Back to Texas...

If two wingnuts had their way, children in Texas, and throughout the country would not learn about Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall because they were not important enough to learn about. Well, they seem to have relented on Chavez, but I can't find anything on their opinion of Marshall. No, they want to make room for people like Newt Gingrich, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly and Charlton Heston.

Fortunately, folks at the Univ. of Texas, El Paso is tracking all of this stupid, so folks can hopefully stop it.

It seems as though since January 2008, politics has been subject to an endless parade of stupid. I think Hitler would be shocked to learn that his closest modern analog is a mixed-race man whose father comes from Africa, and that his most offensive act was to provide national health insurance. It is quite apparent that we have not been teaching our children well. Which leads us to today's parade float -- did you hear, Obama is going to give an address to our nation's schoolchildren? He's going to brainwash our children, Clockwork Orange-style into good little Maos! Of course, reasonably intelligent people may wonder how much indoctrination one can possibly pull off in an half hour or less, but reasonably intelligent left the land months ago.

Good indoctrination takes lots of time, effort and dedication. At the least, you need to rewrite textbooks to slant history, and rewrite curricula to fit the ideology you want to pursue -- and make sure you do it when the students are too young to question teacher. Better yet, don't teach them critical thinking. They might start to question you. In other words, do what the Texas Board of Education is planning on doing. And as Texas goes, so goes the nation. Given that Texas is probably the second largest purchaser of textbooks, it's easiest for textbook producers to write to the standards of Texas (and California) first, and sell those books to the nation.

I don't particularly care for the habit of "The Nation" magazine of seeing "keep the proletariats down" conspiracies in everything, but with Congress continuing its drunken giveaways to the multimillionaire elite, I am angry that the tab for this keeps being placed on the backs of folks like me, who can only dream of seeing a yaht. Especially with everyone hyping that the only way to move on up is to get an expensive education (and dismissing anything less than Ivy League as worthless). Oh, don't worry about the costs now... we'll work you until you're dead.