From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 08:22:13 +0800
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Subject: Sept. 19 column - Clintonites reject reality
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Subject: Sept. 19 column - Clintonites reject reality
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    FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED SEPT. 19, 1998
    THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
    It's the government schools, stupid

    Bill Clinton is a fake. As many Americans who had been taken in by him
looked on in wide-eyed horror on Sept. 10 and 11, 1998, this emotionally
hollow creature tried again and again to mimic precisely the right catch in
the voice, precisely the right words, the wiping away of a tear at just the
right moment, in what quickly became known as the Monica Lewinsky
"Apology-thon."

  Just as our penultimate national office manager, George Bush, spoke with
an impatient lack of comprehension about "the vision thing" folks seemed to
want from him, so does Bill Clinton fail to understand the horror with
which it is finally sinking in to about 35 percent of the American populace
that this man (start ital)has(end ital) no core emotions ... he has merely
been miming them all these years.

  But what should really frighten us is not the fact that Bill Clinton is
thus revealed to be the moral and emotional equivalent of one of those
human-looking androids in the science fictions movies, unmasked in a
now-familiar scene in which they begin to stutter and shudder, and finally
go cartwheeling around the spacecraft spewing white hydraulic fluid.

  No, what should frighten us is that only 35 percent of Americans seem to
care. Sixty-five percent say: "So what? All that moral and emotional stuff
is so much make-believe, anyway. Doesn't everybody lie? Doesn't everybody
fake it?"

  Where did this race of pod people come from?

  From the government schools, stupid.

  For years, folks have been dismissing the direst of warnings about the
"public schooling" scam with exasperated disbelief.

  Schools don't fight duplicity, cheating, drug use, and scorn for
achievement, argued New York State Teacher of the Year John Taylor Gatto in
his slim but estimable little volume "Dumbing Us Down" ($12.45, New Society
Publishers, 4527 Springfield Ave., Philadelphia 19143.) Instead, Mr. Gatto
discovered after a lengthy and distinguished career, these things are what
the schools actually (start ital)teach(end ital).

  "Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible
cage, isolated from their chance at community," Gatto warns. "Interrupt
kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is
important; force them to plead for the natural right to the toilet and they
will become liars and toadies; ridicule them and they will retreat from
human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get
even" through exactly the kind of addictive, immature and dependent
pathologies we expect from any inmates -- drugs, violence, random sex.


    #  #  #

  What caused his teachers to praise someone like the young Bill Clinton,
who didn't just dodge the physical risks of Vietnam, but who (as some are
only now discovering) apparently avoided all the emotional risks and
commitments which help a boy mature into a man, leaving a 50-year-old
president at the approximate level of emotional development of a giggling,
groping 13-year-old, promising to "marry" his date to the sock hop if
she'll let him cop a feel?

  Apparently no one believes Mr. Gatto. But the great novelist and
philosopher Ayn Rand further explained the process by which children's
normal mental and emotional development are now systematically and
deliberately crippled in a 1970 essay called "The Comprachicos," available
in the Meridian paperback "The New Left:"

  "At the age of three, when his mind is almost as plastic as his bones,
when his need and desire to know are more intense than they will ever be
again, a child is delivered -- by a Progressive nursery school -- into the
midst of a pack of children as helplessly ignorant as himself. ... He wants
to learn; he is told to play. Why? No answer is given. He is made to
understand -- by the emotional vibrations permeating the atmosphere of the
place ... that the most important thing in this peculiar world is not to
know, but to get along with the pack. Why? No answer is given.

  "He does not know what to do; he is told to do anything he feels like. He
picks up a toy; it is snatched away from him by another child; he is told
that he must learn to share. Why? No answer is given. He sits alone in a
corner; he is told that he must join the others. Why? No answer is given.
He approaches a group, reaches for their toys and is punched in the nose.
He cries, in angry bewilderment; the teacher throws her arms around him and
gushes that she loves him. ...

  "The teacher's mechanical crib-side manner -- the rigid smile, the cooing
tone of voice ... the coldly unfocused, unseeing eyes -- add up in the
child's mind to a word he will soon learn: phony. He knows it is a
disguise; a disguise hides something; he experiences suspicion -- and fear.

  "A small child is mildly curious about, but not greatly interested in,
other children of his own age. In daily association, they merely bewilder
him. He is not seeking equals, but cognitive superiors, people who (start
ital)know(end ital). Observe that young children prefer the company of
older children or of adults, that they hero-worship and try to emulate an
older brother or sister. A child needs to reach a certain development, a
sense of his own identity, before he can enjoy the company of his 'peers.'
But he is thrown into their midst and told to adjust.

 "Adjust to (start ital)what?(end ital) To anything. To cruelty, to
injustice, to blindness, to silliness, to pretentiousness, to snubs, to
mockery, to treachery, to lies ... and to the overwhelming , overpowering
presence of Whim as the ruler of everything. ...

  "After a while, he adjusts. ... He learns that regardless of what he does
-- whether his action is right or wrong, honest or dishonest, sensible or
senseless -- if the pack disapproves, he is wrong and his desire is
frustrated; if the pack approves, then anything goes. Thus the embryo of
his concept of morality shrivels before it is born," and is replaced with
the realization that the objective reality of achievement is worthless,
that everything of value is instead gained through the emotional
manipulation of the pack, Ms. Rand explained.

  "Cut off from reality, which he has not learned fully to grasp, he is
plunged into a world of fantasy playing. He may feel a dim uneasiness, at
first: to him, it is not imagining, it is lying. But he loses that
distinction and get into the swing. The wilder his fantasies, the warmer
the teacher's approval and concern. ... He begins to believe his own
fantasies. ... Why bother facing problems if they can be solved by
make-believe? ...

  "The teacher prods him to self-expression, but he knows that this is a
trap; he is being put on trial before the pack, to see whether he fits or
not. He senses that he is constantly expected to feel, but he does not feel
anything -- only fear, confusion, helplessness and boredom. ...

  "So he learns to hide his feelings, to simulate them, to pretend, to
evade -- to repress. The stronger his fear, the more aggressive his
behavior; the more uncertain his assertions, the louder his voice. From
playacting, he progresses easily to the skill of putting on an act. ... He
cannot know by what imperceptible steps he, too, has become a phony."


    #   #   #

  Is it really so hard to see how an "education" system that grades
children on group projects and "how they fit in with others," that flatters
them that all their uninformed opinions are equally, indiscriminately
worthy of "discussion groups," that rejects the tried and true practice of
encouraging the majority to aspire to match the achievements of the best
and the brightest, instead naming (start ital)every(end ital) child
"Student of the Month," could end up producing a Bill Clinton ... or 100
million Bill Clintons? Is it really any surprise that two whole American
generations are now schooled not in math, spelling, and grammar, but rather
in fantasy, deception, and manipulation?

  Can we really be surprised that they ignore evidence that the garbage men
pour all their sorted trash into the same trucks, insisting the exercise of
sorting green bottles from brown is still worthwhile if it "raises
everyone's consciousness"? That they snort at statistics proving cities
with gun bans actually have the highest rates of crime, or that one volcano
releases more "greenhouse gases" than 1,000 years of Freon? They they
instead insist it doesn't matter whether an "assault weapons ban" will
really reduce crime, or whether banning spray cans will really close the
"ozone hole," so long as jailing the violators of such freedom-crushing
edicts makes us all (start ital)feel better about ourselves(end ital),
since "at least we tried"?

  Should we really be surprised to hear them now, whining "What do you
want? Everyone has affairs. Everyone lies under oath." Or, as letter-writer
Bob Gore puts it in the Sept. 20 Las Vegas Review-Journal:

  "I feel like I'm living in a country that is collectively raising an
adolescent. Listen to Billy Clinton and his friends: 'I didn't do it.
Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove a thing. Everybody does it. It's no
worse than anybody else. Kenny is a snitch ... and he's an old meanie. I do
not have the five dollars that was on your dresser (I already spent it). I
have to answer all the tough questions. I know I burnt the house down, but
think of the new one we'll get. I'm sorry for what I did even though I
didn't do anything.' ...

 "We're living an episode of 'The Simpsons', and Bart's in charge," Mr.
Gore concludes. "I can't wait for this kid to move out -- as soon as he
grows up."


Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal. Readers may contact him via e-mail at vin@lvrj.com. The
column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media
Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.

***


Vin Suprynowicz,   vin@lvrj.com

Education rears disciples, imitators, and routinists, not pioneers of
new ideas and creative geniuses.  The schools are not nurseries of
progress and improvement, but conservatories of tradition and unvarying
modes of thought. -- Ludwig von Mises

The most difficult struggle of all is the one within ourselves. Let us not
get accustomed and adjusted to these conditions. The one who adjusts ceases
to discriminate between good and evil.  He becomes a slave in body and
soul. Whatever may happen to you, remember always: Don't adjust! Revolt
against the reality! -- Mordechai Anielewicz, Warsaw, 1943

* * *

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-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@philodox.com>
Philodox Financial Technology Evangelism <http://www.philodox.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'