“Portrait
of an Anti-American”
By Marvin J. Folkertsma, PhD
Grove City College
They come in all shapes and sizes, without regard
to age, race, color, credo, Speedo, national origins,
pedigree, filigree, or no degree. They are full-blooded,
half-blooded, sixteenth-blooded, green-blooded,
one-sixty-fourth-blooded something or other, Vulcanese,
Pekinese, or strip tease. They are mono-cultural,
multicultural, counter-cultural, literate, semi-literate,
anti-literate, tall, short, fat, thin, caffeinated,
or decaffeinated. They appear in versions that
are intellectually challenged, follicle-challenged,
or deodorant-challenged, and they sport Brooks
Brothers suits, baseball caps, with or without
shorts, tank tops, nose jewelry, or fruit-of-the-looms.
For the caffeinated, one-sixty-fourth something
or other type, one could hardly improve upon the
chain-smoking, flowing Fabio-locked personage
of Ward Churchill. For the decaffeinated, grunge-like,
intellectually challenged fruit-of-the-loom (I’m
guessing, here) variety, there is that Homer Simpson-as-a-boy
specimen, complete with insipid grin and South
Park voice, who insisted with profound historical
insight that Bush resembled Hitler—a point
he made in a geography class, no less. Makes one
shudder to think what goes on in a history class.
However variegated this menagerie is, they have
at least four things in common. First, they resent
those who characterize them as obsessive-compulsive
disorder types as though that were a bad thing.
Second, they are all from planet earth, though
admittedly, further research is needed on this
matter. Third, their beliefs mimic exactly those
about whom George Orwell once commented (with
left-wing professors in mind), “You’d
have to be an intellectual to believe something
like that. No one else would be such a fool!”
Which leads us to the fourth, and most important
point: they all despise America with a passion.
There is a very serious message behind this admittedly
tongue-in-cheek introduction—deadly serious,
in fact. Anti-Americans dominate many of our classrooms,
newsrooms, and boardrooms. And as pointed out
by David Horowitz in his shocking overview of
academia, The Professors, these inveterate haters
with tenure are indoctrinating the most impressionable
members of our society with views so outrageous,
that upon hearing them, one’s first inclination
is to reach for an abnormal psych text to gain
a sense of what’s going on.
The message they spout is simple-minded and formulaic.
The United States is the most racist, sexist,
imperialistic, war mongering, homophobic, dictatorial,
environment-despoiling (that’s my favorite)
and genocidal country in the history of humanity.
America is the scourge of the world — the
Anti-Christ incarnate, the Darth Vader of the
universe, whose unfathomable depredations make
Hitler, Stalin and Genghis Khan seem like Boy
Scout leaders. America, in short, is just not
a nice place.
Behind this tenth circle of hell description of
the United States that would make Beelzebub blush
and Dante eat his heart out is a contradiction
so huge that you can drive the planet Neptune
through it. The professors don’t leave America.
These misanthropic muggers all stay in this heart
of darkness, this bottomless pit of evil. The
question is, why?
Here the solemn observations of Abraham Lincoln
come to mind. In a brilliant address given in
1838 when he was only twenty-eight years old,
Lincoln warned about the perils of the ambitious
person, who has time on his hands and few useful
ways to employ it. “Distinction will be
his paramount object,” Lincoln pointed out,
“and although he would as willingly…
acquire it by doing good as harm, yet, that opportunity
being past, and nothing left to be done in the
way of building up, he would set boldly to the
task of pulling down.”
That’s why they stay—the professors,
teachers, cynical journalists, disaffected politicians,
and treasonous opinion leaders. They are ambitious
people; they hate America; they want to destroy
it.
And they are teaching our children.
(Marvin Folkertsma, PhD is a professor of political
science and Fellow for American Studies with The
Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College.
He is the author of several books. His latest
release is a high-energy novel titled "The
Thirteenth Commandment.")
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