Culture Wars

This AM, I opened a WebCT Mail message from one of my students in HIST 1302-004. Over the weekend, I came across an item from an Australian newspaper asking what was the most costly event in U. S. history? It wasn't the Civil War or WWII or anything before 1865 or after 1945, until November 2001. The most costly event is the stock market loss of $5.6 TRILLION since 2001 and still in danger of dropping further. WWII cost $3.4 Trillion to come in second. I received more than a dozen guesses over the weekend. One student came up with the correct answer last night. I posted a notice to that effect on the WebCT Bulletin Board. Then, I opened this message:

A Student wrote on Sunday, August 3, 2003 9:54pm, in a
message with the subject - Bogus Question:

That bonus question was very misleading. You made it
sound like it was one single, black and white event like
a war or something. Not 4 or 5 different things
"contributing" to an "event." Not to mention that I
actually guessed the Enron thing and got no credit. Oh,
and just out of curiosity, are you a democrat?

-A Student

Sapper replied:

Your message subject and the message itself are
insulting. First, this was a BONUS POINT opportunity. If
you don't like the game, don't play. Enron was only part
of the $5.6 TRILLION loss (and still losing) of value in
the U. S. Stock Market since November 2001. Finally, my
political affiliation is none of your affair. I don't
ask you to identify your politics, even though the snide
tone of your rude question suggests that you are not a
Democrat. For your information, I have voted since 1964
and I have voted for Republicans, Democrats,
Independents, and various other minor party candidates.
How I vote is NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS. Now, I hope that I
have made myself perfectly clear. If you don't like HIST
1302-004, you have an option: drop the course.

-Dr. Sapper

Sigh. The culture wars. I am glad that I don't teach freshmen at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

[x Raleigh News & Observer]

Sunday, July 20, 2003

Clueless and calculating

By J. PEDER ZANE, Staff Writer

According to officials at UNC-Chapel Hill, they're just a bunch of clueless naifs, mystified by the controversy surrounding the book they've asked incoming freshmen to read, Barbara Ehrenreich's best seller , "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America."

But to their well financed right-wing critics, they're calculating bomb throwers, bent on indoctrinating unformed minds with their leftist politics.

Clueless or calculating? Two views, worlds apart. Both may be right -- better make that correct (but not politically). The reason helps explain why the brouhaha at Chapel Hill is much larger than one book and one campus. The flap is a flash point in the increasingly noxious and partisan political battle that has been crackling since the Supreme Court made George Bush president in December 2000.

To begin, "Nickel and Dimed" is not simply an account of the struggles of low-wage workers. It is a polemic against American capitalism. Built around three one-month stints Ehrenreich spent working as a maid, waitress and Wal-Mart clerk, "Nickel and Dimed" compellingly illuminates the challenges faced by her fellow employees. It does not even attempt to give an employer's point of view or provide a larger context for understanding the forces driving our economy.

Instead, Ehrenreich uses her reporting, and her sharp wit, as literary devices to liven up a call for a higher minimum wage and more powerful labor unions. "Nickel and Dimed" does not force readers to think, but tells them what to think.

Given the right-wing's anger over last year's summer reading assignment, "Approaching the Qur'an" by Michael Sells, UNC's surprise at the controversy over Ehrenreich's avowedly leftist work seems unfathomable. According to UNC-CH Provost Robert Shelton, "Nobody I talked to thought this would be a controversial book."

I don't doubt that. And therein lies the problem. His comment suggests a staggering lack of intellectual diversity on campus. What critics cast as a "Marxist rant," campus officials see as an honest and important work that tells the truth about an under-addressed social problem. Who's right is a matter of opinion. What seems more certain is that UNC officials -- like their critics at the conservative John Locke Foundation in Raleigh -- are so like-minded that they never came across a single voice expressing a common complaint about the book.

However, the "Nickel and Dimed" debate is far more than a tired rerun of the ongoing drama "Ivory Tower Liberals and the Right-Wing Fanatics Who Despise Them." The two radically divergent views of the book reflect the increasing compartmentalization of American intellectual life. As our politics become more partisan and our news sources more varied and ideological, it is becoming easier to pass one's life without ever hearing many opinions that challenge one's perspective. Broadly speaking, liberals get their version of reality from CNN, NPR, the Nation magazine and progressive books and Web sites, while the right feeds on a steady diet of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, the Weekly Standard, Ann Coulter and conservative blogs.

Where you tune in increasingly defines who you are. And never the twain shall meet.

Is "Nickel and Dimed" fair and balanced? You decide.

While I accept UNC's claims of cluelessness, I also suspect that, subconsciously at least, their actions were quite calculated. Their choice of Ehrenreich's book has an in-your-face quality that reflects a cancerous dynamic that has metastasized since the presidential election (selection?) of 2000: a process I call "the rightification of the left."

Liberals are mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore. After years of mostly silent suffering at the mouths of conservative firebrands, the left has decided that turnabout is fair play. While Al Gore has called for a liberal talk-radio alternative as strident as the one the right has ridden so hard for so long, left-leaning writers have been sharpening their knives. The nation's most prestigious newspaper, The New York Times, boasts three liberal columnists -- Bob Herbert, Maureen Dowd and Paul Krugman -- who describe the Bush administration in Michael Savage-esque terms. Ehrenreich and her fellow provocateurs such as Noam Chomsky ("9-11") and Michael Moore ("Stupid White Men") have turned their fury into best sellers.

And this fall, publishers will release dozens of books inveighing against Bush and the right including "The I Hate Republicans Reader" edited by Clint Willis, "They've Stolen Our Country and It's Time to Take It Back" by Jim Hightower and "Lies, And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them ... A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right" by Al Franken.

We may lament the left's efforts to ape the worst habits of the right, but their logic is undeniable -- what's good for the goose is good for the gander. In this context, UNC's selection of "Nickel and Dimed" can be seen as a salvo in the culture wars. Given the current political environment, defined by warring camps who live in their own worlds, it is reasonable to conclude that the school's administrators were both clueless and calculating. A part of them couldn't imagine that anyone would find "Nickel and Dimed" inflammatory; part of them, it seems, wanted to send this message: If you thought last year's book was bad, try this one on for size.

© Copyright 2003, The News & Observer Publishing Company