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Kansas Senator Bob Dole was out on the stump last week, throwing raw meat to his party's right-thinkers. He sounds like a liberal Democrat every time he does this. A few months ago, he jumped on Hollywood, saying private corporations should put social responsibility ahead of the bottom line.
This time, he wants an official language -- more
bureaucratic meddling in matters best left to the open
market -- and he wants to supervise local school curricula
(real Republicans believe in local control) to insure that
they don't sow doubt about the nobility of America in
the minds of our children.
During my school days, we learned to feel sorry for the poor children of the Soviet Union, whose textbooks and teachers were required to glorify the U.S.S.R. We Americans were free to pursue the truth, and our histories were not forced into some ideological straitjacket.
But that isn't good enough for Bob Dole. Just like the
liberal academic elites
he criticizes, and like the
commissars we were taught to fear in the 1950s, he sees the
teaching of history as a form of indoctrination. He doesn't
have anything against propaganda -- he just wants to be
sure that his version gets used.
Thus I figure that Dole's next campaign stop will be at a high school. He'll teach a history class, just as President Clinton did last week, and he'll doubtless make it available on cable, just as Newt Gingrich, a former history professor, does with his lectures.
And as a preview, I offer this history lesson:
Once upon a time, a brave European white man named Christopher Columbus discovered that the world was round, and that you could reach Japan by sailing west.
On Oct. 12, 1492, he landed on an island in the Caribbean Sea, far out of his way, because an oppressive and meddling Spanish affirmative-action law forced Columbus to hire an unqualified navigator.
Even so, the poor, wretched natives were very glad to see him and learn that they were poor and wretched because there were so many single mothers among them. The natives were quite grateful for the schools, hospitals, and churches that Columbus and his gallant men established for them.
Over the years, more and more people came to settle in this empty new land.
They, too, devoted themselves to building schools and hospitals for the grateful natives. But it was hard to find enough people to work on the farms, so these pioneers sent emissaries to Africa, where unemployment was high because they had not repealed the capital gains tax.
The Africans leapt with joy at the opportunity to go to the new lands and work on the farms for benevolent Christian owners. Every time a ship from the new land docked, the Africans ran down to the wharf and begged to be taken.
In 1776, some outstanding people in the new land, called
Patriots,
got together to protect their lives and
property from dangerous radicals and revolutionaries, known
as Tories
or Loyalists.
Although there were a few scuffles, the Patriots actually triumphed by working within the system. They formed the Continental PAC and contributed to parliamentary campaigns, thus gaining their independence from Great Britain and answering George Washington's heartfelt prayers from Valley Forge.
After independence, the Patriots gathered and wrote a constitution for the new United States of America. It insured certain basic rights: the right to fire employees who mouth off too much, the right to petition government for zoning regulations to maintain property values, and the right to practice any mainstream religion for one hour on Sunday morning.
All went well and the new country grew. The people in Texas, California, and New Mexico invited American soldiers to come west and liberate them.
A few years later, many Indians in the Wild West were getting tired of their monotonous diet of buffalo meat, and so they asked the U.S. Army to exterminate the beasts so that the Indians could enjoy a varied cuisine of moldy flour spiced with weevils, tinned beef offal and hot lead.
This process continued as the nation grew and prospered. Cubans and Filipinos, Hawaiians and Eskimos, all begged the United States to send in its noble soldiers to establish democracy, and though the expense and sacrifice were often considerable, the country always came through.
All was not perfect, of course. Every so often, dangerous radical foreign agitators would sneak into the country and stir up discontent. For instance, miners who usually sang hymns of praise for their exhilarating 12-hour days would get infected by these radicals, and would go on strike and threaten law and order.
But always there were benevolent patriots like John D. Rockefeller who would pay the soldiers, out of their own pockets, to protect Americans from these agitators. This generosity is an example to us all, and we should be grateful for such public-minded idealism.
And so we get to modern America, where, if you study
hard and go to college and then graduate with honors and do
post-graduate work, you can become part of the academic
elite
and be denounced by a politician.
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