In a recent front-page photo of protesters disrupting a regents meeting at UC Davis, Nathan Brown, an assistant professor of English, was shown lecturing about socialism and Marxism. Brown became an instant protester hero for his letter calling on Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi to resign after campus police pepper- sprayed students during a peaceful demonstration Nov. 18 against tuition hikes and in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street.

As a former college English instructor myself, I wondered why an English professor was lecturing about communism instead of Conrad.

A look at Brown's Web page indicates that this next term he will be teaching a course on, "The Real Movement of History: Left Communism and the Communization Current." Instead of Hamlet and Moby Dick, the students will read: "Manifesto of the Communist Party"; "The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement"; "Comrades, But Women"; "Human Strike in the Field of Libidinal Economy"; "The New Capitalism and the Old Class Struggle"; "Introduction to Civil War"; and "The Coming Insurrection."

The course "will be devoted not to the idea of communism, but rather to understanding communism as the real movement of history."

A review of the course readings suggests that while we examine the potential misuse of pepper-spraying during a peaceful demonstration, we should also examine the implications of the inflammatory response.

"Liberate territory from police occupation," advise the "Invisible Committee" authors of the 232-page "The Coming Insurrection." Here are more quotations from this treatise:

• "Two centuries of capitalism and market nihilism have brought us to the most extreme alienations."

• "When a few thousand young people find the determination to assail this world, you'd have to be as stupid as a cop to seek out a financial trail, a leader, or a snitch."

• "Depose authorities at a local level. Wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to invest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing the authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision."

• "Every act of harassment (of police) revives this truth. … The police badge that he carries in his pocket documents his shame."

• "A real demonstration has to be 'wild,' not declared in advance to the police. Having the choice of terrain … we can lead the cops … rather than being herded by them."

Lessons from the riots in Greece, the authors say, include studying how to turn "a situation of generalized rioting" into "an insurrectionary situation" and "what to do … once the police have been soundly defeated there."

Another publication on the professor's reading list discusses the "human strike" movement, designed not "to reveal the exceptionality or the superiority of a group on another but to unmask the whateverness of everybody as the open secret that social classes hide." Clearly on a par with the best of English Lit.

Brown's website also lists articles he has written in radical philosophy, including a review of a book on atheism that features a photo of a naked man draped over a piano; and "Red Years," a piece that leads with this quote from a book: "The only conflict that appears real is the one that leads to the destruction of capitalism."

Might there be more to the uproar over the pepper-spraying incident than first meets the eye? If the police overreacted by using pepper spray, does that exonerate those who are riling up the protesters to overreact themselves, in order to potentially fit into a radical ideological viewpoint?

Since the university has apologized and is reportedly taking corrective actions, the launching of five separate investigations, a legislative hearing and potential lawsuits seems as much an overreaction as the pepper-spraying itself.

Worse, excessive measures in response to the incident play into an orchestrated effort among some elements of the Occupy movement to distract us from what is truly ailing our country. We are not facing a Tiananmen Square mow-down of several hundred innocent civilians as occurred in China in 1989. We are facing the tearing down of our fundamental American values and institutions, which is undermining our economic strength and morale.

Our universities should be preparing our future leaders not with studies in anarchy, but with an understanding of the economic and moral underpinnings of our own form of government that has enabled the United States to lift more people out of poverty and oppression than any on earth, and how to end the distortions of that system that currently afflict it.

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Margaret A. Bengs is a former spokeswoman for state agencies and a political speechwriter who lives in Carmichael. Reach her at peggybengs@hotmail.com.

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