Last Refuge of a Scoundrel

On August 3, 2021, Missouri’s U.S. Congressman Jason Smith introduced into legislation a House Bill entitled the Love America Act, a bill similar to one introduced earlier in the Senate by our own Josh Hawley. While the expressed patriotism of these elected representatives seems quite laudatory on first look, one must probe below the surface to see the real meaning and motives behind such proposals. After all, it was Benjamin Franklin who, in his Autobiography, warned future American generations of the dangers of pretense when he stated that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” We, as American citizens, should keep this quote in mind when we evaluate the sincerity of such grand gestures by Mr. Smith and Mr. Hawley. Are they sincere expressions or merely expedient pretenses that pander to an ill-informed public? Let’s take a closer look at those legislative proposals.

Smith’s proposal claims that “radical, left-wing education activists are hijacking school curriculums and injecting poisonous ideology onto our nation’s youth. These Critical Race Theory advocates seek to reframe our founding as racist in an effort to turn America into an unrecognizable socialist country.” How our nation’s founding as racist could, in itself, somehow turn the U.S. into a politically or economically socialist country is beyond me, but I’d remind both Smith and Hawley that virtually any college textbook on economics or American history makes it quite clear that our economic system has been a combination of both capitalistic and socialistic policies, at least since Franklin Roosevelt’s first term in office beginning in 1933. However, there is little understanding of socialism among voters in this nation. Some confuse it with National Socialism, or Naziism, on the extreme Right end of the political spectrum (and therefore diametrically opposite), which would actually align it with Trump’s ideology. Others are obviously ignorant of its economic impact on their very lives. I clearly remember an ironic incident in which I was standing in line at a local bank listening to two men railing against socialism while cashing their Social Security checks. To say that our electorate is misinformed is quite an understatement, and I can’t think of a more revealing example than this one.

What does Smith propose? That school districts “require students to read the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Pledge of Allegiance and recite portions…at certain grade levels.”  In particular, “In 8th grade, students read the Declaration of Independence and are able to recite its preamble.” Let’s deal with this one.

As a high school English teacher in the early 1980s, I often taught, as a part of classical American literature, a brief unit on Thomas Jefferson and his first draft of the Declaration of Independence. Here is an interesting quote from that seldom-mentioned first draft:

He [King George III] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where Men should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he has obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the Liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Though Jefferson focused his blame on King George III, it is clear from this passage that he recognized the essential immorality of the institution of slavery, though he himself was a slave owner. Also, it is now an accepted historical fact that he had sexual relations with his slave named Sally Hemings (one-quarter African, three-quarter white) and thereby sired a long line of descendants from that union. Likely as not, one student or another would bring up that fact—without my mentioning it—and soon I found myself being chastised for withholding relevant information. What I learned from this is twofold: resourceful students will find and remember scandalous or controversial facts, and teachers lose credibility when they try to hide the truth. As they should.

What is also possible but not entirely clear is the speculation that the slavery issue would have been solved then and there, in the summer of 1776 at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, if Jefferson hadn’t felt compelled to remove that passage from the succeeding draft of the Declaration. Why did he do so? To satisfy several delegates representing Northern businessmen with profitable interests in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the delegates from South Carolina and Georgia, two slave-holding colonies that threatened to withhold support by not signing the declaration, basically a declaration of war against Great Britain. As a result, slavery was not dealt with, and it continued as an institution in the Southern states that later became the Confederacy. That institution ended, of course, when the Union victory in 1865, paid for in hundreds of thousands of lives, insured the nationwide implementation of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

What is clear is that not dealing with “self-evident truths” that are not self-evident at all to a large segment of our nation is a surefire way to bring on the eventual collapse of our democratic republic. Jefferson’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” simply wasn’t accepted then by many (as now), which means that, yes, systemic racism was built into the very founding of this nation. Recently many of our nation’s citizens have recoiled at the psychological breakthroughs that occur when one recognizes guilt feelings—whether deserved or not—rising to the surface from one’s own subconscious mind. In an attempt to protect their children from such discomfort, these reactionaries want to ban books, the discussion of controversial issues, the unraveling of an often unpleasant national history—in short, truth-telling of all kinds. Truth-telling is painful, of course, but likely an essential step in the mass healing of this nation. It is time to pull the bandages back and let our wounds heal in the light of day, not stick on some dubious patriotic bandaids that rely on zombie-like recitation of non-understood texts.

While these wounds are healing we, as our country’s citizens, must move on. Instead of promoting the Culture Wars of Smith and Hawley’s extreme Right, we must solve the problems of inflation, environmental pollution and climate change, immigration, the growing disparity between the rich and the poor, the general decline of healthy lifestyles, the increasing power of authoritarianism across the globe. I am pleased when I see people of diverse races, ethnic groups, social classes, religious beliefs, occupations, educational levels, personal interests, etc., all working together to make this nation’s future better for our children. But we must not lie to them.

1960s Counterculture and American Public Education

I still laugh at the idea that the 1960s counterculture somehow weakened our public education system. Hell, by the time the Counterculture reached areas like my own here in MO–about 10 years later–it was so weak itelf that it had little lasting effect on most facets of our local culture. That is true of most of this nation, actually.

Schools still went on overemphasizing sports and the débutante activities preferred by social elites. After all, academic learning is hard work, not always fun, and there is always the risk that somehow the nerds might get some credit and some clout.

I was a public high-school teacher from 1978 to 1990, and thereafter taught at a local community college. Math and English. I call the 1980s the decade of “Let’s Not and Say We Did”, in education, because of an incident that occurred in my classroom in 1982.

I was urging students to prepare for a quarterly exam–in grammar, as I recall–had given them a good study guide, gone over practice exercises, and called for questions. No response. When I cajoled them again–as teachers tend to do–I said something like “Let’s be ready for this one.” A student in back then piped up, “Let’s not and say we did.”

In spite of this student’s obviously facetious intention, I’ve often thought of this attitude as a perfect characterization of the so-called “concern” of many parents about academic standards. After all, this attitude wouldn’t be considered funny in many places where academic skill and accomplishment is revered. There are plenty of extrinsic incentives for participating in sports, social activities, and sometimes vile gossip about other, less fortunate, students, but few incentives for academic achievement. I speak about the South and the Midwest, in particular, because these are the areas I’m most familiar with.

This “anti-intellectualism”–to give it a name–is simply a way to convince oneself that academic work doesn’t “pay off”, is not really important to one’s future (true–it may have little to do with one’s future income), does not affect one’s character development, and may be downright immoral because it encourages us to question the status quo, in everything from social perceptions to religion.

Our long-established cultural tradition of negating academic achievement in favor of athletic goals, wealth accumulation or celebrity status belies the notion that somehow 60s counterculture brought about the beginning of the end of public-education standards. Encouragement, mainly from teachers and some parents, is simply no substitute for the student motivation that accrues when definite, pragmatic rewards are sanctioned by the public at large. Unfortunately, in general, they are not, and we have seen this daily in our public schools.

The counterculture movement did influence social mores to the extent that more baby-boomer college students, especially in the 1970s, chose liberal-arts majors rather than science, engineering, or math. I was an exception in the late 60s, but eventually discovered literature, philosophy, the social sciences, and history during my grad-school tenure in the late 70s. My life choices then were influenced by the counterculture, no doubt, but my own academic standards grew in relation to the unshackling or discovery of facets of my personality I previously had suppressed. This “liberation” or self-discovery, I believe, became my motivation, though extrinsic incentives to leave the engineering field and go into teaching were few.

These “intrinsic” incentives–yes, affected by the counterculture, at least in me–seem generally recognized and even accepted by most people, though some scoff at or shake their heads at the prospect of making such choices. They know this is a matter of individual values, tastes, experiences, lessons learned, and emotional responses to changes in one’s own life. What many don’t seem to understand, however, is that the opportunities to liberate oneself in this way flourish best in a liberal-arts environment, with diverse ideas and not only social acceptance but also encouragement.

Virtually all parents want their children to be “successful”, but too often they want to define that success in ways unnatural to the individual, or shackled to an American Dream that is dubious at best or downright tragic at worst. The counterculture movement helped alleviate that malady in our culture, by encouraging individuals to think and act for themselves, in ways that led not only to more lucid self-awareness but also more empathy for “the other”.

I believe–in spite of the rampant 50s nostalgia among my generation–that these emphases have been and continue to be goals worthy of American public schools. The platitudinous scapegoating of the Counterculture for low academic standards is simply another convenient way to avoid looking squarely at the lack of incentives–extrinsic and intrinsic–that has plagued our students for many decades.

Bourgeois Monstrosities, Part 2: A Reply to Dana R. Casey’s “A Monstrous Story for a Monstrous Curriculum…”

A recent guest editorial in my hometown newspaper led me to do some research about the writer and a political group called “Citizens Against Common Core.” The editorial writer, apparently a “whistleblower-teacher” bent on attacking the Obama Administration through one of the new Common Core curriculum standards, has disseminated a rash of falsehood throughout the internet about a story entitled “A Mother of Monsters,” by Guy de Maupassant. Her contention that the use of this story in a Common Core teaching module is “designed to corrupt essential human decency” defies the internal logic of the story itself, and her accusation of a Marxist conspiracy to sully the minds of fourteen-year-olds is particularly galling…and revealing at the same time.

After my reply on the editorial page two weeks later, several individuals asked whom I meant specifically by the “con men” and their victims. In this case I mean modern media pundits with their devious political agendas; the victims include all those unwashed by the power of critical reading, including factual research, and critical thinking, especially what is called “formal logic.” How are they victimized? They sometimes vote, for one thing–often according to their fears and weaknesses and prejudices, and often against their own best interests, or the interests of their loved ones. They also pass on their oblivious victimization to the vulnerable around them who listen.

Can I be more specific? It would be impossible for me to chronicle the evolution of “shysterism” in our society, how we’ve accepted and even institutionalized deceit in almost every sector, but I guess I’d start with the indentured servants of the 16 and 1700s who were told they could, after a few years of servitude, make a fresh start in America, absolved of their former crimes or financial debts, if only they would do the grueling physical labor of colonizing a wilderness. A dozen-plus generations later, today, their descendants, raised on an American Dream they don’t really understand, suffer from an even greater disparity in economic and political power than their forebears. One only has to go to the Internet to find an income-distribution pyramid elongated so sharply at the top that it is evident real wealth is steadily flowing up, not trickling down. When the con men are rebutted with this fact, they tell us this is the nature of laissez-faire (unfettered) capitalism, that those of the poor and middle class who fall deeper into poverty deserve to in some way. It’s a matter of poor choices, not the circumstances of their lives; no one is taking advantage of them, the con men argue. Often their logic is unfettered as well, but when one calls them on that, they resort to theories sometimes summed up as “Social Darwinism”–a kind of economic “survival of the fittest”, while ignoring the words of Jesus in Matthew, Chapter 19 or Mark, Chapter 10 , or James, Chapter 2 and 5, or the words of Paul in I Timothy, Chapter 6. There are simply too many examples to mention here.

Near the end of my mother’s life, I found her agitated one evening as I visited her in her small apartment in one of the several government housing projects in our town. After some coaxing she told me about her concern that her neighbors–mostly poor, rural people like herself–weren’t paying their bills because they were pledging a substantial amount of their social security income to televangelists they had heard on their radios or seen on their TVs. She said that she had found this sort of thing her entire life: decent people wanting to invest in something meaningful and lasting and good, but deceived and manipulated by spiritual hucksters who have no real concern for their well-being. Later I applied this critical thinking myself, to the political hucksters who have usurped our airwaves–broadcast band and shortwave radio, and now news channels on TV–to sell their dubious political wares.

On other occasions I found my mother listening to the radio and chuckling at some remarks by Rush Limbaugh, then in his early years, saying something like, “Mr. Limbaugh, it’s possible that….” I remember smiling to myself, grateful that she had an intuitive understanding of the either/or fallacy, a ruse commonly used by pundits like Limbaugh to reduce a political argument to only two alternatives. Nevertheless, I also knew that, without formal training, she might not have the armor to resist all the hidden and often false premises, the non-sequiturs, and the post-hoc fallacies that Rush could throw at her.

I’m happy to say that my mother, gone now over 20 years, never seemed to buy into the diatribe she sometimes listened to with avid interest. I know though that she was concerned about its effects on the people she knew around her. Since then I’ve encountered the revisionist American history of Glenn Beck, the “children’s literature” of Limbaugh’s *Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims*, and the Newsmax columns on foxnews.com. After all, somebody has to keep an eye on these people, my mother once said.

She would have been most appalled, I think, by the proliferation of get-rich schemes that sponsor these pundits. Currently, I’d point to ads on Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s radio programs that involve a Bible code which shows one how to grow wealthy (Moneycode411.com or Moneycode12.com). Here one can watch a video and buy a one-year membership to learn or find the code. That is the bait. The hook is a claimed value of $149 with a promise that Newsmax is going to double the initial fee of $50 soon. I know that many will defend this as “laissez-faire capitalism” and I know that the Madmen admen have developed artiface into an art form, but I’d have to call this a soiled American Dream in a cultural context, and a call to Mammon in a spiritual one.

Bourgeois Monstrosities: A Reply to Dana R. Casey’s “A Monstrous Story for a Monstrous Curriculum…”

Recently in a local Caruthersville, MO, newspaper, The Democrat Argus, I read a public school teacher’s guest editorial entitled “A Monstrous Story for a Monstrous Curriculum: The Ugly Heart of Common Core.” I was particularly struck by the vehemence of the attack on the Obama Administration’s Common Core curriculum and an “assigned” writing module that involves Guy de Maupassant’s short story “A Mother of Monsters” and Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird. After quoting a Conservative news service, the would-be whistleblower-teacher goes on to argue a leftist conspiracy to corrupt the minds of children, in the use of the word “bourgeois” and in the wording of one of the module’s writing assignments, paraphrased here: “Explain how the main characters in these stories demonstrate individuality in the face of outside pressure.” The writer seems especially appalled by Maupassant’s story “A Mother of Monsters” and assumes that the assignment refers to the two evil mothers. Here I’d like to show why I think politicizing this story and the associated writing assignment is at best a risky proposition. To follow this discussion it’s important to first read the story itself–it’s free as a three-page ebook. Here is a link to a copy.

Though I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that the federal government, any department, should not be assigning specific content, saying this Common Core lesson is “designed to corrupt essential human decency” flabbergasts me. For one thing, human decency was corrupted a long time ago, and much of the world’s literature, including the Holy Bible, is about precisely that. For another, it is not evil intent, usually, but ineptitude that leads to poor wording of a writing assignment. One starts to get the picture though, when one remembers that the characters demonstrating individuality in “A Mother of Monsters” are not the two mothers at all but the narrator, who has been duped by his false perceptions, and perhaps the doctor, who sets the record straight at the end, both members of the middle class.

In To Kill a Mockingbird the narrator, Scout, also demonstrates individuality in the face of local social pressure–in this case, racial bigotry in a small Southern town. Her father, Atticus, an attorney defending a black man accused of raping a white woman, refuses to yield to the escalating threats to himself and his family. Of course, there is nothing to prevent one from applying themes from literary classics to a modern fractured political context, right-wing and left-wing, so let me take a stab myself at those monsters here.

As a 20-year English teacher myself, nine of these in a local community college, I was sometimes questioned by students about the use of the French words “bourgeois” and “bourgeoisie.” Apparently our “whistleblower-teacher” believes that the use of these words in any context involves a Marxist conspiracy, but I can’t think of any reputable critics or professors who would agree. Consulting an authoritative dictionary, one finds that both adjective and noun refer to “the middle class” or “the shopkeeper or business class,” in the earlier primary senses, and to “the smug, complacent middle class” in the later and secondary senses. The former meanings are mainly neutral and free of negative associations, while the latter clearly carry with them a negative bias. This seems a natural progression, given France’s cultural and political history, in which the complacency of the merchant class, which managed to bring in a comfortable income, especially by catering to the desires of the wealthy, was seen by Marxist theorists as largely responsible for the plight of France’s wage-earning poor.

The tension in this story, like so many of Maupassant’s, lies in the disparity between appearance and a deeper reality. Both evil mothers sacrifice their children’s welfare for their own selfish desires, conscious or unconscious, but what led them to this behavior? Extreme greed or vanity? Tortured with fear and shame, the pregnant peasant girl has made a tragic decision, as juvenile minds often do, and now, driven from her farm, she is an outcast with few options. Enter the travelling showmen, the capitalists ready to exploit her weakness, as some unscrupulous capitalists often do, and she deepens her involvement in evil, making the expedient choice to sell her “monsters” to freak shows–in other words, to become a member of the merchant class herself.

The editorial writer may be making the mistake of thinking, like some of the high school papers I’ve seen, that Maupassant was “embodying Marxist propaganda” in his story “The Diamond Necklace.” That’s like the tail wagging the dog, because one must distinguish here between four entities, in roughly chronological order: Maupassant; Karl Marx himself; the later Marxist theorists, mainly concerned with economics and politics, who often quoted yet sometimes misinterpreted both Marx and Maupassant; and Marxist literary criticism, which doesn’t require one to be a Marxist. One must remember also that Marxist theorists and propagandists, in various parts of the world, have often quoted the words of Jesus, but that doesn’t make Jesus a Marxist, does it?

The subtle character arc of the narrator in “A Mother of Monsters” is often overlooked by modern readers raised exclusively on epic action films, sporting events, and gladiatorial contests, including soap operas and reality tv shows. Nothings happens, they will say; there is no anger, no tension. What is needed to help students understand such stories is simple empathy. The teacher’s primary focus should be on the narrator as the central character, and a comparison of his perceptions of the two women–one a “wild beast”, a “brute” that he should have strangled when he had the opportunity; the other an “elegant, charming, dainty woman, surrounded by men who paid her respect.” But are these appearances who they really are? Has the unfortunate peasant girl now turned businesswoman lost all of her humanity? She is still scorned as an outcast. And why do the attentive men pay the attractive society matron such respect, in view of what she has done to her children? Do they have their own selfish desires, perhaps unconscious? Is it a lack of self-awareness?

Suddenly the reader begins to understand: the narrator quickly recognizes the evil of the first woman and does not forgive it; he is in denial, at first, over the evil of the second and so feels no need to judge her. It Is the doctor’s facts about the physical health of the attractive lady’s children that produces the subtle tension and triggers the narrator’s insight. And then we the readers, if we are also self-aware, have our own epiphanies: “I tend to make the same mistake.” The subtle anger here is at the narrator, for having been duped, and at ourselves, a kind of shame. I’ll let readers apply this themselves in modern situations, but I’d point to Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” and to the “Real Housewives” tv celebrities for consideration, though we seldom seem to see their children. To research this you might start with “Real Housewives of New Jersey brings the kids into the family drama,” on the website foxnews.com, and start asking yourself questions.

Once students know what is going on, they will easily make the knee-jerk moral judgements we so require of them. But we should hope for something more–that they assimilate the theme and apply it to the perceptions in their own lives. They’re too young, some parents will say; why subject them to this? The answer is simple and I’ll pose it as a question: Would you rather wait until they’re 18, liable as adults, and besieged by all the shysterism in the world, or begin now to promote their self-awareness and savvy about our often false perceptions of con artists who, consciously or unconsciously, want to take advantage of them? Who knows, they might even develop some compassion for the outcast single mother with the big-screen tv and some righteous anger for the socially accepted Kardashian women.

We adults know that con artists are often waiting for us when we pick up the phone, turn on our computers and TVs, and sometimes even when we meet our new sons- or daughters-in-law. Humor aside, what is our best defense? The answer is research and self-awareness.

Right-Wing Attacks on Common Core Curriculum Beset with Falsehoods

Check out this link: http://stopcommoncorewa.wordpress.com/2013/09/01/a-monstrous-story-for-a-monstrous-curriculum-the-ugly-heart-of-common-core/.

As a 20-year English teacher I felt I had to point out this blatant inaccuracy about Maupassant’s story “A Mother of Monsters.” This nonsensical attack on the story is based on the most juvenile of misunderstandings. The character “demonstrating individuality” in the face of outside pressure is the narrator, a member of the bourgeoisie himself, not the two evil mothers. I wrote a lengthy reply, “Bourgeois Monstrosities,” for my hometown newspaper, The Democrat Argus of Caruthersville, MO, and it was printed in the Feb 5 issue of this year. Seems Ms. Dana R Casey has been propagating this idiocy all over the nation. Why I haven’t seen more English profs step in to refute her contentions about the associated writing assignment, I don’t know, but I’ve done my research on this story. I also haven’t seen the curriculum designers do any defending of their writing assignment, which in my judgement is actually a good one, not the Pollyanna platitudes I believe Ms Casey might want from her students.