I wonder if I think of American History in a faulty manner, taking a historical perspective that ends up with a excuse crutches for various currents strains of politics — the “worse instance in the past” valve.

Head back to the frightening mid-point of the last century, and an effort raged — probably emenating from out of Orange County — to stick a marker on every book in every book in the libraries suspected of Communist influence, to alert the public naturally.  It was as wide a net as you would imagine for such a Grass-roots Cold War Citizens’ Project.

A few months ago and percolating for months, from out of neglected elections came Texas Board of Education guidelines that met Thomas Jefferson with suspicion.  It was several years ago that a great big Hub Ub occured wherein conservative media outlets went on an uproar over a school administration “banning of the Declaration of Independence”.  That story was a farce: a school teacher had battled her district as she forced forward a Christianist lesson plan — a heavy focus on George Washington’s rather unimportant religious writings, for instance — the “Declaration of Independence ban” was a propaganda hook to focus cultural war enmity on the “Secular”ist Enemy.

The “Tea Party” reportedly took over the Republican Convention in the state of Maine and adopted a peculiar platform.  It was another of those interesting cases of what happens when committed acitivists overwhelm a spot nobody cares much about.  More telling than even that, the Modern Day equivalent of Bircher Resolutions against One World Governments and the UN (oh, wait) and the Impeachment of Earl Warren, was the ranshacking of the Middle School premises they met in.

When he went home for the weekend on Friday, one of Clifford’s most prized teaching tools – a collage-type poster depicting the history of the U.S. labor movement – was affixed to his classroom door. Clifford uses it each year to teach his students how to incorporate collages into their annual project on Norman Rockwell’s historic “Four Freedoms” illustrations.
The poster includes this quote from the labor organizer and one-time presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs: “Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.”
“It’s one of my favorite posters,” said Clifford. “I’ve had it sitting there for seven years.”
Enter the Knox County Republicans, whose weekend convention coup has attracted national attention as a harbinger of a movement that knows a thing or two about agitation.
Details are sketchy – as they often can be when political passion gives way to apparent criminal activity. But this much we know: When Clifford returned to school Monday morning, his cherished labor poster was gone.
In its place, taped to the same door, was a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that read, “Working People Vote Republican.”
“So I start laughing at first, thinking, ‘All right, that’s funny,”‘ said Clifford. “But then I go inside my room thinking the poster will be on my desk – and it isn’t. And so now I’m like, ‘You know what? This is baloney!”‘ […]
While Clifford used his break time Monday to bang out a few pointed e-mails to GOP leaders asking for help in getting his poster back, King Middle School Principal Mike McCarthy started getting phone calls from rank-and-file Republicans who were upset by what they said they had seen in Clifford’s classroom.
They objected to other “freedom” posters produced by kids from past years – one depicts former President George W. Bush with no eyes over the caption “I feel like I can see evil.”
They objected to a sticker attached to a filing cabinet in the corner that reads, “People for the American Way – Fight the Right.” (Clifford says he didn’t put the sticker there – it was on the cabinet when he salvaged it from another classroom.)
They also objected to the contents of a closed cardboard box they found near Clifford’s desk. Upon opening it for a look-see, they found copies of the U.S. Constitution printed and donated to the school by (gasp) the American Civil Liberties Union.
McCarthy, who happens to be this year’s Maine Middle Level Principal of the Year (for the second time), tried to reason with the one of the anonymous callers.
“What you saw was a snapshot after school of what was up in the room on that day,” he noted. “You haven’t been privy to all of the different ideas that have been talked about in that classroom.”
The caller’s reaction?
“She just got more and more agitated,” McCarthy said.
That’s when McCarthy reminded the caller that a teacher’s poster actually had been stolen. Her response, he recalled, was, “Well, it should have been because it shouldn’t be in that classroom!”
“Well, that’s not how we do business around here,” replied McCarthy, by now somewhere between simmer and full boil. “We’re more than willing to discuss ideas, but we don’t steal.”
Contacted on Tuesday at his home in Rockport, Knox County Republican Chairman Bill Chapman said he has no idea who took Clifford’s poster.
As for the classroom’s decor, Chapman said, “We were wondering just what kind of picture he was painting to the students. (The posters) all, as I saw them, had the same theme behind them, which was very anti-American, anti-free enterprise, anti-religious.”

I will state that these things sometimes have opposite effects.
I begin to understand the problem with a convention as means of nominating a political party’s candidates — see Bob Bennett in Utah, who by all accounts would have won a more broadly participated in primary contest against either of those opponents who punted him.  I wonder if his apparent toyed run off of the Republican line might not be a good idea, and not just that but a mildly moderating effect with him defining himself against his ideological opponents as a “Problem Solver with Conservative Values” or whatever.
The case appears that if Maine followed Utah in their selection process pattern, they just might actually have that same “nominate to the right, to the right, always to the right” effect.  The difference is that Utah is a one-party state and their lunatics are reasonably and roughly representative, whereas Maine’s Lunatics would just go on to lose the general election.

Nevada brought us that candidacy of Sue Lowden, and the “Chicken Barter as Health Care Policy” quip is weirdly telling and curiously aligned with your Texas Board of Education moves and the Maine Republican Convention Middle School treatment.  What Lowden presented was a a conception of American history that idealized some bucolic Pre-Progressive Era Rural America.  Then again, some parts of this set-up I associate Norman Rockwell with, and the Maine incident shows they’ve a problem with him.  Sue Lowden is suddenly in a bit of political trouble, her primary opponent has risen markedly in the polls off the strength of an endorsement from Joe the Plumber.  I don’t quite know where the peg Party remorse — if her Health Care quip had any effect, it wouldn’t have been against it so much as against the general election poll tightening it engendered against Harry Reid.

But really, the Flash-points in Education just come fast and furiously.  Ideally, your “Ethnic Studies” would be fully integrated into a more broad tapestry of a curriculum, but there seem to be these stubborn forces — a Texas Board of Education here and there — that aren’t much allowing for such a thing.
We can take refuge in the Science curriculum, then?

A mysterious ad that accuses a candidate for governor in Alabama of supporting the theory of evolution and questioning the Bible has triggered a dizzying and nasty shouting match in the state’s hotly contested Republican primary race. 
The ad — part of a campaign against Republican candidate Bradley Byrne by a group called the True Republican PAC — questions Byrne’s faith and accuses him of being a “liberal.” 
Referencing Byrne’s time on the state school board, where he was first elected as a Democrat in the 1990s before switching parties, the ad’s narrator says in a quizzical voice:
“On the school board, Byrne supported teaching evolution, said evolution best explains the origin of life — even recently said the Bible is only partially true.” Another voice closes the ad by saying Byrne is “trying to look conservative.”   
That and other ads triggered an all-hands-on-deck response from the Byrne campaign, which launched a “truth team” website, issued a series of statements denying the group’s charges, accused a GOP opponent and Democratic operatives of being in cahoots against him, and launched an ad of its own. The campaign also released a lengthy statement calling the faith ad “despicable.”
In the statement, Byrne said he believes “every single word” in the Bible is true and that, to the contrary, he fought to get creationism taught in Alabama’s schools. 

This country is doomed.

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