| David Beito is associate professor of history at the University of Alabama, and author of “Taxpayers in Revolt and From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State.”
|
|
The Cultural Revolution in Chapel Hill —
Forty years ago, state-supported bullies in China publicly humiliated dissenters by having them wear signs around their necks expressing shame for their “incorrect thoughts.” Although China remained Communist, the government eventually apologized to the victims.
These methods, long since rejected as barbaric in China, are now standard practice in the government schools of Chapel Hill, N.C. During a mandatory workshop on diversity, teachers and staff take a survey of 26 questions asking their responses to situations involving affirmative action and other issues. When the results are tallied, the organizers put signs around the necks of each participant showing a numerical score. The organizers then line them up from highest to lowest. Of course, those whose answers are deemed incorrect are made to feel as uncomfortable as possible.
The man responsible for this exercise is Glenn Singleton of the Pacific Educational Group. His “courageous conversations” program is spreading rapidly. In addition to Chapel Hill, the profit centers of Singleton’s expanding diversity empire include the Cherry Creek school district in Colorado (which is paying his firm six figures), Bellevue Community College in Washington, and many others.
This is all extremely depressing for people who value education and academic freedom. The worst part of it, however, is the groveling readiness of so many faculty to subject themselves to public degradation under the abusive eyes of Singleton’s associates. Meanwhile, the government schools and colleges that are wasting funds and time on this kind of nonsense continue to dumb down standards and preside over the tyranny of low expectations for all students, black and white.
— David Beito
| Carl Isackson is a contractor and baseball fan residing in the San Francisco Bay area.
|
|
A Pirate’s life —
David Maraniss (author of bios of Clinton, Gore, and Vince Lombardi, among others) was on the radio the other day promoting his new book “Clemente.” The interview brought up the issue of humanitarianism, and its ability to obliterate everything else from the consciousness of Americans.
If you’re not familiar with him, Roberto Clemente was one of baseball’s first Latin superstars. Playing in small-market Pittsburgh on some bad Pirate teams, Clemente was pretty much ignored nationally until the Bucs won the pennant and World Series in 1960. Although he hit safely in all seven games of the series and was probably the best player on the team, the series is remembered for only three things; Pirate player Bill Mazeroski’s last inning homer to win Game 7; a bad-hop, double-play grounder that hit Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat, sparking a rally that gave Maz his big chance later on; and the Yankees’ utter demolition of the Pirates in the three games they won: 10–0, 12–0, and 16–3.
Clemente went on to win four batting titles and an MVP in the ’60s, yet still played in the shadow of Mays, Aaron, and Frank Robinson. And properly so. As great as Clemente was, those three players were better. When fans got around to mentioning Clemente, it would be either because of his unbelievable throwing ability (he had, arguably, the best outfield arm in major league history) or because of his being one of the game’s biggest hypochondriacs.
Finally, in 1971, again on the national stage, Clemente received his due. He put on one of the greatest World Series performances ever, fielding spectacularly and again hitting safely in all seven games to lead the Pirates to another World Championship. He was chosen the Series MVP. He’d go on to have another fine season in 1972, finishing the year with exactly 3,000 hits for his career.
On Dec. 31, 1972, Clemente was killed in a plane crash on a “mercy mission” for the Managua earthquake victims. His body was never recovered from the ocean.
Back to the radio interview. I’d say that 25 of the 30 minutes were spent on Clemente’s humanitarian efforts, which as far as the interview was concerned, consisted chiefly of boarding a criminally overloaded plane with a drowsy pilot and crashing and dying. This is undoubtedly tragic and I give Clemente all the credit in the world for trying to help. He appears to have enjoyed doing work for charity. And it should be pointed out that for his efforts he’s held in great reverence throughout Latin America (he was from Puerto Rico). Still, it’s always disturbed me that this tragedy now defines his life even in the United States, and his stellar Hall-of-Fame baseball career is all but forgotten.
Let’s face it, it’s only because he was a baseball superstar that his “humanitarian” efforts are remembered at all. I dunno, maybe he’d prefer being remembered only for his final attempt at good works. But it’s as though his accidental death had assigned him a new job title . . . “humanitarian.” And erased “baseball player” from his resume.
— Carl Isackson
| Andrew Ferguson is
managing editor of Liberty. |
|
The more things change . . . —
With congressional elections just around the corner, let’s turn to Rep. Jim Moran, (D-Va.), speaking before the Arlington County Democratic Committee, to see what’s at stake: “When I become chairman [of a House appropriations subcommittee], I’m going to earmark the shit out of it.”
So, nothing, really.
— Andrew Ferguson
| Ralph R. Reiland is the B. Kenneth Simon professor of free enterprise at Robert Morris University.
|
|
A bodyguard of lies —
Nestled among news about Pittsburgh Councilwoman Twanda Carlisle giving $28,795 in tax money to a family friend for what was basically a cut-and-paste “health study,” the ongoing public anger across Pennsylvania about the post-midnight 16% to 54% legislative pay grab in Harrisburg, and news that FBI agents found $90,000 in cash hidden in U.S. Rep. William Jefferson’s freezer, comes the publication of “Good and Bad Government: The Ideals and Betrayals of Government,” a new book by Geoff Mulgan.
Summarizing his long look backward, Mulgan, a former senior adviser to Tony Blair, writes that he found consistent vices in government over many thousands of years. He quotes the reply from Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin, when asked to sum up the business of government in a word. “Voruiut,” replied Karamzin (“They steal”).
What’s “timeless” across the ages, contended Karamzin, is that “bureaucrats over the millennia have proved equally adept at manipulating public power for their own ends.”
What’s equally timeless is that politicians have proved to be similarly adept in attempting to manipulate the truth for their own ends. “In wartime,” stated Winston Churchill during World War II, “truth is so precious that she must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
The idea is that strategic deception and lying play a key role in safeguarding military operations, i.e., loose lips sink ships.
Nonetheless, time and again, we’ve seen that bad policies can also sink ships, and that politicians see the truth about their blunders in military actions as so damning that it “must be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
In wartime, governments lie sometimes to bury information that could “rouse negative public opinion,” and “sometimes to save lives and sometimes to make the killing easier,” writes Thomas R. Lansner, adjunct associate professor of international affairs at Columbia. “Imputing the literally diabolical to one’s nemesis allows moral justification and sometimes spiritual comfort for those who will be called upon to kill, as well as for those in whose name killing will be done.”
In a moral crusade, in short, we’re painted as “The Great Satan” and they’re the “Axis of Evil.” The job of the spinmasters at the top, on both sides, is to manufacture the public’s consent. In the offices of central planning, the notion that the public should receive complete and candid information to evaluate a war and employ their democratic rights to change policies if a conflict has been misrepresented or mismanaged is seen as both menacing and useless.
“For one school of thought, none of this matters much,” Mulgan writes in a recent issue of The Spectator. “According to this view, government is just a sideshow to real life in the age of iPod and global markets, a soap opera that is occasionally entertaining and often exasperating, but of limited significance.
“Living in an individualistic age, we prefer to ascribe our successes to our own virtues, not to the actions of bureaucrats and politicians.”
The evidence suggests that this stance of standing apart is profoundly mistaken. It matters when our tax dollars are being squandered by a city council; it matters when politicians mismanage health care, education, and war; and it matters when a congressman has more hundred-dollar bills than ice cubes in his freezer.
Rep. Jefferson (D-La.), caught on videotape in a Ritz-Carlton accepting $100,000 in $100 bills from an FBI informant, allegedly planned to use the money to bribe a top-ranking Nigerian government official in order to grease the skids of a business deal from which Jefferson’s children would get a cut of the revenues.
The serial numbers on the cash in the freezer, found wrapped in foil in plastic food containers in packs of $10,000, reportedly match the serial numbers of the bills supplied in a briefcase to Rep. Jefferson by the FBI at the hotel.
Jefferson’s lawyer, Robert Trout, contends that the videotape and cold cash are just “part of a public relations agenda and an attempt to embarrass the congressman.”
What doesn’t work to fix any of the above is apathy and detachment, Mulgan maintains. “Democracy,” he writes, “has decisively enhanced the virtues of government and constrained the vices by making governments more afraid of citizens than vice versa.”
Warning of the dangers of public passivity, Mulgan quotes French philosopher and economist Bertrand de Jouvenel: “A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves.”
— Ralph R. Reiland
| Eric Kenning is a freelance writer living in New York. |
|
| Bush Scores Goose Egg in New Polls WASHINGTON — President Bush’s job approval rating has dropped to zero, an all-time low, according to new polls, which found that his last enthusiastic unindicted supporter, former FEMA director Michael Brown, has suddenly changed his mind.
Brown had given Bush a ringing endorsement as recently as last week, when he was begging for spare change just outside the White House grounds and Bush, out riding his bike for the afternoon, ran into him. After panting Secret Service agents assigned to follow the president on foot and extricate him from any quagmires he might steer himself into disentangled both men from the twisted bicycle spokes and handlebars, Bush slipped a $20 bill into Brown’s paper cup, which prompted Brown to say, “Bushie, you’re doing a heckuva job.”
But Brown said he had second thoughts when he got home and found that the twenty had a portrait of Karl Rove instead of Andrew Jackson on it. Investigators believe that it was one of the new bills issued by Halliburton, which was recently given a contract by the White House to print its own money.
Asked at a press briefing about the incident, White House spokesman Tony Snow said that given the fact that Beijing now owns the U.S. Treasury, “Michael Brown is lucky that the $20 bill didn’t have a picture of President Hu, of the Republic of China, on it instead.”
Experts say that the recent erosion of the president’s conservative base may be even more drastic than previously recognized, since the president himself no longer expresses approval of his own performance, confusedly asking a pollster who called at 8:15 p.m., just before his bedtime, whether Zogby would do anything for attention-deficit disorder and whether his new prescription-drug plan would cover it.
Administration officials have denied rumors that if the president’s standing in the polls falls any lower, to below zero (this can happen when annoyed respondents force polltakers to eat their data), his job would be outsourced to someone who would be able to perform it more competently, and for less money. But in Bombay, India, Bahjaree Ramarandra, a 20-year-old customer service representative for an American cellphone company, said that she would be “more than happy” to serve as the new American president “for, let’s start with a ballpark figure, around let’s say $6.85 an hour.” She stressed that she spoke English fluently, having studied it for months, and that she understood this would now be a requirement for the position. She added that she was also used to getting angry, threatening phone calls all day and telling people to please calm down, so, she said, “I’m sure I can handle the neoconservatives.” — Eric Kenning |
| | | | |
