“Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see…”
As time goes by I become ever more convinced that we’re living in America’s twilight years. The tide is turning from a nation of go-getting, productive and unabashedly ambitious people to one of whining crybabies, paralyzed by the fact that life can be a real bitch, with all due respect to my neighbor’s dog. Americans have lost all sense of proportion, and it gets worst each passing day.
While there are people being slaughtered in other parts of the world simply because of their beliefs, we’re worried about finding a WiFi hot spot in Starbucks so we can Tweet about Demi Moore. Yet many of our fellow countrymen have decided that America is awful and the epicenter of all that is wrong in the world. They pine for an America that’s more like a cross between Denmark and some basket-case third-world backwater.
The Magical Mystery Tour is hoping to take you away... Hoping to take you away.
The Occupy Wall Street (and other cities across the nation) crowd is a spectacular example of bratty baby talkers who apparently want Big Daddy government to take care of their every need. They are the Entitlement Generation, spawned by the Worst Generation, a.k.a., Baby Boomers.
While compared to the Tea Party by the media, the Occupy “movement” has nothing in common with those protests. Where the Tea Parties are civil, law-abiding and respectful, the Occupy urchins are uncivil, profane and law-breaking. They are, in short, the definition of a mob.
The Tea Party’s message was for government to back off and allow us the freedom to take care of ourselves. The Occupiers’ message, as far as anything cohesive can be discerned from it, is more government, more intrusion and more entitlements, all paid for by everyone but them.
The element of the Occupiers that irks me most is the college grads who sunk tens of thousands of dollars into a pointless education, expecting to immediately emerge as middle-class urban hipster dufuses with loads of disposable income.
The first thing they should have learned at school was that it might help to have a marketable skill. I’m sorry, but constructing and using a beer bong or rolling a joint doesn’t count, nor does all the progressive multicultural claptrap that passes for scholarship at our increasingly irrelevant universities.
While other developing nations are focusing on engineering and technology, American universities increasingly focus on regressive nonsense. For instance, the mission statement of the University of Texas’ Center for Women’s and Gender Studies says, in part: “The mission of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) is to create committed communities that address the challenges faced in the areas of gender, sexuality, diversity, and equity.”
Note that the Center’s mission is not to impart useful, practical knowledge that someone could apply to be a productive member of society, but to “create committed communities.” In other words, its entire mission is propaganda.
I assume that someone who graduates with a BS degree in Women’s and Gender Studies could get a job as a diversity manager at some corporation, creating rules and red tape that hinder and harass those who have real jobs at the company. It’s no wonder that America is becoming less competitive in the global market.
Moreover, while these graduates may be well-versed in Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture (an actual class in the Center’s curriculum), they will be perplexed by the most basic of economic principles. Because they don’t understand economics, they will assume governments are instituted to secure their right to a flat screen TV, round-the-clock WiFi Internet access and health care, among others, without having to do anything to get whatever goodies they might want… Strawberry Fields Forever.
Unfortunately, there’s something called reality that smacks all of us in the face, and that reality is human nature. As I’ve written here a million times, all people, and I mean all people, are selfish. Whether you want to call it Original Sin or Natural Selection, it is an incontrovertible fact.
America’s founders worked human nature into the fabric of the founding documents in order to protect the people from the people who would govern them. According to the founders, governments are instituted for a very simple purpose: To secure life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. They are not instituted to take money from someone else and give it to you so that you live a more comfortable life.
But in the mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world that is 21st Century America, lawless, unproductive wussies take to the streets to protest the fact that hard-working Americans are making money. They say the system is rigged, and I agree; it’s rigged to reward those who work hard and aren’t afraid to start at the bottom of the ladder and work their way up.
There is no other nation in the history of the world that has allowed so many from the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder to become wildly rich and successful. This is not possible in the fantastical dream world Magical Mystery Tour of the Occupiers and their ilk, who would love to destroy the pillars upon which our nation’s success was built and lead us into the Strawberry Fields of universal poverty and despair… Forever.
“Since the 1960s, many newly minted academic disciplines have appeared that are not the result of new scholarship or scientific developments but of political pressures brought to bear by ideological sects.”
-David Horowitz
During the political upheaval on college campuses across the nation in the 1960s, the more radical agitators called for revolution. This radicalism spawned such groups as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Weather Underground.
When revolution failed to materialize and all the bourgeoisie institutions remained relatively intact, the radicals burrowed into the university system. The new strategy was to undo the traditional system from within through the classroom and the textbook.
As Todd Gitlin, a founding member and president of SDS and now a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, wrote in his book, Varieties of Patriotic Experience, “My generation of the New Left — a generation that grew as the war went on — relinquished any title to patriotism without much sense of loss. All that was left to the Left was to unearth righteous traditions and cultivate them in universities. The much-mocked political correctness of the next academic generations was a consolation prize. We lost — we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks.”
The influx of radicals into the university system brought a drastic change to the very fabric of academia, particularly in the Humanities/Liberal Arts. A system which once prided itself on disinterested and unbiased scholarship based on the scientific method was now awash in subjective ideology.
This would not be a problem in a university system dedicated to open dialogue and inquiry. The problem is that universities and their professors line up in lockstep with progressive ideology, punishing and shutting out any dissent to the party line. The typical college student’s exposure to ideas is limited to what has been deemed acceptable by their left-wing ideologue professors, effectively making any of their assignments – whether as extra credit or as part of their core grade – exercises in an echo chamber.
All of this has been meticulously documented in a number of books written by former New Leftist David Horowitz, including The Professors, Indoctrination U and his autobiography, Radical Son. So if you want the full scoop on what’s really going on in today’s university system, I highly recommend reading his books.
Much of this documentation is archived at Horowitz’s website, Frontpagemag.com. Here’s but a sample of the widespread bullying and intimidation in the name of “peace” and other progressive misnomers at America’s universities:
A couple of years ago, a student in a Peace Studies course at Ball State, taught by jazz saxophonist George Wolfe, claimed that Professor Wolfe used his class to promote a political agenda, using the classroom to argue against all forms of violence except revolutionary violence, assigning a one-sided text which argued among other things that the word “terrorist” was another term for “guerrilla” and could be applied to the American founders, and offering extra credits and better grades to students who supported his viewpoints…
When the student’s article appeared in FrontPage [exposing the one-sided political nature of the class], the Ball State administration and faculty instantly came down on his head like a ton of bricks. He was warned by the chairman of the Political Science Department not to write any more articles for FrontPage or to talk to the press. He was ridiculed by his professors in class. When I wrote an editorial questioning the credentials of a jazz saxophonist to teach issues of war and peace, the Vice Provost at Ball State, Beverley Pitts defended him saying he was a member of the board of the Toda Institute for Peace Research. The Toda Institute turned out to be an organization created by Soka Gakkai, an international Buddhist cult. Backed by his university, and with the support of the local press, Wolfe went on a campaign to smear me as a “political extremist” and “McCarthyite.”
The foundation of the prevalent ideology on campus is Marxism, plain and simple. Scratch the surface of any Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, Peace Studies and similar pointless “Studies” programs, as well as just about anything under the Liberal Arts umbrella, and you’ll find Marxist philosophy as its foundation. From this is built an ideological propaganda platform through which naïve college students are funneled so that they’re more likely to blindly accept the Hope and Change that will ultimately unravel the American experiment as framed by the Founders.
A growing meme amongst the progressive crowd, and closely related to the Truther movement (Truthers being those who believe 911 was an inside job by the American government), is the audacious accusation that America brought 911 on itself. This Blame America First trope is the direct result of left-wing politics being force-fed to youngsters through America’s “educational” system.
A growing number of academic programs in the university system across this great country are thinly veiled ACORN-like recruiting centers for budding progressive, social-justice activists from a pool of blissfully ignorant, beer-guzzling, medical marijuana-smoking young whippersnappers.
These precocious youngsters are taught by seemingly scholarly academic types that America (sometimes spelled with a K, as in Amerika, or the KKK of Amerika) is an imperialist, racist nation bent on subjugating people of color the world over, and that anyone to the right of Michael Moore is a fascist. The mass media relentlessly reinforce this message with constant propaganda that Joseph Goebbels would be proud of (see also: Cameron, James. Avatar, et al).
Ironically, many progressives reared in such a system find themselves in common cause with global Jihad. Of course global Jihadists, if they reach their goal of a world caliphate, are likely to frown upon the myriad of causes most dear to progressives, such as a homosexual marriage free-for-all and abortion. By “frowning” I mean “putting the infidels to death by stoning.” Mark Steyn put it as only Mark Steyn can: “A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting ‘Hands off my bush!’”
So very true, yet progressives seek to undermine any attempt to squelch this particularly virulent strain of the peaceful religion, Islam. I suppose they’re too busy re-hashing America’s shoddy treatment of Native Americans and blacks (can we move on, please?) to realize that justifying Jihad – in effect, collaborating with Jihad – may very well lead to some dire circumstances.
Still, I’m struggling with this concept; that is, how America is ultimately to blame for 911. Usually, the response to the question of how America brought 911 on itself is, “America’s global policy.” Okay. What about America’s global policy?
What is it, exactly, about America’s policies in the past 100 years that ultimately led a bunch of Islamic fanatics to fly airplanes into buildings with hundreds of terrified passengers on board with them? And, regardless of America’s policies, this is justified? Put yourself in the airplane with Mohamed Atta, amigo, and then tell me if that deranged idiot was justified in his actions.
It’s easy to sit safely in Middletown, USA and pontificate in abstract about how Muslim countries have been subjugated by Europeans and Americans and quite another to come face to face with someone who’s preparing to put the infidel (you) to death. And I tell you what, if I had lost a loved one on 911 and some hipster dufus made a crack about blaming America for 911, there would be hell to pay.
But I digress, as usual… Typically, our progressive friend cannot answer the follow-up question. Sure, they may rattle on about the division of Muslim countries after both World Wars or America’s policy during the Iraq-Iran war, and so on and so forth. But there’s one particular piece of land that’s the sticking point here, and which has driven U.S. policy since 1948. That’s right. It’s all the Jews’ fault!
Why, ultimately, do the Islamic radicals hate us? Primarily, it’s our association with Israel. Secondarily, yet related, is the fact that most of us are infidels of one stripe or another. Progressives don’t care to delve very far into the actual messages coming out of the madrassas and media in Muslim countries.
Instead, parroting the popular progressive line about poverty, they simply close eyes and ears to the truth being shouted from the rooftops… er minarets. The message is not, “We’re desperately poor, so we’re going to strap explosives to ourselves and blow up amongst the infidels!” No, it’s: “We hate the Jews and the Christians! In fact, we hate the Buddhists, the Hindus, the atheists, the agnostics… Heck, anyone who’s not Muslim, especially those who ally themselves with the Jews!”
(I suppose the usual PC disclaimer should be inserted here. Yes, most Muslims are peace-loving, law-abiding folks, depending on the law to which they’re subject. Still, the volume of officially-sanctioned anti-Jewish, anti-infidel material coming out of Muslim countries with nary a peep in dissent is disconcerting, to say the least. Plus, if you’re not Muslim in a Muslim country you’re a second-class citizen. You can’t even own a Bible in most Muslim countries.)
This Jew-hating thing has been going on for a long time, at least since the Jews were identified as Jews. It’s the oldest trick in the book, and progressives buy it hook, line and sinker. My guess is that progressives, since they believe in the goodness and ultimate perfectibility of human beings, figure the Muslim world will come around once they recognize the esprit de corps they shared with Jihad. My other guess is that they will be sorely disappointed in the outcome.
There were a lot of people back in the 1930s who figured Hitler was someone they could deal with. The problem was they never bothered to read Mein Kampf, or if they did they skipped the parts about world domination and getting rid of the Jews.
So, while the Jihadists and Iran’s Ahmadinejad and his ilk lay out their plans plainly for all the world to see (destroy Israel, kill and subjugate the infidel), progressives rattle on meaninglessly about America’s complicity for global terrorism. Oh well, at least Howard Zinn would be proud that progressives reared in our university system will continue to mindlessly regurgitate his Marxist nonsense masquerading as scholarship.
Recent Comments