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to.”  Suffice to say, the book has little good to say about the Vietnam War.  Nor, for that matter, does a selection from the anti-war tome “Where is Vietnam? American Poets Respond”  The anthology, edited by Walter Lownfels, contained in its complete form the contributions of 87 poets.  As one reviewer summarizes, “Although a few poems are set in Southeast Asia, most of the works presented in these anthologies reflect the writers’ attitudes to U.S. involvement in Vietnam by references to the political scene, the war as seen on TV or reported in the newspapers, and to antiwar themes in general. These anthologies and the numerous individual poems that were published served to define and sustain the general intellectual opposition to the war.” 

Watson’s particular selection from the anthology, from Denise Levertov, is the work of a long-time radical and anti-war activist who, at an April 15, 1970 rally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, stated,

“I believe we cannot bring the wars to an end – and I use the plural “wars” because there are wars going on in many countries, and in all these wars the United States has a hand – we cannot bring the wars to an end without bringing the capitalist-imperialist system to an end.  These wars, whether in Asia or in Latin America or wherever they erupt, are wars of national liberation, in which people are fighting for self-determination against America’s puppet governments, America’s CIA and its “advisors,” America’s napalm, American’s giant corporations, even when American troops are not involved.” 

Levertov urged “we, white radicals,” to “be out demanding that the trial of Bobby Seale and the other Panthers be stopped.”  “More and more,” Levertov concluded, “people must be prepared to act militantly.  The days of mere protest are over…if it sounds apocalyptic, o.k., it is apocalyptic.”  In order to escape “a period of terror, of increased repression, of bloodshed,” Levertov warned, “one chance of survival…lies in solidarity and in the recognition now of the necessity of revolution.”  What utter garbage.  This author is what a respected UCLA faculty member like Robert Watson believes is a relevant voice in presenting a balanced portrait of the Vietnam War, the defining military conflict of an entire generation?  Ah, but we assume that Watson is interested in balance, when that’s not at all the case.

While Levertov is a particular lowlight, none of Watson’s other selections are any better, ranging from Oliver Stone’s embittered anti-Vietnam movie “Platoon,”  to a reading of the music group 10,000 Maniacs’ song “The Big Parade.”  The song, written from the perspective of the child of a serviceman killed in the Vietnam War who finally visits the Washington, D.C. memorial, asks “Who caused my mother's tears, was it Washington or the Viet Cong?” and comments, “Abraham had his war too, but an honest war / Or so it’s taught in school.”  Rounding out Watson’s assigned materials is a selection from Wallace Terry’s book “Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans.” The selection, an interview with military veteran Reginald “Malik” Edwards, carries Edwards’ recollections of being called a “chocolate bunny” and a “Brillo” head.  Edwards, not surprisingly, has little good to say about the war or the military.  So do the math and count up Watson’s selections for the class.  Out of the assigned items, not one is even arguably pro-war; few even present a mixed verdict on the subject.  For the most part, Watson’s teaching conforms to his personal politics – utterly radical, utterly one-sided.