Having seen the televised collapse of the World Trade Center towers, I think I finally understand the Gulf War. Or rather, I think understand that there were two Gulf Wars. There was Operation Desert Storm, the 42-day war to liberate one monarchy from another invading dictatorship. And then there was what Evan Carton calls Operation Campus Storm, a journalistic campaign to save the study of Western culture at American universities from affirmative action, multiculturalism and the specter of Political Correctness, or PC for short.

So why should a war fought ten years ago in a different region of the world concern us? Isn’t World War II and particularly Pearl Harbor more relevant, given that the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center took place on our soil? One can and should connect September 11^th to December 7^th. Yet this comparison does not operate to the exclusion of other comparisons. So if you’ll bear with me, I plan to get to Pearl Harbor in just a moment.

Before discussing Pearl Harbor, though, we might remember that Campus Storm and Desert Storm took place in tandem. As the U.S. military vanquished one enemy abroad, an earlier Bush administration needed to vanquish its domestic enemies from within. These enemies might threaten a much-needed national consensus in support of a war. And so, while the Bush administration did not directly train its sights on intellectual saboteurs lurking on campuses across the country, in Carton’s words Operation Desert Storm and Operation Campus Storm emerge from “the same complex of dominant – yet increasingly unsettled – American assumptions about the nature of personal and national identity.”

Although commentator George Will was not the first one to do so, his 1991 columns probably did more to publicize the alleged abuses of PC more than anyone else. Will’s version of PC cast leftist academics as the villains in a vast conspiracy to replace common culture with an elitist orthodoxy and dogma. As anyone who has spent any time at a university knows, campuses offer no shortage of orthodoxy and dogma. However, Will’s fallacy of pseudo-proof manages to ignore that many different correctnesses operate on campus as well as off, and take place on the right as well as the left.

The accusation of PC brilliantly captured and colonized common sense – without much resistance – as an extension of a politically conservative, quasi-religious perspective. This way of looking rarely made explicit its own biases. Rather, by denying its own identity – aligned with the dominant and traditional – it managed to make any other explicit mention of identity seem at best quaint and at worst, freakish and divisive. In scrupulously avoiding mention of what it was, PC could effectively demonize what it was not: critical of the status quo, embracing diversity, engaged with global concerns rather than solely with national ones.

So in this post-September 11^th war on terrorism, why focus on the now seemingly pointless internal culture wars of the past? Because I think the underlying notion of correctness remains useful to understanding how September 11^th and December 7^th correspond. Even more important, though, universities and academic forums like this one have a critical role to play. As this Bush Administration uses the pretext of war to enfeeble civil protections, universities must take leadership in reasserting core democratic values. Yet taking this leadership role will remain difficult from the cultural margins where PC helped to put scholarly voices.

Political Correctness usefully masks and makes natural the consolidated corporate and big-P political power of consequence while magnifying the more diffuse, extreme and petty small-P politics of academia and of lesser consequence. Like any other attempt to impose a set of beliefs, PC assumes that no one will notice or question PC’s own form of correctness. So while PC intends to stifle dissent and disagreement with the status quo, a meaningful challenge to correctness critiques the power of consequence, not the power of pettiness. A meaningful challenge takes on commonly if not dearly held beliefs. While decrying political correctness might be in vogue, the charge remains relatively easy to make. Asserting that democratic principles should remain at the core of American national identity – especially in time of war – can prove infinitely more grueling.

At the risk of asserting my own form of correctness, then, let me propose two assertions: that Political Correctness really continues an older and longer tradition of anti-intellectualism in American life, and that we might more fruitfully identify PC’s own correctness as Literal Correctness.

By Literal Correctness, I mean the tendency to mock interpretation and deride nuance. LC denies multiple perspectives, and dismisses irony unless broadly applied in the most unmistakable terms. It asserts surface and shallow meaning as the meaning, to the exclusion of all other meanings. In fact, LC seems remarkably hypersensitive – even intolerant - toward the possibility of multiple and contradictory meanings co-existing. LC shuns reflection and eyes intellectual activity with suspicion. Only the most literal, obvious and narrowest interpretation can conform to LC’s demands.

The Literally Correct response to Bill Maher’s recent remarks on the ABC show Politically Incorrect is instructive. Maher dared to rework the notion of cowardice by distinguishing – perhaps not particularly well, but an attempt – between dropping bombs from an airplane and using an airplane as a bomb. To punish Maher for daring to violate the tenets of LC, which only allows for decrying enemy cowardice, both FedEx and Sears pulled their advertising from the show. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer used the occasion to warn Americans “to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.”

The Literal Correctness of responses to September 11^th remains understandable. The hijackings were a heinous tragedy of an enormous scale of which we still do no fully comprehend. While flagwaving, military jingoism and harsh words for both guided and misguided critics of US foreign policy may not have been the best response to this tragedy, let’s not underestimate the magnitude of what happened, and its initial impact on the culture.

In disturbing fashion, however, the Literally Correct response since September 11^th has begun to seriously undermine essential freedoms and international law. Literal Correctness uses military tribunals to bypass the judicial branch of government because due process is just too complex. It violates attorney-client privilege and refuses to disclose basic information like the names of 1100 aliens indefinitely detained since September 11, all in the name of national security. It embarks on such ambitious plans as the one to interview 5000 foreign males who entered this country in the past two years. Incidentally, I can’t think of a better way to alienate thousands of people and encourage entire communities not to talk to law enforcement. Instead of strengthening global resolve against terrorism by using international courts to prosecute war criminals, the Literally Correct response finds an identifiable nation with a reprehensible regime – one that the U.S. inconveniently once helped to install - and punishes that regime by dropping bombs that, no matter how smart, inevitably sacrifice civilians. Just like how the death penalty works, literal correctness must find someone to pay, regardless of guilt or innocence.

The Literal Correctness of the U.S. response to September 11^th remains entirely consistent with the historical record of this country. In “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” historian Richard Hofstadter ably connects the rampant anti-Catholicism of the 1840s – espoused by such groups as the Know Nothing Party, a group professing to know no other truth than the truth of an immigrant threat – to such later incursions on civil liberties as McCarthyism. While some recent scholarship has argued that fear of domestic Communists during the 1950s was warranted, today few can defend Senator Joseph McCarthy’s tactics. The House Un-American Activities Committee, of which McCarthy headed, interrogated American citizens on the basis of their political beliefs. Anyone even remotely associated with a Communist – popularly known as a Fellow Traveler – might find him or herself hauled before Congress to testify. Since these were Congressional hearings and not criminal or civil proceedings, those testifying did not have the typical protections accorded in a court of law. The Hearings would make literal what HUAC wanted to find: Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? The Committee would then engage in the ritual of naming names. In an effort to root out a vast Communist conspiracy, McCarthy and the Committee pressured those testifying to inform on their closest friends and family, no matter how remote their association with a left-wing cause might be, in order to render the threat of Communism in its most explicit terms.

While the Literal Correctness taking root following September 11^th arguably may not have had as dramatic effect as the Red Scare of the 1950s, this nation remains perilously close to re-enacting wholesale violations of civil liberties that have come to serve as blots on the democratic principles that define our history. Amid the passions and necessities of their respective eras, there were plenty of justifications for slavery, lynchings, genocide, internments and holocausts – nuclear and otherwise.  We grew to regret those actions, just as we will grow to regret the actions taken against thousands of legal residents following September 11^th. As presidential scholar Steven Hess notes in a recent story on National Public Radio, “these things, in retrospect, are almost always judged by history to be a mistake.”

But what of that literal connection between September 11^th and December 7^th, two days when enemies attacked America on its own soil? To deny this parallel is obtuse. But to see only the literal connection, without any reference to historical context and to the exclusion of any other possible connections is equally obtuse. The United States entered World War II, not just after Pearl Harbor, but after a yearlong public Great Debate between those who supported intervention and those who supported isolation. In this recent war on terrorism, the American public never had a chance to weigh the merits of engaging in yet another protracted war that moves effortlessly from Afghanistan to Iraq to any country the U.S. unilaterally determines is supporting what the U.S. unilaterally determines is terrorism.

This loss of public debate is but one casualty of the literally correct link between December 7^th and September 11^th. Rather than make the mistake of dismissing this connection, universities must hold lots of public forums like this one where participants debate and deliberate over the nature of the variety of linkages one can make to September 11^th. So let me in closing propose another date with which to connect September 11th: February 27^th, 1933. On this date, a fire burned down part of the Reichstag, or German parliament building. Chancellor Adolf Hitler accused Communists of setting the fire. Within days, President von Hindenburg suspended freedom of speech and assembly. Within a month, the Parliament voted to consolidate political power with Hitler and the Nazi Party.

I do not mean to suggest that what has happened to the World Trade Center and what happened to the Reichstag function as equivalent. What I do mean to suggest is that what happened after February 27th and what is happening after September 11^th carries a disturbing likeness. On encountering the literally correct dichotomy pitting Western Civilization in a war against Muslim barbarians, we might do well to remember historian Richard L. Rubenstein’s assessment of Auschwitz and the Nazi final solution: “the Holocaust bears witness to the advance of civilization.” Literal correctness demands that the advance of this civilization can take place only when we are inflicting the collateral damage, and only with the sacrifice of what LC deems to be mere personal freedoms. I am not proposing to abolish all forms of correctness, nor am I denying my own form of correctness in these remarks. Rather, I am urging the academic community to develop and cultivate many kinds of correctness, but especially an informed correctness that privileges diversity over uniformity, democratic principles over national security and interpretation over compliance. Right now, I can’t think of a better way to embody a meaningful patriotism in support of this country’s ideals than rigorous debate and if necessary protest, as opposed to the literal patriotism that flies flags, asserts obedience, and cloaks what essentially remains an artless power grab to consolidate political and business power.