Letters
Editors: Although I have no answer to the profoundly difficult and persistent question Michael Lind raises in his article, "Are We a Nation?" (Summer 1995), the conclusion to which he comes...
...We do so sparingly, and we screen their material carefully before granting our permission...
...It is a familiar story that we feel most like Americans in our ancestral homelands...
...Lind takes for granted the existence of such a pervasive, encompassing vernacular culture and merely hints that "it has more to do with family, neighborhood, customs, and historical memories than with constitutions or political philosophies...
...Frankly, I don't know...
...But because we have a long "lead time for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, selfaddressed envelopes...
...Trans-America, we are told, is the leftist political Eden the United States could become if and only if vernacular culture is rightfully recognized as the true backbone of American nationalism...
...But if you would prefer not to receive such mail, please drop us a note at Dissent, 521 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y, 10017...
...As for twisting quotes, this is Kimball's main claim to excellence...
...Vernacular culture should not be a yardstick by which to measure our American identity...
...The perpetual influx of immigrants bringing disparate opinions and interpretations of world events moreover shatters any solidarity of historical memory...
...The first attempts will surely be brutal and will lead to a state of affairs more painful and dangerous than the former condition, under the dominance, but also the protection, of an external authority...
...However, one can achieve reason only through one's own experiences, and one must be free to undertake them...
...Perhaps that strand is our mutual recognition of each other as misfits from other, distant lands...
...I beg to differ...
...Even within the same diasporic community, families can be radically different as parents and children struggle to choose between customs of the old world and elements of assimilation in the new...
...1 surmise that Scialabba was not being ironic in stating that "Kramer and Kimball would sooner die than fake a fact or twist a quote...
...It was over 150 years before the dominant AngloSaxon culture in this country offered up a mature literature...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...And besides, it seems a tad far-fetched to consider someone more American than my mother by virtue of their intimacy with all the meaningful possibilities of the words "cool" or "funky...
...region, class to class, parent to child...
...One must be free to learn how to make use of one's powers freely and usefully...
...it shifts from region to A Note to Our Subscribers Dissent occasionally allows other magazines and organizations to mail promotional letters to our subscribers...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...They might not deliberately fake facts, but the New Criterion is undoubtedly the most sloppily edited intellectual journal extant, each issue being loaded with factual errors...
...In a piece trashing literary theorist Fredric Jameson, Kimball tried to make Jameson into a comsymp by saying he "speaks of Maoism as the 'richest of all the great new ideologies of the '60s.'" However, Kimball de126 • DISSENT Letters leted Jameson's next sentence in the essay cited: "One understands, of course, why left militants here and abroad, fatigued by Maoist dogmatisms, must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when the Chinese in turn consigned `Maoism' itself to the dustbin of history...
...It takes a long time to separate the wheat from the chaff, especially in matters of culture and the development of reason...
...Lind dismisses this disunity by arguing that those who do not master the American idiom are not as "American" as those who can, but in many cases recent immigrants prove to be the most patriotic, though perhaps not deft at weaving "tongue in cheek" into daily speech...
...America is more than a loose clutter of separate peoples...
...Editors: In his essay in the Fall 1995 issue, George Scialabba writes that efforts at multicultural education "have undoubtedly made possible some valuable work and attracted some people to culture who would otherwise have been lost to it...
...I respect Michael Lind's attempt to conquer the question of American nationalist identity and thank him for entertaining my comments...
...To Letter Writers • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...In a nation where nearly all of the inhabitants are immigrants from various parts of the world, the ideas and practices of families are never entirely the same...
...A lot of dross fell by the wayside before the emergence of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, and Twain...
...Summer 1995), the conclusion to which he comes raises several concerns...
...What can one say about a journal with this stance whose media critic, James Bowman, says of Rush Limbaugh that "it would be difficult to find many people on the radio more civil...
...He believes that multicultural education has done more harm than good...
...Lind cuts to the fallacies of multiculturalists and democratic universalists, but remains surprisingly vague on the subject of his own solution, "Trans-America...
...But they have also generated a really staggering amount of mediocre and tendentious work...
...For example, Kramer's and Kimball's report on a panel titled "Teaching the Political Conflicts," over which I presided at the 1994 Modern Language Association convention, must have set a record for most errors in five paragraphs, including identifying literary critic Richard Ohmann as an "economist," calling the organization "The Modern Language Society," and saying that the session was on teaching literature rather than rhetoric and composition...
...Kant, writing on freedom, said "[011ie cannot arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...I am investing my college education in the belief that there exists a certain strand of unique American experience that binds together this nation...
...Multicultural education is, at least in part, an attempt to grant some freedom to minority voices in the culture...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...Perhaps it is our tacit pact with our uncommon neighbors to live and let live...
...Scialabba should be wary of concluding that the New Criterion is "on the whole . . . right" in the culture wars when that "Arnoldian" journal and its allies seem able to make their case only by distorting leftists' positions beyond recognition...
...More than criticizing its shortcomings, we should be encouraging its growth...
...Editors: George Scialabba's generally judicious article on the New Criterion (Fall 1995) grants too much credibility to that journal's political tirades, which farcically belie its posturing about upholding Arnoldian critical standards...
...WINTER • 1996 • 127...
Vol. 43 • January 1996 • No. 1
