Where was
I? On the wrong page? The wrong channel?
Outside the bandwidth? As building managers here in New York shut
down the elevators at 11:30 p.m. on December 31, 1999, so that
citizens would not be trapped between floors by Y2K microchip
failures—and licensed pyrotechnicians launched EPA-sanctioned
fireworks from cordoned-off Central Park “venues” at precisely
12:00:01 a.m., January 1, 2000, to mark the arrival of the
twenty-first century and the third millennium—did a single solitary
savant note that the First American Century had just come to an end
and the Second American Century had begun?—and that there might
well be five, six, eight more to come?—resulting in a Pax Americana
lasting a thousand years? Or did I miss something?
Did a single historian mention that
America now dominates the world to an extent that would have made
Julius Caesar twitch with envy?—would have made Alexander the
Great, who thought there were no more worlds to conquer, get down
on all fours and beat his fists on the ground in despair because he
was merely a warrior and had never heard of international mergers
and acquisitions, rock and rap, fireball movies, TV, the NBA, the
World Wide Web, and the “globalization” game?
Was a single bard bestirred to write a
mighty anthem—along the lines of James Thomson’s “Rule, Britannia!
Britannia rule the waves! Britons never, never, never shall be
slaves!”—for America, the nation that in the century just concluded
had vanquished two barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods, the German
Nazis and the Russian Communists, two hordes of methodical
slave-hunting predators who made the Huns and Magyars look
whimsical by comparison? Or had the double A’s in my Discman died
on me?
Did anybody high or low look for a
Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi to create a new tribute on the order of
the Statue of Liberty for the nation that in the twentieth century,
even more so than in the nineteenth, opened her arms to people from
all over the globe—to Vietnamese, Thais, Cambodians, Laotians,
Hmong, Ethiopians, Albanians, Senegalese, Guyanese, Eritreans,
Cubans, as well as everybody else—and made sure they enjoyed full
civil rights, including the means to take political power in a city
the size of Miami if they could muster the votes? Did anybody even
wistfully envision such a monument to America the International
Haven of Democracy? Or had my Flash Art
subscription run out?
Did any of the America-at-century’s-end
network TV specials strike the exuberant note that Queen Victoria’s
Diamond Jubilee struck in 1897? All I remember are voice-overs
saying that for better or worse … hmm, hmm … McCarthyism, racism,
Vietnam, right-wing militias, Oklahoma City, Heaven’s Gate, Doctor
Death … on balance, hmm, we’re not entirely sure … for better or
worse, America had won the Cold War … hmm, hmm, hmm …
My impression was that one American
Century rolled into another with all the pomp and circumstance of a
mouse pad. America’s great triumph inspired all the patriotism and
pride (or, if you’d rather, chauvinism), all the yearning for glory
and empire (or, if you’d rather, the spirit of Manifest Destiny),
all the martial jubilee music of a mouse click.
Such was my impression; but it was only
that, my impression. So I drew upon the University of Michigan’s
fabled public-opinion survey resources. They sent me the results of
four studies, each approaching the matter from a different angle.
Chauvinism? The spirit of Manifest Destiny? According to one
survey, 74 percent of Americans don’t want the United States to
intervene abroad unless in cooperation with other nations,
presumably so that we won’t get all the blame. Excitement?
Americans have no strong feelings about their country’s supremacy
one way or the other. They are lacking in affect, as the clinical
psychologists say.
There were seers who saw this coming even at the unabashedly pompous peak (June 22) of England’s 1897 Jubilee. One of them was Rudyard Kipling, the empire’s de facto poet laureate, who wrote a poem for the Jubilee, “Recessional,” warning: “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday /Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” He and many others had the uneasy feeling that the foundations of European civilization were already shifting beneath their feet, a feeling indicated by the much used adjectival compound fin-de-siècle. Literally, of course, it meant nothing more than “end-of-the-century,” but it connoted something modern, baffling, and troubling in Europe. Both Nietzsche and Marx did their greatest work seeking to explain the mystery. Both used the term “decadence.”
But if there was decadence, what was
decaying? Religious faith and moral codes that had been in place
since time was, said Nietzsche, who in 1882 made the most famous
statement in modern philosophy—“God is dead”—and three startlingly
accurate predictions for the twentieth century. He even estimated
when they would begin to come true: about 1915. (1) The faith men
formerly invested in God they would now invest in barbaric
“brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the
non-brothers.” Their names turned out, in due course, to be the
German Nazis and the Russian Communists. (2) There would be “wars
such as have never been waged on earth.” Their names turned out to
be World War I and World War II. (3) There no longer would be Truth
but, rather, “truth” in quotation marks, depending upon which
concoction of eternal verities the modern barbarian found most
useful at any given moment. The result would be universal
skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt. World War I began in
1914 and ended in 1918. On cue, as if Nietzsche were still alive to
direct the drama, an entirely new figure, with an entirely new
name, arose in Europe: that embodiment of skepticism, cynicism,
irony, and contempt, the Intellectual.
The word “intellectual,” used as a noun
referring to the “intellectual laborer” who assumes a political
stance, did not exist until Georges Clemenceau used it in 1898
during the Dreyfus case, congratulating those “intellectuals,” such
as Marcel Proust and Anatole France, who had joined Dreyfus’s great
champion, Emile Zola. Zola was an entirely new form of political
eminence, a popular novelist. His famous J’accuse was published on the front page of a daily
newspaper, L’Aurore (“The Dawn”), which
printed 300,000 copies and hired hundreds of extra newsboys, who
sold virtually every last one by midafternoon.
Zola and Clemenceau provided a wholly unexpected leg up in life for the ordinary worker ants of “pure intellectual labor” (Clemenceau’s term): your fiction writers, playwrights, poets, history and lit profs, that whole cottage industry of poor souls who scribble, scribble, scribble. Zola was an extraordinary reporter (or “documenter,” as he called himself) who had devoured the details of the Dreyfus case to the point where he knew as much about it as any judge, prosecutor, or law clerk. But that inconvenient detail of Zola’s biography was soon forgotten. The new hero, the intellectual, didn’t need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding—that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.
From the very outset the eminence of
this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a
tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was
inseparable from his necessary indignation.
It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral
superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at
the rest of humanity. And it hadn’t cost him any effort,
intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years
later: “Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot
with dignity.” Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth
century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is
hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat
offer at a dinner party: “An intellectual is a person knowledgeable
in one field who speaks out only in others.”
After World War I, American writers and
scholars had the chance to go to Europe in large numbers for the
first time. They got an eyeful of the Intellectual up close. That
sneer, that high-minded aloofness from the mob, those long
immaculate alabaster forefingers with which he pointed down at the
rubble of a botched civilization—it was irresistible. The only
problem was that when our neophyte intellectuals came back to the
United States to strike the pose, there was no rubble to point at.
Far from being a civilization in ruins, the United States had
emerged from the war as the new star occupying the center of the
world stage. Far from reeking of decadence, the United States had
the glow of a young giant: brave, robust, innocent, and
unsophisticated.
But young scribblers roaring drunk (as
Nietzsche had predicted) on skepticism, cynicism, irony, and
contempt were in no mood to let such … circumstances … stand in the
way. From the very outset the attempt of this country cousin, the
American intellectual, to catch up with his urbane European model
was touching, as only the strivings of a colonial subject can be.
Throughout the twentieth century, the picture would never change
(and today, a hundred years later, the sweaty little colonial still
trots along at the heels of … sahib). In the 1920s the first job
was to catch up with the European intellectuals’ mockery of the
“bourgeoisie,” which had begun a full forty years earlier. H. L.
Mencken, probably the most brilliant American essayist of the
twentieth century, led the way by pie-ing the American version of
same with his term “the booboisie.” In fiction the solution was to
pull back the covers from this apple-cheeked, mom’s-cooking country
of ours and say, “There! Take a good look at what’s underneath! Get
a whiff of the rot just below the surface!”—the way Sinclair Lewis
did it in Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer
Gantry, and Arrowsmith, for which he
became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and
Sherwood Anderson did it in Winesburg, Ohio.
Anderson’s specialty was exposing the Middle American hypocrite,
such as the rigidly proper, sexually twisted Peeping Tom Midwestern
preacher. He created a stock character and a stock plot that others
have been laboriously cranking out ever since in books, TV, and
movies, from Peyton Place to American Beauty.
The Great Depression of the 1930s gave
our version of this new breed, the intellectual, plenty of material
to get wholesomely indignant about. For a change, America did look
dreadful. But even then things weren’t as blissfully vile as they
were in Europe, the birthplace of the intellectual. Europe, after
all, now had the Depression plus fascism. The solution was what
became the specialty of our colonial intellectuals: the adjectival
catch-up. Europe had real fascism? Well, we had “social fascism.”
And what was that? That was the name Left intellectuals gave to
Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt’s “reforms” merely masked the
fascism whose dark night would soon descend upon
America.
“Fascism” was, in fact, a Marxist
coinage. Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini’s Italian party,
the Fascisti, and applied it to Hitler’s Nazis, adroitly papering
over the fact that the Nazis, like Marxism’s standard-bearers, the
Soviet Communists, were revolutionary socialists. In fact, “Nazi”
was (most annoyingly) shorthand for the National Socialist German
Workers’ Party. European Marxists successfully put over the idea
that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of “capitalism.” Few
of their colonial cousins in America became doctrinaire,
catechism-drilled Marxists, but most were soon enveloped in a heavy
Marxist mist. The Marxist fable of the “capitalists” and the
“bourgeoisie” oppressing “the masses”—“the proletariat”—took hold
even among intellectuals who were anti-Marxist. Prior to the
Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, the American Communist Party had great
success mobilizing the colonials on behalf of “anti-fascist”
causes, such as the Loyalists’ battle against the “fascist” Franco
in the Spanish Civil War. “Anti-fascism” became a universal ray
gun, good for zapping anybody, anywhere, from up here … on the
intellectuals’ Everest of Indignation.
After World War II, this mental
atmosphere led to a curious anomaly. By objective standards, the
United States quickly became the most powerful, prosperous, and
popular nation of all time. Militarily we developed the power to
blow the entire planet to smithereens by turning a couple of keys
in a missile silo; but even if it all blew, we also developed the
power to escape, breaking the bonds of Earth’s gravity and flying
to the moon in history’s most amazing engineering feat. And there
was something still more amazing. The country turned into what the
utopian socialists of the nineteenth century, the Saint-Simons and
Fouriers, had dreamed about: an El Dorado where the average
workingman would have the political freedom, the personal freedom,
the money, and the free time to fulfill his potential in any way he
saw fit. It got to the point where if you couldn’t reach your tile
mason or your pool cleaner, it was because he was off on a Royal
Caribbean cruise with his third wife. And as soon as American
immigration restrictions were relaxed in the 1960s, people of every
land, every color, every religion, people from Africa, Asia, South
America, and the Caribbean, began pouring into the United
States.
But our intellectuals dug in like
terriers. Just as they had after World War I, they refused to
buckle under to … circumstances. They saw through El Dorado and produced the most inspired
adjectival catchups of the twentieth century. Real fascism and
genocide were finished after World War II, but the intellectuals
used the Rosenberg case, the Hiss case, McCarthyism—the whole
Communist Witch Hunt—and, above all, the war in Vietnam to come up
with … “incipient fascism” (Herbert Marcuse, much prized as a
bona-fide European “Frankfurt School” Marxist who had moved to our
shores), “preventive fascism” (Marcuse again), “local fascism”
(Walter Lippmann), “brink of” fascism (Charles Reich), “informal
Fascism” (Philip Green), “latent fascism” (Dotson Rader), not to
mention the most inspired catch-up of all: “cultural genocide.”
Cultural genocide referred to the refusal of American universities
to have open admissions policies, so that any minority applicant
could enroll without regard to GPAs and SATs and other instruments
of latent-incipient-brink-of-fascist repression.
“Cultural genocide” was inspired, but
in this entire opéra bouffe of fascism,
racism, and fascist-racist genocide, the truly high note was hit by
one Susan Sontag. In a 1967 article for Partisan
Review entitled “What’s Happening to America,” she wrote:
“The white race is the cancer of human history; it is the white
race and it alone—its ideologies and inventions—which eradicates
autonomous populations wherever it spreads, which has upset the
ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very
existence of life itself.”
The white race is the cancer of human
history? Who was this woman? Who and what?
An anthropological epidemiologist? A renowned authority on the
history of cultures throughout the world, a synthesizer of the
magnitude of a Max Weber, a Joachim Wach, a Sir James Frazer, an
Arnold Toynbee? Actually, she was just another scribbler who spent
her life signing up for protest meetings and lumbering to the
podium encumbered by her prose style, which had a handicapped
parking sticker valid at Partisan Review.
Perhaps she was exceptionally hell-bent on illustrating McLuhan’s
line about indignation endowing the idiot with dignity, but
otherwise she was just a typical American intellectual of the
post—World War II period.
After all, having the faintest notion
of what you were talking about was irrelevant. Any scholar or
scientist who merely possessed profound knowledge in his or her own
field did not qualify as an intellectual. The prime example was
Noam Chomsky, a brilliant linguist who on his own figured out that
language is a structure built into the very central nervous system
of Homo sapiens, a theory that
neuroscientists, lacking the instruments to do so heretofore, have
only recently begun to verify. But Chomsky was not known as an
intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, something he
knew absolutely nothing about—thereby qualifying for his new
eminence.
American intellectuals of the Adjectival Fascism phase had a terrible year in 1989. In June, Chinese students in Beijing rebelled against the ancien Maoist regime, defied the tanks, and brought out into Tiananmen Square a plaster statue, the Goddess of Democracy, who, with her arms lifted to the heavens, looked suspiciously like the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. Who among the intellectuals ever would have suspected that Chinese dissidents had been looking to America as their model of freedom all along? Then on November 9 the Berlin Wall came down, and in no time the Soviet Union collapsed and its Eastern European empire disintegrated.
It was a mess, all right—no two ways
about that. It made it damned hard to express your skepticism, your
cynicism, your contempt, in Marxist terms. “Capitalism,”
“proletariat,” “the masses,” “the means of production,” “infantile
leftism,” “the dark night of fascism,” or even “anti-fascism”—all
these things suddenly sounded, well, not so much wrong … as old … “Vulgar Marxism”
it came to be called, vulgar in the sense of …
unsophisticated.
The important thing was not to admit
you were wrong in any fundamental way. You couldn’t let anybody get
away with the notion that just because the United States had
triumphed, and just because some unfortunate things had come out
after the Soviet archives were opened up—I mean, damn!—it looks
like Hiss and the Rosenbergs actually were Soviet agents—and even
the Witch Hunt, which was one of the bedrocks of our beliefs—damn
again!—these books by Klehr and Haynes, in the Yale series on
American Communism, and Radosh and Weinstein make it pretty clear
that while Joe McCarthy was the despicable liar we always knew he
was, the American Communist Party really was devoted primarily to
Soviet propaganda and espionage, and their spies really did
penetrate the U.S. government at high levels. Yale!—so respectable,
too!—how could they give their imprimatur to these renegade
right-wing scholars who do this kind of stuff? Not to mention the
Spanish Civil War—archives! Turns out the
Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of
hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first
Soviet puppet state!
And now Vietnam, our other bedrock, the
holiest of all our causes—those damnable archives again! How could
anybody be so perfidious as to open up secret records? They make it
look like the Soviets and the Chinese, in concert with the North
Vietnamese Communists, were manipulating the Vietcong all along!
They make it look like America’s intervention in Vietnam was some
kind of idealistic crusade, fought solely to stop the onslaught of
Communism’s slave-hunting Magyar hordes in Southeast
Asia!
The main thing is to make sure we don’t
let them use this stuff to invalidate the way we ascended the
Olympian peaks of aloofness for seven decades, from November 11,
1918, the end of World War I, to November 9, 1989, the day the Wall
fell. The fact that America won the Cold War does not wash away the
stains America left during the Cold War, does it? We’ve still got
the devil himself, the brute, Joe McCarthy, and Richard Nixon and
the House Committee on Un-American Activities and all that crowd,
who cost a lot of people in Hollywood and academia their jobs,
don’t we? And racism? The mere fact that the powers that be gave
everybody all these so-called civil rights and voting rights
doesn’t mean that virulent and peculiarly American disease has been
eliminated, does it? Not by any means!
This urge to expose the fallacy of “American triumphalism” has led to a poignant moment here in the year 2000. For eleven years now, ever since Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Wall, people in the former empire of the Soviet Union have been looking to the United States for the very principles of living in a condition of freedom. East European college students will startle you with their knowledge of America’s own struggle for freedom two and a quarter centuries ago. In 1993, in New York, I happened to meet a Hungarian student who knew speeches by the great orator of the American Revolution, Patrick Henry, by heart, and not just his famous “Give me liberty or give me death” speech of 1775, either, but also his 1765 Stamp Act speech, the one before the colonial House of Burgesses in Williamsburg. He could recite it verbatim:
“‘Caesar had his Brutus; Charles the
First, his Cromwell; and George the Third—’
“‘Treason!’ cried out the Speaker of
the House. ‘Treason!’
“‘—may profit by their example,’ said
Patrick Henry. ‘If this be treason … make
the most of it!’”
Young people like him in Eastern
Europe, where writers such as Solzhenitsyn and Václav Havel were
the very keepers of the flame of freedom, have naturally sought out
American literary figures to learn of the great democratic
principles of the freest nation on earth. But almost without
exception, American writers are … intellectuals. If our young
Hungarian were to walk up to an American intellectual and recite
Patrick Henry’s Stamp Act speech, he would receive in response only
(in Thomas Mann’s phrase) a hollow silence.
Where else can the millions recently
freed from the late Soviet tyranny turn? To America’s clergy? Alas,
except for the rare brave Roman Catholic padre, America’s clergy
have become irrelevant to public opinion, unless they yield to the
temptation—and many have—to become intellectuals
themselves.
That leaves our academic philosophers,
our year 2000 versions of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and
David Hume. Here we come upon one of the choicest chapters in the
human comedy. Today, at any leading American university, a Kant,
with all his dithering about God, freedom, and immortality, or even
a Hume, wouldn’t survive a year in graduate school, much less get
hired as an instructor. The philosophy departments, history
departments, English and comparative literature departments, and,
at many universities, anthropology, sociology, and even psychology
departments are now divided, in John L’Heureux’s delicious
terminology (The Handmaid of Desire), into
the Young Turks and the Fools. Most Fools are old, mid-fifties,
early sixties, but a Fool can be any age, twenty-eight as easily as
fifty-eight, if he is one of that minority on the faculty who still
believe in the old nineteenth-century Germanic modes of so-called
objective scholarship. Today the humanities faculties are hives of
abstruse doctrines such as structuralism, poststructuralism,
postmodernism, deconstruction, reader-response theory,
commodification theory … The names vary, but the subtext is always
the same: Marxism may be dead, and the proletariat has proved to be
hopeless. They’re all at sea with their third wives. But we can
find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors we can
be—women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals,
transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers,
prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees—which we can use to
express our indignation toward the powers that be and our aloofness
to their bourgeois stooges, to keep the flame of skepticism,
cynicism, irony, and contempt burning. This will not be Vulgar
Marxism; it will be … Rococo Marxism, elegant as a Fragonard, sly
as a Watteau. We won’t get too hung up on political issues, which
never seem to work out right anyway. Instead, we will expose the
stooges’ so-called truths, which the Fools ignorantly cultivate,
and deconstruct their self-deluding concoctions of eternal
verities. We will show how the powers that be manipulate, with
poisonous efficiency, the very language we speak in order to
imprison us in an “invisible panopticon,” to use the late French
“poststructuralist” Michel Foucault’s term.
Foucault and another Frenchman, Jacques
Derrida, are the great idols of Rococo Marxism in America. Could it
be otherwise? Today, as throughout the twentieth century, our
intellectuals remain sweaty little colonials, desperately trotting
along, trying to catch up, catch up, catch up with the way the
idols do it in France, which is through Theory, Theory, Theory. In
this pursuit, some colonials inevitably run faster than others, and
leading the pack currently are two academicians, Stanley Fish and
Judith Butler. Before the Wall came down, the archetypal American
intellectual was a mere scribbler who joyfully hoisted himself up
to the status of intellectual. Since the Wall came down, the
archetypal American intellectual is the scholar who has joyfully
lowered himself to the status of mere intellectual. If Nietzsche’s
already fabulous powers of prophecy had been specific enough to
dream up a couple of characters to dramatize the deconstruction of
Truth with a capital T that he foresaw, he would have dreamed up
Fish and Butler and thrust them into Thus Spake
Zarathustra. Fish is a sixty-one-year-old Milton scholar
with a Ph.D. from Yale. Or a lapsed Milton scholar; he achieved
stardom as the Rococo head of the English Department at Duke and
now has been commissioned by the University of Illinois at Chicago,
for $230,000 a year plus perks (big-time stuff in academia), to
assemble a stable of Rococo stars in para-proletariat studies, not
excluding, he says, study of “body parts, excretory functions, the
sex trade, dildos, bisexuality, transvestism, and lesbian
pornography.” Fish says such things with a true Swiftian gusto,
relishing the inevitable alarm that ensues. As colonial Rococovists
go, he cuts a uniquely dashing figure, driving a vintage Jaguar, a
long scarf furled about his neck, à la Théophile Gautier. In his
rakishness and mischievous gleam, he differs markedly from the
cranky deconstruction crews who follow him. He does wear sweaters
with no shirt visible underneath, however, just as nearly all Young
Turks, male or female, affect some sort of Generation X
garb—sweatshirts, T-shirts, jeans, sneakers, all-black Young
Artists outfits—in order to out-casual and out-Young the Fools, who
are still stuck back in the Tweedy Prof mode.
On the conceptual level, Fish is best
known for his “reader-response theory,” which holds that literary
texts mean nothing in themselves, that meaning is only a mental
construct concocted by the reader. It is a short step from this
premise to the argument that the powers that be have had a picnic
loading the language with terminology calculated to make you
concoct the mental constructs they want you to concoct in order to
manipulate your mind.
May I offer an arch and perhaps
familiar but clear example? Recently I came across a woman at one
of our top universities who taught a course in Feminist Theory and
gave her students F’s if they spelled the plural of the female of
the species “women” on a test or in a paper. She insisted on
“womyn,” since the powers that be, at some point far back in the
mists of history, had built male primacy into the very language
itself by making “women” 60 percent “men.” How did the students
react? They shrugged. They have long since learned the futility of
objecting to Rococo Marxism. They just write “womyn” and go about
the business of grinding out a credit in the course.
One student told me the only problem
was that when she wrote her papers on her word processor and used
spell check, all hell broke loose. “You get these little wavy red
lines all over the screen, under ‘womyn.’ Spell check doesn’t have
‘womyn.’” Then she shrugged. “Or at least mine
doesn’t.”
The undisputed queen of feminist theory
is Judith Butler, a forty-four-year-old Hegel scholar with (like
Fish) a Ph.D. from Yale, who is also known as the diva of Queer
Studies. She is small and not very prepossessing, but graduate
students all over the country say “diva” at the mere mention of her
name. A group of them put out a fan magazine called Judy! devoted to chronicling the way she rams home her
“performativity” theory of speech and sexual behavior as forms of
anarchy.
“All gender roles are an imitation for
which there is no original,” runs her most famous paradox. She is
even more famous for her convoluted Theoryese. In 1998 the journal
Philosophy and Literature named her winner
of their Bad Writing Contest for a sentence that began “The move
from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view
of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation …”—and went on for fifty-nine words
more. Her zine fans love the insouciant yet erudite way she
dismisses such attacks. “Ponderousness,” she says, referring to
Hegel, “is part of the phenomenological challenge of his
text.”
The battle of the Fools versus the
Young Turks has escalated beyond words, however. In 1987 the
traditionalists formed a self-defense organization called the
National Association of Scholars; 1,000 joined. In a public
statement, Fish, while at Duke, branded them with the R word, the S
word, and the H word—racist, sexist, and
homophobic—and sent a memo to Duke’s provost recommending that no
member of the tainted organization be allowed on key university
committees. The provost refused. The Scholars accused Fish of
trying to blacklist them. At more than one major university, Young
Turks roamed about in Gen X clothes, red ballpoint pens at the
ready, sniffing out deviationists … sexists … racists … classists
(sic) … homophobes … ethnophobes … The
stories of Young Turks nudging and whispering to keep graduate
students away from Fool courses, to the point where some Fool ends
up with zero students for the year, would make a fairly grisly
chapter in a book.
In the face of such confidence and aggressiveness on the part of the Young Turks and such devotion on the part of their graduate-student T.A. followers, who is left to support a student in her misgivings about “womyn” or any other manifestation of Rococo Marxism? Her other teachers? Some dean? The university’s president? The most unlikely of all, believe me, is the president.
Recently I met a student who told me he
was taking a cross-disciplinary course entitled Civilizations of
North America. “Cross-disciplinary” is a fashionable term in
academia just now, not to be confused with the old (Fool) term
“interdisciplinary,” which refers to the use of concepts from two
or more conventional scholarly disciplines to study a particular
subject, such as using the concepts of sociology and economics to
write history. No, “cross-disciplinary” refers to crossing all
disciplines … much the way a 747 crosses the North Pole at 40,000
feet above an impenetrable cloud cover … on the way to a single
destination: Rococo Marxism. So the instructor informs the class
that while Americans might have more money, possessions,
technological advantages, and conveniences than Mexicans or
Canadians, when it comes to “social cleavages”—along the lines of
race, gender, class, ethnicity, and regional imbalances—Americans
are the primitives. On this subject—life’s fundamentals—we need to
take lessons at the knees of the Mexicans and the
Canadians.
The Canadians? The Mexicans? No
kidding? … Didn’t the French of Quebec province get so bitter about
the British majority that they almost seceded from Canada just five
years ago? And just six years ago didn’t the Indians in Mexico’s
southernmost province, Chiapas, rise up in an armed rebellion? And
gender … gosh … isn’t it an open secret that foreign corporations
like to employ women on their assembly lines in Mexico because
Mexican women are taught all their lives to submit to male
authority? Or am I dreaming?
Shrugging: “Hey, I don’t know. That’s
what he told us.”
By now, in the year 2000, that’s what
anyone is apt to do … shrug and go on about his business. For
eighty-two years now, America’s intellectuals, right on time, as
Nietzsche predicted it, have expressed their skepticism toward
American life. And, as the French say, “Skepticism soon hardens
into contempt.” As any Fool sociologist could tell you, there are
only two objectively detectable social classes in America: people
above the bachelor’s-degree line—i.e., people who have graduated
from four-year colleges—and people below it, who haven’t. By now
people above it have learned to shrug and acquiesce to “political
correctness,” to Rococo Marxism, because they know that to oppose
it out loud is in poor taste. It is a … breach of the etiquette you
must observe to establish yourself as an educated
person.
Meanwhile, in the ranks of people below
that sheerly dividing line, the bachelor’s degree, all those limo
drivers and cable TV linesmen on the cruises, there are plenty who
voice their opposition—at night, over cigarettes, in the ship’s
Palais Doré cocktail lounge … muttering, grousing, grousing,
muttering … all the while doubting their own common sense. Is it
any wonder, then, when survey after survey shows Americans entering
the Second American Century, the Pax Americana, in a state of …
whatever …
We are left, finally, with one
question. What exactly do the intellectuals want out of their
Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics? Is it change they want, change
for all the para-proletariats whose ideological benefactors they
proclaim themselves to be? Of course not. Actual change would
involve irksome toil. So what do they want?
It’s a simple business, at bottom. All
the intellectual wants, in his heart of hearts, is to hold on to
what was magically given to him one shining moment a century ago.
He asks for nothing more than to remain aloof, removed, as Revel
once put it, from the mob, the philistines … “the middle
class.”
Just think of the fun Nietzsche could
have had, if only God were not dead! Think of what it would have
been like for him if he could have lolled for the past hundred
years—he died in 1900—on a king-size cloud in Heaven, with angels
playing Richard Strauss (he had given up on Wagner) in harp
quartets as he gazed down upon the creatures only he had been
brilliant enough to foresee … the barbaric brethren … the world
warriors … the Truth demolition crews prowling about in children’s
clothes … A prophet, I presume, enjoys seeing his prophecies come
true, but I have the feeling Nietzsche would have become bored by a
hundred years of … “the intellectual” … I can almost hear that
hortatory and apostrophic voice of his: How could you writers and
academics have settled for such an easy, indolent role—for so long!
How could you have chosen a facile snobbery over the hard work, the
endless work, the Herculean work of gaining knowledge? I think he
would have shaken his head over their ponderous, amateurish
theories of cognition and sexuality. I think he would have grown
weary of their dogged skepticism, cynicism, irony, and contempt and
would have said, Why don’t you admit it to me (no one need
know—after all, I’m dead): if you must rate nations, at this moment
in history your “accursed” America is the very micrometer by which
all others must be measured.
And he would have been
right.
The Marxists of the Soviets’ East
European empire had their Havel; the Marxists of the Soviet Union
itself, their Solzhenitsyn; and the Rococo Marxists of
America—
“Chauvinism!” cry the intellectuals.
“Patriotism!”
—may profit by their example. If
this be patriotism … make the most of
it!