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How not to be a sucker 3.2: reading a book report critically

In the previous post, I showed that Dinesh D’Souza egregiously mischaracterized Rigoberta Menchú’s memoir I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala in his 1991 book, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. That was relatively easy to do because Menchú’s book is available online, as are Wikipedia, the archives of the New York Review of Books, and the Nobel Peace Prize’s website.

I did the digging because I get obsessive about things, but it ought to be possible to get pretty suspicious of D’Souza’s summary from his writing alone. In this post, I’ll describe how I might have done that.

I’m building on something I’ve learned in decades of producing bad designs for computer programs: I get a queasy or itchy feeling about the code I’m writing well before I’m willing to admit I’ve gone astray. After all this time, I’m still lousy about pausing and investigating that feeling – about stopping and trying to turn vague unease into solid suspicion. (It probably has something to do with that “gets obsessive about things” thing.)

I know I’m not alone in this.

I think it’s the same for reading dodgy texts like D’Souza’s: you’re likely to realize that something is indefinably off before you can identify just what. So you might ignore that feeling too long instead of pausing and rereading, or attending to that feeling as you read on (which, in the case of a deceptive author, will likely cause it to increase). In this post, I’ll give two examples of that.

A bit of a problem is that I came into D’Souza’s book already knowing his reputation. I wasn’t giving him the benefit of the doubt that I’d give a normal author, so I just noted down the obvious and investigated later. And I frequently went out of his text (to, for example, check his facts), rather than reading straight through.

I had all the thoughts I’m going to describe, I just didn’t have them in the sequence given, nor did I fully elaborate them in my head until I started writing my first post on D’Souza’s farrago of falsehoods. In a sense, I’m doing what Imre Lakatos described as a “rational reconstruction": what I could have done back in 1991, arranged in an order with a more compelling through line (and fewer digressions) than reality ever provides. To show how it could be done, in the ideal.

To emphasize how the following account is plausible rather than true, I’ll treat myself as a fictional character also named Brian.

As with all these posts, I link to archive.org’s copy of Illiberal Education so that you can check my citations. In quotes, boldface indicates my emphasis.

A story of politeness

The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” but “That’s funny …” – Isaac Asimov Well, probably not. As usual, Quote Investigator ruins it for everyone.

1991: Brian was reading Illiberal Education. It had all the trappings of a researched piece of nonfiction: interviews, citations, numbers, and the like. Chapter 3 centered I, Rigoberta Menchú, someone Brian had never heard of. (He’d never heard of D’Souza either.)

As Brian sometimes did, he stumbled over a sentence. It was this one, on the second of three pages directly addressing Menchú’s book:

“Yet Burgos-Debray met Rigoberta in Paris, where presumably very few of the Third World’s poor travel.” (D’Souza, p. 72)

Burgos-Debray was the person who interviewed Menchú, transcribed the 24 hours of tapes, and edited them into the book. What jarred Brian was the contrast between using Burgos-Debray’s surname and Menchu´s given name. What’s up with that?

He flipped back a page and started skimming for names:

Hmm… Flipping through other parts of the book, Brian saw Dinesh’s habit is to introduce a person with both given name and surname, then use the surname thereafter, sometimes with an honorific. So, for example, the second (and final) mention of Professor Renato Rosaldo is:

“Her usefulness to Professor Rosaldo is that Rigoberta provides a model with whom American minority and female students can identify” (ibid).

Brian habitually didn’t pay much attention to book titles or chapter titles, so it was only now that he realized the title of the chapter was “Travels with Rigoberta.” Dinesh is really taking it all the way.

And maybe even further. Looking at the table of contents, Brian first realized Dinesh is fond of allusive chapter titles:

Wait a minute… Was “Travels with Rigoberta” an allusion to John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley? Brian could see it: both are memoirs, and D’Souza makes much of the incongruity of a Guatemalan peasant woman having traveled to Paris. Comparing a grown woman to a dog (Charley is a French poodle) is kind of cringe. But an author (Dinesh) intent on belittling another author (Menchú) might just go there.

Brian began to wonder if “dismissive” or “condescending” might not be the word to describe how Dinesh wants readers to feel about Menchú.

What other words leapt out? Dinesh calls her “really a mouthpiece for a sophisticated left-wing critique of Western society, all the more devastating because it issues not from a French scholar-activist but from a seemingly authentic Third World source” (ibid). He also does that thing where you mock an idea by putting it in scare quotes:

‘Rigoberta is a “person of color," and thus a victim of racism.’ (ibid.)

He portrays her as essentially passive:

“Rigoberta’s claim to eminence is that, as a consummate victim, she is completely identified with the main currents of history.” (ibid.)

She’s accomplished nothing:

“Undergraduates do not read about Rigoberta because she has written a great and immortal book, or performed a great deed, or invented something useful. She simply happened to be in the right place at the right time.” (ibid.)

Her problems were not so bad, certainly not so bad as to justify a whole book:

“Rigoberta’s victim status may be unfortunate for her personal happiness […]” (ibid.)

This provoked an idea. Dinesh’s thesis statement for the chapter is: these stupid kids at Stanford are being taught they’re victims of Western culture when they’re actually its beneficiaries. Brian recalled that (after two epigraphs), “Travels with Rigoberta” opens thusly:

" ‘Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture’s got to go,‘ The lack of capitalization is sly. What “had to go” was the curriculum named “Western Culture”; here, Dinesh encourages you to think the chant was about all of Western culture. He’s teaching the reader an attack on the first is an attack on the second. the angry students chanted on the lawn at Stanford University. They wore blue jeans, Los Angeles Lakers T-shirts, Reeboks, Oxford button downs, Vuarnet sun glasses, baseball caps, Timex and Rolex watches.” (p. 59)

Moreover,

“The weather was beautiful in California, the campus pristine, many of the students hailed from middle-class and privileged families.” (ibid.)

In this particular case, the students were being egged on by an “outside agitator,” Jesse Jackson. (See p. 64 and footnote 2.) But most often it’s professors teaching these privileged students they’re actually victims, and solely because of their identity. And reinforcing that message was the purpose of I, Rigoberta Menchú in the revamped Stanford curriculum:

“Her usefulness to Professor Rosaldo is that Rigoberta provides a model with whom American minority and female students can identify: they too are oppressed after all. [To be read with a dismissive roll of the eyes, Brian was sure.]

“But Rigoberta is no ordinary victim. As Burgos-Debray argues, She does not in fact argue this. she has suffered from multiple vectors of simultaneous oppression. Rigoberta is a ‘person of color,’ and thus a victim of racism. She is a woman, and thus a victim of sexism. She lives in South America, which is a victim of European and North American colonialism. If this were not bad enough, she is an Indian, victimized by latino culture within Latin America. Rigoberta’s claim to eminence is that, as a consummate victim, she is completely identified with the main currents of history.” (p. 72)

But Brian was puzzled by the rhetorical function of belittling Menchú and her experience. Dinesh brushes off “her parents [being] killed for unspecified reasons in a bloody massacre” (p. 71) when he could have leaned into Menchú’s status as an actual victim and used it to make the students look even more shallow and ignorant. (“Look how silly these students are, with their fancy watches and fancy houses and unmassacred families, safely cosplaying victimhood.")

But he leaves that card unplayed. Conspicuously so, to the point where it seems he’s intent on belittling not just Menchú herself but her life story. “She rebels against Europeanized Latino culture in all its manifestations, including domestic machismo and political indifference to Indian cultures” (ibid). Brian in 1991 knew little about Guatemala – Peru and Nicaragua were much more prominent in the US press – but even so he knew that, across South and Central America, a lot of killing was happening and “political indifference” was just a weird way to characterize dead indigenous peasants.

Brian remained puzzled, but the weirdness did serve to emphasize how little Dinesh quotes Menchú. Just the one sentence:

“At times, we managed to scrape a living in the Altiplano and didn’t go down to the fincas.” (Illiberal, p. 71)

In fact, Dinesh conspicuously passes by opportunities to quote Menchú. For example, he writes “Nor does Rigoberta’s socialist and Marxist vocabulary sound typical of a Guatemalan peasant” (p. 72), then just leaves that hanging. Show, don’t tell, man! 2024 Brian notes that Dinesh doesn’t because he can’t. Here’s a randomly chosen bit of her rhetoric and vocabulary, chosen from toward the end of the book (the more political part): “We have put our trust in the campañeros in the mountains. They saw our plight. They go through what we go through, and they have adapted to the conditions we live in. We can only love a person who eats what we eat. Once the Indian opens his heart to them, all those in the mountains will be his brother. We didn’t feel deceived as we did with the army, when the army takes away the sons of the Indians. That means a break with their culture, with their past. We felt abused when they came and took our men, our boys, because we knew that although we might see them again, they would no longer be the same.” (Menchu, p. 203) Not exactly ripped from the pages of Das Kapital.)

Brian decided to just live with the puzzlement, put it down to a hypothetical fixation of Dinesh’s on dupes and villains:

  1. Stanford students are being duped by their more-educated professors.
  2. Stanford students are wrong and silly to be so duped.
  3. Menchú is poorly educated. Her interviewer, transcriber, and editor (Burgos-Debray) is a “scholar-activist” (Illiberal, ibid).
  4. Therefore, Menchú is being duped by Burgos-Debray.
  5. And, like the students, she is silly/gullible.

This line of thought did highlight a similar incongruity between what Dinesh shows of Burgos-Debray and what he tells about her. He quotes her three times (p. 72):

Contrast those to Dinesh’s summaries of what he believes Burgos-Debray thinks (also p. 72):

Dinesh’s whole account has the sort of weirdnesses that Brian had long associated with emotional grudges. Maybe Dinesh is just prejudiced against illiterate peasant women? thinks they can have nothing to say worth hearing? and let that prejudice take over his narrative?

Brian later concluded this theory was wrong. Or at least importantly incomplete.

Playing the not-a-victim card

(The “Dinesh” gag is played out, so I’ll drop it now.)

Because D’Souza believes Western culture is unfairly maligned, he has a number of sections where he points out ways that non-Western cultures are worse than the West, and also how eagerly other cultures adopt Western ways. So:

“What is peculiarly Western, Lewis maintains, is the abolition of slavery, and it was not the force of slave armies, but the conscience of the slave-owning countries, which toppled the institution. Well, except for Haiti. As Emerson said of the emancipation of slaves in England and America, ‘Other revolutions have been the insurrection of the oppressed. This was the repentance of the tyrant.’ The same is true of women: Western ideas have helped to bring about basic rights for women that were, until very recently, regarded as preposterous in many countries of the world.” (p. 86)

With this, Brian broadly agreed (with some caveats, like about how slavery seems to have been markedly more cruel in the Americas). But he was brought up short by this:

“Today most of Latin America is democratic, largely due to human rights policies begun by President Carter and continued by Presidents Reagan and Bush.” (p. 87)

Back in 1991, Brian had a hairline, and his eyebrows disappeared into it. Carter had been ok-ish about pushing for human rights in Latin America, but Reagan and Bush had definitely not been.

Brian saw the geopolitical situation like this:

The United State’s Latin American policy throughout the Cold War (including Carter) was justified by reference to a global struggle between a culture of industrial capitalism, democracy, and human rights on the one side; and industrial communism on the other, where communism-as-practiced was considered incompatible with democracy and human rights. See: the Soviet Union. Administrations held it acceptable to temporarily sacrifice democracy and human rights (for other people) because those Western virtues could be added onto industrial capitalism once it won, whereas that wouldn’t be possible if industrial communism won.

From this point of view, Brazil (whose military dictatorship ended in 1985) was a policy success, whereas Guatemala in 1991 was a success not yet achieved.

Brian, reading D’Souza in 1991, knew the Reagan and Bush administrations’ attitudes toward human rights violations in Guatemala and similar countries: they didn’t happen (much) and if they did happen, it was the peasants’ fault. D’Souza’s discussion of Menchú echoes the party line: At the time, Brian wouldn’t have known that D’Souza had been a policy adviser in the Reagan administration, but just from the text of Illiberal it was clear D’Souza was on the conservative-to-reactionary side of the US political spectrum.

  1. Deflection and minimization. Menchú’s “parents are killed for unspecified reasons in a bloody massacre, reportedly carried out by the Guatemalan army” (p. 71). She is “a seemingly authentic Third World Source” (p. 72). No one ever calls someone “seemingly authentic” except to cast doubt on their authenticity.

    Contrast with D’Souza ally Professor C. Vann Woodward’s reaction after he read the book: “Her story is indeed a moving one of brutal oppression and horrors.” (Woodward, op. cit., previous post). D’Souza shows no sign of having been moved at all.

  2. They deserve it. To the Republican administrations, there were two sides to the Guatemalan Civil War. The military dictatorship was on the side of industrial capitalism, democracy (in due time), and human rights (eventually). Their opponents therefore had to be on the side of communism and dictatorship. There is no other option like, say, peasants just wanting to be left alone. By this logic, the fact that Menchú was against the dictatorship necessarily entails she was a Marxist.

That settled it. As they say, every accusation is a confession. D’Souza portrays professors as manipulating students, facts be damned. When it comes to I, Rigoberta Menchú, D’Souza is manipulating the reader, facts be damned. At least, that’s the way 1991 Brian was prepared to bet.