Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

Cultural Illiteracy and Linguistic Dumbing Down

            Recently an academic luminary from an elite university suggested that the American classic Huckleberry Finn be changed to eliminate offensive language, specifically a well known and hateful word, (changing it to “slave” as in “Slave Jim”). This peculiar sensitivity makes me wonder if the professor reads anything other than the unreadable, politically correct writing that now masquerades as scholarship in the English departments of most American universities.

I recently read Thomas Wolfe’s great American novel Look Homeward Angel, which contains offensive words like those in Huckleberry Finn.  Has the politically correct professor read Look Homeward, Angel? If he has, does he think the offensive language should be changed?

            Ernest Hemingway writes that Huckleberry Finn is the first authentic American novel because Mark Twain writes in the American vernacular, which often contains offensive words. Before Mark Twain American writers followed the belletristic style (after belle lettres) favored by anglophile critics. Great writer that he was Mark Twain broke new ground with Huckleberry Finn, the best anti slavery novel in American literature, but which is now distorted by half educated, politically correct English professors.

            I also wonder, has the professor read any American literature written by distinguished black writers? Richard Wright’s Native Son, for example, has as its main character the tragic Bigger Thomas. Any guesses as to why Wright chose the name “Bigger”? Will the professor bowdlerize Native Son to make it more acceptable to the sensitivity crowd? How about Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy?

            But cultural abuse of great literature goes beyond the elimination of so called offensive language in American classics and extends beyond the university. These days one can find Shakespeare’s plays written in contemporary English because, according to the dumber downers, Shakespeare’s syntax, word selection, and blank verse are hard for youngsters to understand. Funny, during my school days teachers and students read the plays together, and my teachers did a good job teaching students how to read and understand Elizabethan English. Furthermore, we memorized famous passages like Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar (“Friends, Romans, countrymen…”) and Macbeth’s reaction to Lady Macbeth’s death (“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day…” etc.). 

            Then we have the egregious abuses of English as represented in dumbed down English translations of the Bible. Of all the English translations of the Bible, none approaches the Authorized Version (The King James Version) for the beauty of its poetry and its timeless ability to remain in one’s consciousness. When I was a child learning the Bible in my Methodist Sunday school and church liturgy, the King James Bible was the Bible I heard and I still remember its marvelous verses: “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” now dumbed down to “Let the children come to me” or “How can this be since I know not a man” now rendered as the incredibly clumsy “How can this be since I have not had relations with a man?” or “Whom God has joined together let no man put asunder,” which is now the wretchedly inclusive “Whom God has joined together human beings cannot separate.”

            The worst English Biblical translations occur in my Catholic Church in the tone deaf New American Bible, which, among other atrocities, renders St. Paul’s “I have fought to good fight” to the embarrassingly inaccurate “I have competed well.” Hearing that at Mass is like hearing long fingernails scrape across a chalkboard. And speaking of the Mass, the dumber downers have worked overtime there. Before Vatican II Catholics all over the world heard the beautiful Latin Tridentine or Pius V Mass at worship. Now they celebrate in the vernacular with hootenanny hymns and mistranslations of Pope Paul VI’s Novus Ordo Mass.

            Dumber downer translators and their advocates defend the new translations because the older ones are hard to understand. In other words people are too stupid or too unteachable to learn. Isn’t it interesting that illiterate slaves, who were forbidden by law to learn to read, listened to the King James Bible and not only understood but also created spirituals that demonstrated that understanding, “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” for example?

            Fortunately for Catholics Pope Benedict XVI has made it possible for all priests to now say the Pius V Mass in Latin and the Church has also corrected the mistranslations of the Novus Ordo Mass. Can we hope that someday an educational reformer and cultural restorationist like Benedict will emerge for the whole society to restore beauty and taste to language, literature, architecture, and manners, and where bowdlerizers will be too embarrassed to advocate on behalf of their culturally illiterate and nihilistic ideas? That’s a most needed educational reform and one for which we must most devoutly pray.

Everyone must bring his book

It’s “Everyone must bring his book” not “Everyone must bring their book” because “everyone” is singular and “their” is plural. The rule: a pronoun must agree with its antecedent. Since “everyone” is the antecedent, the pronoun must be singular. Grammatical symmetry dictates this English usage rule. So, why do so many misuse the pronoun “their”? First, probably from ignorance, which is no crime. Unless someone (such as this writer) has a special interest in English usage, he probably will not concern himself with usage minutiae. Next, “everyone” as a singular pronoun seems counter-intuitive to some English speakers, so they intentionally and unashamedly violate the rule. Then we have the politically correct reason: using masculine nouns and pronouns to refer to both men and women is sexist.  

The last reason for misusing “their” demonstrates continuing feminist insistence on political correctness (pc). Other pc examples include tone deaf words like “chairperson” and “foreperson.” One can envision the eventual replacement of “human being” with “huperson being” because “man” is obviously the source of evil in the modern world. “Man” and “mankind” have always been used to designate both men and women, but to the pc crowd these designations are sexist.

            In a radio PSA about children and homework, the President of the Tennessee Education Association (the TEA, which is the Tennessee branch of the NEA) tells “a parent” about the importance of helping “their child with their homework.” Now, if the august TEA President is unaware of English usage rules, here is the correction: “It is important that a parent help his child with his homework.” If, on the other hand, pc is her problem – the TEA President is female – but she still wants to demonstrate knowledge of basic English usage (which she should, after all she is a teacher), she can say, “It is important that parents help their children with their homework.” That construction maintains grammatical symmetry, plural pronouns (their) with plural noun antecedents (parents, children), while avoiding use of the dreaded generic male nouns and pronouns.

            How did it suddenly become necessary to abolish the use of generic male nouns and pronouns to stand for both men and women? Major blame falls upon the late Kate Swift who wrote The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing, which the feminist community quickly embraced, and with which cowardly men have refused to argue. Many men, especially politicians, mainstream news anchors, corporate CEO’s, and academics, would rather walk barefoot across burning coals than risk being called sexist, racist, homophobic, or the epithet du jour.

The worst result of linguistic political correctness has been upon church hymns and English translations of Sacred Scripture. Recent English translations with “inclusive language” have removed much of the poetry from the Inspired Word.

            And by the way, feminists invented the sexist language notion. The use of generic “man” for men and women did not result from some male conspiracy to exclude women but from the etymology of “man.” According to Jacques Barzun, “the Sanskrit root ‘manu’ denotes nothing but the human being and does so par excellence since it is cognate with the word for ‘I think.’” “Woman,” says Barzun “is etymologically the ‘wife human being.’”

            Fortunately, most men and women react negatively to pc “inclusive language” when it goes too far, as most attacks on cultural tradition always do. For example, most people completely reject sex neutral references to God because in that context inclusive language is like fingernails on a chalkboard; only pc people dislike referring to God as “Him.”

I doubt that in public discourse we will ever have to endure such constructions as “Founding Persons” for Founding Fathers or “Forepeople” for Forefathers, but readers should not be surprised if such constructions sneak into their children’s schoolbooks. Pc cultural nihilism usually rules there.

           

           

           

             

           

Guns will not go away

Guns Will Not Go Away

The current gun control debate reminds me of the Nicholas Cage film Lord of War, which accurately and effectively demonstrates, even though it’s fiction, that it’s not only America but the whole world that is armed. The difference is that in America citizens have a legal, that is, a constitutional right to be armed. At the beginning of the film, Cage’s character, an international arms dealer, states that there is an AK 47, the Kalashnikov, for every twelve people in the world. As a weapons dealer his goal is to arm the other eleven.  

            The AK 47, semi automatic knock offs of which are everywhere, was invented by a Russian sergeant (he was later made a general in the Soviet Army) and is one of the most ubiquitous and most reliable weapons of its type in the world. The Chinese company Norenco manufactures versions of the AK as well as other pistols and rifles, which are sold everywhere. The rifle shoots 7.62x39 bullets, which are available worldwide, but probably in short supply here since the Sandy Hook massacre.

            Recent history shows that the election of liberal Democrats, mass shootings, such as the Gabby Gifford incident in Arizona, the Aurora, Colorado theater massacre, or the Sandy Hook shootings, and also inevitable hysterical and uninformed liberal gun control campaigns are good for gun and ammunition sales. For example, when Bill Clinton became President in 1993, 7.62x39 semi automatic rifles as well as 7.62x39 cartridges sold rapidly because gun owners feared that Democratic gun grabbers would enact confiscatory gun controls. There followed the semi automatic assault rifle law, a failed attempt to limit magazine size (to ten rounds) and assault weapons sales. Chinese gun makers quickly got around that law by merely making a few cosmetic changes to AK-47 style semi automatic rifles; moreover, thousands of large capacity magazines remained available.

            Later on gun and ammunition sales returned to normal and did not change until the election of Barack Obama, another liberal Democrat who gun owners feared would push for new restrictions on gun ownership, hence ammunition and gun sales exploded and the prices of both rose dramatically.

            This history shows that Americans are not fearful of each other but of government restrictions on gun rights. The rush to buy guns and ammunition after Mr. Obama was elected was not a fearful, hysterical exercise, but a rational decision based on the anti self-defense history of liberal members of the President’s Democratic Party.

English and It's Discontents

English and Its Discontents

            “Every time someone says ‘whom,’ I reply, ‘Whom? Meem?’”  Those were the words of my college Shakespeare professor regarding grammar and usage. He continued, “We follow these rules only because Eighteenth Century pedants (he used a more colorful word than “pedants”) wrote grammar books.” This comment came after someone asked about English usage in Shakespeare’s plays. For example, in Julius Caesar Marc Antony describes Brutus’s stab wound as “The most unkindest cut,” which violates our rules for comparing adjectives. We have been taught to write or say either “most unkind” or as Microsoft Word instructs, “unkindest.”

            Did our usage rules really come from Eighteenth Century pedants? In part they did. Next question, why did the pedants write grammar books and where did they get their rules? Grammar books appeared when men found out they could make money in an emerging market, in this case the one created by the rise of the bourgeoisie. Of humble origins and not formally educated like the gentry, wealthy bourgeoisie bought the trappings of culture as the nouveau riche of our day do.

To formulate a set of rules, grammar book writers looked to ruling class usage and to Latin, then considered to be superior to all other languages. After all, educated people knew Greek and Latin. So now when we learn what has come to be called Standard English – we used to call it good or proper English – we are actually learning to speak ruling class English.

            The most annoying rules created by the grammar book pedants, which most people now ignore, come from Latin: we are supposed to say, “It is I” not “It’s me” because a pronoun following a linking (or copulative) verb (“is” a linking verb) must be in the nominative (or subjective) case. “I” is nominative, “me” objective (or accusative, as Latin students may remember). Another rule very difficult to follow: never end a sentence with a preposition, to which Winston Churchill is said to have replied, “This is something up with which I will not put.” Then there’s the rule about split infinitives. An infinitive is “to” plus a verb. An infinitive is split when a word or phrase is inserted between “to” and the verb. With some expressions following this rule is impossible. For example, “We hope to more than double our profits this year.” Inserting “more than” between “to” and “double” splits the infinitive.

            The problem with using Latin as a model for English grammar is that English’s antecedents are not Latin but varieties of German. Germanic tribes from the North German Plain, the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, conquered the British Isles around the Fifth and Sixth Centuries, A.D. Our English developed from the Germanic languages they spoke. Angles lived in “Angle-Land,” which became England where English was born; and while contemporary English contains many Latin borrowings, as well as borrowings from French and other languages including American Indian dialects, linguists call those borrowings lexical, not grammatical. English is not grammatically Latin.

            Having said all that, and even though I love to make fun of usage rules, I believe that following sensible rules improves communication. Just as standardized spelling, developed as a result of printing and increased literacy, helps English speakers understand each other better, so do rules of usage. They fine tune understanding, for example, the differences between “uninterested” and “disinterested” or “imply” and “infer” or the universally misused and misunderstood words “affect,” “effect,” and “impact.” Also, learning grammatical structures makes it possible for people to learn to write and punctuate clearly, for example, rules such as this: “When an adverb clause begins a sentence, follow it with a comma. When it ends a sentence, no comma is required.” Obviously, people can’t understand this rule without knowing about adverbs and clauses. Unfortunately, most people either forget or never learn these English basics; nevertheless, proper form improves communication in writing and speaking.

In any event, widespread language lapses from Standard English don’t bother me because I don’t want to be a language policeman (political correctness in English bothers me a great deal, but addressing that requires another long article). More importantly, I value great literature with its infinite variety dialects and usages, and also the wonderful variety of English dialects spoken in America and throughout the English speaking world. I’m sad that many of us have had regional and cultural dialects educated out of us. Now, if I want to hear the English dialect my grandparents spoke, I must travel to isolated places like Smith or Tangier Islands in the Chesapeake Bay. I regret the loss; the broad midland English of the evening news now spoken by many Americans lacks the variety and richness of regional dialects, which I would much rather hear. To this end I’m thankful to country music for keeping Sixteenth Century Scotch-Irish accents alive.

             

             

           

           

Are We Safer Since 9/11/01?

Are We Safer?

            Every September someone on the TV news asks someone else if we are safer today than we were before the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Republicans say yes. The absence of terrorist attacks here since 9/11 is their proof. Democrats say no. The absence of attacks proves nothing.          

I say it’s the wrong question. The 9/11 attacks killed about 3,000 people, a terrible event and one that required a strong and intelligent response, but at that time we were a nation of more than 280 million. Do the arithmetic. Your chances of dying in a terrorist attack on that day were infinitesimal. On the other hand you have a one in 75,000 chance of dying in a bicycle crash, a one in 68,000 chance of choking to death, a one in 20,000 chance of drowning, and a one in 5,300 chance of dying in an automobile accident. Is anyone frightened enough to give up cycling, eating, swimming, or driving a car? The truth is that one thing keeps us safe: mathematical probability.

            I once heard terrorism described as theater: a terrible spectacle but of not much consequence to most people. Terrorists know that people are more likely to be influenced by a terrible dramatic act than by the dry recitation of mathematical probabilities. That’s why they do what the do; more importantly, we should always remember that they do what they do because they are weak. Acts of terror are all that they have.

            But terrorism works in perverse ways. For us that one terrible act on 9/11/01 led to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and 4,500 more American deaths, increased federal spending, the needless creation of a new cabinet department, needless delays in air travel, and the Patriot Act, which gives government agents new power to limit individual freedom – as if they didn’t have enough now.

            All of which works to the benefit of those who love the bloated warfare/welfare state: national security experts of all kinds and from all areas, D.C. think tank employees, defense contractors, K Street lobbyists, government employees, and big media organizations and their reporters whose favorite pig wallow is war and disaster.

How all this government activity affects potential terrorists is anyone’s guess. I suspect it has no effect at all.

            Are we safer? As I said, it’s the wrong question.          

                       

           

Benghazi Was Not the First

Benghazi Was Not the First

            President Obama and his administration continue to receive deserved criticism for their handling of the Benghazi attack, but history shows that putting Americans in needless danger or leaving them to swing in the wind for political reasons is not new. Here are some of the more egregious examples from history:

            In 1983 some smart people in the Reagan State Department thought it a good idea to make 240 Marines sitting duck targets for terrorists at the Beirut, Lebanon airport. “Showing the flag” seems to be a recurrent theme in exercises like that. “A strong U.S. presence” was supposed to reassure U.S. allies in the region. Some reassurance: a truck bomb ended the lives of 243 Marines. At the time Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and his close advisers in the DOD objected to positioning the Marines that way, but the striped pants crowd overruled them. The buck stopped with President Reagan, of course.

The 1968 North Korean attack on the USS Pueblo, killing one crewman, followed by the taking of the ship and the one year imprisonment of the Pueblo crew provides another example of Americans hazarded and unprotected for reasons not understandable to ordinary people. In that Cold War environment where “everyone knew” that everyone else was spying, things like this were not supposed to happen.    

Pueblo was a small, lightly armed (two fifty caliber machine guns) intelligence gathering, converted cargo ship designed to listen in on electronic communication from the communist Asian mainland. No one was supposed to mind, you see, because Soviet fishing trawlers did the same thing off the coast of the U.S. A spying quid pro quo was supposed to exist between Cold War opponents. North Korean officials didn’t get the memo.

Worse, American Naval forces could have assisted Pueblo but did not. Put this one on the Lyndon Johnson administration. Then after their release from the North Korean prison; when Commander Bucher and the Pueblo crew returned to California, no one from official Washington greeted them. California Governor Ronald Reagan and his wife Nancy greeted the skipper and his crew at the California airport but no one from the White House or the DOD. To add insult to injury the Navy wanted to court martial Commander Bucher for dereliction of duty. To his credit President Nixon stopped the court martial.

            The most disgraceful example of official abandonment of Americans in danger and the appalling cover-up afterwards was the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on the fourth day of the 1967 Arab Israeli War. The cover up, vigorously aided and abetted by the Israeli lobby and their handmaids in the US government and the US Congress, continues to anger and outrage Americans with first hand knowledge of the event, that is, those Naval personnel on board Liberty during the attack. In fact, when they have tried to get the truth of the incident to the nation they have been stonewalled by publishers and the media and called anti-Semites by the Israeli lobby.

            Here’s what happened: As the Liberty, a World War II cargo ship which had been converted to carry sophisticated electronic intelligence gathering equipment, steamed slowly in international waters fourteen miles from the Sinai Peninsula, waves of low-flying Israeli fighter bombers attacked the ship with rockets, napalm, and cannon. The air attack lasted twenty minutes. Liberty was left afire, listing sharply. Eight crewmen had been killed and the Captain seriously wounded. About a half an hour later Israelis attacked again, this time with torpedo boats, killing twenty-five more Americans. In total the Israeli attacks killed thirty-four Americans and wounded 171.

            Claims of mistaken identity by Israeli officials were and continue to be lies, for Liberty carried a large American flag; furthermore, six hours before the afternoon attacks Israeli recon aircraft had flown over the ship. They knew who they were attacking and did it anyway because they feared that actual intelligence would conflict with the official Israeli accounts of the events that precipitated the Six Day War.

            For starkly immoral political reasons President Lyndon Johnson’s administration covered up the true circumstances of the attack, and under the influence of the Israeli lobby succeeding administrations have continued the cover up. Appeasing an influential American lobby was and has been more important than the lives of American sailors and Marines.

            And by the way, going back to the December 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor one can see another example of Americans made sitting ducks by politicians. Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Samuel Richardson advised President Roosevelt that stationing the fleet in Pearl Harbor was provocative. He therefore advised moving the fleet back to Long Beach, California. For that Roosevelt replaced him with Admiral Husband Kimmel, who, after the infamous attack, became a favorite political scapegoat.

            And so on. I also suggest readers look at the impossible situation Major Robert Anderson faced at Fort Sumter prior to the War Between the States in 1861.

            From time immemorial leaders of powerful nations have shown little regard for the lives of their fighting men. Power warps their character, or maybe those who seek power have none to begin with.

           

 

What Happened to Washington's Birthday?

Who Stole George Washington’s Birthday?

            As a few local citizens celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday here last month I had these thoughts about national holidays:

            For many years the nation celebrated George Washington’s birthday every February. Then one day George Washington’s birthday disappeared to be replaced by something called Presidents’ Day, as if all Presidents were equally entitled to a day.

Now the only national holiday celebrated in honor of a famous American is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. How come? Was King more important to America than George Washington or the framers of the Constitution? Who codified the free speech and assembly rights that King and the crowds at the Lincoln Memorial exercised during his famous 1963 “I have a dream” speech?

            What about important captains of industry like John D. Rockefeller, Ida Tarbell’s slanders notwithstanding, whose entrepreneurial skills produced an oil production and distribution system that has for more than a century fueled American prosperity, not to mention his philanthropic legacy that continues everywhere to this day? Then there’s Samuel Colt and Henry Ford; the economies of scale from interchangeable parts and mass production made it possible for Ford’s workers to buy the cars they were building. We also have market entrepreneurs like Commodore Vanderbilt and James T. Hill, and on and on. All these men contributed greatly to America’s economic progress, and without economic development there would have been no social advancement for anyone, minority or non-minority.

            What exactly did King do? Give him credit: he led the successful Montgomery bus boycott that ended the back of the bus humiliation; he developed a Gandhian non violent strategy of civil protest that served the country and the civil rights movement well for a time; and he delivered a very effective speech – the “I have a dream speech” – that aroused the conscience of many Americans. Even with all that it took the assassination of President Kennedy to motivate Congress to pass the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.

            People forget that at the time of his death King had gone out of fashion with many in the civil rights movement. Stokely Carmichael’s “black power!” had become the civil rights rallying cry while Malcolm X had replaced King as a favorite leader. Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and other urban blacks made fun of King calling him “de lawd.” Carmichael further devalued the idea of non-violence, calling it a sometimes useful tactic but adding, “If some honky touches me, I’ll break his arm!”

            As with Lincoln and JFK, after King’s murder all the faults and controversies surrounding him disappeared to be replaced by almost universal adoration, the kind of deification that came to Lincoln and JFK after their violent deaths.

            As Washington, Madison, and the Captains of Industry have marched through history their faults have become known and then embellished by the multi-cultural blamers (who are compulsive America haters) while their contributions have been ignored. Those same blamers, however, will brook no criticism of King even though it’s indisputable that he consorted with communists, was a compulsive womanizer, and plagiarized his Boston University doctoral dissertation.

            King’s contributions were important but not the most important, as having a national holiday in his honor suggests. Bring back George Washington and let those who venerate King celebrate without a government sanctioned day off.  

           

Achievement Testing is Forever

Standardized Achievement Testing Is Forever

“Bad Teacher” is a profane and obscene film that people should avoid. Unfortunately I didn’t, but I always look to salvage something of value from every experience, good or bad, and I found something in this film worthy of discussion: public school standardized achievement testing. In this film the bad teacher steals the answer sheet for an Illinois state achievement test and drills her students on test question answers. They score highest in the school district, and she wins 6,000 dollars, which she wants for plastic surgery. It is interesting to note that at this writing the school systems of Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C are under investigation for widespread cheating on standardized tests.

             Standardized achievement testing has been around for years and has political origins. Current testing projects began when citizens asked these questions: “How come so many youngsters graduate without basic skills? Many cannot read at grade level or do basic arithmetic, and most have little or no knowledge of their nation’s history or its government. How come? We must do something!”

            Of course schools have given standardized tests for years. For a long time the New York Regents exam was held up as an example of the kind of test states should require for graduation. Unfortunately, as more students entered high school more failed the exam, causing a lot of fatuous hand wringing about cultural bias. I don’t know what New York does these days.  

I can remember being herded into the school cafeteria long ago for several exhausting days of testing. Incorrigible seventh graders at the time, we made testing into a game. Instead of trying to answer questions, many of us made designs with the opscan-like blocks on our answer sheets. (They didn’t have opscan in those days, but answer sheets had four blocks like opscan sheets. Tests were graded with punched out overlays.)  Some made diamonds, others triangles. We had great fun.

Who knows how our school did? I do know one thing. Many of my classmates went to college and on to successful careers in engineering, law, medicine, and business. The friend seated across from me making zig zag designs on his answer sheet graduated from Georgia Tech and has had a successful engineering career.

            About thirty-five years later, in response to the question, “How come our children don’t learn?” state legislators got involved and mandated still more testing. In Maryland, where I then lived and worked, Project Basic was created to teach basic skills. Basic skills tests, called functional tests – a writing test, a basic math test, and a citizenship test – were given to ninth graders. All students had to pass the tests to graduate. Since many entering ninth graders lacked basic reading and math ability, remedial classes were formed to teach them what they should have learned earlier.

            The tests measured subject matter I learned in the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. Unfortunately, many of our entering ninth graders lacked these basics, hence the emphasis on testing. Later on the state department of education created a more advanced and accelerated battery of tests, which also became the focus of school instruction.

            By the time No Child Left Behind (NCLB) came along, Maryland schools were well along in testing. Wrong headed though it is, NCLB is just another step in a process begun years before by state legislators and educationists trying to improve the schools, or more cynically if one wishes, to justify their jobs and their expenditure of taxpayer money, or, even more cynically, to centralize education and remove local control.  

            An unfortunate result of functional testing in Maryland was its effect on mentally challenged students. Before the functional testing program these students participated in vocational development programs where they learned entry level job skills and were placed in jobs while still in school. After testing began, parents were asked if they wanted students to get a regular high school diploma, in which case they had to pass the functional tests, or to continue in vocational development. Sad to say, many parents chose the former, causing special education teachers to shift their focus from vocational development to test preparation.          

Standardized achievement testing is unavoidable in today’s educational environment. Rational instruction should produce sensible testing and successful students, but too many cultural currents beat against school success, especially in school systems where disadvantaged children form the majority. In spite of all the blather one hears about education from all political sectors, right to left, no one really knows what to do about public education, or at least, no one knows how to create politically viable solutions to public education’s intractable problems.

            But educationists can write tests! The names may change but programs like NCLB        will continue.

           

           

           

Is Secession Possible Today?

Can Secession Come to America?

If states seriously threatened secession, the President would send troops in faster than President Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock in 1957, so legal secession cannot happen here even though the Declaration of Independence encourages it and nothing in the U.S. Constitution forbids it. But since Mr. Lincoln especially, Presidents have rarely been bothered by the Constitution. Like dictators and other tyrants, they do what they have to do to keep power. To most Presidents as with most career politicians, power is the highest good.  

Another equally powerful force against secession is the Federal government’s money. Citizens and states depend on social security, military pensions, highway funds, education funds, and other programs of largesse. Dependence upon Federal money would dampen secession sentiment faster than armed troops. No matter how citizens may feel about the current state of affairs in the nation, they cannot afford legal secession.

            But Americans also cannot afford the out of control government now moving inexorably towards financial ruin. So, even though secession cannot happen in the near term, its feasibility is worth discussing. Contrary to what the history books teach, the first secession did not occur in the 1860’s but earlier in 1775 when disgruntled American colonists decided that the King’s tax burden was too high. Compare the colonists’ taxes to contemporary America’s and some might ask, “What were they fighting about? They had it good.” Nonetheless, following the dictates of the Declaration of Independence, American colonists seceded from Great Britain and formed their own nation.

            Then, following the precedent established by the nation’s founders, southern states began the secession movement that led to the War of Northern Aggression. Secession was Constitutional; attacking seceding states was not, but Lincoln showed little concern for the rule of law. Lincoln, who succeeded famously in thwarting secession, killing 800,000 Americans in the process (800,000 is a new scholarly estimate based upon continuing research) is considered America’s greatest President by many. That’s a historical rule: kill more people; earn more praise; see more monuments to yourself built.

 A kind of secession does exist, however. Like our continuing de facto racial segregation, de facto secession has been with us for some time. As Pat Buchanan writes, Americans are seceding from each other. The Red State/Blue State divide is a real and a cultural, more than a political phenomenon. Red America is religious, culturally conservative, family oriented, hard working and frugal. Citizens of Red America believe in God’s objective moral truth (that is, the Natural Law or the Moral Law, explained simply and eloquently by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity). This truth is permanent and unchangeable and continues regardless of what human beings may think from time to time. Citizens of Blue America, on the other hand, are moral relativists, where truth is a plastic or malleable idea and changes in accordance with convenience and fashion. This difference of viewpoint creates a cultural chasm too wide to breach. More than anything, this contributes to the continuing in-migration of Americans from Blue Nation to Red Nation.

Most Americans who migrate to Red States say they move for economic reasons like lower taxes and lower housing costs. Others cite quality of life: less urban congestion and lower crime rates, but the unstated (and politically incorrect) reason argues most convincingly: people prefer to be those with whom they share common moral and cultural characteristics. The diversity police of course apply the racist label to Red America.

Enlightenment propaganda notwithstanding, human beings are tribal creatures. History and contemporary culture shows that tribalism trumps everything. What is happening in America is what happens everywhere: Balkanization based on ethnicity, religion, and race. We are now two Americas: non white and white, and as years pass, the tensions that once existed between non-white and white ethnic groups will end as each isolates itself from the other. Tensions among non-white ethnicities will increase, as is now happening in Los Angeles between African Americans and Latinos (and which, for obviously politically correct reasons, is never reported by the MSM). History shows that these tensions will escalate as white Americans, who will one day be outnumbered, withdraw to protected enclaves in Red States.

Secession is here to stay.  

Gun Control through the Years

Gun Control through the Years

            Fifty years ago this November, Lee Harvey Oswald used a mail order, military style, bolt action Carcano rifle equipped with a scope to murder President John F. Kennedy. Earlier that year, using the same rifle Oswald had taken a shot at General Edwin Walker, called a right wing extremist by the media, and missed. According to Gerald Posner’s Case Closed, which chronicles Oswald’s life and the Kennedy assassination, former Marine marksman Oswald had practiced with the rifle many times at an abandoned gravel pit.

            Like most bolt action military rifles manufactured for infantry use, the inexpensive Carcano was an accurate and effective weapon in practiced hands. Oswald bought the rifle and scope by mail order for about $16.50.

            Predictably, immediately after the assassination the gun control crowd blamed the rifle and bemoaned the fact that it was so easily available through mail order. As a result, not long after the assassination Congress passed and the President signed a law prohibiting such mail order gun purchases. Rifles could (and still can) be bought by mail order, but the law requires that they be delivered to local gun dealers and picked up there by buyers.

            Incidentally, bolt action military rifles like the Carcano, for example, the popular Mouser 8mm K-98 and the .30-06 Springfield, originally designed to be assault weapons for soldiers, have been modified over the years for hunting. “Sporterized” .30-06 Springfield rifles were once very common (the father of one of my childhood friends had one and used it often to hunt deer). The K-98 Mouser action has also been very popular with hunters and in practiced hands can take down a 600 pound elk at some distance. Magazine capacity is limited; five rounds for the K-98, but practiced, skilled riflemen with plentiful supplies of five round stripper clips can load and fire very rapidly. German soldiers used the rifle to great effect in both world wars. And of course Tennessee sharpshooter Sgt. Alvin York used the bolt action Springfield rifle in World War I to kill enemy machine gunners. He also used the venerable seven round semi automatic 1911 .45 caliber pistol to kill more German soldiers.

            In 1966, armed with a high powered 6 mm hunting rifle, University of Texas engineering student Charles Whitman barricaded himself atop the Texas Tower at the University in Austin, then shot and killed sixteen people and wounded thirty-two others.  The rifle and ammunition had been purchased legally. And the people killed by Whitman’s limited magazine capacity hunting rifle were just as dead as those killed more recently by weapons with high capacity magazines. Like Oswald, Whitman was a former Marine. 

            After Whitman was killed by courageous police officers, an autopsy of his remains revealed a brain tumor. Further investigation uncovered information that he had told a doctor he felt like killing people. In any event, the mail order gun purchasing prohibition didn’t stop Whitman.

            Sometime later gun control fanatics shifted their attention to handguns, saying things like “Handguns have no use but killing people.” One could buy long guns off the rack in gun stores without a background check, but in Maryland where I lived in the 1980’s and 1990’s and also in other states, buyers had to wait a week before picking up handguns they had purchased. Some states prohibited handgun purchases by out of state buyers. In addition, at that time Maryland had strict rules about carrying handguns in vehicles: they had to be unloaded and out of the driver’s reach and could only be carried to and from shooting ranges. None of these laws kept Baltimore from being among those big American cities with the highest murder rates, but legislators and gun controllers felt good about making life inconvenient for law abiding gun owners.

            Later on in the 1980’s gun control enthusiasts developed an obsession with “Saturday night specials,” inexpensive handguns then widely used by robbers and muggers. In Maryland a Saturday night special law was passed over the objection of self defense advocates, and gun controllers once again felt warm and fuzzy.

            Gun controllers’ current obsession with assault rifles began in the 1990’s and was followed by the assault weapons ban, which had no effect on gun violence. In fact one of the nation’s murder capitals and also the President’s hometown is Chicago, where most of the killing is done not with assault weapons but with handguns.

            As for assault weapons, any firearm can be used to assault people, just as any knife can be used to stab people, but rifles with beautifully polished wooden stocks and pretty blued barrels don’t look as menacing to clueless gun control advocates as do semi-automatic AK knock offs or .223 caliber AR-15’s, some of which to me look like Mattel high capacity squirt guns.

            In the early years of the 2000’s, driven around by his mentor John Allen Muhammad, teenage DC sniper Lee Boyd Malvo used a .223 Bushmaster to murder nine  innocent citizens and wound three others. The Bushmaster can carry a high capacity magazine, but he could have been just as murderous with any hunting rifle, for he never took more than one or two shots from his hiding place in the trunk of their modified sedan. Killers with a will and a plan will not be deterred by laws that ban ugly weapons with high capacity magazines. 

            But the call for banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines has nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with disarming law abiding citizens. It’s the camel’s nose in the tent. Using phrases such as “No hunter needs a thirty round magazine,” gun controllers hope to turn public opinion towards more restrictive laws. When a new gun ban doesn’t work, they will then push for more restrictions. Dishonest protests to the contrary, their true goal is the abolition of private gun ownership. They have an irrational fear of law abiding gun owners, not because they fear for their safety, but because law abiding gun owners show a sense of independence that threatens the gun controllers’ religious attachment to and their worship of the all powerful government.

Maya in Zero Dark Thirty

What Was It All About, Gloria?

            Zero Dark Thirty is Kathryn Bigelow’s cinematic account of the hunt for and killing of Osama Bin Laden. This overly long film (two hours, forty minutes) is mostly about Maya (played by Jessica Chastain), who makes it her life’s mission as a CIA operative to find and kill Bin Laden (they call him UBL in the movie). What kind of woman is Maya? She’s one tough customer. Early in the movie, with cold detachment she witnesses the water torture of an Arab who may have information on the whereabouts of UBL. And, like the burly male interrogator and torturer, she tells the prisoner that things will go better for him if he gives them what they want.

            Maya is also one of the boys. She can drop f bombs with the most hardened male CIA or SEAL operatives. More driven than they are, she doesn’t give up her quest when her male counterparts show fatigue. Again, she’s one tough woman.

            When UBL is finally located she doesn’t want to use the SEALS with “all their Velcro” but prefers a plane with a bomb or two to obliterate the compound and everything in it. Again she’s one of the boys, or worse, she’s one of the baddest boys, those who can kill without regard to collateral damage, the current euphemism for the indiscriminate killing of innocent men, women, and children.

            Maya is not actually present at the raid on UBL’s compound, but she does monitor electronically as SEALS terrorize children, kill all the men and a few of the screaming women, and then find and kill UBL. “I think I’ve got the jackpot here,” says a SEAL after killing the man he thinks is UBL, but UBL is not positively identified until the SEALS return the remains to base camp where Maya unzips the body bag and shakes her head yes.         

When the raid is over and the SEALS return to base camp, Maya flies out in a giant cargo plane where she is the only passenger. As the film ends, she sits near the rear just inside the huge aircraft, straps herself into a jump seat, and gazes sadly as a single tear starts. What a woman!

            Maya is an advertisement for women in combat: she is willing to torture, maim and kill with the worst of men. What is the message here? Given equal opportunities women can be as cruel and immoral as men. What an accomplishment!

           

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of the Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.

Reason itself is a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.

G.K Chesterton (1874-1936)

Mankind have an aversion to intellectual labor; but even supposing knowledge to be easily available, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.

Samuel Johnson from Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson

Progressive Language Abuse

            One of the political left’s major cultural contributions has been the wholesale debauchery of the language. They have succeeded in capturing control of much of the public discourse in the mainstream media, in academia, and in public education. Here is a partial list of their words or their definitions, which many people now accept uncritically:

Affordable – applies to housing only. There are no such things as affordable clothes or cars. This word replaced more accurate words and phrases: cheap, low cost, and less expensive. One of those imprecise pc words beloved by collectivists, it applies to government housing, which has been around forever but has only recently become affordable.

African-American – What happened to colored, Negro, and my favorite, black?

I will call people whatever they wish but why seven syllables when one (black) will do? Whatever happened to “Black is beautiful”? And as long as we are acceding to people’s wishes, we should lose the name Caucasian (most white folks aren’t from the Caucasus); white will do.

            America – Progressives have their own version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” Their version: how does America suck? Let me count the ways.

            Business – bad

            Big business – really bad

            Climate change – Do readers remember global warming?  Now it’s climate change because there has been an embarrassing lack of warming for the last ten years; climate change is the preferred term, just in case things begin to cool. Environmentalists will then still have an excuse for government intrusion into your business.

            Corporate – really bad big business

            Diversity – This word applies to race, ethnicity, sex, and sexual preference only. It excludes ideas or opinions that depart from pc orthodoxy. For example, the American educational establishment discourages the expression of conservative, Christian, or orthodox Jewish ideas. The thought police call those ideas hate speech. And Lord help a conservative or Christian minority who espouses views that depart from the pc catechism.

            Environmentalism – An intolerant religious movement that brooks no opposition to its beliefs. Liberal columnist Ellen Goodman, for example, compares global warming skeptics to holocaust deniers.

            Evolve – that’s what Republicans do when they become more like Democrats. According to the chattering classes, they have “grown.”

            Gay – This once meant happy and carefree. Now it means homosexual. It’s an Orwellian use of language to hide the reality of the disorder it describes. It’s like “pro choice,” which covers a bogus right to kill babies in the womb, or “affirmative action,” which legitimizes racial preferences or reverse racism.

            Green – another religious word from the environmental catechism. People looking for its origins should read Charles Reich’s 1970’s howler, The Greening of America.

            Green job – What color are other jobs?   

            Homophobia – “Homo” means man. “Phobia” means fear of. So the word means fear of men? “Homo” also means the same. Does homophobia mean fear of the same?

Infrastructure – This apparently refers to roads, bridges, tunnels, reservoirs, the electrical grid, and so forth. “Crumbling infrastructure” is a favorite progressive locution. President Obama promised to fix the crumbling infrastructure and also to provide jobs.

Living wage – Those not receiving a living wage are now dead.   

Multicultural – The term probably originated with the Marxist Frankfort School. In practice it means anti Christian, anti Western, anti American, and anti white male.

            Native American – Readers know that Columbus called the aboriginal people he encountered Indians because he thought he had found the Indies, but why is that mistake any worse than Native American? After all, while our aboriginal people didn’t call themselves Indians, nor did they call themselves Americans. America was named for the cartographer Amerigo Vespucci who was the first to chart Columbus’s voyage to the New World. So why is Native American better than Indian? Racially, our indigenous peoples look more like Indians from India than white 15^th century Italians from Florence.

Part II

            Person – instead of man, woman, gentleman or lady, people now use inclusive language, another pc form, ostensibly to make women feel better, for example, “chairperson,” “foreperson,” and “spokesperson.” It appears that “man” must be removed everywhere: not mankind but humankind. I wonder if man should be removed from human: not a human being but a huperson being. And why are personnel departments now called human resources departments? How about huperson resources instead, but if person is preferred elsewhere, what is wrong with personnel?

            Progressive – the word now favored by many on the left. Apparently “liberal” is seen as a pejorative by some on the left. But progressive means the same thing: big government will fix everything, and anyone who disagrees is selfish, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic and wants your mom and dad in the street eating Alpo.  

            PC pronoun/antecedent abuse – It was once good form to write or say “Everyone should bring his book” not “Everyone should bring their books” or “Every parent should read to his child” not “Every parent should read to their child.” Male pronouns stood for male and female. Now the anthrophobia is so severe that the rule is broken everywhere with regularity. People with an aversion to inclusive male pronouns could say or write “Parents should read to their children...” where the plural pronoun “their” agrees with the plural noun “parents,” but they don’t. Either they don’t know that “everyone” is a singular antecedent and should therefore be followed by a singular pronoun, or they refuse to follow the rule to avoid being accused of using sexist language. This pc aversion to using masculine nouns and pronouns to stand for both male and female is just plain silly. PC women lack self confidence (and pc men are whipped).

            Racist – Anyone who disagrees with collectivist social or political ideas is a racist. It’s also one of the weapon words used to cut off debate. And it works. Corporate and political leaders live in constant fear of being labeled racists. A racist is anyone who departs from pc orthodoxy. If one disagrees with affirmative action, he is a racist. If he disagrees with President Obama (this stated explicitly by Jeannine Garofalo), he is a racist. If he disagrees with campus speech codes, he is a racist.

            Rainforest – What ever happened to jungles? I guess “Save the rainforests” is more compelling than “Save the jungles.”