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What They've Thought
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What They Thought October 9, 2005 Alan
Caruba Click here for columnist bios |
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No, I do not intend to wait around for another list ranking the various Presidents of the United States for their intelligence, courage, whatever. I already have my nomination for the dumbest, dopiest, most goofy President we ever elected to office. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jimmy Carter! For those old enough to remember this simpleton, he was elected after the debacle of Richard M. Nixon’s famed Watergate mess. There was such a mass revulsion against the criminality practiced by Nixon and the gang of nitwits around him that, when Jimmy came along, the Democrats could not believe their luck. He had been Governor of Georgia, but the Peach State didn’t need a rocket scientist to keep the wheels turning. Jimmy had been a graduate of Annapolis, but had left the Navy to return to peanut farming. Consider that as a career choice! Anyway, Jimmy was a bona fide liberal, opening up government offices to blacks and women. Of course, when Bush43 appoints blacks and women to office, he’s accused of doing it as a sop to these constituencies, not because, in the case of Dr. Condoleezza Rice, he’s giving the job to one of the most qualified public servants in the modern era. Jimmy gets heaps of credit for having negotiated a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. It involved Israel returning the Sinai to Egypt. This was celebrated with the Islamist assassination of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian President who signed the deal. These days the Egyptians are having conniptions over the likelihood of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza area pouring into Egypt. It’s not like Egypt hasn’t had decades of problems with the Islamic Brotherhood from well before the pre-Arafat days. The prospect of crazed, gun-toting Palestinians on their border does not evoke smiles in Cairo. It was Jimmy Carter who also managed to give the Panama Canal back to the Panamanians. The US built it and ran it, paying Panama a handsome fee, but Jimmy just couldn’t wait to unload it. The Canal is critical to the national security of the United States, but these days, if you visit, you will find that Red China has purchased and maintains facilities at both ends of the Canal. As Bugs Bunny is known to say, “What a maroon!” Jimmy, though, is best known for his brilliant mismanagement of the Iranian takeover of the US embassy in Tehran, Iran, in 1979. Months before the crazy ayatollahs took over Iran, Carter told the Shah that it was “an island of stability” because of the “love which your people give to you”! Not long after, the Soviet Union decided to invade Afghanistan, thus leading to the rise of the Taliban and, later, al Qaeda. Jimmy embargoed grain shipments and took our athletes out of the 1980 Olympics to be held in Moscow. The problems he left behind were later cleaned up by George W. Bush after 9-11. People could not wait to get to the election booth to vote for Ronald Reagan; they liked Reagan so much, they reelected him. The only people who liked Jimmy were unhappy Democrats. At this point, most ex-Presidents have the good sense to fade from view. Gerald Ford has done such a terrific job of being a former President, most people don’t even know that, at age 92, he is still alive. Former President George Herbert Walker Bush has done a wonderful job of keeping out of the spotlight unless called upon to raise money for flood victims. We shall never be rid of ex-President Clinton unless he starts eating fatty foods again or the old ticker gives out while being serviced by some new intern. But not Jimmy Carter! The old peanut farm is just not enough to keep Jimmy busy checking the harvest. He openly opposed the first Gulf War to liberate Kuwait. He flew to North Korea in 1994 to try to “negotiate” a deal about nuclear weapons, all the time praising Kim Il Sung. He’s been gallivanting around the world, monitoring rigged foreign elections, and as was his preference while in office, never meeting a dictator he didn’t like. His distaste for Israel and preference for the Palestinians is pure anti-Semitism. He has never ceased expounding the idiotic notions he held when he was in office from 1977 to 1981. Jimmy had some advice regarding the cost of energy when he was in office. His answer was to turn down the thermostat and dress up in heavy sweaters. Were you still cold? Well, tough luck, pal. Drill for some oil or natural gas to put some heat in the radiators? No way! That’s why, when Jimmy authored an opinion article that appeared in the Washington Post and was later syndicated to other newspapers, he was absolutely appalled at the notion of actually drilling for the oil in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge. A word here to help you get a sense of ANWR; the area is 19 million acres in size—about the size of South Carolina. Alaska comprises 378 million acres. The coastal area of ANWR alone is well over a million acres. The total area involved in the extraction of oil is 1.5 million acres. Of that area, only 2,000 acres would be needed for the oil wells, the pipelines, a couple of roads, and the necessary structures for personnel. By comparison, Reagan National Airport is five times larger! Is Jimmy Carter interested in accessing oil needed by Americans and available on American soil? No. What is he concerned about? “A nursery for caribou, polar bears, walruses, and millions of shorebirds and waterfowl that migrate annually to the Lower 48.” Mind you, none of these creatures will be affected at all by drilling in an ANWR area that is less than one-twentieth the size of Washington. DC. All those worried about the caribou, please form a line on the Left. Jimmy Carter is an embarrassment. He didn’t have a clue when he was in the Oval Office and he still doesn’t. Like Clinton, he feels compelled to advocate liberal policies long since rejected by the voters. |
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It was only a matter of days after Katrina before the PC crowd went into overdrive. We don’t have refugees in this country; we have evacuees. I was interested to learn this, of course, so I began watching some of the new citizens in our area to see which they really were. The term evacuee seemed to define a normal person — one who is civilized and has had a particularly nasty situation dumped in their lap. The term refugee reminds me more of a horde of people that destroy and pillage as they travel. When I pull up to a gas pump at any station now I’m greeted by a sign that says: “Due to the number of drive-offs and no pays, you will have to pay before pumping your gas.” I now have to take an extra four or five minutes to pay for my gas getting change after pumping because of a bunch of no count scum bags out to take whatever they can. I also witnessed another thing that was quite interesting in a store. As a couple in front of me was checking their groceries I noticed that the husband was taking the bags and using them to cover the other groceries in the bottom of the cart. I didn’t say a word and I acted like I hadn’t noticed it either. I wanted to see how far this went before they got caught. The man moved his cart over to where he would be able to leave and as he did so I noticed they had a lot of other items on the bottom of the cart that were covered with three small rugs. The checker noticed them and made them put the rugs up to be checked too. He put two of them up onto the counter. When she checked them he put them back onto the bottom again. Then he decided to alter his strategy by leaving from a different angle. As soon as they were through paying for what they intended to pay for, they tried to leave. I was about to say something but I noticed that the checker had also thought the sudden change in plan indicated something might not be quite right. She pulled them back and extracted another one hundred and twenty dollars from these yayhoos. They were very apologetic and much more broke than they had intended to be. Most of us were enjoying the show, as embarrassing as it was. I never cared for thieves because they are a hidden tax on the rest of us. They are slavers that demand we pay their way. I waited at an ATM where some guy with one of those Red-Cross cards was trying to get five hundred dollars from a system that tells you up front that the most you can get is three-hundred dollars in a day. He tried for five hundred and kept going down until he managed to get two hundred and fifty. (He was coming down in fifty-dollar increments and miraculously avoided the magic number of three hundred.) Then he started at five hundred again and worked his way down until he, imagine this, got another fifty. Isn’t that amazing! Fifty plus two hundred and fifty equals three hundred! I wonder what school that guy graduated from. Actually, I don’t. The local schools are overloading with some of the children of these people, and a lot of them from New Orleans are being thrown out. They are discovering all too late that they are expected to be respectful and not a disruptive influence for everyone else. A couple of nights ago we were leaving work at the rather odd hour of about one-thirty and we decided to take the interstate. Ray Nagin had let anyone who wanted to return to New Orleans to do so unless they were from a few areas that don’t exist anymore. He made a statement that they weren’t going to allow New Orleans to turn into what it had been before. Normally we would have taken a different route that is a little more out of the way and a little faster. But we knew they were letting everyone back in so that wouldn’t be a safe route to travel anymore. After dark, that route wasn’t safe for a normal person even before all of this, unless you were driving a jeep with a rocket launcher and a fifty cal. on it. Then you might be able to make it. As we were getting off of the interstate to finish the rest of the trip on Highway 11, we noticed that the local gangs who had just gotten back in had decided to answer Nagin’s statement with their own. Someone’s nice new car was pulled up onto the median and recently set on fire. That was something I had hoped I would never see again. I’m hoping that Nagin can get all of it under control again. Right now I’m also hoping that as the refugees go back to New Orleans the evacuees won’t be subjected any longer to those stupid signs at the pumps. R.A. Hawkins Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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As we speak, the town of Dover, Pennsylvania, is debating whether intelligent design theory ought to be mentioned in public school science classes. I find it somewhat ironic that we’re discussing how to teach the origins of life when we can’t even straighten out how to teach what happened after it began. Forget about science. Let’s talk about the most one-sided, whitewashed subject in all of education: The War of Northern Aggression. Or as the kids call it, the American Civil War. When I was younger, I was constantly reminded of how important the Civil War was. Yet until I got to college and minored in history (by my own volition, I might add; seek and ye shall find), I never met a teacher who thought it was important enough to actually investigate both sides of the story in the classroom. The official line was simply this: The South owned slaves, so Lincoln freed ‘em. Case closed. End of story. Yet somehow, in spite of making such a long story short, my teachers managed to teach and re-teach the Civil War over and over again—pounding it home several times a year, every year, between the ages of eight and eighteen (which, i.e., was really hard to sit through). On top of this repetitive Civil War coverage, I was subjected to what could only be called Lincoln Worship. Every February, cardboard cutouts of our 16th President’s somber face would adorn classroom walls for President’s Day. We’d hear about how kind and gentle he was. He was brilliant, they’d tell me. And word on the street was he even liked cats. Eventually, it got to the point where we learned that Lincoln could fly. Soon thereafter, dads started sacrificing their sons atop altars covered with five dollars bills. Lincoln was THE GREATEST GODDAM PRESIDENT EVER, they said (sans the “goddam” and without the Caps Lock). I owed my freedom to him. All of us did. You were with him, or you were with the slave owners. I lived under the impression that Lincoln was a step down from God for many years. If I’d been hit by a big yellow school bus and killed my last day of high school, I would’ve died safe in the knowledge that Honest Abe walked on water, breathed life into blacks, and let loose bolts of thunder from his perch atop Mount Olympus. The only thing missing from Lincoln mythology was how Native Americans believed the whole world was really just a giant Abe Lincoln, who sat on the top hat of a larger Abe Lincoln, who sat on the top hat of a larger Abe Lincoln, infinity. But I suppose that’s because Lincoln killed all the Native Americans to make way for his choo-choo trains, so there wasn’t anyone left to tell the story. A funny thing happened when I got to college, though. Actually, a lot of funny things happened when I got to college, but let’s stick with our Lincoln narrative here. Basically, when I got to college, I met a teacher who, like, totally attempted to teach American history. He wasn’t a Lincoln basher, this guy. He wasn’t a player hater. He didn’t sympathize with the South. The only thing he did, quite honestly, was bore me to the point where I considered killing myself right there in the classroom, like that kid from the Pearl Jam video. However, this professor happened to mention something I’d never heard before. In plain English, he swam against the stream of all common knowledge. Lincoln’s main objective wasn’t freeing the slaves, he said. It was saving the Union. As Lincoln himself once put it: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” Now, wait a minute, I thought. How was that possible? The reason for my disbelief was clear. All my life, I’d been taught that Abe Lincoln’s righteousness was immutable, and that his war was a war against racist Southern idiots. This was pounded home, over and over, again and again—made true—to the point where I was unable to wrap my mind around the idea that Lincoln was anything other than Lord and Savior of Black People. For that reason, I was also unable to entertain the notion that, yeah, maybe there really were two sides to the Civil War. It would be like somebody telling an 80-year-old, “Listen, before you croak, there’s something we’ve been meaning to tell you. The sky isn’t blue. It’s magenta. Yeah, sorry about that.” I’d been taught that Lincoln’s motives were to set free the Negroes, and I rejected my professor’s argument—his utter objectivity—like a transplanted body part. Over the years, though, through personal research, I’ve come to think differently. The Civil War was about slavery, yes. But it was about more than slavery. And slavery was about more than racism. It was about economy. Lincoln represented certain Northern industrial interests, which were at odds with the Southern agrarian system. The South seceded not out of sheer hatred for coloreds, but to protect their economy (built, though it was, on the backs of coerced black laborers). Lincoln wasn’t really entitled to wage war on the South, but he did it anyway—revoking states’ rights and setting the precedent for unchecked federal power, which remains in place today. Some might call that fighting for freedom. Others might call it establishing tyranny. Now, we can argue all day about whether the North or South was right. I happen to think the South was, but with certain misgivings. Slavery was the norm in the world back then. That doesn’t make it right; it just makes it the norm. All the same, though, the practice of slavery faded into peaceful obscurity everywhere else on the planet except America, where we love freedom so much that we apparently have to kill for it at least once every 20 years. To me, this is simply unnecessary. America could’ve waited for slavery to fade away. It could’ve come up with an economic transition fair to both Southern farmers as well as their slaves. But no. No, carpetbaggers just had to have jobs. That’s why public schools should include a Southern perspective in their Civil War curriculums. Not because the South was necessarily right, or because the North was necessarily wrong, but because the singular Northern perspective skews what actually happened. A lot of people didn’t think a war was needed to end the practice of slavery. A lot of those people happened to live in the North. But you’d never know it, the way they glorify the high and mighty—and, incidentally, racist—Union when teaching the abridged history of America’s Civil War. If you want to believe Lincoln’s goal was to free the slaves—fine. If you think he had to suspend habeas corpus, imprison rival politicians, and shut down dissenting papers because, for freedom to live, it had to be killed—great. Think whatever you want to think. I honestly don’t care. Six-hundred thousand lives were wasted in that war, but hell, they’re dead now, so there’s no use crying over spilled milk. All I’m saying is, in war, there are always two sides to the story. Always. Even in our current war. And if you don’t teach both sides to school kids, they’ll never be able to critically pick one. That kind of lopsided thinking gets us precisely nowhere in this world. It’s a great way to trick kids into staying on your side of a conflict. But it’s also a driving force behind most conflicts to begin with. Take it from me. I was 25 by the time I learned Abe Lincoln wasn’t the one swapping quarters for teeth under my pillow. Teach both sides of the Civil War. Jonathan David Morris Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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According to Wikipedia, (in the United States) “Living an exclusively Spanish-speaking life is viable in some areas due to the constant influx of immigrants and the prevalence of Spanish-language mass media.” Also, many American manufacturers label products in Spanish and retailers provide dual-language advertising and in-store signage. In the movie Spanglish, the character Flor (played by Paz Vega) moves herself and her daughter from Mexico to Los Angeles where 48% of the people speak Spanish; a place where she can feel at home. Subsequently, she finds it unnecessary to learn English until she realizes that she needs to be able to communicate her feelings with the people who have hired her as a housekeeper/nanny without relying on her daughter Cristina to translate for her. In the beginning of the movie, when forced to keep a stronger eye on her daughter, Flor realizes she must navigate an English speaking environment to raise her income level while working one job instead of relying on two low paying jobs where English is not required. She later becomes determined to learn to speak English in the three months they are staying in Malibu with her new employers and succeeds in learning to communicate with her English speaking family. The prevailing theme of the movie is that although the Mexican mother and daughter both are able to assimilate, they understand the importance of and hold onto their cultural values. As an educator, I was picking up on another theme playing out in the movie. Those who communicate in Spanish can get by in their native tongue but will achieve greater success if they can communicate in English. So why is it that our schools leave so many English learners behind? There are many in the academic community who believe that bilingual education is failing our students and that immersion in English instruction is the best way to assimilate into the school system. Others argue that it is important that English Learners value their culture and not leave their native tongue behind. Who is right? There are many variables which must be considered before answering that question. The educational goals of any school are that all students should be capable of doing grade level work. Some would argue that students should be able to demonstrate their proficiency in their native language. However, as we’ve seen in the movie, being able to navigate in English is necessary to achieve greater personal and financial success. Although Flor knows Social English, certain skills require knowledge of Academic English. This should be mastered in the schools. In order for students to become proficient in grade level academic content, they must be instructed in English as soon as possible. The problem with some bilingual programs is that they are taught by instructors who do not possess English fluency, they rely on Spanish instruction, and they don’t teach the same academic content that is required of English speaking students. In this area of expertise, highly qualified teachers are extremely important and unfortunately there are not enough of them to go around. It is unreasonable to enroll students in a sub par educational environment where students often languish for years getting further and further behind and becoming more and more isolated from their peers. The best bilingual programs are referred to as two way or dual immersion. According to Collier’s research, when implemented correctly, “Language minority (Hispanic) students in two way programs experience more long-term educational gains than students in other bilingual or English as a second language programs.” But because of the shortage of qualified instructors, students may actually benefit more from English immersion in an ELL class. Most elementary schools don’t include being fluent in two languages as an educational goal. When these schools implement a dual immersion program, they must draw on more financial resources in order to provide textbooks in two languages, sometimes hire two qualified teachers to teach the content properly if one cannot provide appropriate instruction in two languages, and the curriculum must be taught in less time because additional time is expended on learning two languages. This must be done at every grade level because if you don’t continue using a language academically, you will lose what has been learned. In states like Illinois, where schools are required to offer bilingual programs, it would be a great disservice to place students in a setting where it is impossible to attain a sustained high quality educational experience. It is better to allow individual school districts to determine whether this type of program can be offered responsibly. Like it or not, the goal of the school system is to prepare students to achieve success in an English speaking environment. To that end, immersion is sometimes the most feasible solution. Nancy Salvato Web Site Contact Back to Top |
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No column this week.
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©2004-2005 by their respective authors. Reprinted by permission. |
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