| In certain minority circles, everybody's
talking about the majority who's so dumbed-down that they no longer care
about perjury, obstruction of justice, or gross misuse of power. It's almost
as if barbarism was a new political trend. Of course some are pointing
to the media as a cause. And you probably have heard the collective
media described as the propaganda wing, or "Fourth Estate" of American
government. But while most of us realize that the media has effectively
become the Fourth Estate, it's only beginning to dawn on us that there
has also long been a Fifth.
We're talking about the American system
of education, both public and private. We're talking about grades K through
Twelve. We're talking about those A's, B's, M's, and P's attached to the
names of individuals who have ran the gauntlet of upper academia. We're
talking about the PC facilitators. We're talking about the Fifth Estate.
Locked in the narrow detention of their
own denial...like virtually everyone else incarcerated in even the most
comfortable American prisons...limousine liberals and plush corporate contract
members of the media hold themselves innocent. Innocent at least, of political
bias. Although to anyone capable of tying his own shoes, the charade of
the majority of talking heads and syndicated quill pushers has become as
clear as Waterford Crystal. Nearly ninety percent of the Washington press-corps
admits being Liberal, and Hollywood doesn't even pretend. And if the bias
of the Fourth Estate is evident to the point of popular cynicism, the same
is true of the Fifth Estate. After all, that's where most of the Manhattan
media anchors and Hollywood visionaries got their education.
From a certain point of view then, the
American system of education appears to be the training ground for those
tending a pure propaganda engine for progressive political ideologies.
So much so that it has become a political force in its own right. There
are presently 760 federal programs that deal with education. And even as
we speak the central government is trotting out long-legged new plans for
huge increases in spending. Voracious instructors and academic administrators
pant obsequiously with tin cups ready. But there's nothing new about this
trend in America. Long before political correctness became politically
correct, foundation facilitators were busy planning.
"The term 'planning'
is mostly used as a synonym for socialism, communism, and authoritarian
and totalitarian economic management. Sometimes only the German pattern
of socialism...Zwangswirtshaft...is called planning, while the term socialism
proper is reserved for the Russian pattern of outright socialization and
bureaucratic operation of all plants, shops and farms. At any rate, planning
in this sense means all-around planning by the government and enforcement
of these plans by the police power." ...Ludwig von Mises, Planning
For Freedom
Look Out for the
Truant Officer
Frederick Gates, Chairman of the General
Education Board, a private institution funded by the Rockefeller Foundation,
remarked about their hopes for public education as far back as 1902. In
the Board's Occasional Letter he wrote, "In our dreams, we have
limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility
to our molding hand."
This must be the molding hand that lent
itself to the systematic destruction of the American ideal of individual
liberty and personal accountability in favor of our current "kleptocracy."
And it must be the progressive hand that's now dangerously flirting with
that wretched seductress popularly described as American
Fascism.
One thing's for sure. It is a
trend. And it's a trend that also appears to include a smug effort to use
education as a vehicle for cultural destruction. The primary target has
long been the stabilizing force of traditional Western values that works
through individual conscience. Specifically, these are the values of the
ancient Jews and their gentile Christian progeny. At the Center for
the Study of Popular Culture, David Horowitz described it as a blend
of Judaic law and Hellenistic philosophy. It's the historic alloy of law
and value, of personal liberty and individual accountability, of faith
and reason. While Jesse Jackson chants, "Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture's
gotta' go," his multicultural followers reject the very values that gave
the world the Magna Carta, the Mayflower Compact, and the Declaration of
Independence. And the destruction of that value system clearly appears
an orchestrated means to reduce the public to a new barbarism, with the
primary purpose of rebuilding the collapsed culture under authoritarian
socialism. That notion was considered in greater depth in The
Meaning of Original Sin.
"It's not because men's
desires are strong that they act ill; it's because their consciences are
weak." ––John Stuart Mill, On
Liberty, III:178
In A
Common Faith, John Dewey wrote that he didn't know, "...how any
realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal
in human affairs is possible without surrender of the conception of the
basic division to which supernatural Christianity is committed." Dewey
was a socialist ideologue who is sometimes known the Father of Progressive
Education. But more than merely rejecting the supernatural or personally
intrusive aspects of Christian culture, Dewey was rejecting the "basic
division" to which the culture was committed. A division that was ideologically
opposed to nihilistic moral relativism on the basis of a logical pragmatism.
The cannons of Western Culture are every bit as much documents on sociology,
anthropology, and history, as they are liturgical tracts.
Accordingly, in 1932, the Fabian Socialist
George S. Counts wrote in Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order,
that, "Teachers should deliberately reach for power and then make the most
of their conquest...[toward the end of]...careful planning, and private
Capitalism by some form of socialized economy." He taught at Columbia University's
Teachers College. The progression of this trend, and all the related social
fallout, has continued almost unabated for the entire twentieth century.
And in the 1960's...almost as if there
was a systematic decision that since the Fabian method wasn't getting them
there fast enough...they went with Gramsci. It's almost as if they envisioned
a day like today, where the public virtue would be so thoroughly degraded
that a breaking point would be reached and Gramscian "normalization"
would finally be at hand. In the January/February 1983 issue of The
Humanist Magazine, John J. Dunphy, summa cum laude graduate
of the University of Illinois-at Edwardsville, echoed that trend. He declared
that, "The battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public
school classroom... Classrooms must and will become an arena of conflict
between the old and the new...the rotting corpse of Christianity... and
the new faith of Humanism."
If Ronald Reagan's moral majority is
in fact dead, as Free Congress Foundation's Paul Weyrich said in
the aftermath of President Clinton's "acquittal," then the particular educators
described above are the kind of liberals who set up the kill. If we accept
President Washington's admonition that liberty is most easily destroyed
through licentiousness, then the death of American morality signifies the
mortal aging of our liberty. And if we believe de Tocqueville when he told
us that America was great because America was good, then we're probably
witnessing the end of American greatness. And it will probably be seen
as a great achievement by her spiteful, envious ideological enemies, both
without and within. At least in the short term.
"We have no government
armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by
morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would
break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a
net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It
is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." ...President John
Adams, second President of the United States addressing the U.S. military,
October 11, 1798
The failure to remove an impeached president
from office is spun by the Left as a rejection of the "repressive"
value system of Western Culture. They obsess on the sensible axiom that
insists the state has no business in the bedroom. And while most of us
are in agreement, the question is whether thoroughly separating the traditional
flag-bearers on the Right from the political process is any wiser than
allowing the smug brats in the spoiled counter-culture a completely free
hand on the Left.
What's really personal life anyway?
Did anybody catch reports of the recent stunt of rolling a motor home full
of copulating gay men through States retaining anti-sodomy laws? Do you
remember Maplethorpe's splash on the cultural scene by tapping the National
Endowment for the Arts to give us such thrilling little gems as a photograph
of a man with a bullwhip stuck up his anus? Does anybody really think that
throwing it up in our faces like that is really a socially productive or
politically sensible? Roman Emperors committed oral copulation with suckling
infants. Should we embrace that too? Should we challenge the proscription
against "snuff films" on the basis of the First Amendment? Should
we keep our hands off the purveyors and the morbid clients who find stimulation
watching men have sex with women while actually choking them to death or
slicing their throats? I mean, come on.
History suggests that once a culture
goes off the deep end, unless a miraculous force acts against it, it rarely
stops until it pounds its way into the earth at the bottom. Rejection of
the foundations of traditional value is much more than merely dumping the
prohibition against getting naked with some exotic dancer named Baby
Oil and wallowing in worship at the putrid feet of Larry Flynt. It's
actually a rejection of the very value system that protected us from the
tyranny of totalitarianism.
Dancing With the
Sweetheart on my Left
Just how prevalent is this Politically
Correct trend in American academia? Judge Bork recently reminded us that
way back in 1964 there were 40 law professors at the Harvard Law School
when he was being considered for a position. Thirty-nine described themselves
as liberal, and one as conservative. Administrators were hesitant to hire
Bork, because they felt that two conservatives on a staff of 41 would upset
the balance between political views.
And a recent Rocky Mountain News
survey of the political affiliations of liberal arts professors at the
University of Colorado reflected 184 Democrats and only six Republicans.
The History Department contained 27 Democrats and zero Republicans. In
Philosophy there were 12 Democrats and zero Republicans. The English department
polled unanimous as well. Every one of the 29 professors were registered
Democrat.
Listen to the authors of The
Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses:
"What remain of the '60s on
our campuses are its worst sides: intolerance of dissent from regnant
political orthodoxy, the self-appointed power of self-designated 'progressives'
to set everyone else's moral agenda, and, saddest of all, the belief that
universities not only may but should suspend the rights of some in order
to transform students, the culture, and the nation according to their ideological
vision and desire."
They went on to state that, "The result
has been an emerging tyranny over all aspects of student life...a tyranny
that is far more dangerous than the relatively innocuous parietal rules
of ages past. It is a tyranny that seeks to assert absolute control over
the souls, the consciences, and the individuality of our students––in short,
a tyranny over the essence of liberty itself."
"The brand
of Fascist political correctness we see on American campuses today is representative
of some of the most intolerant closed-mindedness this side of Beijing."
...Joseph Farah
Theater instructor Jared Sakren was recently
denied tenure at Arizona State University because he loved Shakespeare.
Faculty members insisted that Shakespeare was "sexist." He would have to
change such insensitive works as The
Taming of the Shrew if he wanted to present them to students. After
Sakren's dismissal, the department chair claimed that she planned to "kill
off the classics." While Shakespeare may be too controversial for us these
days, students are able to enroll in courses as bizarre as Colorado’s "The
Social Construction of Reality," Harvard’s "Fetishism," and Oberlin’s "Queer
Acts." The course description of the latter read: "Drag will be encouraged,
but not required." How comforting for those heterosexuals wrangled into
taking that class as a prerequisite to obtaining their Social Science degree.
In 1994, homogenized radical student
leaders on the University of Massachusetts campus demanded that the university
drop the "Minuteman" as the school mascot on the grounds that these revolutionary
heroes were "racist, sexist, white, gun-toting males." Never mind that
their socialist, student-counterparts in Vietnam and China embraced Mao
Tse Tung who said, "Political power emerges from the barrel of a gun."
Or
that their very own Marx wrote in 1848 that the "Slavic riffraff...as well
as the Czechs, and Croats, are retrograde races whose only function in
the world history of the future is to be cannon fodder." Or that their
icon Engels wrote in the same year that, "World war will make whole reactionary
peoples disappear from the face of the earth. This, too, is progress. Obviously,
this cannot be fulfilled without crushing some delicate national flower."
Should we nudge these self-indulgent academic mavens of the progressive
elite and admonish them that it might be their very own delicate national
flower that could next be violated? And that the "reactionary peoples"
that may disappear could include their friends, loved ones, even themselves?
Should we bother?
And it gets worse. Our Clintonesque
culture is advancing with the Goals 2000 program well underway.
The new history standards issued in October of 1994 featured sheer political
correctness and historical revisionism. New textbooks virtually ignore
individuals such as Betsy Ross, Thomas Edison, Paul Revere, Alexander Graham
Bell, Albert Einstein, the Founding Fathers, and even crucial historic
American events like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Commenting on the Goals 2000 policy
in USA Today on October 28, 1994, Joel Urschel said, "This is surely
the most absurd extension of the victim culture mind-set afflicting the
nation...Better, I guess, that we study the lives of those who didn't fight
for their beliefs, avoided political debate and muddled through life without
a creative accomplishment or an original idea. This is egalitarianism reduced
to a philosophy of simplistic nonsense that even the socialists in the
old Soviet Union couldn't swallow."
In his book Dumbing
Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, John Taylor
Gatto tells us that, "No sane human being hasn't judged the value of instruction
based on outcomes...[OBE is] a pedagogical manifestation of 'managing by
objectives.' It's too difficult to control all the behavior of the herd,
so you set these goals and get the herd to behave the way you want by leading
them to these goals." Among the things OBE is said to apply significantly
reduced emphasis are spelling, multiplication, history, and geography.
And this must be good news for high school graduates who already can't
read a map to find out where they live, or don't know the difference between
being chaste and being chattel. But it's not such good news for those who
have to compete with the hardened-by-fire children of modern Laogai China.
The darkest side of OBE is manifest
by tracing its promoters. James Guines helped design Chicago's proto-OBE
program, and was a disciple of the infamous B. F. Skinner. Guines noted
in the Washington Post, "If you can train a pigeon to fly up there
and press a button and set off a bomb [as Skinner had done during W.W.II],
why can't you teach human beings to behave in an effective and rational
way?" Guines agrees with Skinner that teaching a pigeon to commit suicide
is a rational act for the pigeon if it's unaware that the action will lead
to its mortality. It's good news for the goals of the totalitarian teacher,
but bad news for the hapless student.
We have to recall Skinner's book Beyond
Freedom and Dignity to really appreciate his philosophy. He describes
the obstacle to behavior modification by noting that, "Freedom and dignity
illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous man
of traditional theory and they are essential to practices in which a person
is held responsible for his conduct and given credit for his achievements.
A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement
to the environment...A technology of behavior is available...but defenders
of freedom oppose its use." His point appears to be that he feels it's
necessary to deprive humanity of traditional notions of "freedom and dignity"
in order to bring about the triumph of what thinkers of his era called
"scientific world Humanism."
In criticism of the traditional, non-Humanist
view of freedom and dignity, Marxists Theodore Adorno published a study
called The Authoritarian Personality. The social commentator Christopher
Lasch notes the Adorno report would solve America's social problems by,
"Subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy...by
treating them as inmates of an insane asylum." In other words, if someone
values his dignity and freedom more than the excesses of post-modern socialism,
then he's insane and the benevolent state will have to step in and heal
him.
Only those who managed to induce the
American people to surrender their Constitutional heritage without even
being aware it happened, exceeded the cleverness of the pop-culture rant.
But we've got news for the myopic American Left: It's all been done before.
From the Soviet manual on Psychopolitics:
PSYCHOPOLITICS:
The art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts
and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and masses, and the effecting
of the conquest of enemy nations thorough "mental healing."
Does anyone remember the venerable Alexander
Solzhenitsyn's commencement address at Harvard University in 1978? The
one where the soft, snobbish brie-and-baguette crowd berated him for challenging
their humanist Tower of Babel? He said the incident hurt him more than
the eight years he spent laboring over the Gulag Archipelago in
the
camps, writing snippets on toilet paper and matchbook covers. This
was from Harvard, the school that gave the world the likes of the venomous
neo-Pharisee Alan Dershowitz. Here's a sequence of excerpts from Solzhenitsyn's
address warning us about the conquest of enemy nations through mental healing:
"The center
of your democracy and of your culture is left without electric power for
a few hours only, and all of a sudden crowds of American citizens start
looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin,
then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy. But the fight for
our planet, physical and spiritual, a fight of cosmic proportions, is not
a vague matter of the future; it has already started. The forces of Evil
have begun their decisive offensive, you can feel their pressure, and yet
your [TV] screens and publications are full of prescribed smiles and raised
glasses.
"Two hundred, or
even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America,
that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction
of his instincts or whims. Subsequently, however, all such limitations
were discarded everywhere in the West; a total liberation occurred from
the moral heritage of Christian centuries with their great reserves of
mercy and sacrifice. State systems were becoming increasingly and totally
materialistic.
"There is a disaster,
however, which has already been under way for quite some time. I am referring
to the calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness.
"It is not possible
that assessment of the President's performance be reduced to the question
of how much money one makes or of unlimited availability of gasoline. Only
voluntary inspired self-restraint can raise man above the world stream
of materialism.
"Even if we are
spared destruction by war, our lives will have to change if we want to
save life from self-destruction."
Still having trouble making the distinction
between license and liberty?
The economy's fine, so why should we
worry about personal life, about an absurd anachronism like virtue? A recent
study claimed it revealed that 40 percent of the students at Harvard Business
school admitted that after they graduate they would not hesitate to cheat
their prospective employers if they believed they could "get away with
it." This implies that four out of ten of those polled who end up working
for you either in the private or public sector, are willing to cheat you
whenever they think they can. And of course, many of them already are.
They're cheating you out of not only your labor and your money, but your
ideological and literal heritage in liberty as well.
And Then There's
Leno
So give it to me straight, Doc. Just how
bad is it? Well a 1990 survey of 200 major corporations found that 22 percent
of companies had to teach their employees to read, and 41 percent had to
teach employees to write. Ninety million American adults could not write
a letter complaining about a consumer billing error. The Hearst Corporation
conducted a poll revealing that 45 percent of those asked believed that
the Marxist slogan, "from each according to his ability, to each according
to his need," is part of the U.S. Constitution. And while every recent
graduate may know how to use a condom or recognize Patricia Ireland, only
four out of ten polled adults could correctly identify the Bill of Rights.
A recent Associated Press poll placed
Monica Lewinsky eighth on the top-ten list of most-admired American women,
barely below Mother Teresa. Hillary Clinton was number-one. The same poll
placed Bill Clinton above the Pope, and a Washington Post poll in
late January gave Larry Flynt higher numbers for trustworthiness than Henry
Hyde. And the State of the Union address claims that the federal government
can ameliorate this tragedy by throwing more of your money at the problem
and producing more drag queens with Ph.D's.
"When an
opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your
child belongs to us already.'" ––Adolf Hitler
From the ever popular icon of American
culture, The Tonight Show, host Jay Leno occasionally walks the
streets outside the NBC studio in Burbank California polling people with
a live camera crew. On August 8, 1995, he displayed pictures to teen-agers
he stopped at random. Shoving his wireless microphone up in their faces,
he showed the likeness of Joe Stalin next to the fictional cigarette advertisement
cartoon character Joe Camel. None of the young adults could identify the
man who Solzhenitsyn says was responsible for the deaths of 60 million
who resisted "mental healing," but everyone recognized Joe Camel.
Leno then displayed Caesar Augustus
and the Little Caesar's pizza chain cartoon character. The results were
the same. He went on with Napoleon Bonaparte and Captain Crunch, then Colonel
Qadaffi and Colonel Sanders, and finally former president Jimmy Carter
and Mr. Peanut. No one could identify even one of the real historic
characters, including a recent president of the United States. Virtually
everyone knew the advertising characters. The audience was hysterical.
Young adults all know peanuts, pizza, and the mechanics of sodomy, but
only 41 percent can identify their own Bill of Rights.
What's the matter, man? Can't you take
a joke? We're the new barbarians, and damn proud of it! We love
them dumb. That way they yield themselves with perfect docility. You
understand what I'm talkin' about, dude?
I'm talking about a culture war over
a sovereign political prize that may already be lost. And if it is, I'm
talking about kissing the traditional American concept of liberty goodbye.
I'm talking about the possibility that the Fascists may have won without
firing a shot, aided and abetted by the arrogant, vapid cretins on the
intellectual American Left. And I'm talking about our morally bankrupt
system of education at the very heart of this tragedy. I'm talking about
the Fifth Estate. |
