Category: Issues of the Day

America Goes Backward

The administration has proceeded more stealthily. Welfare cuts can be blamed on the states. The lopsided tax cuts are misleadingly presented as benefiting us all. Shrinking environmental protection can be justified as a defense of the economy. Increased surveillance of citizens’ private activities and of aliens’ movements are said to be “required” by homeland security. A military budget equal to those of all other nations combined can be justified by the vulnerability of the US revealed on September 11, and by the proliferation of threats. Every decision or move can be defended in reassuring language. The public is invited both to take pride in America’s unique might and to worry about the perils that lurk everywhere.

From “America Goes Backward” by Stanley Hoffman in The New York Review of Books.

Now we lock ’em all up

According to historian Gordon S. Wood, “Traditionally[,] accused criminals were held in jail only until they went to trial; then if convicted they were fined, whipped, mutilated, or executed, but not incarcerated.” [Emphasis mine.]

“Debt and Democracy” in the June 12, 2003, issue of The New York Review. Wood points out that debtors were the sole exception. “But actions for debt could send the debtor to prison where he languished….”

(Wood is indeed the same Gordon S. Wood whose work is discussed in the one-upsmanship bar scene in Good Will Hunting.)

Carolina controversy

According to it’s website, the UNC Chapel Hill “Carolina Summer Reading Program is designed to introduce you to the intellectual life of Carolina. Expected of all new undergraduate students (first year and transfer), it involves reading an assigned book over the summer, and participating in a two-hour discussion with select faculty and staff members.” The program is in its fifth year.

As might be expected, there has been controversy. Last summer a conservative Christian group filed a lawsuit on behalf of three students in an attempt to stop UNC from requiring the class of 2006 to read Michael Sells’ Approaching the Qur’an: The Early Revelations. This year the reading is no longer "required&quot—it is "expected." Even so, some conservative UNC students and state legislators leveled criticism at the reading program for selecting Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, a book that displayed what they deemed an incomplete view of working America.

[Raleigh] News & Observer columnist J. Peder Zane provides interesting commentary:

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

[T]he ‘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.

Do the five selections demonstrate a bias? Should they? (Descriptions from Carolina Summer Reading Program with minor edits.)

2003 — Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America is Barbara Ehrenreich’s account of what it is like to make a living on the salary of a low paid or ‘unskilled’ worker. Taking jobs as a waitress, cleaning woman, nursing home assistant and Wal-Mart employee in three different cities across the nation, Ehrenreich struggled to make ends meet. Her account of these jobs, the generous and gutsy people she works with and their desperate struggles for survival on minimum wage is direct, vivid, and engaging.

2002 — Approaching the Qura’n: The Early Revelations, translated and introduced by Michael Sells, consists of thirty-five suras, or short passages from the chief holy book of Islam, that largely focus on the experience of the divine in the natural world and the principle of moral accountability in human life. Easily accessible to any college-level reader, these suras are poetic and intensely evocative, beautiful meditations, comparable in many ways to the Psalms of David and other classics of world literature.

2001 — Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman explores urgent yet painful questions of medical ethics and cultural difference. It tells the story of Lia Lee, the child of Hmong immigrants from Laos, who was born with severe, life-threatening epilepsy. Relating the tragedy of Lia, her parents, and her doctors with skill and compassion for all involved, Anne Fadiman explores the radically different notions of disease that divided the Hmong sense of health and disease from the views of American scientific medicine. The resulting conflict left behind heartbreak and bitterness and raises pressing questions for all thoughtful citizens.

2000 — Chosen by a group of students and faculty, Confederates in the Attic, a national bestseller by Tony Horwitz, is a poignant book about the Civil War and its effects on today’s society. Horwitz writes with a journalistic edge honed by his work with The Wall Street Journal and a few years dodging danger as a foreign correspondent. As many a Southerner will tell you, the war which technically ended 135 years ago continues to impact the nation’s cultural identity. Horwitz’s fast-paced and entertaining text describes a group of men and women attempting to relive the Civil War era in every detail.

(Even this was not without controversy: According to UNC, "the book’s Chapter 13 has engendered comments and criticisms of its portrayal of Mrs. Alberta Martin, the last known living widow of a Confederate Veteran.” See statement by the person who holds power of attorney for Mrs. Martin.)

1999 — There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz tracks two young boys — Lafeyette and Pharoah Rivers — and what it is like in parts of contemporary urban America by focusing on life in a tough public-housing project on Chicago’s west side over a two-year period. We get to see how real, good people, in a terrible environment, are affected by social problems and social policies at ground level.