03.15.10
John Bircherism
Today, this in from Yahoo News on absurd potential changes in public school history textbooks for Texas. The reason being, as goes Texas, so everyone else must suffer equally.
A greater emphasis on “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s.??? This means not only increased favorable mentions of Schlafly, the founder of the antifeminist Eagle Forum, but also more discussion of the Moral Majority, the Heritage Foundation, the National Rifle Association and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America.
One would be hard-pressed to name one substantial thing the Heritage Foundation has contributed to the US.
Paul Revere’s? Uh-uh. Great inventors? No. Scientists? No. Great advancers and defenders of civil rights and the rule of law? No. Healers and philanthropists? No. Eradicators of smallpox? No. Discoverers of electricity? No. Great astronauts of our time or first makers of the electric guitar? No and no. Arms controllers and peace workers? No. House of Nobel laureates? No. Invented the Internet? Sadly, no. Heroes of bloody Tarawa or the Meuse-Argonne? No.
Haters of homosexuals. Yes. EMP Crazies? Yes. Despisers of Democrats? Yes. Upholders of old-right-wing-white-guys political club? Yes. Dumping ground and sounding board for out-of-power GOP pols? Yes. Bomb Iran lobby central. Check. Advocates of using lasers to battle pirates? Yes!
A reduced scope for Latino history and culture. A proposal to expand such material in recognition of Texas’ rapidly growing Hispanic population was defeated in last week’s meetings—provoking one board member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out in protest. “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist,” she said of her conservative colleagues on the board. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”
It’s a damn shame when the last and only way to learn about the intertwine of American and Mexican culture — like if you don’t live in California or Arizona — is through the record catalog of ZZ Top. I heard it, I heard it, I heard it on the X!
A more positive portrayal of Cold War anticommunism. Disgraced anticommunist crusader Joseph McCarthy, the Wisconsin senator censured by the Senate for his aggressive targeting of individual citizens and their civil liberties on the basis of their purported ties to the Communist Party, comes in for partial rehabilitation. The board recommends that textbooks refer to documents published since McCarthy’s death and the fall of the Soviet bloc that appear to show expansive Soviet designs to undermine the U.S. government.
Can we have a shout out for Roy Cohn, too, while you’re at it?
Language that qualifies the legacy of 1960s liberalism. Great Society programs such as Title IX—which provides for equal gender access to educational resources—and affirmative action, intended to remedy historic workplace discrimination against African-Americans, are said to have created adverse “unintended consequences??? in the curriculum’s preferred language.
Thomas Jefferson no longer included among writers influencing the nation’s intellectual origins. Jefferson, a deist who helped pioneer the legal theory of the separation of church and state, is not a model founder in the board’s judgment. Among the intellectual forerunners to be highlighted in Jefferson’s place: medieval Catholic philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas, Puritan theologian John Calvin …
How Calvinist. Stoning should have never fallen out of favor.
[The] recommendations include an entry listing Confederate General Stonewall Jackson as a role model for effective leadership, and a statement from Confederate President Jefferson Davis accompanying a speech by U.S. President Abraham Lincoln.
A recommendation to include country and western music among the nation’s important cultural movements. The popular black genre of hip-hop is being dropped from the same list.
To DD this is more richly amusing than dismaying.
In education, we could get exactly what we’ve been working to deserve. If one believes in a God, he apparently has a very finely developed dry sense of humor.