By
Tom McDermott
To the ever growing list of politically incorrect literary works, add yet another great American novel-J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye." According to a recent Washington Post article, despite being more popular than ever with students, the book is quickly falling into disfavor with educators. Once a staple for mandatory reading lists in high school English courses, Catcher, like "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" before it, now finds itself on the hit list of the Left.
Ironically, the same generation that relished reading a book banned for its language and "subversive" nature is now censoring it because it fails to fit their political agenda. While the brouhaha over Huck Finn ostensibly focused on Twain's liberal use of racial slurs, the teachers say that Catcher is not multicultural enough and, therefore, simply no longer relevant to today's audiences. They say it must make way for works by contemporary minority authors like Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou.
Assigning these authors is fine and dandy. But let's be frank. The quality of their work does not even come close to Salinger, let alone Twain. In the politically correct fantasy world of academia, the color of an author's skin is more important than the quality of his work.
Leftist educators labor under the assumption that minority students are unable to relate to anything written by dead white males. Partly because they are male, partly because they are white, but mostly (Salinger excluded) because they are dead. In their view, if it's not contemporary, it's crap.
The teachers argue that Salinger's protagonist is a "privileged white male" whose days as the incarnation of teenage angst are numbered. They could not be more wrong. What teen, black or white, alienated or well-adjusted, cannot relate, at least on some level, to Holden Caulfield? This is a classic that transcends time, setting, class, gender and, yes, even race.
Huck Finn remains among the greatest novels ever written for one very simple reason. It was a brutally honest depiction of a young America. And truth is the single greatest enemy of the potentates of political correctness. From the use of dialect and a cast of characters including swindlers, abusive drunks, slaves, religious hypocrites and kind strangers, Twain succeeded in writing the first truly American novel.
But all this had to be purged from the collective consciousness of American high school students because racial slurs might make some of them uncomfortable. Forget that it's the premiere work of American fiction. It has the N-word in it, so down the memory hole it goes. (By the way, that's a reference to 1984, another work not likely to make the cut for these teachers' mandatory reading lists for obvious reasons).
Political correctness is the bastard child of Marxism and Marcusian philosophy. So, naturally, literature is not the only subject area in which it has probed its cold, bony fingers.
Recall just a few years ago when radical feminists entrenched in the ASU Theater Department sabotaged the career of Professor Jared Sakren. His crime: teaching works from the "sexist European canon" like the plays of Shakespeare and Ibsen.
The sciences are not immune either. It used to be that majoring in a hard science or math offered students a safe haven from the type of political re-education that occurs in humanities departments, but no longer. Some ecology textbooks now focus more on the latest drivel from radical eco-freaks than on the actual environmental science. Who needs biochemistry when you could better spend that time learning the ins and outs of eco-feminism and Marxist environmental policy?
A recent North Carolina State University study revealed hundreds of blatant errors in high school science textbooks produced by major publishers. One of the reasons the study cited is that accuracy is rapidly taking a back seat to sensitivity.
Truth becomes a disposable commodity when we only read things which make us feel good about ourselves.
Tom McDermott is a student in the James E. Rogers College of Law. He can be reached at perspectives@wildcat.arizona.edu.
