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The author focuses on nationalism in the United States There I was, in the basement of the Margaret Mitchell House in Atlanta. Lynda Hawkins, the curator, pointed out a photo of the movie set of Gone With the Wind, taken in 1939. Sitting cross-legged at Vivien Leigh's feet is none other than Martin Luther King Jr., 10 years old then, who as a member of the children's choir of his father's church, had been brought in to sing at the premiere of the movie. It's one of the weirder historical conjunctions I've come across, and I'm still not quite sure what to make of it. The very surprise I feel is a testament to the endlessness of irony, if not our ability to reinvent ourselves over time. The culture wars have been flaring again, with new intensity, and this time against the backdrop of real wars, frontal assaults on affirmative action and civil rights, a rapidly diminishing sense of trust within the body politic, as well as poisonous disregard for anything like civility. At Harvard, President Lawrence Summers asserted at a gathering of biologists, that women just might be genetically hobbled in math and science. Columbia University--like a number of other universities in recent times--has been divided by heated encounters between students and professors on opposite sides of the conflict in the Middle East. All I will venture to say is that to the extent there is any hope of reconciliation, if just within the bell jar of the campus, it has not been helped by the amplified shrieking of the New York tabloids. Even the usual discussions of whether the First Amendment is absolute or whether we can enforce civility through speech or conduct codes seem to have flown out the window. There is a redefining of in-group and out-group in a way that is rapidly superseding the smaller subjects around which the controversies originally swirled. It's not about political correctness anymore; it's about a rising nationalism that has consequences with teeth.
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