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Mark A. LeVine

Mark A. LeVine (UC Irvine History Professor)

It's Good to be Dangerous Again

Mr. LeVine is professor of modern Middle Eastern history, culture, and Islamic studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of the forthcoming books: Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil; and Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, 1880-1948. He is also a contributor, with Viggo Mortensen and Pilar Perez, to Twilight of Empire: Responses to Occupation. Click here to access his homepage.

It Feels Good to be Dangerous Again

I'd like to thank the Academy for the great honor of being named one of the 101 most dangerous professors in America. Out of the tens of thousands of scholars teaching across this great land, it is certainly is special to be named to this auspicious list. Colleagues and friends keep coming up to me and shaking my hand, saying “Well done!” and “Keep up the great work!” al-Jazeera wants to interview me again. And maybe now I won't get bumped from a CNBCinterview about the Danish cartoon controversy for a story on ink jet printers (I didn't realize they still make ink jet printers).

Come to think of it; this isn't the first time I've been called dangerous by my peers. Back in the day, when I was first starting out in the music business, I worked for a small but busy Manhattan recording studio. After a few weeks the owner presented me with a plaque bestowing the title “Dangerous Mark LeVine” upon me in honor of the “mean” solos I played for his customers.

Twenty years later and it's good to be dangerous again. I must admit, when I first got the news, I thought Mr Horowitz, the author of The Professors, had confused me with one of my colleagues at the UCI Medical School. After all, they apparently have actually been responsible for a few needless deaths, or at least kept patients waiting a really long time for a new liver. All I've done, according to Horowitz, is corrupt a few young and impressionable minds. But even there, as an editor at the LA Times reminded me, there are quite a few professors at UCI with reputations far more dangerous than mine, so I consider myself lucky, and in fact, unworthy, to have been named the only representative from my university for such an auspicious award.

But I'm confused about what exactly it is that makes me so dangerous. Indeed, when I spoke to one of the assistant editors of the book, I was informed somewhat dismissively that I was in actuality only “in the middle of the pack.” in other words, I'm not really that dangerous; perhaps more of a nuisance with potential, or only dangerous after long exposure, like saccharin or fumes at the gas station. Or maybe I'm guilty by association; as Norman Finkelstein, infamous author of such bloodthirsty screeds as The Holocaust Industry and Beyond Chutzpah and definitely one of the top five most dangerous professors outside of Saddam University, was a reader of my Master's thesis. And Noam Chomsky once told a publisher of mine that he liked my new book, although apparently not enough to read it all the way through and write a blurb.

Certainly it can't be for what I actually write or teach. Unlike my colleague Joseph Massad of Columbia University, no right wing organizations have felt it necessary to send spies into my classroom or get students who didn't take my class reveal how anti-Semitic I am. On the other hand, some leaders of the OC Jewish community threatened never to give another dime to UCI after I invited half a dozen leading Israeli and Palestinians scholars to an open forum on reimagining the peace process (they didn't mind the Palestinians, apparently, but felt that the Israelis “didn't represent mainstream public opinion in Israel.” I guess they think that the best way to reimagine something is to bring in the very people whose lack of imagination got us into the current mess).

But still, I can understand why I have a way to go before I become a poster child for revoking the tenure system, at least in tax-payer funded public universities. According to Mr. Horowitz--or at least, the intern at his webzine frontpagemag.com who “researched” the chapter on me--my main crimes seem to be that my website is too self-congratulatory (guilty as charged, but how else would Horowitz have noticed me?), that I am “responsible for a steady stream of anti-American and anti-Israel diatribes” (a bit of a stretch, since in my last book, Why They Don't Hate Us, I have a whole section criticizing the peace movement for doing this very thing), and perhaps most damning, that I advocate a “quasi-Communist utopia” and a “classless society.”'

This is a bit strange, since I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the Communist Party or identified myself as a so-called “Marxist scholar.” But even if I did, I'm not sure how doing so would make one “dangerous” to America. Advocating Communism today is like rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I can't imagine a more irrelevant political position short of being a member of the Whig Party. I'll admit that I do teach Marx on occasion in the classroom; but if Horowitz has a problem with that, he should take it up with the nation's leading business schools, who teach him for more frequently than do I. (Note to David: I will be teaching a graduate course on Marx and his intellectuals heirs next year. But by the time students get to graduate school students are so thoroughly corrupted I assume it's not worth trying to save them.) Perhaps Mr. Horowitz, an admitted former Marxist, is still hung up on his old flame? As for me, I prefer the label “post-Habermasian actually neo-liberal” (neo since it political liberalism in the US died in the first Bush presidency). I do confess a fondness for Antonio Gramsci; but I can't imagine Horowitz would consider him a legitimate Marxist, since Gramsci felt that the cultural-political superstructure was as important as the base in determining the course of history.

As for being utopian, I admit that I'm guilty as charged. I have two young children and would like to see this country, and the world at large, live up to the high ideals upon which the United States was founded. And unlike Horowitz and his generation of disgruntled ex-Leftists, I still believe it's possible for America to live up to its founding promises and be a force for good in the world rather than just naked self-interest, greed, and the benefit of corporations with ties to red-state Republicans. Does that make me dangerous? I wish it did, but I fear Mr. Horowitz is giving me, and the American people, more credit than is our due. As far as I can tell, American empire is safe and secure, despite my best efforts to topple it (although Musab al-Zarqawi seems to be doing a good job in Iraq).

But it's nice to feel like my work hasn't been completely in vain, and I promise you, member of the Academy, that I will work tirelessly in the coming year to live up to the great honor bestowed upon me. I just bought Protools and have been furiously practicing my guitar. I even wrote a new song, “David and Mark.” It's supposed to be a chicken-scratch guitar duel a la that song from the movie Deliverance. I'll play the guitar and David, you can be the autistic-savant banjo player like that kid in the movie. Then we'll see who's really more dangerous.