My previous post (see below) contained my explanation for the devolution of the cinematic musical. The same commentary could apply to Hollywood in general. Another DC/Marvel regurgitation, rich in CGI visuals and not much else, is today’s theatrical high point. Sad.
To get a sense of the sublime that Hollywood was capable of producing, watch this scene from “My Fair Lady” of Audrey Hepburn and cast performing “I Could Have Danced All Night” (Hepburn’s voice is dubbed, but nonetheless….).
Once again, if you can, run it through a set of speakers.
Is our culture exhausted? I’m of two minds, but there are signs of fatigue, if not decline. Last night, I finished watching “My Fair Lady” on Netflix in HD and through my stereo system, as close as I can get to a theater experience for a film from 1964. It was magnificent and got me to wondering why we seem incapable of producing such cinematic grandeur today.
Not that there haven’t been attempts, but for me, they don’t measure up. Sorry, “La La Land” and “Chicago”, the two most recent endeavors to capture the magic, are poor knock-offs. The material elements are present in the physical choreography and vocalizations, and, yet, the whole package appears as a cheap imitation.
One factor for the debasement might have something to do with Hollywood’s zeal to be edgy. By edgy, I mean norm-busting: the unrelenting pressure to be a challenge to what used to be considered wholesome. It’s oft-putting and takes away from the synergistic combination of artistry, craftsmanship, and cinematography.
The zenith of the musical probably was the 1950s-60s. After that, it’s all downhill to the CGI/rapid-imagery, stale scripts, and unremarkable and uninspiring music of today. It’s so bad that the downfall of the musical coincides with the downfall of the Oscars. Who cares, except for the old stuff?
Please watch this performance of the wonderful song “On the Street Where You Live” from “My Fair Lady”. If you can, run it through a set of good speakers. Nothing from Hollywood’s current repertoire compares.
Lest we find ourselves distracted by all things Ukraine at the moment, we should not suffer temporary blindness to the ongoing threats closer to home. If you’ll recall, we are engaged in a wholesale demolition of our cultural inheritance under the guise of a landslide of hackneyed buzzwords: diversity, equity, inclusion (curiously in that order to avoid the acronym DIE), social justice, systemic racism, white supremacy, et al. An older but truer meaning of the word stewardship comes to mind.
See 1 Peter 4:10:
“As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.”
See Genisis 2:15:
“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
The ransacking of the legacy flies in the face of the obvious meaning of stewardship. Throughout the Bible it is used to remind us that God is the ultimate source of all gifts (broadly defined) and His expectation that we are to wisely use these favors. It is not a cover for political enthusiasms such as recycling regimes, anti-plastic crusades, climate-change manias, the assault on fossil fuels, government handouts for windmills and solar panels, the punishment of workers in certain commodity industries, the promotion of guilt-trips for owning an SUV, the policies of herding families en masse into cramped apartments, the demonization of single-family-residential, and the relegation of the public lands to mere hikers’ paradises and no one else need enter. God’s gifts are conferred on a businessman exercising property rights to extract mineral wealth from the earth as they are for white collar public employees wealthy and organized enough to politically force everyone else to live according to their preferences. At present, there the mutilated corpse of stewardship lies.
If I hear another clergyman spout from the pulpit stewardship as the guise for greenie agendas, I’ll scream.
The insipid mangling of stewardship has manifested beyond Green New Deals and into a frenzy for an inflated race-consciousness. Hyper-sensitive race-awareness tars everything to the point of a wholesale dismantlement of our grand cultural inheritance. Statue-toppling, the insidious doctrines of race-obsessiveness in instruction to the young, the rantings and bullying in social media, the loud advocacy of the extinction of personal freedoms in free markets, and the espousal of life under massively intrusive government commands will mean the death knell for God’s gifts. “Stewardship” undermining stewardship. Go figure.
A rereading of the writings of Zora Neale Hurston are the antidote to what she referred to as the “race man”, the carnival barkers for perpetual race-victimhood, people like the barely coherent Ibram X. Kendi or the insufferable Maxine Waters.
Ibram X. KendiMaxine Waters
Check out this gem from Hurston’s essay “Art and Such”, wherein she decries the tendency of the “race man” to reduce the entire black experience to oppression and sorrow:
“Can the black poet sing a song to the morning? Upsprings the song to his lips but it is fought back. He says to himself, . . . ‘Ought I not to be singing of our sorrows? That is what is expected of me and . . . if I do not some will even call me a coward. The one subject for a Negro is the Race and its sufferings and so the song of the morning must be choked back. I will write of a lynching instead.’ So the same old theme, the same old phrases get done again. . . . The writer thinks that he has been brave in following in the groove of the Race champions, when the truth is, it is the line of least resistance and least originality.”
Zora sets the record straight. This latest campaign to ravage our inheritance is absolutely mind-numbing. The soul-destroying dogmas reduce thought to mindless chants. These people aren’t capable of originality and can add nothing to our inheritance. They only pillage. A painter’s palette is replaced by a sledge hammer.
In 2001, upon meeting Russia’s Vladimir Putin for the first time in Slovenia, Pres. George W. Bush famously said that he looked into Putin’s eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” Apparently, Bush was bromanced by a heartrending Putin tale from his youth of his mother giving him a cross that survived a fire at the family dacha. Later, Vice-President Cheney chortled that when he saw Putin, “I think KGB, KGB, KGB”. Bush’s outpourings of sympathy were corrected by Cheney’s blunt realism.
We need more of Cheney’s therapeutic realism regarding all sorts of misguided beliefs that are eviscerating our country. One such assemblage of mind-junk running amok is environmentalism. This thing is an “ism” and not to be confused with its root, the environment. It’s a vast social engineering project that rivals anything bursting forth from the mind of Karl Marx, for whom it is related. After decades of persistent persuasion throughout the culture, it has settled into our myopic but comfortable middle class. We are willing our own demise, and the historical corrective in the form of a sober middle class has checked out of prudence and into folly, or so it seems.
Though, be mindful of the universal caveat: to be certain, not all of the middle class, but a sizeable chunk in varying degrees. One must avoid the sophistry of the woke in assuming a homogeneity of thought in a group arbitrarily defined by some external, physical factor (income, race, ethnicity, gender, etc., etc.).
The ”ism” is an example of a belief system every bit as straitjacketing as anything found in The Communist Manifesto, a kind of theology without an afterlife. Instead, the surrogate afterlife is a materialist utopia, a pie in the sky. The grand scheme begins with the acolytes’ favorite diagnosis of what ails us in the form of human eco-disruptions that have allegedly damaged our entire existence, us personally, and all our surroundings. The prescription requires the true believers to take control of the state to engineer a better human being for a better world. Devastation, though, is history’s likeliest verdict.
Climate change doctrines are the latest infatuation which has been used, for instance, to wreck our domestic energy industry and begin the coercive reengineering of our existence. Fact: no reliable energy, welcome to the stone age. And solar panels and windmills won’t cut it, so don’t go there. The eco-fanatics’ dream, however, will translate into the reality of dependence on Saudi monarchs, Iran’s mullahs, Putin, and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro. Welcome to national subservience to imperial thugs and welcome to chronic retreat and defeat. President Biden is the latest figurehead trying to lead us into this new catastrophe.
Events in Eastern Europe – Ukraine in particular – have exposed the problem. We are in the midst of a massive federal, state, and local effort, led by the feds, to turn topsy-turvy our way of life in pursuit of almost anything labeled “sustainable” in 2,000-page Green New Deals (GND) while at the same time we are beset with the aggressions of Russia and Red China who are threatening to tear apart our alliances and trade relationships. We are pulled toward the amateurish visions of AOC as we are stretched in the opposite direction to stand up to tyrannical aggressions. It’s a two-fer for a beating. Lincoln’s “house divided against itself cannot stand” should ring in our ears.
The fact that the middle class, mostly white collar, has largely bought into this secular faith is evident everywhere. It can be heard from the pulpit to the classroom.
Groups who are the zealous spearhead of the movement notice their narrow demographic appeal in the white collar, urban/suburban/exurban, middle to super-rich cluster. The Sierra Club, Wisconsin chapter, admits it: “The lack of diversity and inclusion amongst staff and members of environmental organizations is a key component to their difficulty in effectively combating environmental justice issues.” In 2015, the group’s national governing body felt compelled to kneel before the cliché of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to paper over the obvious truth of the group’s cramped attractiveness (sierra club 2015 diversity equity and inclusion pdf).
Pew Research points to the same constricted demography. Using Dem/Rep breakdowns as the metric – since GNDs aren’t in the Republican playbook – we get a sense of who’s rallying to the flag of the firebrands. The Democratic Party is, after all, their institutional home. Democrat strength has been rising in the same demographic wherein eco-activists draw their legions: white, college educated, and urban/suburban. These aren’t any kind of Caucasoids; they are whites of the other two characteristics.
For blue collars to join, they must either be confused or suicidal.
This isn’t your grandpa’s middle class. For a sizeable portion of them, they see the world as an urban park due to their unfamiliarity with anything else. Ensconced in their suburban bungalow, or coastal dwelling, or exclusive condo, or gentrified brownstone, they are far removed from the kind of people who make the stuff of their life possible. Distance culturally, morally, socially, geographically, and economically, sometimes over multiple generations, colors both their perspectives and profound ignorance. It’s easy for them to complain of the high price of housing but then support environmental policies that jack up the price of construction materials and strangle the supply of homes. To them, the national forests are a park, not a possible source of 2X4 studs, and the more land under the control of the Nature Conservancy the better in their mind. The monumental incongruency is startling.
Environmental activists protest outside of the Harvard Club where Trump’s EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt was scheduled to speak, June 20, 2017 in New York City.
Do you think the nations who wish us harm – yes, we do have them – are oblivious to the presence of a demographic fifth column in our midst? As Biden would say, “Come on, man!” In the 1970s and 80s, we called Soviet morale-busting campaigns disinformation. They called it dezinformatsiya which The Great Soviet Dictionary of the era defined as “false information with the intention to deceive public opinion.” The 1980’s Operation Infektion attempted to convince the world and us that our government invented HIV/AIDS in order to sap our will to resist them. President Reagan got a full blast of it when he countered a Soviet military buildup in Europe and resisted Soviet adventurism around the world.
Today’s Kremlin wouldn’t be continuing the practice if there wasn’t an audience for it, as there was for the Nuclear Freeze and peace movements 40 years ago. Former Soviet KGB apparatchik Vladimir Putin would be very familiar with this staple of Soviet war-by-other-means and is evidently using it. One of the biggest foreign boosters of John Kerry’s climate change hucksterism is Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council. Patrushev goes further in hawking American woke capitalism. Is he doing it out of pure altruism? Quoting Biden again, “Come on, man!” He knows, and we should know, that climate-change apocalyptics and social justice flimflammery only cripples us. What better way to advance Putin’s national interests than to cheer John Kerry’s galivanting escapades and The Squad’s congressional agenda? Weaken your adversary and warm up the tanks is a well-worn tactic.
Nikolai Patrushev
The Kremlin gets traction with the hooey because many white collars are habitually open to the jive. When will these urbanistas realize that they can’t have a safe and prosperous country alongside blackouts and escalating utility bills? Electric cars, or electric anything, isn’t going to deliver 45,000 pounds of produce to their favorite Whole Foods outlet. Their Beemers and Subarus can’t be made without the liquid residue of primordial jungles. The stuff of fossil fuels surrounds them at a time when they are trying to kill it off. It’s one of the purest examples of economic self-negation imaginable.
We have more than a Left problem. We have a middle-class problem. The two intersect at environmentalism and ensure the atrophy of our economy, our national resolve, and compromise the defense of our national interests. No better word is available than “betrayal” . . . or maybe stupidity.
The French poet Alain de Lille wrote in 1175 AD, “. . . a thousand roads lead a man forever toward Rome.” In modern usage, “All roads lead to Rome” is meant to convey the center of something. Rome was the center of gravity for the classical Mediterranean world. Washington, D.C., has arisen as our Rome, for good or ill.
Durham’s indictment of Michael Sussman, Perkins Coie law partner and DNC lawyer, brought to mind the trope. If one cares to look closely at it, Sussman’s world is DC, a socio-politically incestuous pit of vipers that resists accountability. Don’t be surprised if Sussman and the DC network of Democratic Party swamp denizens never face justice for fabricating the Trump-Russia humbug. The swamp can get a Nixon (Watergate) but try and make them answer for their behavior? I’m skeptical. The Gordian Knot of intertwining relationships protects them.
John Durham, Special Counsel, and Michael Sussman
We’d be better served if all roads didn’t lead to DC. How? Breakup DC, scatter its federal departments, agencies, and the bulk of its employees to the far corners of the country. If any political chicanery were to take place, investigation and judgment would take place outside the shield of this cripplingly I-got-your-back web.
The Sussman case illustrates the outlines of this tightly knit socio-political hive. All the principal parties in the story, with the exception of Durham, are cozy with each other. According to Durham, Sussman is the man who peddled Trump-Russia collusion to his pals in the Obama administration. Enlisting the preexisting army of federal government operatives to cripple your political opponent is the queen on the political chessboard. It’s exactly what Sussman did in meeting with his old pal James Baker, FBI general counsel, to enroll the DOJ in placing a politically useful moral cloud on the Trump campaign. Trump was hounded throughout 2016 and into most of his presidency.
James Baker, FBI General Counsel
Don’t forget, later, Mueller and his cadre of Democrat henchmen spent two years (2017-2019) and $32 million to probe Trump-Russia and found . . . nothing!
Robert Mueller in testimony before the House Judicial and Intelligence Committees in July 2019.
The connections extend beyond Sussman and Baker. The trial court judge overseeing the case is Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper, Obama appointee and long protégé of Democrat power-broking legal eagles in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Cooper, Baker, and Sussman were veterans of the Clinton DOJ – and many would later move into the Obama regime – and frequently interacted socially and professionally.
Judge Christopher R. “Casey” Cooper
Amy Jeffress, DC lawyer and wife of Judge Cooper.
It doesn’t end there. Remember Lisa Page of “smelly Walmart shopper” fame? Her lawyer is Judge Cooper’s wife, Amy Jeffress, who was previously employed as national security adviser to Eric Holder, Obama’s AG. No accusation of conspiracy here, but instead there exists the network of friendships and mutually beneficial relationships that can last a lifetime.
Quite logically, conflicts of interest abound. If this was an honest world, recusals would be the most common feature surrounding the Sussman case, or any case with a partisan in the dock in the snake pit of DC, up to the city’s totality. This rabidly anti-Republican population (Republicans are 6% of registered voters) screams change of venue for any defendant who’ll be helped or harmed by a partisan reputation.
Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser has Black Lives Matter painted on street to the White House, then occupied by Donald Trump.
DC’s deeply embedded partisan hostility is just one reason for moving things out of the city. More threateningly, our government no longer represents us, the “us” being anyone whose experience with the country doesn’t emanate from an Ivy League campus, or from 35,000 feet, or passing through on the Acela. If we are to have rule by expertocracy, let’s move them closer to the plebes. For instance, pick any small-to-medium sized city in Kansas to headquarter the Agricultural Department. Say, move the Department of Justice to Lubbock – or any town with a strong commitment to the Second Amendment – if the town will have them. Commerce could head to Tampa or Mobile, since California is out of the running because it is determined to destroy its ports. Move the Pentagon to Camp Lejeune. Dynamite the five-sided edifice in Arlington for more breakwaters on the Chesapeake. HHS could benefit from small town values so place it in any small census tract away from a college campus and between the Rockies and Appalachians. DHS, the homeland security Borg, would benefit from a location like El Paso, Tx., to be closer to a porous border. The same is true for the rest of the cabinet.
Illegal immigrant caravan moving through Mexico on its way to our southern border, 2021.
Don’t worry, they don’t need to be within spitting distance of each other to fulfill their job descriptions. After all, if it was such a great idea to Zoom our kids’ education, they ought to phone it in too – or more accurately broadband it in – from a long way away.
As for the entangled web of regulatory agencies, find the most aesthetically unpleasant locations in this transcontinental nation. No coastal views or beautiful mountain vistas. We’ve got close to 4 million square miles to work with. The idea is to make these people want to cut short their stays in jobs telling us what to do. Brown and barren hills, blistering cold winters, and 110-degree summers would work wonders. They might want to get real jobs.
A portion of flat Wyoming.A federal minimum-security prison
But herein lies a danger: scattering the hive to the winds might infect more locations with their socio-political-cultural decrepitude. An answer might be found in treating federal government employment as a form of minimum-security imprisonment. Workplaces and housing ought to be separated from the surrounding area behind secure fencing with ingress and egress carefully monitored. It might contribute to the impetus to end their incarceration and join the real world.
The above has zero chance of enactment but establishes a preferable end state to work toward. The idea is to avoid the nomenklatura-problem. No doubt, we have made great strides over the past 90 years in Sovietizing our existence. A large and overweening class of apparatchiks, insulated and living a world apart, must be brought to heel before they sabotage our civilization.
All roads should lead to Akron, Peoria, Lubbock, Wichita, Duluth, . . . .
RogerG
*Read Andrew C. McCarthy’s article, “Welcome to the Swamp, Mr. Durham”, National Review Online, February 19, 2022.
Homeless encampment along the beachfront of the LA area.
Hillary Clinton in a 2015 Anderson Cooper interview on CNN: “I’m a progressive, but I’m a progressive that likes to get things done.” Well, what is it that she claims to be in order to “get things done”? However defined, she isn’t alone. Today’s Democratic Party is almost the exclusive home base of it.
Progressivism should not be confused with “progress”. Progress is a trend of improvement. Progressivism is an ideology, a belief system similar to a religion but without the supernatural. Call it a secular religion – and thusly an oxymoron – but that hasn’t stopped it from having its moment in the sun, which it still enjoys. The glow won’t last forever. At a certain point, it’s botches are too glaring to ignore. Is the trucker protest a sign of the dethronement?
Call it prog-thought. Many hear of it but few can describe it. Don’t expect to be enlightened by the schools. The schools give it curt treatment because emphasis is given to actions and historical personages, all of which they approve because they are caught up in prog-thought.
Homeless encampment near downtown LA.
What you won’t get from the instructor is the fact that the ideological edifice is built upon Hegel’s idea of history as a chronology of improvements, one piling on top of the others over time. Improvement is defined as the heightened status of rationality in decision making, and rationality is best embodied in people like him, Hegel (professor at Heidelberg and Berlin Universities) – credentialed, degreed, many years of formal schooling. The purported efficiencies of the post-Napoleonic bureaucracies of his native Prussia were his ideal, which would blossom after his death under Bismarck and the Kaisers. Notice the absence of popular sovereignty in the scheme. The perspective’s early acolytes included 19th century Americans trained in German universities. It’s the beginning of the movement to train the apostles of the administrative state in the home of specialized PhD’s (college) who would infiltrate the subsequent and growing alphabet soup of unaccountable agencies.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Today, we are governed by the alphabet soup more than our elected representatives. Agency letter groups proliferated in the 20th century’s new and expanding field of public health in the FDA, CDC, NIH, NIMH, NIAID, etc., and the proliferation of state and local entities. The field of public health came to be the province of advanced-degreed specialists – the specialist possessing governmental power in the service of their specialty. The narrowness of perspective of the specialist is sharpened by a work life in the unique social eco-system in this expanding bureaucracy.
A climb up the greasy pole (in Churchill’s words) of career advancement places a premium on risk-aversion. The routine for career advancement remains the same throughout: don’t stand out, except as a compliant, ingratiating subordinate while avoiding black marks on evaluations. Steering clear of risks to one’s institutional reputation and the blinkered view of life spent in a specialty shapes a constrained, risk-averse personality for decision making. It showed during the Covid scare.
Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease,
At the onset of the pandemic, instead of admitting ignorance of the virus, Fauci and others flip-flop on masks until resting on masking-forever, sometimes triple-layered. He must be seen as doing something and the default position is obsessive risk avoidance. It reaches absurd lengths, and a complete lack of common sense. Take a look at this gem of guidance for children from the WHO: “Before putting on the mask, children should clean their hands…at least 40 seconds if using soap and water…. Children should not touch the front of the mask [or] pull it under the chin…. After taking off their mask, they should store it in a bag or container and clean their hands.” Riiiiight! Picture that!
Fact is, the mitigations of mandatory-everything – lockdowns, church and school closings, masking, social distancing, vaccinations, deserted central business districts, the Zooming of life, etc. – is unprecedented. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, it wasn’t done in 1918 (Spanish flu), 1957 (Asian flu), or 1968 (Hong Kong flu). Back then, more people were cognizant of life’s risk calculus. Risk accompanies everything we do. As for diseases, they came and went with the suffering that is the flip side of life. The only difference is that today we have raised a population on the belief in a faux phalanx of “experts” to shield us from life’s vagaries.
The 1968 Hong Kong flu didn’t interrupt the Woodstock festival, lilled 100,000 Americans, and infected President Johnson and the Apollo crew.
To no surprise, we have bred a mass of neurotics: people wearing masks while worshipping at the feet of tunnel-visioned experts and believing their pronouncements to be “the science”. You’ll see them everywhere in the Covid era from the masked while driving alone to the lonely outside jogger with labored breathing enveloped in the thing. A time traveler from the 1950’s, while viewing the scene, could be excused for thinking that the doomsday movies of his time were akin to biblical prophesies.
Empty Times Square, 2020
The heralded “science” becomes less the search for truth and more the reflection of the more immediate needs of bureaucrats and their progressive patrons. Absent, or in spite of, the gold standard of randomized clinical trials, they reach for observational studies. The difference between the two is profound. The latter can have difficulty in determining causation. That won’t stop interested parties – bureaucrats and politicians – from manipulating and interpreting the observed findings.
We saw the corrupted practice during the pandemic. For example, New York under lockdown had fewer cases than wide open Florida at a certain moment. But New York’s results are due to unrelated factors peculiar to the state, and, given enough time, theirs jumps ahead of Florida. Averaged over the two-year lifespan of the pandemic, the experiences of the two are roughly the same — only Floridians are happier. During the interim, in the risk-averse blue bubbles, the populace became guinea pigs to placate the biases of politicized and narrowly-informed specialists.
Epidemiologist at work in the lab.
In spite of it all, you can’t say that the actions of the hyper-active state worked. The virus continued to afflict more than the unvaccinated. It mutated and still spread. The guidance went from 15 days to stop the spread, to lockdowns to bend the curve, to school closures for up to two years, to mandatory mask-wearing and vaccination, to an end to fellowship in worship, to a retarded work ethic, to a crippling of small business, to the debilitating alternative reality of Zoom (or Skype).
What did we get for it? Looking across the immediate history, we got a summer of riots (2020), an emerging police state to squash resistance to the administrative state and party in power, inflation, empty store shelves, an unwillingness to return to work, loosey-goosey elections, and a loss of at least one academic year of educational achievement for kids in homes below the median income. It is a catastrophe for which we may have difficulty recovering.
We should not be surprised that the expertocracy led us to this impasse. These administrative functionaries are people with a very pinched background living a secluded life, and, as it turns out, residing in selective and exclusive locations as well. Fauci, Walensky, and the others hobnob in the blue bubble. Their social circumstances, and educational backgrounds, are as limited as their range of understanding. It’s an exclusive club populated by progressives. The club’s perimeters are policed by the high costs and exclusive zoning that require an ample income to afford the 5 or 6 Benjamins to take the family to a Senators game. For your information, Fauci’s annual take from the federal treasury is only $16,000 less ($384,000) than Biden’s ($400,000), and that doesn’t include his abundant investment portfolios from years of unstated influence peddling.
I don’t think that there’s a chance that we’ll see Fauci enjoying beer and chips with an Akron plumber, or any plumber for that matter, for the Superbowl. He and the rest of them live a world apart, and the world beyond the blue bubble is beginning to be weary of the expertocracy. Its reputation has taken a hit in polls and surveys. The CDC’s esteem in one survey fell from 60% in March 2020 to 41% in December 2021. The public’s opinion of the federal government flipped from a high of 70% in 1972 to 39% in 2021 in one Gallup poll. Pew put it at 73% in 1957 and 24% in 2021. The results are richly deserved.
Is a peasant revolt brewing? Truckers have had it. Moms and dads have had it. The only remaining question is this: Does the average person understand the connection between our current predicament and the reigning orthodoxy of progressivism as promulgated by an expertocratic priesthood? The root of all evil in the modern era is not mammon, but is more likely to be found in a blind faith in apparatchiks. It’s the one thing that eugenics, communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have in common.
Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco, on Sept. 26, 2018. (Liz Hafalia/San Francisco Chronicle via AP)
Yep, you read it right. Who would have thought it possible, in San Francisco of all places? Voters on Tuesday sent packing three true-believing social justice warriors on the school board for wrecking the educations of the city’s children: school board President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Granted, the city’s school-age cohort is proportionally the smallest of any major US city, but residents of all stripes have had their fill of turning the most vulnerable – children – into lab rats for chic political crusades.
Even more striking is the reaction of the city’s Asian-American population. They quickly grasped where this was heading. School board member Collins let the cat out of the bag. She tweeted, and never apologized, that the city’s Asians were cognitively “white supremacists” for complaining of school closures, the obsessive effort expended to rename 44 schools, the erasure of any semblance of merit in doing things like the rejection of competitive admissions for the district’s elite Lowell High School. The woke blokes and blokettes just learned a powerful lesson. Don’t mess with tiger moms!
One parent, Siva Raj, cut to the chase. He said,
“The city of San Francisco has risen up and said this is not acceptable to put our kids last. Talk is not going to educate our children, it’s action. It’s not about symbolic action, it’s not about changing the name on a school, it is about helping kids inside the school building read and learn math.”
Right! Now, what will this portend for the future? Could woke school boards across the country be heading to electoral guillotines as parents across the nation rise up as the newest edition of Committees of Public Safety? The spirit of Robespierre is ripe in the land.
Rapper 50 Cent performs during the Pepsi Super Bowl LVI Halftime Show at SoFi Stadium on February 13, 2022 in Inglewood, California. (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
Let me start by saying, I don’t care. As a Florida allegator hunter might put it, I don’t have a dog in that hunt. The game pits two teams for which it’s hard to conjure any enthusiasm. The Bengals are from Ohio and the Rams have never been, for me, an object of affection. So, what will I do . . . if you’re even interested? I’ll record the thing to zip out all the hype, including the unbearable half-time show. I’ll get the result and later see how it ended that way. In other words, I’ll view the spectacle in my old role of a coach analyzing game tape.
My only interest, and it’s a slight one, is in the underdog (LA is favored) and maybe watching the next Tom Brady in the making: Joe Burrow. After that, meh! My appetite has been ruined. The NFL, like the rest of the big-metro blue bubbles, has shown itself to be duly immersed in the cloistered zeitgeist of the fashionable neo-Marxist critical theory, pushing radical BLM slogans throughout the season. A game not about politics came to be about politics. It’s hard to get up for the America sellout (the NFL).
How appropriate for the game to be played in a lefty metropolitan funhouse in the leftward most governed state on the furthest leftward edge of the continent. I pity the athletes for they will pay the greatest pound of flesh for playing a game in the highest taxed state outside of North Korea. But what does it matter if you earn a million and have to turn over a couple hundred thousand to subsidize a fiscal and cultural nightmare?
In other words, where are our school leaders leading us?
Parents talk before rally to oppose critical race theory in Loudon County schools, June 12, 2021.
Please listen to the last 30 minutes of the Radion Free California podcast and capture Will Swaim’s (of the California Public Policy Center) interview of Dr. Lance Izumi, Senior Director of the Center for Education at the Pacific Research Institute. Click on Dr. Izumi’s picture for the interesting conversation. You’ll find it compelling if you’re worried about the condition of your child’s school.
Dr. Lance Izumi
To be clear, let’s not tar everyone with the same brush. Not every Trump voter cheered the January 6 riot, not every Democrat is, figuratively speaking, in bed with the socialistas of The Squad, and not by a long shot is every teacher responsible for the mediocrity of the schools. During my near 30 years as a public high school teacher, I have seen the great variability in teacher quality but few, very few, fit the bill as truly incompetent and uncaring. Some, like me, failed at their first bite of the apple, but learned the lesson that effectiveness is a dynamic process, experience being the best stylist of good teaching.
Yet, undeniably, something is amiss in our schools, and most emphatically in our public schools. Pre-pandemic, the failings spared no socioeconomic group. Certainly, the pandemic panic exacerbated the situation. Using the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as the benchmark, schools with overwhelming middle-class enrollment produced dismal results with over half performing at below grade level. It only gets worse when we look at schools with the entire student body on the school lunch program. So, moving to a “better” neighborhood for the “better” schools is a fool’s errand. You’re only getting a student body in nicer clothes and cars, not a better education.
If I was to choose one overriding factor for the dreary situation, it would come down to rotten leadership. And I don’t mean to make administrators as a group the brunt. Poor captaincy stretches from many school board members to professors to superintendents through an administrative descent to the individual school, and, lest I forget, their directors and abettors in state and federal government. Most of this leadership crowd is pickled in a brine of progressive ideology emanating from the political arena and the gatekeepers of credentialing, the collegiate schools of education.
Teachers must also traverse the same gauntlet.
If you’re shocked by racial shaming sessions in your child’s Zoomed Social Studies lesson, well, what did you expect? Today’s progressivism is synonymous with the militant wokeness of neo-Marxist critical theory and it percolates through ed courses and the teams of “educators” who produce the curricula. It’s everywhere and everywhere destructive.
People hold up signs during a rally against “critical race theory” (CRT) being taught in schools at the Loudoun County Government center in Leesburg, Virginia on June 12, 2021. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
If you want better schools, clean house of the poison and install leaders with their heads screwed on straight. Start with the state leadership and move like Sherman’s March through the collegiate schools of education and the people who run the local districts. The rot begins at the top, so start there. In the end, the teachers will be better for it.
Oh, before I leave the topic, an important cog in this Borg is the teacher unions. They need to stop being a conduit for this ideological mania. If they are to continue to exist, they must stop seeing themselves in the vanguard of a revolution and more as shapers of patriotic and productive citizens. Got it?
Hillsdale College in Michigan.Student walks past statue of Ronald Reagan on the campus of Hillsdale College.Site of Hillsdale College campus in Placer County near Roseville.
I kid you not: Hillsdale College is coming to California and the true believers of the ruling groupthink are going bonkers. The state is hemorrhaging legacy-cost red ink, businesses, and residents as it is mired in COVID totalitarianism, homelessness everywhere, a crime wave, debased schools, welfare dependency, expensive everything, and public spaces that aren’t fit for children (and adults). And to think that they are frazzled beyond restraint by the appearance of a classical liberal arts college within their playpen. Amazing, absolutely amazing.
If you want to know the reason for the state’s looniness, no better candidate can be found than in the loopy thought processes of many of the state’s college graduates who then scatter into the state’s institutions for employment. An example of the phenomena is 24-year-old Hannah Holzer, “opinion assistant” at the Sacramento Bee. She penned an op ed – really, more of a screed – on January 23 titled “A conspiracy-peddling college is coming to Placer County. That should scare us all” (read here). What does she bring to the table other than vapid sloganeering and ad hominems? Let’s see.
Hannah Holzer
Her LinkedIn resume’ mentions a 4-year stint at UC Davis with an “English – professional writer” degree. Her post-graduate journey winds its way through a news internship at the Bee, a DC communications internship, editor of The California Aggie, editor at SF Weekly, and finally Bee assistant opinion editor/Sunset Beacon freelance reporter at the wizened age of 24. She had plenty of opportunity to ply her trade while infusing her journalism with left wing nuttery.
And it shows. Read the piece. It’s a mental fingerprint of unexamined assumptions and left-wing boilerplate. The opening paragraph is an unacknowledged tribute to the Unibomber’s Manifesto. It’s ripe with “ultra-conservative” (Hillsdale College) and this gem, “. . . extremist institution [Hillsdale College], perpetuating alternative facts and harmful conspiracy theories.” Plowing deeper into the tirade, one finds an excoriation of Hillsdale’s rejection of the lefty bromides of “social justice” and “multicultural diversity”. She then unabashedly and unthinkingly equates the two with “a just nation”. What? A “just nation” is created by the racial discrimination of a racial favoritism? For our intrepid reporterette, lady justice is not to wear a blindfold.
There’s more. She adopts the vocabulary – “dog whistle” – of Democratic Party electioneering. Of course, the phrase is attached to the opponents of the neo-Marxist critical theory and its offspring, critical race theory, leading to this whopper: “. . . they [Hillsdale] view the practice of accurately teaching America’s complex history to students as a threat to white supremacy.” There you have it. “White supremacy” has come full circle to include those who take Martin Luther King seriously.
Hillsdale’s sin is its unwillingness to kowtow to the fashionable tomfoolery that is so commonplace in the modern academy. Hillsdale is an unflinching advocate of classical education – classical means rooted in Western civilization. It’s the same civilization that gave birth to the university, the higher ed that has currently been bastardized to produce the youngins who can’t wait to dismantle it in their ignorance.
Hey, California, the doctor has arrived with a little tough love in the form of Hillsdale College.
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