Popular Culture Review Vol. 8, No. 2, August 1997 | Page 7

Expecting the Barbarians
When I attended a Palo Alto, California, grade school during
the middle years of the Eisenhower era, questions regarding the
greatness of culture heroes like Christopher Columbus never popped
up in the Scott-Foresman history textbooks we were required to read.
Four decades later, of course, all that has changed, at least for the
moment. According to the tenured radicals of academe^ and other
politicized groups of our own time, Thomas Jefferson was an elitist
slave-owner, Benjamin Franklin a blatant sexist, and Dwight David
Eisenhower a shameless, cowardly foot-dragger on the issue of Civil
Rights. As for Columbus himself, he is no longer simply the man who
discovered America; he is perceived, rather, as "a butcher of
innocents, a cruel and inept conqueror, a symbol of genocide," as Alan
Edelstein has written. The list of fallen heroes, Edelstein adds, is
seemingly endless:
Since his assassination John Kennedy has been
idolized, but...also been vilified to the point where
Douglas Brinkley regards some of the attacks on his
memory as approaching 'a vendetta.' Albert Einstein,
the twentieth century's symbol of intellectual
greatness, has been accused of being 'an adulterous,
egomaniacal misogynist.' And Walt Disney, who
made his reputation by making wholesome films for
the whole family to enjoy, was, according to a
biography—an 'unauthorized' one, obviously—
impotent, anti-Semitic, and an alcoholic.^
Famous American writers have also taken their lumps in recent years.
'Thus Ernest Hemingway was a ham-witted boasthard and abusive
adulterer; William Faulkner a dipsomaniacal obscuratanist and
closet racist; Ezra Pound a demented fascist hatemonger; and T.S.
Eliot an e litist and anti-Semite.
This general depreciatory trend isn't limited to American and
European notables: the common man is fair game too. Like the Coney