On most Sundays in Austin, Texas, the sanctuary of University Baptist Church — a graceful yet cavernous space that can accommodate as many as twelve hundred people — dwarfs the dozens who gather there to worship. On September 9, 2001, however, inside the Colonial Revival edifice of “Austin’s Progressive Voice of Faith since 1908,” every inch of every pew was occupied. Crowds swarmed each door and spilled onto the sidewalks of Guadalupe and 22nd streets.
By September 9, 2001, University Baptist Church, most often called “UBC” by those who attended, had been or would be thrown out of every Southern Baptist-related organization in Texas and the whole United States of America. And for good reason: the congregation, despite not only its many schisms but also its location eleven blocks north of the Texas capitol building, had a history of radical inclusiveness regardless of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation. By liturgy if not theology or church structure, University Baptist was what some congregants called “Babtopalian.” Such sectarian subtleties, however, seemed lost on Fred Phelps.
“University Baptist Church's acceptance of gays and lesbians has attracted the attention of Fred Phelps, a Kansas pastor who leads incendiary anti-gay demonstrations across the country,” a pre-story in the Austin American-Statesman announced (Perkes). UBC already knew Phelps was on his way; thanks to interfaith organizations, so did folks at churches, mosques, synagogues, and other civil and political groups across Austin. Phelps planned to bring twenty members of his Westboro Baptist Church to picket UBC's 11:00 a.m. worship service. The Statesman story explained, “Phelps said he learned about University Baptist in August when the church pulled out of the Atlanta-based Cooperative Baptist Fellowship over the fellowship’s policy against hiring gays and lesbians and financing groups that support homosexual causes.” Not that the church was univocal. I had attended the church meeting at which members chose, many of them reluctantly, to withdraw from another relatively moderate Baptist organization, one in which some longtime church members had participated faithfully for years.
“In the past decade, the 71-year-old pastor said his Topeka church has staged more than 21,000 demonstrations. One of the most high-profile and controversial protests was at the Laramie, Wyo., funeral of Matthew Shepard, who was beaten to death for being gay ” (Perkes). While most in the United States had heard of neither Phelps nor Westboro before Matthew Shepard's funeral, the group had been active since the mid-1980s, protesting at funerals of people who died of AIDS, including pioneering gay journalist Randy Shilts in 1994. After Shepard's 1998 murder and Westboro's protest at Shepard's funeral, Phelps -- through his church, made up largely of his own family members — would arguably become by his death in 2014 "the most hated man in America."
Yet Phelps and Westboro did more than farm hatred all across the fruited plain. As the twentieth century turned to the twenty-first, a case against Phelps and Westboro reached the US Supreme Court after the family of deceased Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder filed a lawsuit against Westboro members who protested at his funeral. The Snyder family, in the words of Oyez.org, "accused the church and its founders of defamation, invasion of privacy and the intentional infliction of emotional distress for displaying signs that said, 'Thank God for dead soldiers' and 'Fag troops' at Snyder's funeral" (Snyder v. Phelps). While US District Judge Richard Bennett awarded the Snyder family $5 million in damages, the Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Bennett's judgment violated First Amendment protections of religious expression. Concluded Oyez.org, "The church members' speech is protected, 'notwithstanding the distasteful and repugnant nature of the words'" (Snyder v. Phelps).
The US Supreme Court upheld the Fourth Circuit Court's decision in a ruling authored by Chief Justice John G. Roberts. I quote the decision at some length because judgments about what is public and what is private are central to this project:
The “content” of Westboro’s signs plainly relates to broad issues of interest to society at large, rather than matters of “purely private concern.” The placards read “God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “America is Doomed,” “Don’t Pray for the USA,” “Thank God for IEDs,” “Fag Troops,” “Semper Fi Fags,” “God Hates Fags,” “Maryland Taliban,” “Fags Doom Nations,” “Not Blessed Just Cursed,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers,” “Pope in Hell,” “Priests Rape Boys,” “You’re Going to Hell,” and “God Hates You.” While these messages may fall short of refined social or political commentary, the issues they highlight — the political and moral conduct of the United States and its citizens, the fate of our Nation, homosexuality in the military, and scandals involving the Catholic clergy — are matters of public import. The signs certainly convey Westboro’s position on those issues, in a manner designed ... to reach as broad a public audience as possible. And even if a few of the signs — such as “You’re Going to Hell” and “God Hates You” — were viewed as containing messages related to Matthew Snyder or the Snyders specifically, that would not change the fact that the overall thrust and dominant theme of Westboro’s demonstration spoke to broader public issues. (Snyder v. Phelps)
The right to assemble exercised by those on the sidewalks outside of University Baptist Church on September 9, 2001, anticipating the arrival of a hatemonger, is the very same right that Phelps and Westboro used to publicize their haughty ignorance. Indeed, the First Amendment right peaceably to assemble to seek redress of grievances is a right I and many others had invoked, performed, and fought for during George W. Bush's governorship in Texas and one that has since become central to my understanding of the role of student, staff, and faculty voices in public higher education. Thus, the public fates of even Fred Phelps and Westboro — even these — are worth careful study, reflection, and deliberation.
On September 9, 2001, however, Phelps’ plane was delayed in Dallas. He never got to Austin. Instead of whatever Phelps had intended, what ended up happening at University Baptist Church — on "The Drag" across from my office in Parlin Building, where I worked as a newly tenured associate professor of rhetoric at the time — was this:
On the morning of September 9, 2001, every inch of UBC's huge sanctuary — all the balconies, all the aisles, all the church — was filled with people who showed up to support UBC and its ministries to gay, lesbian, and transgender folks, to homeless people, to people needing to reinvent themselves in faith, hope, and love — and even, finally, to the least of these, this professor of rhetoric.
As University Baptist’s senior pastor, the Rev. Dr. Larry Bethune, wrote in a later sermon reflecting on September 9, 2001, “At least twenty other congregations, including at least two Jewish congregations[,] were represented by delegations.” Hundreds of people of other — or no — faith traditions joined them. In the words of Bethune, “The sanctuary was packed as this diverse gathering shared a transcendent moment of unity in our belief that God is love.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Phelps: he dead.
Now Larry Bethune and I differed on whether the church was a democracy, guided by open deliberation and conjoint human action, or a theocracy, subject to rules and laws beyond humankind's ken. Further, what I saw as Larry's inconsiderate treatment of a woman associate pastor had caused me to leave UBC soon after my father, Austin H. Eberly, passed away; it still gives me some comfort, though, that I was sitting in UBC's sanctuary on March 15, 1998, when my dad — my first Austin — passed away.
Indeed, despite my differences with the Rev. Dr. Bethune, I respected him. I learned a great deal from him about textual histories of not only what Christians tend to call "The Old and New Testaments," but also the Bible's recalcitrant polyphony: although various fundamentalisms seek to collapse ancient texts to unitary meanings, written language itself — even language conventionally understood as sacred — always speaks in multiple tongues and yields multiple interpretations. Larry seemed to understand this, though he didn't always seem to like it. Still, I knew UBC was different from other churches I'd attended when a quote from Nietzsche opened the order of service in the bulletin one week. Plus Larry seemed to appreciate at some level my vulgar, amateur, and trivial research and teaching passion: rhetoric.
Further, Larry and I had a record of working well together for common purpose. Six years before Fred Phelps' flight to picket UBC was cancelled, Larry and I led a "Prayers for Healing from Violence" community event in the University Baptist Church courtyard, almost literally in the shadow of the University of Texas Tower. As far as anyone we talked to in the city and at the University knew, this day — August 1, 1996, thirty years after the Tower shootings — was the first public reading of the names of the people killed by Charles Whitman from the top of the University of Texas Tower in 1966 in what is generally regarded as the first mass public shooting in the United States. Not until after the April 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, would the term "school shooting" become, alas, a common phrase — a topos.
As I have explained in other publications (e.g. “‘Everywhere You Go, It’s There’”), cultural memory of Charles Whitman's actions on August 1, 1966, survived the twentieth century in no small part via allusions in popular culture to a cool, cruel antihero. In Stanley Kubrick's 1987 film Full Metal Jacket, for instance, Marine Gunnery Sgt. Hartman drills his draftees with the assertion that Whitman "showed what one motivated Marine and his rifle can do." Whitman's memory remained alive also as the generalized "bell tower boy," exemplified in Steve Martin's movie Parenthood: the monster child many parents fear they may, through mistakes and unintended slights, come to raise. While film and television recurrently deployed Whitman or his type as a rhetorical resource to dramatize coolness, cruelty, dehumanization, and senseless death, Whitman's victims seemed by 1996 to have been almost completely forgotten (Friedman). Leading up to the fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries of the shootings, thanks to the reporting of Pamela Colloff of Texas Monthly — and to the part-animated documentary film Tower by Keith Maitland — the victims’ stories have finally received a fuller telling.
Despite our differences, Larry Bethune and I were able to work together to offer a literal and discursive space on August 1, 1996, for reflection, memory, and public discussion about violence, victimage, and trauma. Standing in the courtyard beside University Baptist Church that day with dozens of others for an interfaith event called “Prayers for Healing from Violence,” I remember hesitating briefly before reading out the last name on our list, "Charles Joseph Whitman". Should the perp "count" as a "victim"? Would any of Whitman's victims — or victims’ family members — who might be standing there with us today be further injured if we uttered in public Whitman's name too?
* * * * * * * * * *
I was sitting across the street from UBC two days after the rhetorical holy spirit kept Fred Phelps's plane in Dallas on September 9, 2001, two days after my UT colleague and friend Dana Cloud, one of David Horowitz's 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America — stood outside the church beside her daughter, who had made and was holding a sign that said "I love my lesbian mom"—
I was beginning to draft an op-ed for the Austin American-Statesman about what had happened that glorious sunny Sunday morning forty-five hours earlier — about the sanctuary truly being a sanctuary, one filled with some sweet subset of Austin's breathtaking diversity —
I was writing, sitting in the writing center, at the University — the Undergraduate Writing Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where I worked with a fabulous team —
I was writing about the victory of public love over Fred Phelps when one of my writing center peeps mentioned that a commuter plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers.
Half an hour later, as my friend and coworker Scott Blackwood and I sat in the Texas Union, our eyes agape at images of the Twin Towers and the Pentagon billowing smoke, I remarked without volition, "I wish I were in Pennsylvania." Minutes later, United Airlines Flight 93 crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. There we sat, somehow watching the Twin Towers somehow fall.
And then, ten months later, just as I left Texas, the whole United States of America seemed to be turning into Texas.
Another of rhetoric's road trips.
Illustration: Ian Falconer
Towers of Rhetoric, Towers of Memory
Towers of rhetoric are for going up and down. Although only ephemerally sound, the structures prevent the need to shoot from the top or jump to the bottom in order to get one's point across.
Boom.
Startled, the memory-birds fly away.
The first memory-bird is a robin. Since I left Texas in 2002 to return to Pennsylvania, The Commonwealth, a robin — from the same family of robins? we don't know — has every spring endlessly slammed itself against one of four or five different windows on our house . . . for hours at a time . . . every single day. Straight off its long flight from Texas — or from overwintering a few blocks from some other campus — El Robin comes slam slam slam slamming on four specific spots . . . on four specific windows . . . over and over and over and over again for weeks. Perhaps I overempathize, but that bird reminds me of me: the seemingly eternal returning. The slam slam slam slamming into the same spot — onto the same, well, topos. Prodigal Pennsylvanians tend to come back — if we ever leave.
In rhetorical theory, a topos is a literal and/or figurative place for invention to begin and begin again. Any noun is a topos: "tower" is a topos; "Texas" is a topos; "Pennsylvania" is a topos. "Rosa" is a topos. "Austin" is a topos. "Hell" is a topos. Hell, even "topos" is a topos. A topos predicated — followed by a verb — is a claim: Towers fall. Jim jumped. Whitman shot a woman who was nine months pregnant. Between two topoi emerges a ratio, the most fundamental of which is chronological time itself. “I should have done more.”
"I," of course, is also a topos: I left Austin, Texas, to return to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In the eight years I lived in Austin, Texas, I drove back and forth between that city and Pennsylvania roughly two dozen times. My parents, Hope and Austin, were elderly when I left Pennsylvania for Texas in 1994. Sometimes I think I came back to Pennsylvania after they passed away because doing so might somehow bring them back to life. Hope springs. Towers of Rhetoric drives back and forth between the Keystone and Lone Star states essaying to perform a re-collection and thus a reinvention of self.
The second memory-bird is the grackle, beloved by no one I ever met. The grackle is a loudmouthed, poop-spewing bird — a hectorer whose scream is even more annoying than its mess: in groups, grackles aurally out-Hitchcock all the other birds. Chase Staggs, in a 1998 production of his Tower Massacre Musical, figured Charles Whitman's victims as a Greek chorus of grackles, an invention that haunts me each time I return to Austin, Texas, and hear the screaming grackles echo the names of the sixteen people killed by Charles Whitman — and the many more he injured. During my time on the faculty at The University of Texas at Austin, I was not discouraged from investigating with my students individual, institutional, cultural, and public memories of the most traumatic and embarrassing moment in the institution's history. My experience at Texas reflected my experience as a reporter and editor: ask good questions for good purposes, and sooner or later people will appreciate your hard work.
The third bird of memory is the crow; but, no, it must be plural: the crows. All over Penn State's central campus, crows have congregated for the last several years in numbers that arguably create public health hazards — or at least minor public relations challenges. Boomed off to the geographic margins of campus, Beaver Stadium, and the Lasch Building, the repressed crows return to central campus and spew poop so thick on the Old Main mall that, if you "go there," you can't help thinking about what I've come to call "The Shitstorm": Penn State and the child sexual abuse revelations of 2011. The Paterno house is three doors from our house, theirs famously "modest," ours merely shabby: the space between them in November and December 2011 occupied by idling satellite trucks, ubiquitous cameras, and occasional mobs.
The twin towers of rhetoric are memory and invention. If a person or an institution or a people cannot or will not remember, what has been forgotten is lost to future inventions. "And what do the birds say?" asked the narrator of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter-House Five: "All there is to say about a massacre, things like 'Poo-tee-weet?'"
Poo-tee-weet.
The twin towers of this project, the twin architectonic topoi, are the August 1, 1966, University of Texas Tower shootings — how they have been remembered and forgotten in and out of classrooms — and the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, the details of which started to become public in 2011. At Penn State, in Centre County, and across and beyond the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the last of the related legal disputes lawyer on six years later. The space between these two infamous occurrences in higher education, the ratio between them, is half a century.
What is there to learn about higher education and public memory by pairing the two institutional catastrophes? First, the very status of “public” in “public higher education” has changed drastically over the past fifty years. Further, Towers of Rhetoric posits a view of collective memory that charts four, sometimes intersecting quadrants: individual memory, institutional memory, cultural memory, and public memory. The special problem of public memory in higher education is an additional and fundamental concern: undergraduate students aren’t often enough encouraged to study past and current controversies on their own campuses or to note what they might have in common with undergraduates at other campuses so they might recognize themselves collectively as a public.
Yet it was undergraduate students themselves who first compelled me to pair the two institutions inventionally: In Fall 1996, during the fifth week of the first semester in which I taught my first new course, The UT Tower and Public Memory, at The University of Texas at Austin, students, knowing I was a Penn State alum, came to class ready to talk about my alma mater. A nineteen-year-old resident of State College, Pennsylvania — the town to Penn State's gown — had opened fire a few hours earlier on the lawn of the student union at Penn State, killing one student and injuring another before she was tackled and disarmed by an another student. I had been away from Pennsylvania for only two years, and the ratio of, on one hand, the very high-profile 1966 Tower shooting and the individual, institutional, cultural, and public memories of it we were studying at UT with, on another, a comparatively minor though fatal shooting that had occurred in one of the places I considered home — that ratio was inventionally provocative, a twist on the common "we never thought it could happen here" response to public violence. But this time here was there . . . yet somehow "here" simultaneously.
The fatal consequences of Charles Whitman's actions on August 1, 1966, changed how public violence could be imagined. Suddenly, any public space was potentially unsafe. The magnitude of the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal, though obviously very different in countless ways, is similarly breathtaking in terms of its effect on some publics' imaginations. On the day the NCAA sanctions against Penn State were announced, one Penn State alumnus and football fan, Tom Price, told WNEP television, "To me it was our 9/11 today. I just saw planes crashing into towers" (Buynovsky). Price's comments, significantly, were not about the revelations of the sexual assault and rape of children. Instead, the Penn State alumnus was devastated by the NCAA "vacating" Penn State football wins between 1998 and 2011 and, with them, the "winningest coach" record of Joe Paterno, who became Penn State head football coach in February 1966, months before the Tower shootings.
Towers of Rhetoric recalls poet Andre Codrescu's description in a National Public Radio commentary on September 21, 2001, of a “pre-terror project.” “It would be nice to get back to normal,” Codrescu told listeners ten days after 9/11, “but everything we used to do seems very different now…. Inertia keeps some of us working on pre-terror projects, but our hearts aren't in it. Whatever happens next will define everything we are going to do” (“Life on Hold”). Towers of Rhetoric, then, is always in at least two places and two times at once: Texas and Pennsylvania, then and now, now and again, because we thought it — whatever it is, whatever it was — could never happen. Here.
In their own ways, the 1966 University of Texas Tower shootings and the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal had affective consequences for specific publics within and beyond higher education similar to the cataclysms suffered by most people living in the United States on and after September 11, 2001. Towers of Rhetoric contributes to memory studies by using rhetoric to forge continuities among the pasts, presents, and futures of these fulcrum events in a context of what Jenny Edkins has called “trauma time.” In contrast to linear time, trauma time is circular and repetitive. Yet “linear time and trauma time do not exist independently; it is not a question of choosing one or the other. Rather, they define and constitute each other in a complex relationship, almost like opposing poles of a dichotomy” (15-16). Or like towers of rhetoric.
Finally, Towers of Rhetoric urges readers to use the practice of rhetoric to create their own individual and collaborative continuities. That is to say, Towers of Rhetoric takes gravely seriously the individual and social acts of writing and speaking, of listening and reading, of learning and teaching as means of recollecting an integrated self in the context of a shared — or public — world. Your memories, your conversations, and the stories you will tell and perhaps write — and the stories to which you will take the time to listen, carefully — are also reasons that I wrote and recollected the words that have become Towers of Rhetoric.
However far you go, thank you for traveling along.
