America the Schismatic

So this morning I’m driving around and who should come on the radio but Juan Williams, late of NPR and recent of Fox News, chatting with Diane Rehm. Personally, even though what the guy said was taken hugely out of context, my empathy with him is limited by the fact that he was asked several times to quit violating the terms of employment under which he agreed to work. But today he scored some serious points with a couple of telling remarks.

First, he pointed out that if individuals can’t say, on talk shows or in any other respected public venue, how they really feel—for fear of trespassing on some standard of political correctness—then we will not know how people think and feel. All we will know is that they mouth the party line for fear of whatever repercussions may follow an honest statement, right up to and including being fired from their jobs.

And second, while he conceded that conservatives in this country now have an extremist wing that will not tolerate any sort of dissent from its rigid thinking and whose members would happily impose that thinking on all of us, he noted that the same is true of the liberal side. Among the left, who do comprise a large and influential slab of Americans, if you make certain statements that reveal you don’t buy into the accepted dogma, you become a “bad” person, even an immoral one.

As anyone who’s been reading this blog any length of time knows, the threads on my wing-nut turn to the left. But that notwithstanding, I have to allow that Williams has got something there. Advocates of both sides can be bigoted, pig-headed, and doctrinaire. And the consequences for anyone who gets in the line of fire can be devastating.

When I was running the editorial office at the Great Desert University (now it can be said), one of my underlings was a very bright Ph.D. student in history. And one of our client journals was a prominent interdisciplinary journal of women’s studies. To say its contributors were doctrinaire is to understate.

I have little patience for pigheadedness and broad, paranoid assumptions about evil forces, whether they be the white male hegemony or the brown tide. And so, I foisted most of the work onto my graduate student, who enjoyed reading this drivel about as much as I did. She needed the job more than I did, though, so she dutifully plodded through it.

And she did a good job. Authors whose thinking is clouded by preconceived opinion and dictated by emotion produce less than optimal writing. We would get articles that were full of factual errors; muddled understanding of history, literature and science; ill-written copy; and logical howlers. How the things made it through peer review was a perennial mystery. All we could figure was the peer reviewers were every bit as flakey as the journal’s execrable contributors. Copyediting this material was a challenge, and one that took a strong stomach.

Nevertheless, our graduate student persisted through two years of steady, dreary work.

The deconstruction of our office, the only one like it in North America and probably in the world, came on the heels of a series of shattering events in the history department, whose then-eminent public history program fed its graduate students into our handsomely paid twelve-month research assistantships. First, the director of the scholarly publishing program, who had taken over a couple of years before, after its highly respected founder retired, quit with a month’s notice. This left our sister program essentially rudderless for about a year.

Then, in the wake of that disaster, the public history program’s director died. Formerly the chair of the entire history department and deservedly one of the most respected scholars in the Southwest, he was an éminence grise who kept a lid on the craziness over there—and in other precincts in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences—by the sheer weight of his dignitas.

Shortly after this gentleman passed, I began to hear complaints from the editors of the feminist rag about my research assistant’s work. She made too many errors, they said. Indeed, they said, she was incompetent.

Well, she wasn’t making any more errors than any of us made, which was precious few. Most of the errors were being instilled by authors who rejected our edits and whose inanities then went to the typesetter. They had to be corrected, expensively, at the page proof stage because of changes that were made behind our backs. Additionally, these two women—whose names were, unlike ours, on the masthead as the journal’s editors—apparently declined to review the copy before sending it to press, despite repeated reminders on my part. Consequently, there was, shall we say, a disconnect between the return of edited copy to the authors and the shipping of approved copy to the press that published it.

What you need to know about this young woman is that she was a pretty, trim blonde, an alarmingly wholesome person who was openly devoted to her two children and made no secret of her religious faith. To make things worse, until her husband took up with a colleague at his office and abandoned her, she was a happy stay-at-home mom who intended to home-school her daughters.

Anathema upon anathema!

While our office’s future within the university grew dimmer beneath the gathering financial clouds, the chaos in the history department worsened. My dean explicitly forbade me to tell my staff that we were closing, even though she and I knew it nine months in advance. Consequently, when the time came to grab new assistantships and grants, the R.A. in question, who was A.B.D., missed her chance to get the financial support that the university promised to all the Ph.D. students in that department—because she had no idea her assistantship would cease to exist when the fall semester ended and because some hitherto unheard-from forces were coming into play.

What was happening is that the radical feminists in the department, who had come to dominate the place and who highly resented the success of pretty, wholesome, traditionally oriented young women, had turned on her. The chair of her committee, who like any smart academician bent with the breeze, announced she would not read our young editor’s dissertation because she did not see it as a history dissertation. A number of tergiversations ensued, which I shall refrain from detailing here.

Suffice it to say, they did everything they could to block her from writing the dissertation.

Fortunately, she and I were not without resources. I called a friend who held dual tenure in that department and in another, an internationally prominent scholar and author. He had drifted from the history department in response to similar behavior that he had observed in the past. His annoyance over that sort of thing persuaded him to take my R.A. under his wing. He recruited another colleague to sit on her committee, and they wrested the supervision of the young woman’s dissertation away from the assembled witches. She’s writing as we speak, and the coven, whose department is now defunct, will have little to say about it from here on out.

Interestingly, the response to any woman whose choice of lifestyle did not fit what our dogmatic colleagues considered “enlightened” can only be called reactionary.

One can be reactionary on the left as well as on the right. And that, I fear, is what is ailing our country.

Our nation’s polity has shattered into gangs of reactionaries who spend their time, energy, and wealth undermining and lobbing brickbats at each other. They can’t hear each other because they’re too busy shouting. Meanwhile, vast moneyed interests who care nothing about democracy or constitutions or freedom (and in fact would prefer to operate in the absence of those nuisances) manipulate the citizenry and its distracted representatives as they please.

There’s nothing new about vicious divisiveness in America. Many of us can remember McCarthyism—one wrong word and you were a Communist, a tag that under the influence of Joe McCarthy’s personal star chamber could destroy your career and your life. What worries me is that today extremism is so widespread and so pervasive, there seems to be no help for it.

Unless things change, and soon, the democratic republic that we know as America is going to be over. Once and for all.