America's Most Unwanted

Laughter indeed. Not only this, but last June a story filed by the L.A. Times’ Christopher Reynolds contained this seemingly playful reference that has suddenly taken on a new, ominous tone: “Attention, President Bush. If you misplaced a pretzel on or about May 22 in your residence, rest assured that it is in the custody of Colin Hansen, a fifth-grader from Ivanhoe Elementary School in Los Angeles, who found the aforementioned pretzel while touring the White House.” Hmm . . . perhaps young Hansen should be in line to receive a medal for saving the president’s life.

THE WEAKEST LINKS

Last November the American Council of Trustees and Alumni published a tract about the war against terrorism with the scrumptious title Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It. Among its findings? That “college and university faculty have been the weak link in America’s response to the attacks.” If the reader detects the white-gloved hands of second lady Lynn Cheney and Senator Joe Lieberman behind this bit of academic witch-hunting, you are correct — they are co-founders of ACTA, which is one of those overfunded Washington organizations devoted to exposing the degradation of traditional academic standards across our great land. The November rant was notable for an appendix that listed 117 cases in which faculty or students betrayed the war effort, either through loose lips in the classroom or by parading subversive slogans (“An eye for an eye leaves the world blind”) at peace demonstrations. Although in the resulting uproar ACTA thoughtfully removed the names of the offending miscreants from its appendix, the damage, as Vin Scully would say, had been done. Perhaps the document’s most damning exposure was that not one Los Angeles–area college or university (certainly not UCLA or USC) had produced a dissenting quote — while UC Berkeley alone garnered 11. (The unbowdlerized list, by the way, is available. If you’d like to add your name to Cheney and Lieberman’s dishonor roll, see The Nation’s “tattletale” site.)