http://www.frontpagemag.com/guestcolumnists/thornton12-10-01p.htm 

Politically Correct Imports
By Bruce S. Thornton 
FrontPageMagazine.com | December 10, 2001

CALIFORNIA'S SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY is supposed to be a region of conservatism and traditional values. But not on some of its college campuses. There, knee-jerk anti-Americanism and shopworn leftism enjoy a comfortable home subsidized by tax revenues and daddy's tuition payments.

I saw as much recently when I participated on a panel about the current crisis. It was held at a community college in Merced, about 100 miles south of Sacramento. There were three of us on the panel, two of whom totally agreed in their doctrinaire anti-Americanism, a fact that suggests the organizers had in mind not a fair and balanced discussion of the issues, but rather a politically correct pep rally.

One of the panelists was a clone of the Ayatollah Chomsky, repeating the master's same paranoid fantasies and lurid hallucinations about Amerika's dark designs. Particularly loony were his assertions, documented in the books he peddled in the lobby, that the U.S. media were propagandists for the government, which is sort of like hearing a geographer say the earth is flat. The liberal bias of the mainstream media, whose reporters vote about 80% Democratic, is so obvious they don't even bother denying it anymore.

More interesting was the other panelist, an Arab professor of political science at a nearby campus of the California State University. He represents a phenomenon widespread in American academe, the resident alien intellectual who finds in the United States the freedom and prosperity he can't find in his home country. Yet rather than acknowledging that the goods he enjoys result from a political and economic system superior to that of his home, instead he makes a career of relentlessly attacking the very society that uses its tax dollars to support him – and whose goods he enjoys.

This is a curious phenomenon, one unheard of anywhere else, with the exception of England and Australia. Most countries won't even hire foreigners to take jobs natives want and are qualified to perform, let alone tolerate foreigners publicly criticizing their hosts. At one level, this is a good thing, a result of our generous openness and commitment to free speech.

More recently, however, the spectacle of (usually) well-heeled foreign intellectuals castigating America's sins derives from multicultural ideology. This doctrine is a melodrama of Western and American oppression against the innocent "other," whose culture is superior to the soulless, crass "air-conditioned nightmare" that is America, and whose political and economic dysfunction is the consequence of colonialism, imperialism, globalization, or some other demonic minion of what Iran calls the Great Satan.

Given America's crimes against the "other," then, the representatives of those oppressed groups feel justified in coming to America to school its benighted citizens on their sins and get some payback. Once there, they find support from masochistic Americans who assert their own moral superiority by criticizing, at no cost of course, their own home, and from callow college students who like to hear their own affectations of rebellion against authority confirmed by exotics.

The common-sense response to these politically correct imports is to suggest they go back home if they find America so evil. Such suggestions are usually decried as xenophobia or toxic nationalism. They are no such thing. They simply reflect the adage that one's words should match one's deeds, that, as Aristotle said, virtue is a question of action, not words. If America is the evil empire so many leftists claim it is, then there are better venues for the fight against wickedness than the comfortable freedom and material abundance of a college campus.

And when the intellectual comes from a society that wouldn't tolerate his big mouth and untraditional life-style for five seconds, the odor of bad faith becomes overwhelming. So let such people exercise their First Amendment right to bite the hand that feeds them; but also let Americans who love their country while acknowledging its flaws exercise their First Amendment right to tell these people that whatever they say, they have voted for America with their feet.

Bruce Thornton is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and author of Bonfire of the Humanities (ISI Books) and Greek Ways (Encounter). Recently he wrote "A Leftist Bestiary" for FrontPageMagazine.com.