Throughout the recent long presidential campaign, this blogger was banjaxed, as they would say in England. Totally destroyed by the mere thought that John McCain might win the presidency, with the horrifying spectre of Sarah Palin waiting in the wings. I shared my intense desire for Mr. Obama to win with friends in Tavistock, and they applauded my choice, as I knew they would. I had been embarrassed to admit being an American on my many visits the past few years; at last, I was beginning to see a way clear to join them not as an abashed outsider, but as a member of an upstanding community, that community that wanted change—Mr. Obama’s concept of change—more than anything except life itself.
As a journalist, I have spent more than three decades refusing to mention my political preferences to anyone except very close friends and family, and certainly, I never made monetary contributions.
But as my friends and family heard me say many times, desperate times call for desperate measures.
This year, I broadcast my preference far and wide, I gave money and time, and pasted Obama/Biden stickers all over both family cars. I wrote letters to the editor; I posted commentary on the most popular political blogs that accepted outside commentary. In short, I did every possible thing I could to ensure the election of Barack Obama.
This nation needs hope; it needs to rejoin the community of nations as a benevolent leader (if, indeed, that presumed leadership has not been squandered). It needs its friends. Particularly, it needs its friends in the U.K., the EU and, well, everywhere.
The United States needs, finally, to acquire some of the texture of British and European society, for a start. Here, we have had a Johnny One-Note banging the war drums for almost a decade. A Martian visiting might think this nation was all about war, and nothing but war, exported as far and as fast as we can.
We have literal Bully Pulpits singing one other note, anti-choice, and making a political issue out of something that is a spiritual and personal issue and no more need be on a national agenda than the size of my panties. It is personal; taking it into a public context makes it a cheap symbol of dissolution of something very personal in the most degrading possible way. I'm sorry to say, my own stepdaughter has been infected with this singular devotion to proselytizing for a spiritual/personal issue and would have voted based on that, had she voted. (I often wonder, knowing how otherwise sensitive and sensible the young woman is, if she didn't fail to vote simply because her conscience and belief systems were torn about it.)
We have secessionists, and not only in Alaska, who would make this nation into two or more simply so they can continue to befoul the environment, shoot things that don't need shooting, and live in squalor. They can live in all the squalor they can create, I should think, if they will put their actions where their posing is and trek off with a Bowie knife and a can of beans for the farthest wilderness they can find.
We have nascent assassins on college campuses, if one wants to define "universities" founded by fundamentalist religious zealots to be such. One, at Liberty University (can you say oxymoron?) said, in the Washington Post, that if Mr. Obama won, she hoped someone would "reverse" it "asap."
It chilled my soul.
But it brought me directly to the following conclusion:
The single thing this nation needs more than any other is education. Not, you understand, that intellectually impoverished and completely despicable so-called educational program in modern times, No Child Left Behind. No, this nation needs real, honest, bona fide education in the classical--or perhaps even British--mode. Education in which children are taught not only to read, but to think, to examine, to compare, to draw conclusions and, perhaps most of all, to support those conclusions through logical discourse either internal or external.
And we need vocabulary drills, if only so that the populace can use language to see through the smoke and mirrors tossed up by those bent on perverting the language for their own, usually nefarious, uses. A writer named Barry Beck explains why as well as anyone could, using George Orwell’s novel, 1984, to explicate the ways the Bush administration has hoodwinked an ill-educated population through use of language. In the novel, Beck points out, major government agencies are “the Ministry of Peace (which conducts war), the Ministry of Love (which tortures people), the Ministry of Plenty (which keeps people in bare subsistence), and the Ministry of Truth (which alters the description of events until they are outright lies.)
Just so, Bush’s administration enacted the Clear Skies Initiative (in which polluters of many sorts were given carte blanche to dump garbage aloft), Tax Relief (only for a miniscule portion of the population) and No Child Left Behind (a failure of gargantuan proportions, but which, at least, allowed comedians to properly rename the Tax Relief program as No Millionaire Left Behind.)
While this is not a subtle tactic, it is tricky. I think Americans’ first response is, generally, to accept things on face value and to attribute benign motives to any action unless convinced otherwise. This is unfortunate, because, lacking a true university education or a British-style education in grade schools, we are unable to assess the true intent and meaning of words, even a word such as university, a definition that needs to be known to properly assess the function of such institutions as Liberty University.
How many Americans know, for example, that university is meant to be a place in which the totality of knowledge is studied? That the word itself is based on universe, defined as "the totality of all the things that exist; creation; the cosmos" by Webster's New World Dictionary. These days, looking the word up on the web will bring about such answers as "An institution for higher learning with teaching and research facilities constituting a graduate school and professional schools that award master's degrees and doctorates and an undergraduate division that awards bachelor's degrees."
This says nothing about the quality of those degrees. What could the quality of a degree possibly be if it were granted on the basis of studying one particular and narrowly defined version of the cosmos? And yet, Liberty University fills the bill in common American thought these days. Emphasis on common, emphasis on American.
We must learn words in order to learn critical thinking. We must learn critical thinking so that otherwise intelligent people are not so easily led down the garden path as they were by the powers of the evil cadre, God willing now in its last days, in Washington, D.C.
It would be easy to say that we also need to learn again how to be generous and inclusive, as we were when, however reluctantly, we abolished slavery and later, finally, made sure the equality was total, by fiat if not at first in practice.
It would be easy to say that we need to reclaim our Constitution, and we do. But we must first be sure the entire nation is capable of understanding the consequences of its loss. And for that, we must properly, classically, educate the population. Everything hangs upon this. Everything. There is no United States with out its Constitution; there is no Constitution as long as good people are ignorant of its methodical destruction by power-mad zealots whose unfortunately good powers of discernment are bent to the effort of hoodwinking those of us who lack those powers...because we lack education.
I am lobbying, then, for the export of classic British education, the education in which, come hell, high water, or Conservatives in Parliament, every British schoolboy and schoolgirl leaves school knowing how to read and how to think. British schoolchildren are exposed to uncomfortable thoughts and uncomfortable subjects (with much less emphasis on political correctness, as far as I can tell), if for no other reason than to have something sensible to say in the stop at the pub on the way home after a trying day. I might be deluded into thinking that British education is far superior to the drivel that masquerades under that name in the United States, but I don't think so. No Child Left Behind has been widely reviled by educators of all stripes in the United States, as well it should be. “Teaching to test” reached its pinnacle in No Child Left Behind, with nothing at all to show for it except good teachers leaving the profession in droves, and bad ones stumbling along as best they could with no funding to achieve the demands of the program, a fact also well documented.
University teachers in the United States have been censured and fired for expressing non-politically correct thoughts. All thoughts, popular or unpopular, considered or knee-jerk, deserve airing. The essential response of an intelligent society is to allow the thoughts to emerge, and then allow the debate to ensue. If the university fires the professors who express honest thoughts of any variety, debate is stillborn. Without the quickening of ideas clashing with other ideas, being debated and being refined through that debate, we are destined to live forever as it is at this moment, or until someone with a larger gun decides to define things for us as they would have things be, without the intrusion of considered thought.
Mr. Obama is a thoughtful man, and more than once, I heard otherwise intelligent Americans say they were afraid of him because the "didn't know him." Meaning what? They don't know him because he uses thoughts, and he expresses those thoughts in words. Well-chosen words. Not garbled words. Words with meaning, unlike those used by the “misunderestimated” Mr. Bush. (A complete oxymoron; think about it. Not to mention, the outer is a reflection of the inner.)
Words, after decades of the dumbing down of U.S. education culminating in No Child Left Behind, have left the nation behind, incapable of logically separating the sheep from the goats because we cannot define either one, and thus cannot logically defend our position, nor defend our nation from attack from within.
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