I made the mistake (currently writing an article on the decline of American education) of taking Stanley’s suggestion, and so deciphered the Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza essay (Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School) on radical feminism, imperialism, and religion. But besides the postmodern cant, one is struck here by the two frequent artifacts of the academic left.

First, someone who is known, in bumper-ticker fashion, by her endowed Harvard professorship, writes an attack on hierarchy (I could understand that should she be teaching at Modesto JC); and second, she sees nothing absurd in the contradiction of being born a German in fascist Romania, that hand-in-glove marched with the Wehrmacht, and then grew up “under American occupation” in West Germany.

In other words, she grew up in a liberated, free, and democratic Germany that was protected from suffering the fate of eastern Europe under Stalinism. Yet that fact is presented as proof of a certain victim status, and a guidepost to the imperial pathologies of the United States (she saw “occupation” American soldiers obsessed with outlawing and destroying the Nazi flag).

Unspoken, of course, is that she might have preferred it had the United States simply stayed home in 1941, and then she might have enjoyed either an academic career under Hitler’s imperial Germany in Romania and beyond, or perhaps a professorship in a post-Nazi Stalinist paradise.

But no, she wishes to be an elite professor in Cambridge, but not a part of the otherwise sick society that created it (e.g., “I reflect here on Americanness and U.S. nationalism from the perspective of a “resident alien. Because I have not been able to bring myself either to swear the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag or to claim American slavery and Native American genocide as my own history and heritage, I have not yet chosen to become a naturalized American citizen.”) Apparently we overlords have imprisoned this European helot in the Harvard chain gang.

Instead of showing a smidgeon of gratitude to the country that she chose to now reside in, she indirectly compares poor German helplessness against Hitler to the present similar inability of patriotic Americans to stop the Bush imperial war machine (e.g., “The present militaristic rhetoric of the “war” against terrorism has many echoes within my German history…”).

Lost completely is either thanks that she is thriving in a free United States, or that her adopted country of residence created the landscape that she takes for granted by freeing Europe from both fascism and communism which it (alone) created but could not free itself from. (She is welcome to claim either European “heritage”).

We are back to the same tropes in the Wright case: hypocrisy (damning middle-class values as one moves into a 10,000 sq. ft. mansion) and little appreciation shown for how America has evolved or what the United States has accomplished. This frustration among academic elites, which permeates graduate education and is more than just leftish ideology, is almost always a dividend of privilege, affluence, leisure — and geometrically-increasing material and aristocratic appetites that can never quite be met by lesser and more uncouth others.