Piecework

They are in much trouble, and so are we. The notion of education as therapy has led to the distortion of history, the reduction of standards, and, in the new-fashioned American style, the creation of enemies. The examination of an American identity is made subservient to the word before the hyphen. Obviously, the accomplishments of American blacks, Latinos, other minorities, and women should be made known to all Americans, not to make them feel better but to make them know more about their own country and the world of which it is a part. Alas, that is not the goal.

The endless, energy-sapping debate over “multiculturalism” is an example of the more general problem. The word itself is an oxymoron. Every bookshelf is multicultural. Every library is multicultural. Every educated man and woman is multicultural. Culture is multicultural.

But the most rigid advocates of this form of the hyphen aren’t really talking about the multiple, the plural, or about the natural human movement toward synthesis. They don’t want to add to the fund of individual knowledge. They are insisting upon indoctrination, on the replacement of the many with the singular. There is only one road to Rome — and they know what it is.

Afrocentrism, for example, is not multicultural. As preached by men like New York’s City College professor Leonard Jeffries Jr., it is a segregation of the mind. It is also a fraud. As Václav Havel said in 1990, as part of his struggle against the Endgame impulses of Communists and anti-Communists: Lying can never save us from another lie.

In the raging battle over education, Endgamers like Jeffries are now demanding the right to peddle lies. Literature and history have common intentions: to discover the truth about human beings. They can’t be shaped by a creed, an ideology, or a thesis; they can’t be wrapped in the straitjackets of political fashion. Stalinist novels were not novels; they were tracts. Hitler’s movies were not art; they were propaganda. Mao’s poetry is the stuff of wall posters. There have been great Marxist historians, including our own Eugene D. Genovese, but they didn’t alter the facts to prove the thesis. In the end, history should be history, not an alibi.

“If some Kleagle of the Ku Klux Klan wanted to devise an educational curriculum for the specific purpose of handicapping and disabling black Americans,” wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “he would not be likely to come up with anything more diabolically effective than Afrocentrism.”

Most purveyors of this therapeutic nonsense attack their critics as racists. But the basic trouble with infusing kids with racial or ethnic chauvinism is that it doesn’t even work as therapy. Instead of feeling better about themselves, most of these kids come out of the process seething with bitterness. And this being the United States, anger and rage are followed by the need to blame. Hell, it can’t be my fault.

The demands for reparations and revision go on and on, spilling into the newspapers, then amplified by talk radio and television. As presented, there is no solution, because the apocalyptic demand is for the alteration of the past or a surrender of intelligence or an assumption of guilt by the living for the crimes of the dead. But resolution really isn’t the point of all this sound and fury. Fragmentation is the point. Segregation is the point. Conflict is all. We’re Americans. We have been conditioned to prefer conflict to boredom. We prefer violence to talk. We prefer war to peace. We prefer lies to the truth. Clear the board, citizen: We’re reaching Endgame.

III. PROFESSIONAL CYNICS

The Endgame culture of cynicism and bitterness is, of course, best observed in Washington. The genius of the American system has been its ability to compromise. We learned from the fratricide of the Civil War that a failure to compromise could unleash the darkest, bloodiest impulses in the American character. Over the years, we developed in Washington a nonideological style that helped us avoid direct conflict. Sometimes you won, sometimes you lost; politics was a long season, like baseball, in which even the greatest hitters failed six times out of ten. Most of the time, the system worked. Slowly. Tediously.