‘Intellectuals: Mute Voice’

Davis’ shortsighted diatribe against “mute” American intellectuals betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of the intellectual’s role in America.

American intellectuals battle not in our headlines, but in our homework. The American intellectual has correctly targeted our schools and academies as the battleground of ideas.

Our secondary schools and universities, riotously pluralist, rigorously permissive, are so successful at instilling in us a love of free expression that the most arcane censorship issues often end up covered by every major newspaper and magazine in the country.

That the National Endowment for the Humanities pulled the plug on a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition--an artist unknown to 99% of America and offensive to 99% of those to whom he is known--does not announce the end of the First Amendment; rather, the fact that such an event is news at all confirms that our intellectuals have succeeded.

Davis further distended his polemic by bashing every intellectual who has not devoted his or her last month to speaking out against Deng Xiaoping. But where is the need? Here again, the intellectuals who guide us from high school through college have done a good job; almost every reader in America recognizes the totalitarian lie the moment it begins. Do we need Stanley Cavell to unmask it officially? A tribute to our collective intellect that we do not.

JOSEPH F. MAILANDER

Los Angeles