LIFE IN THE ASYLUM
WHERE TO BEGIN?
Today, when one undertakes to address the problems
confronting our great country, the phrase that inevitably comes to mind is:
Where to begin? No doubt we have successfully dealt with serious problems in the past. In a second
war with Great Britain, our nation’s capital was captured and the White House
itself burned to the ground. Yet we prevailed. In our Civil War, the very
concept of our national unity was put to a bloody test. Yet we prevailed. We
emerged better and stronger after that terrible conflict than in any comparable
event in recorded human history. The major reason for that outcome is that a
gangly, unphotogenic bumpkin set us on a path to bind up the nation's wounds rather than engage in an orgy of executions
and imprisonments.
By the way, if during
the last several decades that bumpkin had been a candidate for president, he
would not have gotten through the impenetrable media filter. He was not a
Democrat, he would not have looked good on the cover of GQ, he was not schooled
at Harvard or Yale, and no stock photos of him windsurfing or playing
basketball would have been available. Worse yet, he had a propensity to use the
word “God”. He used it six times in his
four paragraph second inaugural,
while using the first-person singular only twice. Stupid man – he didn’t
realize that an inaugural address was the perfect opportunity to blather on for
an hour, promoting himself with first-person singulars by the score as they
rolled up his teleprompter. Which brings up a perfect opportunity for a Life In
The Asylum challenge: if any reader of this column has a child in our wonderful
public education system, show the child this column and see if he or she knows
who the gangly bumpkin was. Feel free to post the result as a Comment.
Despite our ability to
prevail in the past, today’s situation is unique in the sheer number of
serious, potentially catastrophic problems that confront us all at once. We
have herein identified several of them (not in any particular order): our
despicable sham of a “media”, our atrocious joke of an “education” system, and
the combination of those two that has given us our absurd method of selecting
pygmies as presidential candidates. [The good news is that we will have room
for a lot of our recent presidents on Mount Rushmore if we size their images on
the mountain in proportion to the presidential stature of the ones already
there.]
Lets start with
education, because it not only overlaps other problems, but in many ways it
holds the key to other problems. For instance, if you (as a staunch
Progressive) want to take over our nation’s media, it gives you a nice head
start if you have already taken over the journalism schools. And the journalism
schools being parts of various colleges, it gives you a nice head start taking
over the colleges if you (e.g., Bill Ayers) have never left college since the
Summer of Love. The progressive takeover method is admittedly somewhat slow
(compared, e.g., to the more direct Hugo Chavez method), but it has the virtue
of going almost entirely unnoticed by the somnolent American people.
You do remember Bill Ayers, don’t you? Wikipedia begins his bio as “an American elementary education
theorist and a former leader in the movement that opposed U.S. involvement
in the Vietnam War.” One might more accurately begin his description as “an
unrepentant terrorist whose bombing campaign resulted in multiple fatalities”.
In 2001 he published his “memoir,” for promotion of which he posed standing on
a crumpled American flag [see picture, prominently featured in “Chicago”
magazine]. For reasons at which one can only guess, the University of Illinois
at Chicago gave him a career, a fine income, and lofty titles such as
“Distinguished Professor of Education”. If you want to barf while thinking
about Ayers, click on the above “educational theorist” link. His other claim to
fame was when he lent his living room to introduce our current president
(hereafter referred to as “B.O.”) to electoral politics. B.O. described Ayers as “just a guy in my
neighborhood”, and the watchdog media diligently let that pass.
But the point is, for decades we as a nation have allowed
Bill Ayers and people like him to be in charge of the curricula in our schools.
By electing the inimitable Jimmy Carter, we gave ourselves the Department of
Education, and gave people like Bill Ayers the opportunity to take their “education
theories” nationwide. When such people control the education schools, the next
generation of teachers comes out indoctrinated in such theories and passes
garbage on to our children. When such people control the journalism schools,
the next generation of “journalists” come out inspired not to report facts to
the people, but to promote “social justice” and to “make a difference”. When
such people control the law schools, successive generations of lawyers come out
with the same inspiration, ultimately giving us lifetime-appointed Justices
like the “wise Latina”.
We once had ways, such
as the SAT, to gage how well our children were learning under all these new
theories, and the answer was always “not too well”. So naturally we needed to
dumb down the SAT scoring. When that didn’t work, we naturally needed to make
the test partially essay instead of all multiple choice, thereby doing away
with the very concept of the “standardized” test. Since that didn’t work
either, of course the SAT has to go, and we are working on that. Meanwhile,
other tests have been producing award-winning gains by students, the result of
a new education theory:
widespread cheating by teachers and principals.
Along the way we allowed
militant left wing unions to “organize” virtually every one of our teachers,
willingly or not, into their corrupt clutches. This was something even a left
wing hero like FDR would not permit.
For those who were watching, the militant, organized teachers put on a
wonderful display of concern for the children in Madison, Wisconsin not so long
ago. These same types of people now have the next generation of Americans as
captive indoctrination subjects from kindergarten through college and beyond.
And for our trillions of dollars we get people
like this in charge of our schools.
Test scores aside,
viewing a few videos of the college folks at the Occupy sites tells us a lot.
To the extent they are able to articulate a coherent sentence, they frequently
express astonishment and anger at the fact and amount of their college loan
balances. There is rarely a discussion about having read the loan documents
before signing them. [Can we assume that we still require people to sign for
government loans?] Naturally their demands include forgiving the loan balances.
In other words, free college at the school of their choice. Couple this with
B.O.’s inspiration that every American should go to college, and our new path to the future
beckons.
But first, we must see
to it that any college professor who wants our darlings to do any actual work
has been purged from the system. We have begun this process, and not at
Berkeley or in Manhattan, but in Orem, Utah [at Utah
Valley University]. A professor in the business school dared to inflict
several outrages on his students: he wanted them to work in teams (they did not
want to), he asked them questions (they wanted him to just lecture), and, take
a deep breath, he sometimes called on them even when they did not have their
hands raised. The students retaliated by trashing him on their evaluations, and
the University denied him tenure (effectively firing him). The matter now
resides, of course, in the courts. God help us.
Glad to see you back!
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