of Higher Education reported that many American professors who teach Rigoberta Menchu’s autobiography intend
to continue doing so, and they are angry with David Stoll for having humiliated an already-victimized woman of color. One of her American academic devotees said that even if Rigoberta did make stuff up, her memory must have been distorted by years of oppression! Personally I believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu has a place in the liberal arts curriculum. The book should be taught in courses that survey celebrated literary hoaxes.
Moreover, for her ingenuity in pulling off such an ingenious hoax, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?
But enough about Rigoberta. Let us move from small things to large. Your letter makes a very interesting reference to Ronald Reagan. You remind me that you were much too young to remember Reagan as president. You grew up, poor fellow, in the Age of Clinton. Thus, instead of remembering Reagan’s Challenger speech, or the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, what you’ll probably remember is your mom’s turning off the television to shield your little brother from the sexually explicit parts of Clinton’s impeachment hearings. No wonder you are curious about what it must have been like to grow up with a real president. “What was Reagan really like?” you want to know. “What difference did he make? How will he be remembered?” Actually, the issues you raise are discussed in my book Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader . But I see that you are trying to save yourself $16. Very well, I will try to answer your questions.
Ronald Reagan seemed to be a very ordinary guy. He lacked all the basic credentials that our political science textbooks say are needed in a president. He was a C student at Eureka College. He spent most of his career as a movie actor. He was not a scholar or an intellectual. He had no foreign policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office, and allegedly took naps. He appeared to be an unserious, whimsical fellow who spent much of his time cracking jokes. To the liberal mind, and even to some conservatives, it seemed unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.
Yet even liberals know with hindsight that important things happened in the 1980s. The Soviet Union began to collapse, and socialism was discredited. Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe. The American economy, after being in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear. The technological revolution really took off: Suddenly computers and cell phones were everywhere. A generation ago, John F. Kennedy told Americans who were young and idealistic to join the Peace Corps. Public service was seen as the embodiment of American idealism. But by the end of the 1980s, most young people would rather have started a new company than pick coffee in Nicaragua. The entrepreneur—not the bureaucrat—became the vehicle for youthful aspirations. This cultural shift had policy implications. The welfare state, which
had expanded since the 1930s, stopped growing. The era of Big Government that began with FDR in the 1930s seemed to have come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Was this not the “Reagan Revolution” that the old boy promised?
The liberals refused to believe it. Since Reagan was such a simple, dumb, sleepy, unqualified fellow, he could not possibly have directed the vast changes of the 1980s. This was the premise of Edmund Morris’s official biography of Reagan, Dutch. Morris was selected to write about Reagan because Reagan’s aides thought that a man who had written favorably about Teddy Roosevelt was bound to like Reagan. After all, TR was an outdoors guy and so was RR. What Reagan’s aides ignored was that Teddy Roosevelt was also an aristocrat from an old
to continue doing so, and they are angry with David Stoll for having humiliated an already-victimized woman of color. One of her American academic devotees said that even if Rigoberta did make stuff up, her memory must have been distorted by years of oppression! Personally I believe that I, Rigoberta Menchu has a place in the liberal arts curriculum. The book should be taught in courses that survey celebrated literary hoaxes.
Moreover, for her ingenuity in pulling off such an ingenious hoax, who can doubt that Rigoberta Menchu deserved a prize?
But enough about Rigoberta. Let us move from small things to large. Your letter makes a very interesting reference to Ronald Reagan. You remind me that you were much too young to remember Reagan as president. You grew up, poor fellow, in the Age of Clinton. Thus, instead of remembering Reagan’s Challenger speech, or the signing of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Mikhail Gorbachev, what you’ll probably remember is your mom’s turning off the television to shield your little brother from the sexually explicit parts of Clinton’s impeachment hearings. No wonder you are curious about what it must have been like to grow up with a real president. “What was Reagan really like?” you want to know. “What difference did he make? How will he be remembered?” Actually, the issues you raise are discussed in my book Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader . But I see that you are trying to save yourself $16. Very well, I will try to answer your questions.
Ronald Reagan seemed to be a very ordinary guy. He lacked all the basic credentials that our political science textbooks say are needed in a president. He was a C student at Eureka College. He spent most of his career as a movie actor. He was not a scholar or an intellectual. He had no foreign policy experience when he was first elected president. He put in a short day at the office, and allegedly took naps. He appeared to be an unserious, whimsical fellow who spent much of his time cracking jokes. To the liberal mind, and even to some conservatives, it seemed unlikely that he would prove an effective leader.
Yet even liberals know with hindsight that important things happened in the 1980s. The Soviet Union began to collapse, and socialism was discredited. Today, there are probably more Marxists on the faculty of our elite colleges than there are in all of Russia and Eastern Europe. The American economy, after being in the doldrums throughout the 1970s, went into high gear. The technological revolution really took off: Suddenly computers and cell phones were everywhere. A generation ago, John F. Kennedy told Americans who were young and idealistic to join the Peace Corps. Public service was seen as the embodiment of American idealism. But by the end of the 1980s, most young people would rather have started a new company than pick coffee in Nicaragua. The entrepreneur—not the bureaucrat—became the vehicle for youthful aspirations. This cultural shift had policy implications. The welfare state, which
had expanded since the 1930s, stopped growing. The era of Big Government that began with FDR in the 1930s seemed to have come to an end in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Was this not the “Reagan Revolution” that the old boy promised?
The liberals refused to believe it. Since Reagan was such a simple, dumb, sleepy, unqualified fellow, he could not possibly have directed the vast changes of the 1980s. This was the premise of Edmund Morris’s official biography of Reagan, Dutch. Morris was selected to write about Reagan because Reagan’s aides thought that a man who had written favorably about Teddy Roosevelt was bound to like Reagan. After all, TR was an outdoors guy and so was RR. What Reagan’s aides ignored was that Teddy Roosevelt was also an aristocrat from an old
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