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Sunday, April 23, 2006
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Ducal Drama Drags On Useful, and then rather odd, piece in the Washington Post by the legal analyst Dahlia Lithwick, whose main point is that Everything we are hearing, about the DNA tests and the photos, is selective, secondhand and anecdotal. We are being played by the lawyers, with leaks and well-chosen sound bites. …Pick your fact. Each of them can, it seems, be spun both ways. True, true, and well worth keeping in mind through the ducal drama. Yet after cautioning us against drawing subjective conclusions from this ongoing case, Lithwick herself concludes: This case serves as yet another depressing reminder of all that is wrong with this country: Our sons are spoiled misogynistic bigots, and our colleges are hotbeds of polarizing identity politics. Race and gender and poverty still tear us apart. This is itself a species of emotive and unhelpful rhetoric. The case isn’t about all that’s wrong with this country -- only some of what's wrong with a rather narrow and unrepresentative part of it, the hyperprivileged young. Very few of my male students have ever seemed to me spoiled misogynistic bigots, though I suppose they could be in their off hours. What’s striking about places like Duke and, say, Princeton, to which it’s often compared, is that they’re the opposite of polarizing anything, being significantly composed of students drawn from a small pool of private schools. |