Summer reading at UNC-Chapel Hill continues as a weapon in the arsenal of the Culture Wars in the United States. Last years assignment of Approaching the Quran, a blatant piece of propaganda attempting to promote Islam as a peaceful religion in the midst of the war on terrorism, underscored the anti-Americanism of the campus professorate. Nurtured in the anti-Vietnam era, campus radicalism has grown into a virulent weed fenced off from the garden of real life by the chain links of tenure and esoteric isolation that keeps the Academy remote from the rest of practical political discourse.
This years reading assignment, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America by avowed social activist Barbara Ehrenreich is a rant against capitalism that offers no perspective and contains only a modicum of scholarly validity. But that's to be expected as the desperate death rattles of socialism echo from campus to campus. No one has told them they are the political living dead soon to be interred in the burial mound of history.
What bothers me is the anti-intellectualism of the decline as the University began to dumb down in the 1970s by kicking out the pillars of the liberal arts to push Marxist post-modern theory. The radicals claimed that the accumulation of history that is passed from generation to generation is racist, chauvinistic and homophobic and ignores the travails and contributions of the common man. Out went the greats of history and in came econometrics, radical deconstruction and the end of history. The result is a generation of clueless college graduate zombies wandering blindly through the minefield of modern life.
The assignment of Nickel and Dimed makes the point. The professorate at UNC no longer stands atop the great edifice of civilization when teaching and communicating with students and the general public. Stripped of their credentials they deserve no respect from the rest of us. The assignment of the Ehrenreich book is basically part of the political warfare against the society that feeds and clothes them and keeps them safe in their ivory towers. The controversy gives them relevance so they can verify their existence, little knowing that the rest of us think of them as irrelevantexcept when they mess with our kids.
Had the issues of how tough life can be in the Western world been approached properly by applying the standards of the past, the UNC professors could have taken the proper approach and connected the fact that this is the 100th year of the birth of George Orwell. Surely someone over there would have remembered that Orwell, unlike Barbara Ehrenreich, is an accepted and proven man of letters who has stood the test of time that used to be applied to the definition of what is true genius. Then it would have occurred to someone that Orwell wrote the seminal book on poverty and struggle in the capitalist West in his fascinating and informative book Down and Out in Paris and London.
But au contraire, the intellectual bulb on campus is dimming and darkness is descending on our once proud and envied University. You can see the twilight of ignorance in the eyes of the young, the precursor of the end of civilization.
NOTES FROM LA-LA LAND
You gotta love it. Just as the officious health nuts, greedy attorneys-general and the parasitic fringe of the trial-lawyer set target obesity, the good ol Winston-Salem based Krispy Kreme doughnut chain, still giddy with their recent public offering and success in building franchises nationwide, announce they plan to expand and add over 700 new stores. Take that Mr. Surgeon General.
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Once again it takes a Brit to remind Americans who we are as our politicians are ashamed to defend their own country. Tony Blair deserves his Medal of Honor and needs our support in dismantling the once proud BBC, now a pale imitation of Radio Moscow under the Soviets.
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Before we haul off for Liberia, I recommend you read Paul Therouxs latest travel narrative, Dark Star Safari. Theroux, known for his vigorous honesty, is finally fed up with Africa.
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Its best that Ronald Reagan is not aware of the betrayal of his Supreme Court nominee and first female Justice Sandra Day OConnor in the recent University of Michigan affirmative action ruling where she was the swing vote that hammered another nail in the meaning of America.
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One more thing: the ongoing controversy over whether or not Pete Rose should be allowed in the baseball Hall of Fame because of his gambling habit reminds me that if you believe Michael Jordan left professional basketball to play baseball a few years back, then you are deceived. He was caught gambling on Bulls games, as I hear it, and the decision was made that public exposure of his crimes would be a terrible blow to black self-esteem. This is the dark side of affirmative action.