Will zealots spell the doom of great literature?

W.J. Reeves

EDUCATION

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS is the McCarthyism of the 1990s. Today, the politically correct storm troopers, operating from their positions as college professors, attack Western civilization, the bedrock values of the U.S., and white males. Their mentor appears to have been Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wis.), who trampled on individual liberty in his zeal to expose communism.

Like McCarthy, the politically correct crowd are fanatics, and they have assembled a cultural hit list that I call "The Unteachables." I've been a college professor for 20 years, and this list, like the ponderous life chain created by Ebenezer Scrooge, has grown with each passing year. It now includes: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the King James Bible, Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Macbeth, The Sun Also Rises. Pride and Prejudice, The Maltese Falcon, and the poems of Rudyard Kipling.

One of the better known politically correct gurus is Ronald Takaki, whom I observed, to paraphrase former Vice Pres. Spiro Agnew, pattering his negativity at Princeton University. Of course, no PC professor calls himself PC, so Takaki is a self-confessed MC--a multiculturalist.

He warmed up the Ivy League crowd with fond reminiscences of students at his college taking over a campus building in order to correct the curriculum so that it mirrored the diversity which is America. As he detailed this hooliganism, he threw in a few barbs at some professors who challenge his conclusions, such men of distinction as Alan Bloom and Nathan Glazer, who begged to differ with Takaki about the existence of the great books and affirmative action.

After venting his spleen by bashing those who believe in the values of Western civilization, the PC/MC professor spoke on the conflicts between Asian- and African-Americans, pointing out the tensions caused by the fact that, in cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., 75% of the store owners are Asian. His thesis-addressed to an upwardly mobile audience of Asian- and African-American students sitting in absolute isolation from one another--was that white male America was praising Asians as the "ideal minority." He made use of revisionist history by citing examples from the 19th century, when white planters in Mississippi brought in Chinese workers as an exemplum for the black sharecroppers, thereby driving home his propaganda that Asians and blacks are at odds because of whites.

Takaki offered a remedy for the mind-set that divides people of color in America, exhorting students to "read about themselves," to "embrace diversity," or, in other words, to resist reading books written by white males since these people function in society as prison wardens. It is the Takakis of America who've turned the great books, the classics, into the Unteachables.

In the 20-plus years I've taught, the great books have declined into the Unteachables. The PC crowd has a propaganda tag for many of the hallmarks of Western civilization, including:

* The Constitution--a sexist, racist document written by the Founding Fathers, all of whom were rich, white, slave-owning swine. At the time the Constitution was written, women and blacks were so marginalized in society that they did not appear in the text. The document should be redone by self-proclaimed civil rights leader Rev. Al Sharpton and feminist Gloria Steinem.

* The King James Bible--a misogynistic mythology. From Genesis onward, the Bible presents women negatively. Eve is blamed for Adam's fall; Lot's daughters are presented as sexual predators; and the supreme creator is referred to as "Father." It is outmoded for the 1990s; New Age is the answer.

* The Scarlet Letter--a classic case of the sexual double standard. Hester Prynne gets branded with a A for Adultery while the man is let off easy. Nathaniel Hawthorne was an apologist for harassment.

* Moby Dick--blatant whaleism. The entire book celebrates animal abuse. During the 1990s, the PC hordes freed Willy; in the 19th century, white males hunted Moby Dick.

* The Great Gatsby--classist claptrap. All of the characters are either bourgeois beauties or capitalist creeps. The novel focuses on the idle rich who feed off the honest labor of the proletariat. Gatsby got what he deserved.

* Hamlet--male pattern sexual abuse. Hamlet seduces Ophelia, dumps her, then mind-rapes his mother. He is a demented Dane who denounced women.

* King Lear--daughter denial. A tale of a greedy, violence-prone father denying his daughters their just rewards. They should have kicked him out years earlier.

* Othello--miscegenation and the Mafia. A family of Italians con spire against a black man. Guess who they don't want to come home for dinner?

* Macbeth--witch-bashing. Three sisters who practice an alternative religion are depicted negatively. The play reveals the necessity for separation of church and state.

* The Sun Also Rises--Hemingway's homophobic horror show. Jake Barnes' real problem is not his missing sexual apparatus, but his refusal to come out of the closet and be all that he can be. Just like "Poppa" himself, Jake protested too much.

* Pride and Prejudice--a marriage manual. Jane Austen, a traitor to her sex, ended all of her books with happy marriages. Shame, shame, shame.

* The Maltese Falcon--suicide sexism. Sam Spade sent over Brigid O'Shaughnessy for killing his partner. The truth was that Miles Archer so hated women that he shot himself in the heart in order to frame Brigid.

* Rudyard Kipling--a militaristic maniac who wrote poems about the plight of soldiers in peacetime: "It's Tommy this and Tommy that, and Tommy go away, but it's Thin Red line of Heroes when the band begins to play." Homages to a nation's hired killers.

I've heard, in one form or the other, every one of the above libels against classic works of literature.

The following five works of literature have the seal of approval from the PC/MC thought cavalry:

"The Sky Is Gray" is taught because it was written by a black man and deals with a day in the life of a black woman and her son in America in 1940. It takes considerable misreading not to conclude that the mother is a monster.

Her son has a toothache so severe that she has to take a day off from work in order to get the boy attended to by a dentist. The night before the dentist visit, she forces the seven-year-old to kill his pet chicken for dinner. After refusing, the small boy is struck in the face, directly on the site of his infected tooth. The mother has other, similar, lessons for her child, including a demand that he not turn up his coat collar to protect his aching jaw against a biting winter wind. this done because, she I says, "You're not a bum, you're a man."

If a big, white man had slapped his small, sick son for not killing an animal and then told the boy this was done to make him into a man, can anyone honestly say that the writer of such a short story would not be condemned for condoning child abuse? Yet, Ernest Gaines, the author of this vicious tale, is in the PC Hall of Fame.

Equally horrific, and equally politically correct, is Things Fall Apart, written by Nigerian Chinua Achebe. The hero is Okonkwo, an African warrior famous because of his wrestling prowess. Possessed of at least four wives, Okonkwo shoots his rifle at one of them, causing her to flee over the garden wall, then he terrorizes the other three into cowering silence. The story's central event centers around the man's beheading, via machete, of his adopted son to satisfy a rule of conduct between two tribes.

If this African tale were the biography of an Irishman from Chicago, satisfying his lust through polygamy, using one of his wives for target practice, and decapitating his son because it was the law of the land, the book not only would be banned by the PC patrols, it would be burned to a crisp.

On a somewhat less violent note, there is Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, which is just what those like Takaki believe is good for what ails America. The thesis of this novel is the struggle of four immigrant women to maintain their Chinese identity in the midst of American society.

This is fine, but would Takaki be so accepting if the book were entitled The Weiner Schnitzel Crowd and featured four young German males in emotional torment as they fight to retain their Teutonic heritage? What is the difference between the 20th-century German past and Chinese life under Mao Tse-tung, wherein the dictator's wife presided over the killing of 10,000,000 people during the Red Guard reign of terror? The answer is that the PC cultural police are selective when it comes to which ethnic identities are worth preserving, praising Asia, the Third World, and Africa while deriding all of Western Europe.

A Doll's House is unique because it is one of the few works of literature accepted by the politically correct that was written by a white male, a 19th-century Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen. The reason? The play is about a woman who frees herself from the prison house of her marriage by leaving her oppressive husband (along with her children) and venturing forth into the world to find herself.

The praise of this play reveals that the PC gendarmes never really read the texts they teach. The crucial question is why did the heroine, Nora Helmer, leave her husband? The answer is that she deserted her family because her husband refused to take the blame for a crime she had committed. She says, "I was so absolutely certain you would come forward and take everything upon yourself and say: I am the guilty one."

Feminist author Betty Friedan would hit the roof if she heard a husband suggest that his wife take the fall for one of his crimes. A Doll's House is, in effect, exactly the opposite of what a true feminist should desire since it rests upon complete inequality. When I taught the play and pointed out this fact, the feminists in the class believed me to be "hopelessly insensitive." They probably were right.

Possibly the most popular PC text is Kate Chopin's The Awakening, written in 1899. One of this novelette's major themes is the quest by the heroine, Edna Pontellier, for "erotic freedom." This is accomplished when she rejects her husband and relinquishes her role as mother of her sons and allows herself to be pursued, and caught, by a young lover. Unable to be fulfilled completely, Edna swims away into the sea, never to re turn, drowning, literally, in her sorrow.

The topic of this book is adultery. Would a feminist so readily concede that a middle-aged man could ditch his wife and kids so that he could have a fling with a young, pliable damsel, the reason being that erotic freedom was more important than familial responsibility? Their answer would be an emphatic, vociferous No! These works have certain things in common: They all glorify men and women much like the PC professors themselves, who are largely privileged white woman and Asian- and African-American would-be revolutionaries; exhibit a disdain for Western civilization; and engage in white male-bashing. As misguided as some of these books are, they are on the reading lists at the reputedly best colleges in America. They are taught while classic texts are dismissed as Unteachables.

The specter of political correctness, disguised as multiculturalism, is threatening America. Its proponents continue to advance their agenda. Recently, Change: The Magazine of Higher Education devoted an entire issue to the college curriculum and multiculturalism, reaching the conclusion that "Multiculturalism today touches, in varying degrees, a majority of the nation's colleges." Thus, the PC/MC virus is on its way to devouring American higher education.

There are some outposts of resistance, organizations such as the National Association of Scholars, whose president contends that the PC battalions have politicized the college curriculum and that their leaders absolutely are opposed to the values contained in the classic texts of Western civilization.

College students should be exposed to--as the 19th-century poet and critic Matthew Arnold said--the best that has been known and thought. The Great Books of Western Civilization fill this need. The best defense is a vigorous offense, which, in my case, as an entrenched professor of English, consists of teaching William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Geoffrey Chaucer, Miguel de Cervantes, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Eliot, and rejecting as ideological twaddle the book lists generated by the PC propagandists.

Author F. Scott Fitzgerald said that life consists of beating against the current in order to survive. The current today is the PC tidal wave, and it must be resisted by establishing the Great Books as the centerpiece of higher education.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning