Card-Carrying Members?

Via a friend of mine in the program, Professors Eric Foner (with whom I've taken two classes) and Glenda Gilmore offer a rebuttal to Daniel Pipes' recent list of academics who hate America. An article like this really doesn't deserve a response but, simply put, Pipes is a moron. Reading any chapter of Foner's recent Story of American Freedom -- or any of his other books for that matter -- belies Pipes' ridiculous and dangerous charge of anti-Americanism. And finding fault with Dubya's wag-the-dog Freudian fiasco in Iraq, a soon-to-be-military excursion that has already run roughshod over our Constitution, hardly speaks ill of anyone's patriotism.

If anything, it's egregiously anti-American for Pipes to earmark academics who should be constrained from the "outside." A quote the Daniel Pipes of this world ought to consider: In the words of Cornel West, "To understand your country, you must love it. To love it, you must, in a sense, accept it. To accept it as how it is, however is to betray it. To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that in it which shows what it might become. America – this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of the no into the yes, needs citizens who love it enough to reimagine and remake it."