[Marxism] Campus culture

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030501541.html
On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats

By Ron Charles
Sunday, March 8, 2009; B01

In 1969, when Alice Echols went to college, everybody she knew was 
reading "Soul on Ice," Eldridge Cleaver's new collection of essays. For 
Echols, who now teaches a course on the '60s at the University of 
Southern California, that psychedelic time was filled with "The 
Autobiography of Malcolm X," "The Golden Notebook," the poetry of Sylvia 
Plath and the erotic diaries of Anaïs Nin.

Forty years later, on today's college campuses, you're more likely to 
hear a werewolf howl than Allen Ginsberg, and Nin's transgressive 
sexuality has been replaced by the fervent chastity of Bella Swan, the 
teenage heroine of Stephenie Meyer's modern gothic "Twilight" series. 
It's as though somebody stole Abbie Hoffman's book -- and a whole 
generation of radical lit along with it.

Last year Meyer sold more books than any other author -- 22 million -- 
and those copies weren't all bought by middle-schoolers. According to 
the Chronicle of Higher Education, the best-selling titles on college 
campuses are mostly about hunky vampires or Barack Obama. Recently, 
Meyer and the president held six of the 10 top spots. In January, the 
most subversive book on the college bestseller list was "Our Dumb 
World," a collection of gags from the Onion. The top title that month 
was "The Tales of Beedle the Bard" by J.K. Rowling. College kids' 
favorite nonfiction book was Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," about what 
makes successful individuals. And the only title that stakes a claim as 
a real novel for adults was Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid 
Suns," the choice of a million splendid book clubs.

Here we have a generation of young adults away from home for the first 
time, free to enjoy the most experimental period of their lives, yet 
they're choosing books like 13-year-old girls -- or their parents. The 
only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be 
suburban contentment.

Where are the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, 
the Richard Brautigans -- those challenging, annoying, offensive, 
sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore 
to their parents' dismay? Hoffman's manual of disruption and discontent 
-- "Steal This Book" -- sold more than a quarter of a million copies 
when it appeared in 1971 and then jumped onto the paperback bestseller 
list. Even in the conservative 1950s, when Hemingway's plane went down 
in Uganda, students wore black armbands till news came that the bad-boy 
novelist had survived. Could any author of fiction that has not inspired 
a set of Happy Meal toys elicit such collegiate mourning today? Could a 
radical book that speaks to young people ever rise up again if -- to 
rip-off LSD aficionado Timothy Leary -- they've turned on the computer, 
tuned in the iPod and dropped out of serious literature?

Nicholas DiSabatino, a senior English major at Kent State, is co-editor 
of the university's literary magazine, Luna Negra. As a campus tour 
guide, he used to point out where the National Guard shot students 
during the May 1970 riot. But the only activism he can recall lately 
involved anti-abortion protesters and some old men passing out Gideon 
Bibles. "People think we're really liberal," he says, "but we're really 
very moderate." Submissions to the lit mag so far this year are mostly 
poetry and some memoirs about parents. "The one book that I know 
everyone has read," he says, "is 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.' " So, 
no uprising unless the bars close early.

Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us. A new survey of the attitudes of 
American college students published by the University of California at 
Los Angeles found that two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as 
"middle of the road" or "conservative." Such people aren't likely to 
stay up late at night arguing about Mary Daly's "Gyn/Ecology" or even 
Robert Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance."

Professor Eric Williamson -- a card-carrying liberal in full tweed glory 
-- argues that "the entire culture has become narcotized." An English 
teacher at the University of Texas-Pan American, he places the blame for 
students' dim reading squarely on the unfettered expansion of 
capitalism. "I have stood before classes," he tells me, "and seen the 
students snicker when I said that Melville died poor because he couldn't 
sell books. 'Then why are we reading him if he wasn't popular?' " 
Today's graduate students were born when Ronald Reagan was elected, and 
their literary values, he claims, reflect our market economy. "There is 
nary a student in the classroom -- and this goes for English majors, too 
-- who wouldn't pronounce Stephen King a better author than Donald 
Barthelme or William Vollmann. The students do not have any shame about 
reading inferior texts."

Roger Kimball, editor and publisher of the New Criterion, marches in the 
other direction -- he has no complaints about the market economy -- but 
he arrives at the same dismal appraisal of the academic culture. 
Universities and colleges "enforce an intellectually stultifying, 
politically correct atmosphere that pretends to diversity," he 
complains. "One of the results of this is a notable uptick in 
superficiality and a notable uptick in the anesthetizing of that native 
curiosity that was once a prominent feature of the adolescent mind."

I want to start humming that classic middle-age rant from "Bye Bye 
Birdie": "Why can't they be like we were,/Perfect in every way?/What's 
the matter with kids today?"

But maybe young people's reading choices reflect our desire to keep them 
young. David Farber, editor of "The Sixties: From Memory to History," 
says that the way Americans think about the age of maturity has shifted 
considerably. "There's much more an emphasis now on kids thinking of 
themselves as kids, even into their early to mid-20s," he says. "But in 
the '60s, they thought of themselves as agents of historical change. The 
sit-ins, the civil rights movement, the possibility of being drafted 
focused the mind. The contagion of protest made everyone think of 
themselves as possible demonstrators."

That spirit is still alive and well, even if it's not reflected in kids' 
favorite book titles, according to Mike Connery, who writes about 
progressive youth politics for the Web site Future Majority. He doesn't 
see a generation of vampire-loving boneheads. "Young people today 
express their politics in very different ways than they did in the '60s, 
'70s and '80s," he says. Yes, they love Meyer's "Twilight" series -- 
even his fiancee is "obsessed" with it -- but that's just for escape. 
"People don't necessarily read their politics nowadays. They get it 
through YouTube and blogs and social networks. I don't know that there 
is a fiction writer out there right now who speaks to this generation's 
political ambitions. We're still waiting for our Kerouac."

But is anyone really waiting? As young people shift toward the Internet 
and away from exploring their political activism in books, the blood 
drains from their shelves. For the Twitter generation, the new slogan 
seems to be "Don't trust anyone over 140 characters." What you see at 
the next revolution is far more likely to be a well-designed Web site 
than a radical novel or a poem. Not to be a drag, but that's so uncool. 
For those of us who care about literature and think it still has a lot 
to offer, it's time to start chanting, "Hell, no! We won't go!"

charlesr@xxxxxxxxxxxx

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