What holds me back from bemoaning these survey results completely, swiping at “kids today”, and taking the opportunity to do a standard curse of our educational system, perhaps personalizing it to the point of cursing a particular seventh grade teacher as a personification of “Outcome Based Education”, is the gut feeling I have that It’s probably not that different amongst the whole population at large.

Take this result as a bit of evidence:

74% say people shouldn’t be able to burn or deface an American flag as a political statement; 75% mistakenly believe it is illegal.

Once or twice a year, the “Flag Burning Ban Amendment” is trotted out to score political points. If a majority of people thought a person shouldn’t be legally able to burn or deface an American flag, politicos wouldn’t bother trotting this bill out on such a regular basis.

I think I’ve already said this: I’m not a fan of The Pledge of Allegiance. After the first six words, the question plagues me “Why am I pledging Allegiance to a flag?” If someone tells me that a dear relative fought to preserve the flag, my thought is “If they did, they fought for a stupid reason.” (If you had a choice between living in a Totalitarian Dictatorship that left the Stars and Stripes as the Official flag and living our dear Republic, which would you choose?)

“The foundations of the country are vehemently about its citizens’ right to be defiant to tyrnnical and Godless authority.”

It is at this point in time that I recommend we stop having our kids recite the Pledge of Allegiance and have them recite The Bill of Rights. (Previously I thought The Declaration of Independance of the Preamble of the Constitution would be a just substitute.)

It’s a bit more organic to our nation and sends a better message, methinks.

Provocative, I have to say. I had heard this line of thought before. It’s a caller to Clyde Lewis’s show, and it goes like this:

“I DO NOT Support the Troops. Screw the Troops! It’s an all volunteer military, and they knew what they were doing when they signed the contract. Money for college? It’d be better if they danced on a pole or sold pot!”

Two more callers called in, with some form of agreement. “I was talking with this woman, who said ‘I Have a son who joined the National Guard and has been sent to Iraq.’ I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ She said, ‘No… no… He’s defending our freedom!’ At that point…”

Shades of the (seemingly) oversold stories of Vietnam War soldiers returning and being spit upon. Shades of “Hanoi Jane Fonda”. (IE “Heck, in a weird way, I support the troops in Iraq more than us — IT’S Their Country they’re defending! We have no right to be there.”)

The phrase “Support the Troops” is an emotional hostage act. Half the time a media figure uses the line “no matter how you feel about this war”, it is almost instantaneously undercut with “because they are defending your freedom.” The “anti-warriors” who do gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops” is a sort of kicking away of free will by sort of infantilizing the troops — they’re… young, scratch free will away from them because of their early adulthood. Whether that is any more or less honest than a sort of obscene “hero worship” the “warriors” who gravitate toward the line “Support the Troops”, I do not know.

A game of semantics which is best left to boot away, and leave the lines of Logical Vigour for a different topic altogether. Consider it an experiment in holding multiple contridictory competing thoughts in your mind at one time.

I leafed through (actually only really read the dustjacket) A Patriot’s History to the United States at Borders. The cover, title, and for that matter subtitle, immediately give it away as a response to the famed left-wing Howard Zinn book A People’s History of the United States, a book that veers toward a sort of Manichaean Morality Lesson for America’s Left. (If it’s required for me to explain my problems with that book, I’ll get to it sometime later.)

“From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror”, eh? Columbus… them’s fighting words. Get back to Howard Zinn and it brings to mind the lecture from Portland State University circa 1992 broadcast perpetually on Public Access, wherein you see Zinn quoting a history saying (quick google search brings this up to me) “He had his faults and his defects, but they were largely the defects of the qualities that made him great—his indomitable will, his superb faith in God and in his own mission as the Christ-bearer to lands beyond the seas, his stubborn persistence despite neglect, poverty and discouragement. But there was no flaw, no dark side to the most outstanding and essential of all his qualities—his seamanship.”

As a result, many history books devote more space to Harriet Tubman than to Abraham Lincoln…

The paragraph is something of a farce. I recall my fifth grade classroom, decorated on the wall with the 41 presidents — that is Washington through Bush the Better. It was undoubtedly set up in that way to encourage conversations such as happened thusly: “Kennedy kicks butt!” “No, you fool! Lincoln!!” (The textbook lesson of that year largely jumped from Washington — maybe Jefferson with the “Louisiana Purchase” — to Lincoln. To fill in the spaces and a sense of time, the teacher laid out coloring pages of all these obscuro-presidents… which was where my conversation to the conversation came in “William Henry Harrison beat them all!”)

The “Harriet Tubman” canard? There is this sense I have that the average public school student simply ain’t ever going to be President of the United States, and pretty well can come out with more on how to be an effective citizen from the life of Harriet Tubman than from any of the presidents. Note the dust-jacket line “And they conclude that America’s place as a world leader derived largely from the virtues of our own leaders.” No room for the old line “If you don’t like the news today, go out and make your own news.”

Regrettably, the inside dust jacket is not available at Amazon.com, because the final bullet-point for the book made me scoff. “Learn how, even when America fights a war for the wrong reason, America still spreads freedom.” A historical argument for the “Noble Lie”? Here, we chime in with a great debate point: “Huh? Actually, I could care less whether what’s being said is true or not… we’ll spread freedom no matter.”

Well… whatever.

I just received a “spam-tacular” (what kind of spam you can categorize it, I do not know) for my very first post here:

That was very intresting. thanks for posting it saved me loads of time searching for it. I was going to read all the articles that i could find but you put a bunch all together you made my papper easier to write.

I’m glad that my piece about George W Bush eating a baby was helpful in your paper. May you earn you an A!

Now is a good time to point out that this blog is now 1 year old. Now forget that… it doesn’t matter. It’s an offshoot of something from before, and the fact that I’m still blogging this thing means I’ve passed my original intent.

But Now is a good time to ask a simple question. I’ve been meaning to spool together a “Best of” category for this blog. Nothing more and nothing less than something a passer-by can see prominently pressed at the top of the sidebar, read through, and feel that they really don’t have to read anything else here if they don’t want to. So, the question: What pieces of writing/typing/linking from this little blog stick out in your memory?

Baucus and Burns, I’m guessing, were somewhere in the vicintity of George W Bush’s Montana Social Security Ho-down. (Baucus doing his own counter-programming, so to speak, in battle with Bush.)

Part of the tour, where the selected get to congregate and discuss the issues.

Anyway. I was wrong. Biden voted against confirmation of Alberto Gozalez. Despite his considered opinion that “I like you. You’re the real deal.”

Weeks ago, I was going to list the Senators that voted “no”… but there’s 36 of them, so instead I’ll point out the Democrats who voted “yes”…

Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Joseph Lieberman (D-CT)
Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Ben Nelson (D-NE)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Ken Salazar (D-CO)

It is what it is. Some Senators (13 apparently) think Condelleza ought not be confirmed. I’d have voted yes… Evan Bayh, curiously enough, thought it important to vote “no” — (He is in the Lieberman-esque Corner of having to figure out how to convince a Democratic Electorate that he is a “Democrat” as he seeks the Democratic Nomination in 2008.) I would’ve said “yes”. Some Senators think that Gonzalez shouldn’t be confirmed. You draw the line somewhere, and where that line is drawn is up to each person of conscience. I assume these six are content with Torture, and are waiting for Canibalism to draw that line.

“I expect he’ll be almost as good as Reno and Ashcroft.”