Comments from readers provide opportunities to further expand on a point. Brevity can lead to leaving some terms obscure – the “reprehensible ideas” for instance in a previous post. In the following exchange, I gave some sense about what I might mean by “reprehensible ideas”.
Respondent: Right now, the most important thing is character and decency. Period. No Faustian bargains with the likes of DT.
My reply:You make much of “character” but say nothing of character-destroying policies. Unleashing an unaccountable administrative state sets the stage for unaccountable government and irresponsible conduct. Class warfare policies puts the power of government agencies into the incitement of envy and envy-based confiscation. Modern progressivism’s lifestyle fascism is the single largest organized threat to faith institutions. Trump’s episodic insults to particular persons creates a much smaller universe of victims than the state’s massive and broad social destruction. Don’t be so animated about Trump’s boorish behavior while refusing to recognize the much more serious assault on our national health from lefty policies. That’s the “reprehensible ideas” part of our current dilemma.
A current incarnation of the urban sophisticate is the “hipster”. If I may be excused for engaging in a loose generalization, like other versions of the breed, they are equal parts confident, media-savvy, and clueless. Prime examples of the cross-fertilization of fashion and politics, they are susceptible to pleas to prohibit almost anything presented as irritating and outside of their lifestyle experience. They are one for the constituencies for ban-o-mania.
Don’t like something? Ban it! Why ban it? Simple: it’s too jarring to the mind of your average urban and self-anointed sophisticate. That mind is riddled with the prejudices, half-baked ideas, and unexamined assumptions of a person limited to the secular equivalent of a mountaintop monastery … without the serious study of real monks (“echo chamber” keeps popping into my mind). Ban-o-mania reigns supreme as the preferred option for anyone within the materialist abbey, while adversely affecting everyone not so mentally and geographically insulated.
The locations for the secular monasteries generally matches the 2016 election map. Below is a precinct-by-precinct rendering of the 2016 election results. (1)
2016 election results by precinct. Blue is for the Democratic candidate, red for the Republican.
The blue dots on the map are outposts serving as the intersection of radical chic in culture (some might call it “lifestyle”) and politics. The journalist and essayist Tom Wolfe had a great time back in 1970 with an exposé of cosmopolitan affections for radical left politics of the time. (2)
New York Magazine cover, 1970, with Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” essay.Leonard Bernstein (seated at center), his wife Felicia Montealegre (left) and Don Cox (standing), Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party in the Bernsteins’ 13 room penthouse on Park Avenue in Manhattan, January 14, 1970
I won’t speak to the map’s much rarer blue blobs – I suspect these to be mostly concentrations of post-1965 Immigration Act ethnic and racial minorities and Indian reservations- but today’s metropolitan islands have persisted in the habit exemplified in Leonard Bernstein’s fête to the Black Panther Party.
Though, a vocabulary update to “radical chic” is in order. Yesterday’s “radical chic” is today’s “cosmocialist”, a marriage of “cosmopolitan” and “left-liberal”, typically among our tech elites but also littered throughout most of our corporate and academic boardrooms (hosannas to Reihan Salam for bringing the term to my attention [3]). The “left-liberal” side of the equation is an infatuation with imperial environmentalism, high taxes, and almost anything “anti-poverty”. “Cosmopolitan” is a reference to suspicion about regulation (except, of course, of the enviro variety, a huge contradiction), big labor (even though the teachers’ unions are 100% socially and 80% politically aligned) , and a fondness for open borders and multicultural everything.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (left) with California AG Kamala Harris in 2015. (Reuters photo: Robert Galbraith)
Oh, let’s not forget their contempt for traditional institutions. The Bible as the Word of God, Christianity as understood for millennia, marriage, and morality don’t stand a chance in these micro-universes. Currently, transgenderism has pride of place. As a matter of fact, they have conjured “equality” into behavioral license. Any coupling and self-concept among and within humans must be granted sanction by the state. Those who disagree face ostracization, loss of livelihood, and censorship. Is confinement next? Has it already started?
Now we are well on our way to ban-o-mania – the frenzy to prohibit counter-thought, and counter-things. If only Orwell was here to see it.
It’s become next to impossible to talk about these kinds of things without mentioning California, ground zero for cosmocialist social and political tinkering. Bans on things previously considered innocuous are becoming increasingly common in this political zoo. Examples are many. The state couldn’t refrain from an assault on, of all things … free plastic shopping bags. The usual suspects crafted Prop 67 – the always fashionable environmental lobby – and the always fashionable electorate, dominated by its always fashionable coast, approved it in 2016.
Grocery shopping in the not-so-golden state instantly changed from this:
to this:
Bring your own bags: filthy, torn, too small, not enough, or spill out cash to buy some more. People in the zoo will adapt, no doubt. But grocery shopping instantly became a bit more of an annoying experience.
Another example, this time from the elected “geniuses” in the state’s madhouse, called a “legislature”: marketed as an animal welfare measure, the inmates passed AB 485. It would ban the sale of dogs, cats, and rabbits if they didn’t come from shelters. In essence, due to the way the law is written and it’s probably effects, say “bye, bye” to the ritual of taking the daughter down to the pet store to buy a puppy. For Patrick O’Donnel (D-Long Beach), the bill’s author, pet militants like him can’t envision themselves doing it, so ban anyone else from doing it. Such is the auto-reflex of the ban-o-maniac. The legislation’s fate is in the lap of Gov. Jerry Brown, another cosmocialist. (4)
Assemblyman Patrick O’Donnell, D-Long Beach, and rescue dogs.
For the cosmocialist, dogs are cute; Christian fundamentalists are not. The progressive fatwa against them has already begun. With dim-witted sleight of hand, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) sought to impose her social opinions on the entire faith community in California. Through legislation, she tried to nullify the Supreme Court’s Hosanna-Tabor decision that buttressed a church’s religious freedom exemptions to government’s contraceptive and abortion mandates. (5) She preposterously claimed that the Court didn’t say what it said. For the Court, religious freedom reaches out to longstanding church functions beyond the sanctuary. She didn’t get the message. Fletcher’s logic is the equivalent of a child’s attempt to make a parent’s admonishment of “no” into “yes”.
If mangling the Court didn’t convince, she tried the gender equality angle. For her, the moral code in the Torah, Quran, and the Old and New Testaments must be sacrificed because a woman can show the results of a sleepover with her boyfriend. Since women get pregnant, and men can’t (there’s no place to put the fetus), scripture must now go into the garbage disposal. The minister can preach God’s law from the pulpit – I think – but, according to her, he shouldn’t be able to do anything about single moms and womanizers staffing his school (Was she trying to improve the job prospects for Bill Clinton?). And this passes for serious thought in the California legislature?
A reprieve for Baptists was granted by Gov. Brown’s veto of Fletcher’s abortion to logic. Don’t think for a moment that she and her compatriots have given up.
The Old Testament, evangelicals, pet stores, and traditional institutions are verboten to the tin-eared metro-chic. Similarly verboten is a healthy skepticism about wild-eyed climate-change apocalyptics. They won’t shrink from criminalizing, or subjecting to civil forfeiture, anyone who happens to make the mistake of conjoining a position of authority with cynicism about enviro end-times. Metroplex electorates appear to have affection for Maduro-type (of Venezuela fame) DA’s and AG’s to accomplish the desired end.
Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris in September 2015.
Not wishing to leave California out of the scrum, former AG Kamala Harris (now Senator) joined the AG’s of New York, Eric Schneiderman, and Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, and Massachusetts, Maura Healey, to form an Inquisition to ferret out “counter-revolutionaries” to Al Gore’s fashionable doctrine. It’s the latest craze sweeping the blue-dot jurisdictions: spend millions of dollars to haul into court the petroleum industry for questioning the supreme leader. (6) Ban-o-mania encompasses the campaign to silence opinions.
For everyone else without a corporate lawyer, loss of tenure, livelihood, or excommunication awaits. It’s a reincarnation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. They’re making Mao proud … if the old bloody tyrant was alive today.
Public humiliation by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).Cultural Revolution poster. Smashing the old to make way for the new.
The same is true for guns. Guns are as gauche to the chic denizens of metropolis as the climate views of anyone not in tune with the fashionable orthodoxy. Not surprisingly, respect for the 2nd Amendment fades as fewer and fewer people among the self-described “betters” in urban America have knowledge and experience with the things. This is their mental picture of gun owners, a product of too much late-night tv viewing (late-night comedians, SNL).
Yes, it’s a plain old prejudice, but it matches their ignorance. They live a life without firearms and so conclude nobody needs them. It’s easy for urban electorates to grant the state’s vast prosecutorial powers to AG’s giddy with the prospect of hanging a few gun manufacturers. The aforementioned Maura Healey of Massachusetts set her sights on Glock.
Massachusetts AG Maura Healey with Eric Schneiderman, NY AG, 2016.
Whatever their rationale, come on, it boils down to, “We don’t own them; therefore, you can’t either”. Really, lifestyle is their governing north star.
The corporate boardroom is as populated with hyper-sensitive ban-o-maniacs as deep blue state attorney general offices. The tekkie industry is particularly infected with them. “Caution” is the watchword for any true free-thinker in these occupational habitats. Just as Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla, learned in 2014. He was run out of his own company when it came to light that he contributed $1,000 to the California Prop 8 campaign to defend traditional marriage in 2008. The lefty hive in Mozilla and Silicon Valley swarmed at the knowledge.
Brendan Eich
Ideological cleansing targets anyone outside the metro groupthink. In Eich’s case, he cavorted with those who think that marriage is by nature heterosexual, and can only be homosexual if sodomy is accepted as the act of consummation. Of course, consummation could be dispensed with, but then marriage is reduced to a state-sanctioned friendship pact with the option of wide open conjugal behavior. The whole concept of “gay marriage” enters the grammatical territory of “non-sequitur”. Such thinking, though, is assigned to the Klan in the blinkered imaginations of cosmocialists.
The lefty piranha weren’t satisfied with the corpse of Brendan Eich. They will always need to feed on anyone with the temerity to express a different point of view. James Damore fell into the infected waters at Google when he sought to explain the small presence of women in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) industries in words different from the politically correct orthodoxy. (8)
James Damore and Google
He presented the proposition that women are underrepresented due to the fact that fewer girls have inclinations for STEM, not because of some overhanging pall of misogyny. (9) The snowflakes erupted and the impromptu inquisitors at Google went on a rampage. Damore found himself out of a job, fired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Steve Jobs juxtaposed to Google’s Sundar Pichai amid the Damore firing, by LA street artist Sabo.
The “diversity” police went into action mode to defend the sanctity of the party doctrine. Every one of the tech biggies has a Ministry of Diversity Truth. They sprang in defense of Google. At Google, its commissar is Danielle Brown. Intel has commissar Barbara Whye. Maxine Williams is installed at Facebook’s commissariat. Helping the biggies is a nomenklatura of consultants. Paradigm’s Joelle Emerson is an example. All of them are the keepers of the diversity holy grail.
Paradigm Consultancy’s Joelle Emerson
The whole diversity shtick is profoundly open to question. Yet, it is accepted as the closest thing to a self-evident truth among a class of people who have long ago rejected such truth when Thomas Jefferson in 1776 tried using the concept. Their’s is a pseudo-science meant to perform an ideological function: widely propagate the dogma while simultaneously swamping disagreement. They are the practitioners of the ban-o-mania of thought.
The tennis aficionado John McEnroe recently stepped in it when he declared what is obviously true. Men and women aren’t physical equals on the tennis court. For that, this time it was the equality police that leapt into action.
John McEnroe appearing before the press about controversial remarks.
McEnroe offhandedly stated in response to a question that Serena Williams would be ranked 700 among professional men’s tennis players. (10) Boy did that get the ant hill all abuzz. But for the equality commissariat, there was the disconcerting face-off in 1998 with a 203rd ranked men’s player, Karsten Braasch of Germany. The Williams sisters were teenagerly brash and over-confident, bragging in the ATP men’s office that they could whip any tour player ranked in the top 200.
Karsten Braasch (center) and the Williams sisters at the 1998 Australian Open.
Braasch, ranked 203 at the time, overheard the remark and took up the challenge in a lark. After playing a round of morning golf, Braasch arrived to play each sister one set. The event attracted quite a crowd. During changeovers, he smoked a cigarette and drank a beer. He bested Serena 6-1 and Venus 6-2. The Williams’ points had all the appearance of gifts. (11)
Was McEnroe all that wrong?
There is a sense of unreality in the blue-dot world. The here-and-now must be made to conform to ideological fantasies. In movies, women punch out burly men with skeletal and muscle structures that would collapse on contact if it didn’t occur before cameras and with the assistance of computer assisted graphics. We might be able to accept these illusions since, after all, it’s the movies. But the fantasies don’t dissipate after leaving the theater. There’s legions of prosecutors, politicians, consultants, and academics devoted to making the movie unreality a real life reality.
To make it happen, massive mind control and social engineering are required. All the tools of ban-o-mania are enlisted in the effort. Ostracize, prosecute, legislate, fire, and propagandize (the Bolsheviks called it “reeducation”) anyone not in conformance with the cosmocialist zeitgeist. The sad part is their push to take the campaign national. Their appetites won’t be satiated with dominance over metropolis.
Watch out red America. You’re one election away from being forced into living and thinking like a Greenwich Village hipster. You may not know it, but you have a metaphorical bulls-eye planted on your forehead.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The 2016 precinct map was garnered from “Creating a National Precinct Map”, 4/30/2017, https://decisiondeskhq.com/data-dives/creating-a-national-precinct-map/
“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, Tom Wolfe, New York Magazine, June 8, 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/
Reihan Salam is executive editor of National Review, contributing editor of National Affairs, advisor to the Energy Innovation Reform Project and Niskanen Institute. “Cosmocialist” first came to my attention in his article, “Democrats and Plutocrats”, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451463/democrats-silicon-valley-rich-entrepreneurs-changing-partys-working-class-image
“California pet stores may be required to only sell rescue animals if this bill passes”, Courtney Tompkins, The Los Angeles Daily News, 9/15/2017, http://www.dailynews.com/2017/09/15/california-pet-stores-may-be-required-to-only-sell-rescue-animals-if-this-bill-passes/
“Anti-discrimination measure or blow to religious freedom? California bill sparks debate on employer codes of conduct”, Melanie Mason, Los Angeles Times, 3/29/2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/essential/la-pol-ca-essential-politics-updates-an-anti-discrimination-measure-or-blow-1490826757-htmlstory.html
“Left-Wing AGs Are Playing Politics with the Law”, Jim Copeland and Rafael A. Mangual, National Review Online, 9/29/2016, http://www.nationalreview.com/article/440542/state-attorneys-general-political-abuses-power
“Mozilla CEO resignation raises free-speech issues”, USA Today, 4/4/2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/04/mozilla-ceo-resignation-free-speech/7328759/
“Google Episode Sends a Message: Diversity Is a Tough Sell in Silicon Valley”, Georgia Wells and Yoree Koh, WSJ, 8/10/17, https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-episode-sends-a-message-diversity-is-a-tough-sell-in-silicon-valley-1502383625; also at http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Google-Episode-Sends-a-Message-Diversity-Is-a-Tough-Sell-in-Silicon-Valley-24924773/.
The complete text of James Damore’s offending email can be found here: “Here’s the Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated]”, Kate Conger, Gizmodo, 8/5/2017, http://gizmodo.com/exclusive-heres-the-full-10-page-anti-diversity-screed-1797564320/amp
“John McEnroe: Serena Williams world’s best female tennis player but would rank ‘like 700’ among men”, Scott Allen, The Chicago Tribune, 6/25/2017, http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/breaking/ct-john-mcenroe-serena-williams-tennis-20170625-story.html
The episode is recounted here: “Serena Williams once challenged men’s player at Australian Open”, Sandra Harwitt, USA Today, 1/21/2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/tennis/aus/2017/01/21/serena-williams-nicole-gibbs-australian-open/96876832/
A chant applied to the Las Vegas massacre, almost anything bad involving guns, almost anything bad involving kids, and almost anything that’ll agitate the news cycle for more than a day.
The mass shooting in Las Vegas around 10 pm, Sunday, 10/1/2017.
Lately, we’ve developed a nervous tic nearly every time an incident of mayhem invades our tranquility. It won’t be long before a grandstanding politico trots out in front of a mike and cameras to announce, “We have to make sure this doesn’t happen again.” The fact is, it will. So what is up with the nonsense declaration? It’s the intro to the politicization of tragedy.
It begins with the unquestioning belief in the magical healing powers of legislation. Someone demands that we “do something”, and “do something” means “write a law”. Encapsulate the cure in a 20,000-word statute. What’s up with that?
Has anyone ever taken a look at the “geniuses” who’ll craft the cure? Sorry, high-wattage thinkers don’t heavily populate the upper rungs of those who play the game of politics (i.e. acquiring power, or getting elected), especially on the lefty side of the political spectrum. They may know the art of gaining power, but once in power we quickly learn that they really don’t know or understand much. They’re fumbling, and sometimes dangerous, empty suits.
Nancy Pelosi, (D) San Francisco, Democrat majority leader.
They normally trot out their ready-made, off-the-shelf nostrums. They don’t even have to be relevant to the issue at hand. Just plug ’em in anyway. In a recent CNN townhall after the Las Vegas shooting, Nancy Pelosi (D, San Francisco) quickly pivoted to her current favorite: background checks. The question directed to her was about actions to prevent the Las Vegas shooting. Her answer was nonsense. Do we have background checks? Yes. Would of any of their proposed changes to them make any difference? No.
Simply put, she didn’t answer the question. Besides, her response wasn’t pertinent. The killer, Stephen Paddock, passed background checks as he went about building his arsenal. It’s not that he didn’t go through any. The guy simply flew way under everyone’s radar, including his family’s.
On those “background checks”, all relevant records to a gun purchase are digitized with instant access for any government agent sitting time zones away from the site of the purchase. It doesn’t take long to do a check. States don’t vary that much in doing the look-see, only in the amount of arbitrary inconvenience for the buyer with their waiting periods. Nothing much is accomplished with waiting periods; much is accomplished in irritation.
Still, even with the Democrats’ background enhancements, Paddock would fly under those too.
And with Pelosi and her gang’s proposals, she’d effectively put “dead” to due process in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments for gun buyers. The Constitution is quite inconvenient for those in a hurry to win the political brass ring.
So, what’s she up to? She’s up to politics, gaining the majority in Congress, and impatient in imposing blue America’s values on the rest of the country.
I could bore you to tears with examples of politicos and their love affair with silliness. Here’s congresswomen Carolyn McCarthy, (D) New York, back in 2013 unable to describe a gun item (barrel shroud) mentioned in a bill that she supported.
You think that she’s the only one? Here’s 2 New York state politicos intent on their own bans.
Incendiary bullets are “heat-seeking”?
The confusion among the left about semi-automatic and automatic guns is rampant. The mixup extends to the progressive punditry. CNN’s Don Lemmon steps into it.
The ignorance is pervasive. The bulk of these people don’t own guns, haven’t really lived among them, and have SNL skits running around in their heads about rednecks and working stiffs. Their’s is the world of gentrified neighborhoods, bistros, smartphone-saturation, and the college bubble. Yet, they want to legislate for the rest of us. When they get their hands on the levers of power, the result is absurdity.
From where do we get get this tic to legislate our way to nirvana? It’s built into the progressive worldview. Progressives are intoxicated with the idea of using state power to manufacture a new world, and new human beings to go in it. That means legislation, laws, rules, decrees, and other such commands. Out goes anything not familiar to them in their cloistered existence.
Maybe something can be done about “bump stocks”, but don’t expect it to change the dynamic of fevered imaginations intent on killing large numbers of people. If the desire is there, a means will be found. In other words, it will happen again.
Evil resides in the souls of some men and women … but, first, you have to recognize the existence of evil. Now that’s something to scoff for your average run-of-the-mill urban sophisticate.
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
I suppose that the issue hinges on what is meant by “better”.
Sure, avoidance of gang rape in the school’s bathroom, classrooms-as-battlefields, and the accidental straying beyond the school’s chain link fence into feral environs are legitimate parental concerns. Many parents would assign “better” to any school without these traits.
Under the belief that a geographic relocation might improve things for the munchkins, many parents can’t wait to hook up the U-haul and move to a richer zip code.
A moving truck is shown at a house that was sold in Palo Alto, Calif., Tuesday, June 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma)
However, zip codes of the affluent present their own problems, leaving aside the schools. Websites catering to the school-conscious parent have sprung up in places afflicted with a cost of living commensurate with Warren Buffett’s investment portfolio but many people possessing a net worth more in line with the denizens of 1950’s Levittown. California is a hotbed for these conversations. One site for Bay Area moms and dads, berkeleyparentsnetwork.org, is filled with advice such as “Of course, if you can afford to buy in a place with good schools then by all means buy.” (12) Though for most Californios, being able to make the rent, or mortgage, hangs overhead like the sword of Damocles.
Some have opted to jump ship and leave the state. For many, housing costs are just too big an obstacle to overcome in the quest for better family environs, including schools. From 2000 to 2009, the SF Bay Area registered a net outflow of 600,000 domestic migrants (mostly citizens, not immigrants). After a 5-year pause due to falling house prices from the Great Recession, the exodus resumed as shelter resumed its eye-popping California norm (house prices returning to 6x’s income, beyond the acceptable 3x’s). The 2016 losses for the whole state were on the order of 110,000, most of it from the heavily populated but very expensive coastal enclaves. (9)
Those “domestic migrants” – residents of one state moving to another – seem to be emerging from states with uniform ID: those with the adjective “high” before cost-of-living, taxes, crime, and regulation, and “low” for upward mobility and successful business formation. The usual suspects are California, Illinois, New York, et al.
Destinations are South and West — EXCLUDING CALIFORNIA! Look at the top and bottom of the chart below. The top is reserved for the welcoming states and the bottom for states that shed people like my dog does hair. (15)
Interestingly, the combination of escalating house prices and California’s hostility to suburban living is making for a return of feudal manorialism. A fleeing middle class, sensitive to rising prices for a family hearth, in combination with foreign immigration into the state (2.7 million “undocumented” live in the state – see 13 below), is resurrecting something resembling a lord/serf society. Two researchers characterized the situation like this: “Essentially, the model [for California] is that of a gated community, with a convenient servant base nearby.” (9)
“Convenient servant base”? Sounds much like “serf”, or maybe peasant, to me. “Gated community”? Sounds like “castle”, or chateau.
Is this a French manor from the Middle Ages or contemporary California?Gated development, Carlsbad, California.East Los Angeles neighborhood.
For many, moving for better schools and a more affordable roof most likely means leapfrogging the state entirely. But don’t delude yourself into equating a middle or upper class student body in a new state with a high quality education. Housing is cheaper but the vast majority of schools are likely, at best, to be only marginally better. The only real difference between the middle class kid and inner-city one is the poor kid’s path to mediocrity is a lot rockier. Yes, a mediocre curriculum and poor teacher training awaits all irrespective of better cars in the student parking lot or a student enrollment that’ll do the homework.
Students listening to Ernest Jenkins III in his Manhood Development class at Oakland High School. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York TimesSuburban school in school uniforms.
All schools draw from the same pool of teacher candidates and curricular resources. You’ll find the same textbooks on a home-schooler’s kitchen table as you will find in a Catholic school classroom and a suburban or inner-city public school. The vast majority of teachers are given a remarkably homogeneous college education and teacher training centering on the mind-numbing writings of John Dewey. The sameness is quite remarkable.
30 years worth of experience as a public high school and community college teacher has made me aware of the phenomenal uniformity of what is taught, how it is taught, and who is teaching it.
Two textbooks that were a staple of 20 years of high school instruction and widely adopted are displayed below.
A widely-adopted World History textbook.Ditto U.S. History text.
Over the years, textbooks have declined in narrative with a surge in graphics. Technical, thought-provoking theory has disappeared. Identity politics is amply displayed: for instance, out goes Henry Bessemer and in comes Mary Wollstonecraft. Much space is reserved for our historical sins as these crowd out the richness of debate over the nature of our federal system. Labor history is reduced to a Marxist distillation; excluded is the role of violent anarcho-socialists in some of that history. Immigration and immigrants, of course, are always saintly. The 1960’s reads as if it was cleansed through the censors of the radical left. I could go on.
For pedagogy, teacher trainees are immersed in the mind of John Dewey. Who’s John Dewey? He’s a turn-of-the-century socialist who wanted to turn the schools into factories for making socialists.
Prof. John Dewey at Columbia University.
He’s famous for such arcane mumbo-jumbo as “constructivism” and seemingly commonsensical “child-centered learning”. The “construction” in “constructivism” is simply the matter of raising (or constructing) the child’s receptivity to socialism. “Child-centered” is an assault on the established canon of western civilization. The child’s wants are the guide to instruction, not Plato, the Apostle Paul, or the Founders. The teacher as the adult in the room is to be replaced by the chaos of adolescent urges.
Howard Gardner dispensing his gospel in India.
On this foundation is built the everyone-wins-a-trophy philosophy of “multiple intelligences” via Howard Gardner. Everybody is assumed to be smart, but in reality nobody is smart … if you think about it. The whole thing is a levelling of all students. From this we get the dilution of the curricular core to include excursions into all the “intelligences” to the detriment of a traditional core. It’s conducive to “heterogeneity” and grouping in almost everything.
About that “grouping”, “cooperative learning” are watchwords. Kids are thrust together into groups of varying abilities – the “heterogeneity” thing – and responsibility is socialistically distributed. What better way to “construct” the new child for the socialist future? Keep this in mind as your kid comes home with stories of his or her classroom group.
Don’t think for a moment that AP courses are immune to these influences. AP Literature guidelines now reflect Dewey’s “child-centered” nonsense. AP US History deemphasizes a mastery of historical facts and their connections. They demand mature judgments from immature minds. Across the curriculum, we’re creating opinionated ignoramuses.
It didn’t take long for me to realize that our professional goal wasn’t Jefferson’s ideal of an educated citizenry. It’s about making good little Democrats — by Democrats, I mean the Democratic Party as part of the consortium of the world’s Social Democratic Parties. Read “socialist” for Social Democrat … mostly of the mild sort.
The kids’ minds have long been pried open to being college snowflakes and Antifa recruits. Intolerant and propagandized since shortly after becoming bipedal, many of them are now subjecting us to their partisan and ideologically-laced rhetoric. The rhetoric supplants mature thinking.
Listen to this exchange between a taxi driver and his youthful customer over a hula doll on his dashboard. Count the number of times political boilerplate and the word “offensive” is used by the female rider.
We are reaping the whirlwind as tantrums and thuggishness displace reasoned debate.
We are witnessing the results of 4-5 decades of a blinkered and tendentious instruction. It has penetrated nearly everywhere. Buying a home in a better neighborhood will buy you a preppy student body; it won’t guarantee you a education free of the bacillus. Fleeing a blue state to a red one won’t change the dynamic. A private or parochial school might only provide a safer and more accomplished route to mediocrity. Home schooling might be an option if the curriculum can be kept free of the college ed schools and government’s embrace of identity politics, an unlikely occurrence.
Education reformers are everywhere, and have been arising zombie-like throughout my career. Yet, reform seems to always originate from the same worn out premises. We’ve reached the point that real education reform may require us to ignore the reformers. Unless it happens, we had all better keep an eye on Tommy (see below).
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
Interesting and brief account of treating inner city school students: “An Inner City School Social Worker Shares Two of His Cases”, Howard Honigsfeld, Psychotherapy Networker, 7/28/2015, https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/607/therapy-strategies-for-working-with-underprivileged.
An account of the challenges in an Oklahoma urban school: “A look inside an inner city school struggling with multiple challenges, including ‘needing improvement’ sanctions”, Danniel Parker, The City Sentinel, 5/15/2011, http://city-sentinel.com/2011/05/a-look-inside-an-inner-city-school-struggling-with-multiple-challenges-including-%E2%80%9Cneeding-improvement%E2%80%9D-sanctions/.
Interesting advice in teaching inner city students: “4 Tips to Being a Good Teacher in the Inner-City”, The Libertarian Republic, 11/11/2014, http://thelibertarianrepublic.com/4-tips-good-teacher-inner-city/
Excellent maps showing a changing Los Angeles ethnic demography from 1940 to 2000: “Los Angeles County Ethnic/Racial Breakdown 1940-2000”, http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=169073.0.
“White Flight Never Ended”, Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, 7/30/2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/07/white-flight-alive-and-well/399980/.
“Data shows how major U.S. cities are slowly re-segregating”, Kenya Downs, 3/7/2016, PBS NewsHour, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/major-u-s-cities-may-seem-integrated-but-not-for-long/.
A synopsis of John Dewey’s harmful impact on American education can be found in this critical review of Henry Edmondson’s book, John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, Dennis Attick, PhD candidate in Social Foundations of Education at Georgia State University, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=eandc. The author is clearly supportive of the major tenets of Dewey’s education philosophy.
For an account of the most widely adopted textbooks in today’s America go here: “Widely Adopted History Textbooks”, American Textbook Council, http://historytextbooks.net/adopted.htm.
A summary of recent migration trends for California can be found here: “Leaving California? After slowing, the trend intensifies”, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox, The Orange County Register, 4/23/2017, http://www.ocregister.com/2017/04/23/leaving-california-after-slowing-the-trend-intensifies/.
Metrics of school quality don’t vary that much for schools within the same school district is asserted here: “Do Better Neighborhoods for
MTO Families Mean Better Schools?”, Brief No. 3; Kadija S. Ferryman, Xavier de Souza Briggs, Susan J. Popkin, and María Rendón; The Urban Institute, March 2008, https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/31596/411639-Do-Better-Neighborhoods-for-MTO-Families-Mean-Better-Schools-.PDF. ** The metrics for measuring school quality were performance on state exams, the school’s poverty rate, and exposure to white classmates and students with limited English proficiency.
** “Our kids are still in early elementary school too but I think you will find the answer varies widely. Obviously… not ”everyone” can go to private school! I know some parents who have had their kids just tough it out at a not-so-great middle school, then get a scholarship for private high school. Others with more resources opt to start private school earlier on. And, even some high earning families I know chose Oakland public high schools including Skyline, Oakland Tech, and charter schools. Ultimately it’s hard to say before your child starts school, what type of high school will work for your family. That said, we chose our home based on both elementary and middle schools we liked, at least ”on paper” as you say, figuring high school was too far off to gauge.”; from “Moving for the Schools”, Berkeley Parents Network, August 2012, https://www.berkeleyparentsnetwork.org/recommend/housing/schools.
Ibid. From the segment “Moving vs. private school – how to make the decision?”.
“II. Where Do They Live?”, Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, Pew Research Center, 4/14/2009, http://www.pewhispanic.org/2009/04/14/ii-where-do-they-live/.
“5 facts about illegal immigration in the U.S.”, FactTank: News in the Numbers, Pew Research Center, 4/27/2017, http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/.
“California, Illinois, and New York Keep Losing People to Other States”, Ryan McMaken, Mises Wire, 5/10/2017, Mises Institute, https://mises.org/blog/california-illinois-and-new-york-keep-losing-people-other-states
The Progressives’ zeal to mold people to fit an ideologically-driven stereotype is abundantly evident today as it was in the latter 19th century. Back then, the recipient of their benignly intended efforts – but with malign results – was the American Indian. Today, the target is the entire American population, if not the world’s. The modern Progressives’ gaze became vastly more panoramic as they substitute their judgment for the wishes of anyone directly impacted.
Connecting Progressivism’s dots between the 19th and 21st centuries isn’t hard. Progressivism wasn’t a product of spontaneous combustion. It’s got a lineage – or, if you will, a trail of tears. Its 19th century roots became evident just as one expansive civilization began to swamp a nomadic one. The Progressives of the era – call them “reformers” with their Obama-esque “arc of history” rhetoric – planned a quick transformation of the American Indian into rural gentry. The tinkering with humanity ensued and misery erupted.
Nathan C. Meeker, previously mentioned in another post, was one example of an archetype littered about the civilian branches of the U.S. government. Many were utopian, and near utopian, in outlook with a powerful confidence in their ability to engineer better human beings. The American Indian seemed to be the preferred guinea pig in their social laboratory.
Vincent Colyer
Another scion in the Progressive line was Vincent Colyer, the Indian Board of Commissioners secretary. In a 1871 “peacemaking” tour of New Mexico and Arizona reservations, he upset a happy arrangement for the Chihenne band of Apaches and all others concerned. They were ordered from their much-loved Canada Alamosa reservation (sometimes called Ojo Caliente) in the New Mexico territory to the more inhospitable Tularosa valley, a hundred miles northwest. Colyer simply substituted his judgment for the Chihennes. He would set off an Apache/US conflagration that would sputter on and off for 15 years and only ended with the capture of Geronimo in 1886 and decimation of half the Chiricahua Apache population.
Chiricahua Apaches, 1880s.Apaches on the San Carlos Reservation waiting in line for government rations, 1870s.Chiricahua prisoners, including Geronimo (front row, 3rd from right) being transported to Ft. Marion, Fla., 1886.
“Substituting their judgment” is a common trait of those consumed with the self-perception of possessing superior wisdom. It is the blind spot of the Progressive. Their unquestioning faith in the “expert” is without limit. Jump forward to the middle of the 20th century and we have “urban renewal”.
What started out as “slum clearance” ended up as slum intensification. Social planners – an established squadron in the ranks of the nomenklatura – substituted the haphazard arrangements of neighborhood residents for Sovietized housing monoliths and called it “urban renewal”. In 1954, they gave us Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis.
Pruitt-Igoe (actually Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments) just before completion and its first occupancy in 1954.
It didn’t last 20 years. By the end of the 1960s, it was uninhabitable and a massive eyesore. Its chief architect, Minuro Yamasaki, exclaimed, “I never thought people were that destructive”. The thing was demolished in 1972.
Pruitt-Igoe, 1970.Pruitt-Igoe, 1969.The demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in 1972.
If there was a FBI most-wanted list for such things, the following grandiose public housing projects would join Pruitt-Igoe (see 7 below):
Queens Bridge Houses, Queens, NYC. It was raided in 2005 as the home of the “Dream Team” drug syndicate.
Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Il. In an already crime-plagued city, Robert Taylor displays some of the highest rates of violent crime and gang activity in the city.
Jordan Downs, Watts, Ca. Crime and gang violence are its watchwords for today.
Magnolia Projects, or “Da Wild Magnolia”, New Orleans, La. Let’s just say that the place’s reputation isn’t conducive to raising kids.
Marcy Projects, Brooklyn, NYC. Rapper Jay-Z, a former resident, wrote the rap “Murder Marcyville” as an anthem to its atmosphere. Need I say more?
Cabrini Green, Chicago, Il. No list of the infamous should go without this lovely specimen. Prior to its closing in 2010, USA Today called the place a “virtual war zone, the kind of place where little boys were gunned down on their way to school and little girls were sexually assaulted and left for dead in stairwells.”
The benighted gaze of the “expert” isn’t limited to housing. They’ve destroyed entire swaths of cities in the name of “redevelopment”. A similar roster of the infamous could be constructed for this imperial march of eminent domain’s elimination of private property (see 5 and 6). Lost in the imbroglio is the unique character of a place, evolved over many years of human interaction, only to see it replaced by a modern sterility. This is devolution, not evolution, thanks to the Progressives’ “experts”.
Not happy with fiddling with the cities, under the guise of “climate change”, the “experts” want to bring to all of society what they brought to the urban landscape. Climate change is so protean of a concept that it will abet almost any government meddling in our existence. Now here’s a mandate for the know-it-alls.
California is the epicenter for this latest craze among Progressives. “Climate change” enthusiasms have made the place almost unlivable for anyone aspiring to the middle class. Utility bills and fuel prices are exorbitant. Solar panels are everywhere but that is only possible with a ponzi scheme of subsidies and utility rate manipulation.
The place is so regulated that even getting a plastic bag to carry your groceries to the car demands another purchase … or, alternatively, bring your own filthy things from home. Owning and maintaining a car is now a grueling experience. Illegality might await if you buy a water heater outside your air district. Expressing the desire to start a business could be justifiable grounds for an insanity declaration and commitment to a state institution.
And, of course, the tax burden is back-breaking. No surprise here since the expert-driven paradise is an expensive proposition.
The invisible hand of Adam Smith becomes a deadening hand if it is attached to a Progressive “expert”. In their wake, we have the plight of the American Indian, the inner-city poor, and the California middle class. If success is measured by failure, a place like Sacramento – or any blue dot on the 2016 election map – should have a hall of fame, or shame, dedicated to the Progressive “expert”.
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
For a history of Apache resistance, read The Earth Is
Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, hardback edition, pp. 358-415.
A good survey of early urban renewal efforts can be found in “The History of Hamlin Park Part VII: Early Housing Acts and Start of Urban Renewal”, Mike Puma, Buffalo Rising, 9/23/2013, https://www.buffalorising.com/2013/09/the-history-of-hamlin-park-part-vii-early-housing-acts-and-the-start-of-urban-renewal/
More on Pruitt-Igoe in wikipedia, “Pruitt-Igoe”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruitt%E2%80%93Igoe
An early criticism of “urban renewal” from 1965 can be found here: “The Failure of Urban Renewal”, Herbert J. Ganns, Commentary, 4/1/1965, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-failure-of-urban-renewal/
More on “urban renewal” failures: “5 Disastrous Urban Renewal Failures”, Modern Cities, 3/10/2016, http://www.moderncities.com/article/2016-mar-5-disastrous-urban-renewal-failures-/page/1
More on “urban renewal” failures: “Redevelopment Wrecks: 20 failed Projects Involving Eminent Domain Abuse”, Castle Coalition, http://castlecoalition.org/pdf/publications/Redevelopment%20Wrecks.pdf
“The 7 Most Infamous U.S. Public Housing Projects”, Newsone staff, Newsone, https://newsone.com/1555245/most-infamous-public-housing-projects/
The book is a corrective for anyone wanting to go beyond politically correct fairy tales and the myths of manifest destiny. Naiveté is rampant alongside cruelty and bigotry.
Interesting to me is the now-familiar use of the momentary state of science to draw grand conclusions about people, such as the Native Americans (or American Indians, if you will). Couple that with “progressive” reformist zeal and disaster awaits.
Nathan C. Meeker
No better example can be found than the brief career of rookie Indian agent Nathan C. Meeker (above). A utopian down to his bones, it took him only a year to rile up the Utes as he impetuously and zealously embarked on the all-too-familiar crusade of socially engineering the Utes of Colorado in 1878-9 (pictured belwo). It would end in death all around, including Meeker’s own, the rape of his wife and daughter, and the near destruction of the Utes (illustrated below).
Utes in 1870s photo.Meeker’s destroyed agency in 1879.
Is there a lesson for us in this whole sordid affair?
RogerG
Bibliography and sources:
The Earth Is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West, Peter Cozzens, read pp 341-357.
Unsurprisingly and generally speaking, parents strive to grease the skids for their kids’ future success. Particularly, middle class parents will drive themselves to near bankruptcy in order to guarantee their offspring’s advancement. Yet, when they buy into a nicer neighborhood to enroll junior in a “better” school, are they really getting a “better” school? There’s good reason to doubt that proposition. Much of the corruption in our schools has deep tentacles, and is no respecter of “red” vs. “blue” states, public or private schools, inner city or suburban schools, parochial or secular, and even reaches down into home-schooling. It’s equal-opportunity corruption.
