Knowledge is authoritarian, even in a democracy.

No one, not even the opportunist hacks of the Texas State Board of Education, can fiat this fact away.

Previously, here at Crib From This, I argued that the so-called "Believers" sitting on the Texas State Board of Education are actually nihilists. This time, I wish to demonstrate that the Texas State Board of Education curriculum overhaul reveals the inherent limits to the habitual over-inflated conservative indictment of 'big government'.

A friend of mine, whose politics are a good deal more conservative than mine, nevertheless is in complete agreement with me that the decision recently handed down by the Texas State Board of Education is embarrassing, wrong, bad for education, bad for the study of history, and bad for the students in Texas—and potentially elsewhere—who are finding themselves shat upon by a gang of anti-intellectual, self-centered and neo-secessionist spoiled brats.

Forget the Gospel of Low Taxes. The conservatives of the Texas Board subscribe to a hyper-culturally conservative brand of Dixiecrat Republicanism that has been forcing increasing numbers of middle class Republicans to look askance at the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln that they thought they had known so well.

Interestingly, as one of those old-fashioned Libertarian-types—whose critique of federal government-overreach has to do with fairly subtle questions of commerce and jurisprudence, and not so much with a plot to take away his guns (especially because he doesn't have any guns)—my friend chalks the Texas folly up to of the the perils of centralized, majoritarian decree. In other words, he sees the disaster as issuing not so much from the fanaticism and ignorance of a gang of inbred would-be messiahs, but, rather, from the fact that Texas operates under a system in which a single school board has the power to make a mockery of an entire state's social studies curriculum with a snap of its Born-Again Christianist, Ayn Rand-praising fingers.* The old-fashioned GOP anti-'big government' critique.

I do have to give him credit for creativity. It is interesting to examine the connections between what Libertarians and old-fashioned economic conservatives of his type call 'Federalism' and what Alexis de Tocqueville described as the "tyranny of the majority." Tocqueville argued that, in order for the great American experiment of republican governance to be successful, the right of the minority to dissent must be protected at all costs:

Several particular circumstances combine to render the power of the majority in America not only preponderant, but irresistible. The moral authority of the majority is partly based upon the notion that there is more intelligence and wisdom in a number of men united than in a single individual, and that the number of the legislators is more important than their quality. The theory of equality is thus applied to the intellects of men; and human pride is thus assailed in its last retreat by a doctrine which the minority hesitate to admit, and to which they will but slowly assent. [...]

In my opinion, the main evil of the present democratic institutions of the United States does not arise, as is often asserted in Europe, from their weakness, but from their irresistible strength. I am not so much alarmed at the excessive liberty which reigns in that country as at the inadequate securities which one finds there against tyranny. an individual or a party is wronged in the United States, to whom can he apply for redress? If to public opinion, public opinion constitutes the majority; if to the legislature, it represents the majority and implicitly obeys it; if to the executive power, it is appointed by the majority and serves as a passive tool in its hands. The public force consists of the majority under arms; the jury is the majority invested with the right of hearing judicial cases; and in certain states even the judges are elected by the majority. However iniquitous or absurd the measure of which you complain, you must submit to it as well as you can. [...]

I do not say that there is a frequent use of tyranny in America at the present day; but I maintain that there is no sure barrier against it, and that the causes which mitigate the government there are to be found in the circumstances and the manners of the country more than in its laws. (Democracy In America, Book I, Chapter 15)

And, come to think of it, has it not been along this general line of thinking that the premise of "state's rights" has been defended?—from John Calhoun's championing of "nullification," to the South's moral justifications for Secession, to present-day slogans about the "tyranny of big government" among the Republican rank-and-file?

It would seem that the actions of the Texas Board would support this sort of critique of centralized authority, albeit viewing Texas as a microcosm of the federal government. In a way, it does. However, in another sense, it serves to undermine this very critique—or at least it points to spheres of human activity to which this critique cannot be said to apply.

The problem, as I have found myself saying recently, is that knowledge is not democratically constituted. Knowledge is, in a sense (and shall ever be), authoritarian. And, whatever it is that the Texas School Board might want the world to be, there's simply not much that can be done about that.

We cannot approach knowledge itself, for example, in the same way in which we approach law. For example, even Justice Antonin Scalia knows that you can't be a "strict interpretationist" of history. (It's ephemeral enough as a legal philosophy...)

This is not to suggest that knowledge can be linked definitively, directly or uncritically to specific human beings or organizations, or even to any specific source. The academic disciplines, for instance, are not and don't pretend to be that kind of authority. Quite to the contrary, disciplines are themselves sites of contestation and debate.

When 'experts'—whether they work for an academic institution or for the WMD Committee of the Project For A New American Century—misrepresent themselves, or misrepresent the knowledge in their field, or provide insincere, incomplete or tendentious interpretations of this knowledge, they are—to precisely the extent to which they engage in this behavior—not experts, but merely posing as experts.

In effect, in having pushed the politicization of the curriculum this far, the majority of Texas Board of Education members have exposed themselves not as pie-in-the-sky Fundamentalist Christian-idealists, nor even as Fundamentalist Christian-ideologues. They are simply hacks—up to their earlobes in the toilsome wretchedness of aimless resentment.

We bemused onlookers witness the superficiality of their understanding not only of history but of the political or ideological battles in which they believe themselves to be mired (to say nothing of the empty opportunism of their feigned interest n these subjects). They have taken caricatures of their 'opposition' with total earnestness. Moreover—and even more embarrassing than their threadbare understanding of history—is the sheer self-centeredness and self-entitlement with which they have seen fit to (mis-)interpret any and all 'inconvenient' political and educational tendencies that differ from their own.

Consider the following metaphor. In war, all factions of your opposition are united in at least one significant respect: they are all out to kill you and your fellow soldiers. For purposes of political propaganda and mobilization—the domain in which GOP-hireling Svengalis like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove so excelled—this war-style-worldview can yield some limited successes by fostering solidarity among differing factions within an alliance: the 'enemy' represents a hybrid of characteristics. It's a lowest-common-denominator enemy.

The effectiveness of this approach no longer holds, however, when you are making education policy, nor policy in any domain that deals with disciplines of knowledge and expertise. In this context, undertaking to right all the wrongs of your caricature/hybrid foe leads to disastrous consequences.

Foremost among them is that this foe does not exist.

In my next post, I shall conclude my discussion of the Texas State Board of Education's curriculum guidelines by taking up the questions: (i) Why should we even consider the board's bizarre actions to be "conservative"?, and (ii) When we tacitly accept the self-categorizations of these confused, theocratic would-be secessionists, aren't we letting them frame the debate?



___________
* The utter incompatibility of the pimple-faced-high-schooler's-simpleminded-version-of-Nietzsche pseudo-philosophy of Ayn Rand (who had zero use for god, religion and the like and said so frequently) with the tenets of Fundamentalist Christianity is an example of a phenomenon to which this post turns shortly: the caricatured/hybridized opponents that so often become invented in the course of forging such unlikely political alliances as the GOP cobbled together in the '80s, '90s and '00s. That is, before the GOP emerged, with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, as the party of Southern Secession. Ye Olde Abe Lincoln is a-spinnin'-in-his grave. Probably Ye Olde John Brown is, too. (Return to the main text.)

Why the so-called "Believers" on the Texas State Board of Education are actually Nihilists.

The neo-secessionist, racist and neo-McCarthyist antics of Texans have become so commonplace, that it's hard to muster up the energy to be outraged by anything them folk down there get up to. Nevertheless, I wish to argue that the recent actions of the Texas Board of Education, radically revising the state's prescribed curriculum for history and social studies textbooks, is a turn of events that we should find especially shocking.

Why is it such a big deal? First of all, there is the matter of the scale of the the decision's impact. Few of us know anything at all about the political economy of textbooks, and we are thus oblivious to the textbook publishing industry's vertical consolidation, which has ascended to heights that would have Gilded Age industrialists calling on the White House to 'Bust the damn trusts!', its systematic price-gouging of captive consumers, and its many other anti-competitive and crony-capitalistic practices.

The impact of the Board's action upon public school systems extends beyond the boarders of Texas itself, already containing a huge population, and into several other states. The reason for this is that Texas's particular system of centralized textbook-standardization (which in itself is more than a little reminiscent of Bolshevism) means that the state exercises tremendous influence over textbook content in many other states. The reason for this is that it's expedient economically for the textbook publishing oligopoly simply to produce a single, one-size-fits-all textbook for distribution to many states, as opposed to creating specific editions for specific localities. The only way in which publishers can accomplish this is by producing a single textbook that is written such that it happens to fulfill the guidelines of the Texas Board of Education. The state of California has a similar set-up and therefore exercises similar control.

So, that addresses the scale of the impact of this decision. Now, onto substantive reasons we should be shocked and outraged: for one, the shamelessness and hypocrisy of the alliance of Born-Again Christians, libertarians and "state's rights" types that assumed majority control of the Board. These right-wing ideologues got themselves elected to the Board with the explicit intention of appropriating the school history textbook as the terrain upon which they would declare 'cultural warfare'. The entire project was undertaken in nakedly ideological terms, and in a way that does not even pretend to comprehend the study of history and other social sciences. In fact, as Thomas Frank mentions in his excellent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, the members of the Board are openly resentful of historical expertise itself. (And any kind of expertise, for that matter!) As Frank points out, whatever the real or perceived 'ideological excesses' of past academic historians and textbook authors, nobody could reasonably doubt that those people were undertaking sincerely to produce curricula that did the best possible job of teaching social studies to public school students.

The Far-Right alliance's putative 'revision' has no rationale that has anything at all to do with history, education or students. The 'revision' reflects no coherent understanding of how textbooks work, how historical representations relate to historical facts. It takes textbooks to be nothing more than ideologically grounded statements and interpretations, strung together in a chronological sequence. Of course, its notions of what constitutes 'chronology' is skewed, in that its ideological preoccupations are entirely presentist, which is to say that even its political readings of what various narrative interpretations "mean" are based entirely in the politics of the present day, as opposed to the political frameworks as they were known and understood by historical agents at specific times.

It's funny that some of these Culture Warriors style themselves as "Believers", because their actions bespeak a worldview that is fundamentally nihilistic. The simple equation of curriculum with site of ideological struggle could not be less concerned with educating students -- the function that schools are supposed to perform. For members of the Board to act in the interest of carrying out their ideological struggle alone, means that the are literally not performing their prescribed duty in good faith: they are not fulfilling the only responsibilities that membership on the Board entails. Moreover, they can hardly be said to be acting in accord with their own ideological convictions, because their actions and rationale are motivated by a lack of belief, a lack of faith in public education.

How can you honestly claim to be acting honestly and in accord with your faith and convictions if you are sitting on a board overseeing an institution that you either

1. don't believe is equipped to serve its mission of educating children, but rather, is merely a platform for ideological struggle? or
   
   
2. -- as some members of the Board explicitly state -- wish to destroy the institution of public education?

Is this really a way of behaving that evinces faith in your beliefs and convictions? If you want to get rid of public education, is sitting on the Board of Education really the place in which to carry out this political mission with the honor and dignity that befits your cause and your supposed faith? Can you literally act in bad faith as a way of demonstrating your faith??

In response to the frequent, self-righteous accusations that the Fundamentalist Religionists are in the habit of flinging at we so-called "secularists," I ask:

Who the hyper-relativists now? Who are the nihilists now?

As our accidental poet used to say, make no mistake: the nihilists are on the Right.

Miscellaneous Aphorisms & Observations

Dear Reader,

Below is a collection of twenty-four aphorisms and observations. This is a bit of a Crib From This tradition (albeit an extremely occasional one): It represents Our Blogger's attempt to resuscitate a dying form (or perhaps to deal it a final death-blow). Anyway, please enjoy: Comments are especially welcome (particularly if they are written while in a state of intoxication). Until next we meet, Dear Reader, I shall undertake to remain, as ever,

Your humblest and most obedient servant,
Crib From This

i.

On the nature of outrage. Outrage can be induced only by design.

ii.

To acknowledge reality. To the extent to which we acknowledge reality, we control it.

iii.

On authoritarianism. The authoritarian impulse is produced through the coupling of egoism and moralism.

iv.

On the nature of megalomania. The megalomaniac lives in a universe in which he is necessary.

v.

Concerning the word "lazy." Be careful with the word "lazy," one of the most overused words in the English language.

vi.

On problem-solving and imagination. The central task of problem solving is to imagine a world in which the problem no longer needs solving.

vii.

A thought experiment. Try assuming you're wrong. And try assuming you don't know why you're wrong.

viii.

On declaratives. The substance of a declarative is located in the questions it implies.

ix.

On how people view consensus. Beware of those for whom consensus implies validity.

x.

On fashion. Fashion is a devil, and as such must be given its due.

xi.

On changing yourself. There is no changing yourself without falling out of comfort with who you are.

xii.

On cleverness. Cleverness can be a double-edged sword. Especially for a child.

xiii.

To render decisions arbitrarily. There can be no interesting thoughts without arbitrary decisions.

xiv.

On egotism. The egotist lives in a universe in which he is useful.

xv.

On the nature of "wish-fulfillment." "Wish-fulfillment" is an oxymoron.

xvi.

On fascism. The fascist impulse arises from the coupling of moralism and narcissism.

xvii.

On Sarah Palin. The worst of Sarah Palin is not located in the contemptible things that she says, nor is it located in the cynical causes that she represents: It is that she was tailor-made for us to hate and, sure enough, we cannot help but hate her.

xviii.

On the nature of human weakness. No one is aware of his weaknesses except in an abstract and imprecise way. Were he truly aware of his weaknesses, he wouldn't exhibit them, and they thus would not be weaknesses.

xix.

On Fake Christianity. To be a human being is to be blind: to one's pride, weaknesses, motives and subterfuge. This is precisely why Evangelical or "Born-Again" Christianity is the most cynical kind of unbelief (more cynical by far than atheism): the renunciation of humility and self-doubt.

xx.

Concerning first- and second-order hypocrisy. To the Evangelical/"Born-Again" Christian, we say: "You're a hypocrite, and the stewards of your system of purported 'belief' are the worst kinds of hypocrites in the world. How can you live with yourself?"

She responds: "Everyone's a hypocrite. You're a hypocrite too. How can you live with yourself? At least I, having recognized and renounced my own hypocrisy, am setting out to purge from this world that which is unclean, to put into place the conditions under which man will be worthy of salvation."

Here the conversation ends, because we realize that within her self-enforced ignorance (which she calls, grotesquely, her "faith") resides a second-order hypocrisy: The worship of death.

xxi.

On home-schooling. This is the inherent problem with home-schooling: It reproduces the limitations of the parent—his delusions, demons, psychoses, prejudices, vectors of self-hatred—by transmitting them, simply and baldly, to his child. Home-schooling has been called child abuse, but it's worse than that: It's incest.

xxii.

On the role of "working hard" in formal education. Anything but "work harder." If a bright kid's performance is inconsistent for any number or reasons—be they developmental, socioeconomic, biological or cultural—telling him, "work harder" does little more than restate the problem. It's not good enough.

xxiii.

Concerning the need for comfort. Everyone expends her energies working chiefly toward the end of preserving and maximizing her own comfort. Comfort and leisure are not one and the same: When they coexist, more often than not, they are placed in inverse proportion to one another. In fact, a person is comfortable only insofar as she is (1) a lackadaisical thinker and (2) possesses an incurious disposition.

xxiv.

On the nature of atheism. Atheism can't be defended any more than Christianity can be. Polemicists who frame discussions of their belief or non-belief in the form of a defense are in fact saying nothing at all about their identified subject. Rather, they are advancing a political cause, the nature of which either they are attempting to occlude from credulous readers or about which they, with their adolescent minds, are themselves entirely uncomprehending.

A recent email exchange about Powell's Obama endorsement, veering into discussion of the unconscious assumptions that comprise American "comon sense."

Below is a recent thread of email correspondence between a friend of mine and Yours Truly. I was going to use its raw material as a basis upon which to descant, but in the interest of not wanting to go to that trouble, I have decided instead simply to reproduce it.

It is, of course, redacted, to protect the identities of those whose permission has not been sought. (Permission has been obtained. From Stephen Schlei, anyway. But the full identity of 'Kevin' shall remain, for the moment, a mystery...)

From: Steve
Subject: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom
Date: Sunday, October 19, 2008

I'm sure you've heard about this already. Both of the videos on this page are incredible:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/19/colin-powell-endorses-oba_n_135895.html

In my lifetime I don't believe I've heard a Republican speak more eloquently.

My brother and I were talking about politics, and he brought up an interesting point. I was (am) appalled by the way Americans misunderstand a socialized health care system, and vote against their own interests to support an ideology (capitalism) that doesn't give a fuck about them. We were talking about some other stuff too, but here's what my brother had to say about it, and I think he's on to something:

My theory: people attach themselves not to the ideals and practices of what would apply to them, but to their perceived and possible future situation (that happens to be much better). They won't vote for a healthcare plan that will increase their meager benefits because they believe that they are losing the possibility of benefits that the rich can afford (which they could possibly have one day). It's the same reason no one stops gambling in Vegas, even when they're up. They don't see it as a growth from their starting position, but rather a pittance compared to a huge win.

It's why ordinary people defend big business. It's why they like trickle down economics. It's the entire foundation of the GOP's low class voting base.

I think the Republicans have been selling that dream world for a long time, where you too can be a millionaire (and who should stand in your way?) and all babies are born to loving families.

Steve


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Tom wrote:

Yeah, I totally agree with you and Kevin. I have become very interested over the last few years in the period in US history stretching from the beginnings of the US industrial revolution through to the Gilded Age. Part of the reason I have been investigating this period is because it contains the origins or perfection of many of the myths upon which the GOP (and really, in a wider sense, all of us, because they sit, often unexamined, in the American consciousness, I think) and its ideology are based:

• the myth of meritocracy, of 'classlessness';
• our particular American attitude toward private ownership;
• a preference for empirical and positivistic thinking over critical or theoretical thinking,
• suspicion toward intellectualism and even contempt for ideas more generally (which, as David Brooks points out, sees its apotheosis in the person of Sarah Palin);
• Social Darwinism;
• the equation of social justice with 'charity' and suspicion of 'wealth redistribution';
• the equation of everything from education to religion to friendship to governance with private consumption;
• the assumption that 'status' or wealth are earned and/or deserved, rather than conferred;
• the idea of the inexorability of progress;
• suspicion toward 'expertise'; and
• the tendency to blame oneself for one's own poverty, squalor or misfortune.

We could of course go on with such a list forever, but its upshot is that almost every one of these myths seems more or less grounded in the task of masking from view -- that is, both from the view of those who are successful/happy and those who are unsuccessful/unhappy -- the pervasiveness and power of the very structural inequalities that the myth seeks to negate. If (and to the extent that) you benefit from the system, you're living in denial of your complicity in injustice and harm done to others. If (and to the extent that) we get screwed by the system, it provides for us the means by which we acclimatize ourselves to our surroundings, to our fate.

And so it makes sense to think that some of these poor-to-lower-middle-class racists at McCain/Palin rallies are so very offended at the idea of that these myths will be exposed for what they are. They've lived their entire lives aspiring to something that the system tells them can be theirs one day, be it in the form of success later in life or in the form of success for one's children. But it's a very precise set of aspirations that they've been sold throughout their lives, and they are -- and long have been -- resentful of the idea that someone will take it away from them.

As far as I can tell, the only answer to this huge problem is education. Well, there's one other answer, which is sad, but true (sad AND true!): these people are a dying breed. They don't have the power they once had because they don't enjoy the decent middle-class wages they once had but most importantly they don't have the numbers. And the final irony is that it's the GOP which has been the most aggressive force in destroying them: it's the GOP's doing that is turning their neighborhoods into ghost towns. Thanks for the thought-provoking email. Hope all is well...

Best,
Tom


On Mon, Oct 20, 2008, Steve wrote:

Your ideas are great, and I love the way you put them. The subject deserves serious attention. This idea of the American Dream is so strong a myth that it is a reality, or a form of reality -- not the one most people would like if they could pull back the veil. ....

... Anyway, I can't believe how positive I feel about the prospect of Obama winning the election. It'll be like a great weight is lifted from this country, and I think I'll actually walk down the street differently (I'm not kidding!). McCain is down in the polls, and I'm hoping the negativity we've seen recently means they don't have anything up their sleeves which could significantly sway the election. The GOP is desperate and floundering. To me, Powell's statements have been the nail in the coffin, and have revealed to the world just how out of touch the Republicans are. We can only hope that they get so thoroughly crushed in this election that they have no choice but to start changing their party line. ...

Steve


From: Kevin
Date: Tue, Oct 21, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Steve

Tom precisely explains the extent to which the American Dream has served to suppress progress in this country. I just watched Sick Around the World and it's clear that the only things that have stopped us from pursuing a universal health care system are the myths that Tom listed.

Take the 'myth of meritocracy.' On NPR there was a social analyst that was researching ideological differences between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives, on the whole, subscribe to the idea of fairness in the world. The (particularly brutal) example he gave was that conservatives tend to assign blame to rape victims: that they were 'asking for it' by their attire, social activities, acquaintances, etc. Therefore the rape had some sort of logical justification. Applied to health care, it isn't that people are unjustly denied healthcare by businesses who can choose not to supply it, it's that these people do not work hard enough to earn better jobs that do offer health care. Therefore they don't deserve it - it's only fair.

On a side note, the 'suspicion of expertise' is an interesting one. A study (lost the link, sorry) has shown that people become more insistent about false assumptions if they are given proof to the contrary. For example, let's say a group of people have a 30% certainty that Iraq has WMDs. If they are given the reports and investigative results that clearly show no evidence of WMDs or WMD production, their certainty goes UP to 65%.

It explains why the GOP only has to plant ideas (which to us seem ludicrous) and they gain so much traction. If you insist that Obama associates himself with terrorists, when the campaign produces factual evidence to the contrary it works to your advantage. In this case, you have to give credit to Obama's campaign managers who have masterfully dealt with these attacks. (This also applies to the healthcare thing - those who have fears about waiting lists and expensive govt. run programs will only be more insistent after watching the Frontline episode.)

I'm curious to see if Tom's right about these people being a dying breed. I have faith in the fact that we're moving away from a television-based society to the Internet addicted information junkies of today. Multiple news sources can only be a good thing from here on out, and counters the effect made by choosing only one news source that shares your world view. But I do have fears that the strength of the temptations created by these persistent myths will only continue to fester and grow. I mean, come on. If ever the pendulum was pulled WAY out of line to the absolute limit of bad judgment, it's now after 8 years of GWB and a full on economic collapse. We should be seeing it flying the other direction, but instead we're having to push as hard as we can.

Kevin


From: Steve
Date: Tue, Oct 29, 2008
Subject: Re: Powell endorses Obama
To: Tom

Sorry, I meant to forward on my brother's response to the response you wrote that I forwarded to him. I feel like I'm moderating here. The program "Sick Around the World" that he mentions is a Frontline episode that you can watch off of their website. It's really interesting, and talks about how universal health care works in 5 or 6 other countries, so check it out.

The reason this popped back into my mind is that I was thinking about how much racism there is in this country and how standardized and widespread it is. This "American dream" fallacy supports those racist theories. African Americans aren't economically underprivileged because they're still recovering from hundreds of years of inequality that was only truly addressed 40 years ago, they're just lazy. And all the crime in the ghettos? That's because black people are morally inferior. In this country they have all the same opportunities as me, and look at where they've gotten themselves.

Steve

Sarah Palin: not just dumb, but evil. And the embodiment of a lunatic fringe fringier & more lunatic than known previously to exist.

• When she was mayor of Alaska, Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, Time, "Mayor Palin: A Rough Record":

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

• Did you hear that? I said that Sarah Palin attempted to BAN LIBRARY BOOKS, New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual":

Shortly after becoming mayor, former city officials and Wasilla residents said, Ms. Palin approached the town librarian about the possibility of banning some books, though she never followed through and it was unclear which books or passages were in question.

Ann Kilkenny, a Democrat who said she attended every City Council meeting in Ms. Palin’s first year in office, said Ms. Palin brought up the idea of banning some books at one meeting. “They were somehow morally or socially objectionable to her,” Ms. Kilkenny said.

The librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, pledged to “resist all efforts at censorship,” Ms. Kilkenny recalled. Ms. Palin fired Ms. Emmons shortly after taking office but changed course after residents made a strong show of support. Ms. Emmons, who left her job and Wasilla a couple of years later, declined to comment for this article.

• And, in addition to attempting to BAN BOOKS -- you know, like what they did in NAZI FUCKING GERMANY? -- Sarah Palin is a mean-spirited, vindictive, ideologically rapacious nightmarish RNC-funded opportunist who refuses to accept the idea of Christians assuming public office if they are not born-again Christians (New York Times, "Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual"):

The traditional turning points that had decided municipal elections in this town of less than 7,000 people — Should we pave the dirt roads? Put in sewers? Which candidate is your hunting buddy? — seemed all but obsolete the year Ms. Palin, then 32, challenged the three-term incumbent, John C. Stein.

Anti-abortion fliers circulated. Ms. Palin played up her church work and her membership in the National Rifle Association. The state Republican Party, never involved before because city elections are nonpartisan, ran advertisements on Ms. Palin’s behalf.....Ms. Palin and her passion for Republican ideology and religious faith overtook a town known for a wide libertarian streak and for helping start the Iditarod dog sled race.

“Sarah comes in with all this ideological stuff, and I was like, ‘Whoa,’ ” said Mr. Stein, who lost the election. “But that got her elected: abortion, gun rights, term limits and the religious born-again thing. I’m not a churchgoing guy, and that was another issue: ‘We will have our first Christian mayor.’ ”

“I thought: ‘Holy cow, what’s happening here? Does that mean she thinks I’m Jewish or Islamic?’ ” recalled Mr. Stein, who was raised Lutheran, and later went to work as the administrator for the city of Sitka in southeast Alaska. “The point was that she was a born-again Christian.”

Dear Reader: I beg of you: don't let the Republicans pull this country back into a never-ending fascistic culture-war hell.

VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA TO PUT AN END TO ALL OF THIS NONSENSE. AND CONVINCE YOUR FRIENDS TO DO SO TOO. If we don't win this one for the Constitution, the rule of law, a respect for reason, the sciences and the humanities, an understanding of the primacy of quality education as a moral and economic necessity, we are going to endure decades of listening to idiots like Sarah Palin. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO OUR COUNTRY! DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOUR AND MY CHILDREN. VOTE FOR BARACK OBAMA.

USA as 'classless society', part ∞: education.

The assumption that American society is classless is to mainstream/bourgeois media as hydrogen is to water. But every now and again, while reading a publication such as the online magazine Slate, I'll stumble upon a manifestation of this assumption's embeddedness that I find particularly cloying. Discussions of education that ignore or reflect an author's ignorance of the profound impact of class, racial politics and other historical and current forms of social stratification tend to make me sick to my stomach.

Tell me that Anne Applebaum's recent mouth-breathing rumination All Work and No Play Still Might Not Get Jack Into Harvard doesn't induce nausea in the pit of your tummy. An excerpt:

...[T]he parents of many driven children

Gee, I hate to interrupt so soon, but if "driven children" means anything at all, it refers to children whose means of ordering and comprehending their relationship to the world around them provides for a realizable measure of mastery, competence or autonomy, however construed. Each of these children grow up with either the conviction or the guarantee that there's a piece of the pie with his or her name on it, and it is their task to learn to slice it. So already Applebaum is speaking only of children born into families with a significant social and cultural foothold, a status a child attains only through the good fortune of having been born into the right family in the right place at the right time, and that almost always coincides with preexisting economic wealth.

In other words, Applebaum's "driven children" consists of a tiny, privileged minority. Anyway, she continues, the parents of "many" of these "driven children," who apparently were

raised on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie, retain a kind of nostalgia for a pre-industrial America, one in which childhood involved breaking horses and building rafts, in which "schooling" was optional, and in which dropping out was a romantic option....

Uh, right. And the thing about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Little House on the Prairie is that they're, uh, works of fiction. They are entertainments. They're also myths -- a perfectly fine thing for them to be, by the way -- that are to a lesser or greater extent themselves constructed from the raw materials of previous myths. The pioneer families of the Great Plains. The provincial Southern Town that may have its troubles, but deep down, there's a Heart of Gold. Applebaum knows that life wasn't really like that, right?

So why is it then that she lets this small minority of privileged parents of privileged children off the hook for -- apparently -- mistaking its own privileged yet workaday childhood for a mythical one that existed only in classic fiction and shitty television series? Could it be because this group is engaged in the same act of self-delusion as Applebaum: failure to see the concept of meritocracy for the myth that it is?

It's notable, this nostalgia, because it isn't necessarily shared by other countries. Certainly not by the British, some of whose children start taking serious, life-changing exams at age 11, nor by the Koreans whose children declare they can't let themselves "waste even a second" during their 15-hours-a-day, seven-days-a week quest to get into college, preferably Harvard. In fact, any country committed to meritocracy has to impose exams on its high-school seniors. Otherwise, university admissions will necessarily depend upon wealth, access, and parental connections.

Applebaum is missing the point. University admissions already depend upon "wealth, access, and parental connections." University admissions have always depended upon these things. What changed was that the myth of the United States as a "country committed to meritocracy" gained popularity, prominence and the support of Social Darwinist intellectuals during the American Gilded Age. It's more than mere coincidence that meritocracy's rise to prominence occurred during the fucking Gilded Age. There was a brief moment in the wake of World War II, driven by public spending on social services like the G.I. Bill, during which the playing field did even out the tiniest bit, but those days are long gone, Applebaum.

More strangely, our nostalgia also clashes oddly with the other important American education narrative, the one that focuses on the 46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the "basic" level in science (only 2 percent qualify as "advanced"), the "Dumbest Generation" of semi-literates glued to their cell phones, and the enormous number of teenagers—a stunning one-third of the total—who fail to graduate from high school on time. Since 38 percent of these teenagers recently told one survey that they dropped out because "I had too much freedom and not enough rules in my life," it's no surprise that solutions to the drop-out crisis often involve the imposition of stricter school regimes, with more organized hours of teaching, more pressure, and, yes, more testing.

This is the part that just makes me want to fucking wretch. Tell me, Anne Applebaum, do you suppose that the "46 percent of high-school seniors who test below the 'basic' level in science" are on a level playing field with your precious "driven children," vying for spots at Harvard?

Thus are our kids both stupider than we were and harder working

Well, let's give Applebaum the benefit of the doubt and suppose that she's describing our shared American narrative of classlessness. She doesn't, of course, take a moment to point out that classlessness itself is the most pernicious myth of all. So, instead of calling her stupid or deluded, let's just call her evil.

—though perhaps this makes sense.

Ermmm, Anne, let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Evoking at once the myopia of a county club mom burdened with arranging schedules for her children's tennis lessons and the self-undermining pro-atomized individualism of a fat, exurban AM radio-listener, Applebaum's self-deception -- be it rhetorical or real -- that we Americans are all on a level playing field is just about the most laughable and disgusting thing I can recall having read in Slate. And considering that the magazine includes contributions from Christopher Hitchens, that's no small thing.