Category Archives: Writing

There’s been a little spate of red-baiting going on, perhaps prefiguring the upcoming presidential election, which is probably going to be one of the ugliest in recent history.  I think it started with Allen West’s bizarre claim that the U.S. Congress is full of communists, and now Bill O’Reilly has pipped in, among others, claiming that Robert Reich, of all people, “secretly admires” Karl Marx.  There’s a rhetorical parallel here to the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ charge, in that the accusation isn’t really an accusation, but a sort of guilty–by-association smear, only no one seems willing to say that admiring Marx isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The cold war is over but the smear remains.

I don’t really have any problem saying I admire Marx anymore than I would have a problem with the idea the someone is a Muslim or a Christian or a Democratic Socialist or even a member of the Weather Underground. These are not prejudices, like sexism or white supremacy, that are inherently bad, although there have certainly been bad Muslims, Christians, Democratic Socialists and members of the Weather Underground. I think, though, that Reich’s thesis about the origins of this sort of red-baiting acrimony isn’t correct. I don’t think the problem is that we’ve stopped listening.  I think the stakes are higher: we’re talking about curbing the concentration of wealth.

Doug Henwood, as a side note, is a Marxist who I think is remarkably civil in the face of a lot of nonsense…  Reich, though, is more concerned with us, the so-called mainstream, which he says has become  insular and self-destructive. I don’t mean to trivialize  his ideas, but I find it hard to believe that anyone, liberal or conservative, has much to gain from, say, listening to Rush Limbaugh or anyone on Fox News.  The problem isn’t simply ideological; or, rather, the difference is ideological in the specific sense of being rhetorical.  Rachel Maddow is different from Rush Limbaugh not simply because she believes in global warming or a strong government.

She’s different because she uses language and constructs arguments differently. (Here’s Limbaugh recently on the National Organization of Women. Contrast that to Maddow on Representative Issa.)  Conservative ideology sees rational debate as overly intellectual,  effeminate, and ineffective; it favors a very muscular, pathos oriented rhetoric more like advertising than scientific discourse. It’s easy to find progressive arguments that have taken the path of pathos-based rhetoric too, but it’s less prominent. Conservatives, though, seem to have no other options. There are Limbaughs on the left but no Maddows on the right.

Last night I had one of those maddening Facebook arguments– I’d like to think it was a debate, but it was probably just an argument–that illustrate just how pervasive conservative ideas have become. The key phrase was, “some people are just not meant for college.”  A few hundred years ago that was the exact phrase used to justify keeping everyone  in the political dark except for white men with property. Now it’s become one of those falsely “hard-nosed” phrases that certain otherwise liberal people use to sound “realistic” and “pragmatic.”  We’d love a world in which college is affordable for all but “some people are just not meant for college.” Is it just genetics?

It’s nonsense, of course. Even as recently as fifteen years ago no one who considered themselves liberal, much less progressive, would ever say such a thing; the echos of the long history o discrimination and eugenics were too strong. Years of conservative marketing, though, seems to have wiped out the semantic common sense that sends up alarms when something like this pops up.  It’s also a problem of our American ignorance about socioeconomic class and our increasingly distorted self-image as a culture that encourages equality and mobility.  At one moment we seem to be moving towards an understanding that inequity is a result of policy, and then the insight fades again.

These were my brood-y dark thoughts as I read, “For class warfare, there’s the 1%, and then there’s the 0.1%,” by Henry Banta on the Nieman Watchdog website. Underneath the persuasive conservative rhetoric– especially tropes like “some people are just not meant for college”– lies a reality that seems nearly inaccessible to what might be called the political common sense of the United States. We’ve– using “we” in the loosest sense–created a profoundly unequal society that concentrates wealth in a deeply alarming and unprecedented fashion.  That’s hard to stomach  so we respond by creating a kind of naturalized fantasy to explain the results. It “those people” again.

I knew a jerk once– if someone acts like this it’s fair to call him a jerk– who was so incensed about his students (possible) use of Wikipedia that he proposed a pedagogical exercise to prove how awful it was. He would purposely plant false information on the online encyclopedia and then ask his students a question in class that they would need to do research to answer. They’d go home, or to the library, presumably, punch in their question to Google, and get the planted false answer from Wikipedia. The next day in class, the professor could laugh knowingly and make an important point: Wikipedia is worthless.

This jerk– he’s still a professor as well a jerk– thought this little game was both beneficial to his students and a real hoot. It didn’t work only because when he shared his clever little game with his colleagues via our department listserv a quick-witted professor jumped over to Wikipedia and corrected the misinformation. Mr. Jerk quickly realized he’d been beaten and dropped his plans. I was more than a little surprised, though, that there was very little discussion of the ethics of his behavior which seemed to me to reflect a profoundly corrupt notion of both pedagogy and of the aims and goals of Wikipedia.

This happened nearly a decade ago but it came to mind as I was reading, “Wikipedia Goes to College,” in “Fast Company.” The author, Neal Ungerleider, isn’t exactly hostile to Wikipedia, although his sense of the company’s history seems oddly attenuated, but his language suggests an equally profound misunderstanding of the institution.  Wikipedia, Ungerleider says, is launching a new program that is designed to “crack the market”  by reinforcing its academic reputation and helping it develop more non-English articles.  Does Wikipedia “crack markets” in the same fashion as, say, Apple or Sony?

I don’t meant to suggest that Wikipedia is an ideal organization or that the online encyclopedia has solved all of its problems. I do think it’s fair to say, though, that the reports of Wikidepian inaccuracy are often exaggerated. I don’t use Wikipedia in formal research assignments, simply because I want students to become familiar with peer-reviewed journals.  Wikipedia isn’t trying to “crack the market”  via its ongoing search for a system of checks and balances. The jerk would disagree, and it sounds unsexy and unfashionable,  but Wikipedia is trying to expand the reach and availability of human knowledge.