Customer Reviews

Telling The Truth

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Lynn Cheney's intelligent book greatly enhances the body of literature dealing with America's cultural decline over the past 30-40 years. Her positions are astutely made, and the work is rich in specifics. Unfortunately, it was Mrs. Cheney's brave refusal to hold back that serves as book's sole drawback. Her graphic descriptions while generally appropriate can be nauseating at times. In her discussion of the assault on the arts, she references many the shock displays regurgitated into public view by too many so-call museums. There is just no tasteful way to relate "exhibits" that feature animal carcasses, human waste products, or pornographic debris that would make Bob Guccioni jealous. The one instance where the frank minutia seems gratuitous is the recounting of a heinous family murder that begins chapter 3. Readers may wish to skip this anecdote rather than forego a few nights sleep.

Beyond this tendency to lay it all on the line, Mrs. Cheney can hardly be faulted for the brilliant dialectic. A good portion is devoted to the revisionist theories currently being force fed to college students-especially in humanities-related studies. She rightly comments on the execrable danger presented by the one-sided indoctrination that has replaced factual learning and the presentation of multiple perspectives in America institutions of higher learning. The author, herself, demonstrates an exceedingly open mind; she speaks of the good aspects she sees in philosophies such as feminism, multi-culturalism, and Afrocentrism, even though she finds militant versions of these perspectives harmful.

The title of the book concerns the overall dismissal of the concept of truth that Mrs. Cheney explains is threatening so many segments of our culture. She does not truckle in the face of her imperious adversaries, boldly stating, "when we find ourselves faced with situations that violate good sense-whether it is how our children are being taught or how our legal system is abandoning the principles that have long undergirded it-we should, each of us speak out about what we see. We should not let ourselves be intimidated by seemingly sophisticated statements about how there is no reality and thus no truth."

This book was published in 1995 when her husband's political career seemed to be in permanent hibernation, but it does contain some forward-looking criticism of Al Gore. Reviewing the vice-president's controversial environmental tome, she castigates his animus toward western civilization and the infallibility of truth. She opines "as Gore describes it, the worldview that led to the scientific revolution has been responsible for everything bad (including `the atrocities of Hitler and Stalin') and nothing good, which does cause one to wonder what worldview the vice president imagines gave rise to anesthesia, (the) polio vaccine, and--his pet project-the information superhighway.

Any credible book that advocates veracity naturally criticizes Bill Clinton for his inimical views on truth and his widespread effort to disgrace the concept. Let's hope that this work serves as a fortuitous augur of an era that celebrates and strives to emulate all that is honest and noble in our American heritage.

This book came about using data ( and Writings) compiled by her underlings at NEH during her tenure there. Her underlings were of her same political bent. She went into the chairmanship of the NEH with these political ideologies and uses anecdotal evidence to make a broad-based claim on the state of humanities as a whole. She's attempting to prove what she already believed, not searching for the truth--which is the point of humanities study. She was appointed to the NEH because of who her husband was, not because she cares or even engages in humanities studies. She believes that the study of history should solely encourage patriotism (see all her other books)and her remarks about history standards in high schools should show us that she cares nothing for true humanities study. What she and all her defenders fail to see is that history hasn't changed, but the information we now have allow us to see it as the complicated monster that it is. She should never have been chair of the NEH. She doesn't have the knowledge or mind for it. We study the humanities because they are supposed to help us shape our future--they are correctives for human thought. They show us where we went right, where we failed, and only through their studies can a democratic society progress. That is not what this book is about. This book is meant to be inflammatory, to inspire anger, which is on the opposite side of reason. She wants you to believe that the hoof is the whole pig, and for that, she has done us all a disservice.

Ms. Cheyney takes us out into the real world. What our politicians,school districts and universities are doing to our children and our culture. She documents her stories from FACT, not political correctness, she exposes what is going on in the world of dis-information and situational ethics. Even the word fact has come under assault in today's culture and that's frightening.

Lynne V. Cheney's "Telling the Truth" is an investigation into Postmodernism and its influence on today's culture. Postmodernism holds that there is no objective reality, and therefore that there is no such thing as truth. Reality, in its view, is constructed by dominant social groups, defined by race, gender, or class. Postmodernism is hostile to reason, to excellence, and to standards of any kind. Politically, it is manifested in movements such as multiculturalism and radical egalitarianism, It is hostile to the notion of individual liberty, which it regards as an "inherently oppressive" concept. This philosophy has become widespread in the academic world and is having a growing influence over our culture. Most of Ms. Cheney's book focuses on the cultural manifestations of Postmodernism. Many of these are truly frightening. I recommend this book if you want to learn more about the threat that this intellectual movement poses. The book is written for a general audience and is easy to read.

At that time, the only comprehensive book on the more vicious aspects of political correctness was Dinesh D'Souza's "Illiberal Education". As someone who was teaching at the doctoral level during the late '80's until the late '90's, I had a chance to witness this thuggishness firsthand, and couldn't believe that there was nobody who would go to the public and blow the whistle on the impact of postmodernist relativism on our education industry. Political correctness has lasted longer than McCarthyism did, and has destroyed far more lives and careers, yet because the perpetrators of PC often are the ones writing the textbooks, it has not (yet) had the same impact on the national psyche, because it's existence is not widely disseminated, and it's critics not given enough voice at the high school level. This is similar in some ways to the fact that Communism's atrocities outnumber those of Naziism by a factor of ten, yet this fact hasn't been presented strongly in schools-most schoolkids can, and should, easily tell you that Hitler was a brutal murderer, although almost none even know who Stalin or Mao were. It's clear that the folks writing textbooks will not critique anyone else who is left of center, no matter how horrific their activities. While it is unlikely that Ms. Cheney's book will be taught in government schools, at least the student's parents can buy the book and be forewarned.

The author makes it clear that for the most part postmodern relativists are brownshirts-anger and envy driven individuals who are stuck in a perpetual college-sophomore, adolescent outlook on life. This book gives a great many more examples of the mental illnesses known as postmodernism and relativism. Ms. Cheney is quite careful to present sufficient cases in each area of her critique to waylay any countercharges of this type of thinking being a fringe within the academic theater; rather, it is convincingly shown to be pervasive there. Hat's off to her for publishing this stuff, and providing a vehicle where anyone and everyone can see the facts (although the people she exposes claim that the concept of "facts" is a racist, misogynist, homophobic, male, eurocentric construct) of the worst of the academic left in the U.S. It is apparent from her critics in these reviews and elsewhere that there is anger and dismay at her for daring to publish accounts of these events, but one must consider the motivations of those who fear widespread knowledge of their views and activities.

Where the book was deficient was in the area of proposing solutions to make this intellectual perversion stop dead in its tracks, and to prevent future students from traipsing the same way down this wrong path. Although Ms. Cheney seemed to imply that the objects of her critique would collapse under their own bitterness, ridiculousness, and hypocrisy, and to some extent this has already happened, she proposes little beyond a sort of passive "wait and let them self-destruct" approach. While the problem of the postmodern relativists hasn't gotten worse since 1995, it still exists, and until knowledge of them can reach a much larger number of ordinary decent citizens outside the chattering classes, they still pose a threat to the education industry and more importantly to young people in this country.

A previous reviewer suggested that Mrs. Cheney ought to have been Bush's running mate. I think she'd have made a better running mate for Mr. Cheney, i.e. a presidential one!

Mrs. Cheney makes so many wonderful points in this book that it's hard to decide where to start.

The most striking aspect of the book, and the feature that distinguishes it most from other attacks on academic leftism, is how informed her analysis is. Unlike many critics, she really knows the details of political correctness: its history and early motivations, its original goals and how they differ from its current construals, and the sociological forces that have moved it away from its early ideals.

This book, as a piece of intellectual history, is nearly unrivaled by anything written recently.

Most insightful are the various comparisons between the political idealogy of fascism and American, leftist, political correctness. Mrs. Cheney knows, as anyone who does a little research, that there is nothing wrong with fascism simpliciter. And very much like fascism, political correctness has been steered off course by a number of malicious forces. Everybody knows that even the fascism of 1930s Germany was what you might call a mixed bag. Had it remained true to its original goals and idealism it might have turned out to be a very positive social system, and may have helped more people than it hurt. Mrs. Cheney would certainly agree. And such is the case with political correctness.

My father told me something when I was a boy, and I was reminded of it many times while reading this book. He said, "Son, 99% of the beliefs of 99% of the population are false. It's up to you to find that other 1% of the 1%." The arithmetical mistake aside, it's advice well taken.

Cheers to Lynne V. Cheney for finally putting some serious research and careful analysis into a critique of academic leftism. It's about time someone did!

The Republican vice-presidential nominee's wife adds considerable gravitas to the Bush campaign: much more than Lieberman adds "ethicas" to the Gore ticket.

Her incisive and highly readable tome decrying the deconstruction of the humanities by latter-day relativists is a refreshing breath of air in today's politically correct climate. If Bush doesn't get elected, Mrs. Cheney's book risks being burned, just as books disagreeing with Nazi positions were literally burned for being "socially incorrect."

I found her book more readable than Allen Bloom's "Closing the American Mind" -- mainly because she focuses more on examples than on philosophical underpinnings.

She reveals and documents how academics no longer care about facts or excellence. All is judged by how well it advances a professor's political agenda. So relativists are sure to criticize her book for being in opposition to their attacks on objective scholarship. I have no hope that they will respond to Cheney's challenge to:

"Try to show I am mistaken if you wish, but do so with sound evidence and sound reasoning. Invective and ..........."

They will not, because evidence and logic are precisely what they oppose, such as in the claims that Aristotle stole Egyptian philosophical works from the library at Alexandria (which was not even built before Aristotle's death).

America did not listen to Prof. Bloom, an obscure midwestern academic. Perhaps it will listen now to a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities and a vice-president's wife.

Ms. Chenney's brief, matter-of-fact book exposes the pervasive liberal, left-wing orthodoxy in academia and the media and how conservatives are treated as pariahs and right-wing ideology as apostasy. It's a quick read and sure to infuriate those on both sides of the political spectrum, albeit for completely different reasons. The anecdotes and data are all thoroughly footnoted.

Mrs. Cheney's book is an excellent primer on the ideology (post-modernism) and its many variants that animate and define American politics and popular culture. The central ethic of post-modernism is that truth does not exist. It is not merely indeterminate. It does not exist, period. Furthermore, all that we perceive as reality in our politics, society and culture is, in fact, a social construct, something that does not correspond to something exterior and permanent, the truth -- which does not exist and never has. Even worse, the falsehoods that most people perceive are imposed by a small class - male, Caucasian, Christian, imbued with the ideas, practices and habits of Western Civilization -- to further its class-specific interests and oppress all those outside of its small, sinister circle. And so, ideas like the efficacy of human reason to know the truth and filter error, objectivity in discernment and merit in thought and conduct, truth and beauty are all cruel hoaxes. Hope lies in emancipation from these impositions and the radical deconstruction of law and society as they currently exist. Only then can non-male, non-Caucasian peoples claim their place in the sun, too.

Post-modernism, multiculturalism, deconstructionism, relativism, subjectivism - all stem from the same egalitarian root and are arrayed toward the goal of radically remaking society upon egalitarian lines. Where societies adhere to the ideas of objectivity and merit, certain people do not achieve as much as others or their thoughts are not taken as seriously as others. The excluded or marginalized tend to be minorities and women. What gives rise to the statistical disparity in achievement between men and women, whites and blacks? The traditional explanation is that certain people - for whatever reason - place different emphases on education or certain types of achievement; and also that there are forms of sex- and race-based discrimination that has kept certain people from their full potential. In the post-modern farrago, however, it's not because certain classes - usually women and minorities - are equally meritorious, but because society has allowed itself to accept false and, in any event, outmoded ideas of objectivity, truth and merit.

In its place, the post-modernist - in his many variants, feminist, radical skeptic, multiculturalist, etc. - would exalt what he believes are more commonly found in and valued by "oppressed" classes. And so, subjectivity will surmount objectivity, emotional truth over actual truth, intuition over reason, emotion over rationality, storytelling over empiricism. In this world, as Mrs. Cheney abundantly details, witchcraft is welcomed (by the New York Times on Mother Day) as a healthy development in women's spirituality, false accusations of childhood sexual abuse (through the "recovered memory syndrome" movement) are viewed as healthy developments in women's liberation, and speech codes (as found on many university campuses and in workplaces) are deemed essential for creating a welcoming environment for all minorities.

The catalog of outrages detailed in this book is too great to recount here. And at times, Mrs. Cheney's abundant detail grows wearying. But it has an important purpose. It reminds us how completely these ideas have enveloped society and how evenly they press on us, thereby subtlety effecting the change in consciousness that the evangelists of fashionable opinion seek.

The greatest defect of this book is that there is no discussion of the role of traditional religion in defending human reason, truth and beauty. Her discussion is entirely secular and suffers on that account. Still, it is a fascinating snapshot of the parricide of the west. If an individual is held to account (by processes of law or other social sanctions) for actions he did not commit (as effected by the "recovered memory syndrome"), or cannot make reference to truth in his defense, or is defined by racial, ethnic or sexual classifications instead of individual action, then individual liberty and the rule of law - central ideas of Western Civilization -- are threatened. Out constitutional order will erode, not from outright legal assault so much as from a slow but discernable ebbing away of the essential beliefs that support it. But then, this is exactly the object the post-modernist seeks.

This is hysterical nonsense typical of right-wing ideologues posing as scholars. As a professional geographer, I shudder when I think that an accredited university gave this blowhard a Ph.D. This rant is full of ridiculous generalizations and misrepresentations. To take just one: she claims environmentalists are critical of science because of its dedication to objectivity and rationality (p.12). Of course, the reality is environmentalists make extensive use of cutting-edge science while right-wing activists like the author's husband are doing their best to undermine the use of science in the environmental policy decision-making process, whether its forest policy, pollution control, endangered species recovery, or global climate change. This is just one small example of the many mistruths Cheney perpetuates. Indeed, she rewrites history with more zest than most self-styled revisionists. Having spent all of my adult life in academia, I have encountered my fair share of flaky "postmodernists" and man-hating radical feminists. But one would get the impression from some of the reviews posted here and from Cheney's book that the academy is made up of nothing but America-haters, revisionist, anti-truth, anti-morality professional liars who brainwash our kids on a daily basis. Of course, only someone who hasn't spent any time in the classroom could possibly believe this absurd nonsense. I think my GIS professor would have been surprised to find out that his forest management research was nothing but politically correct lies, and my history professor would have been shocked to learn how "relativistic" and "perverted" his research on state constitutions was. Simply put, Cheney's book is utter and complete nonsense. It should be retitled: "Telling a Very Skewed Version of the Truth, While Turning a Blind Eye to Anything That Might Be Considered Objectionable in the History of White People, Particularly Conservatives." Please don't buy this book--you'll only encourage this pseudo-scholar.