mtpolitics.net

Billy Madison, Yet Again

I may have to start a “We are all dumber for having read that” category.

Our old friend AnalogKid turns up this peach from a Los Angeles Times columnist.

Entitled, “WWFFD? Who cares? Let’s stop fussing about what America’s founders thought, and let our minds run free,” the premise of the article seems to be that the Founders were all “a bunch of sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches,” who were “not the most enlightened thinkers available”

Wow.

Consider, a moment, the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

That’s some very good writing, there. It clearly delineates what the purpose of the union, and what the government is supposed to do. Unless, of course, you want to read it with a PoMo slant, which seems to be the wont of many on the left.

Look, I’m a firm believer in the right of people to “alter or to abolish it [government], and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” After all, that’s how we got here.

But, if we ignore, or toss aside the keystone documents that brought us to where we are, what do we have?

The United States is not a slew of lines on a map, but rather, a meme with some common cultural assumptions.

Did you ever wonder why you were forced to read Shakespeare as a kid? So did I, until I got older and you hear people start saying, “Something’s rotten in Denmark,” or “The play’s the thing,” or “To thine own self be true.”

If you don’t know your Shakespeare, you don’t know what the hell anyone who utters those phrases is talking about.

Or, take something like the 23rd Psalm: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Almost everyone knows that phrase, and its origin. Or at least they should.

It’s all a part of cultural literacy, the bedrock of what makes us all “American.”

A number of years ago, I took a public speaking class where we were all invited to ad-lib on random phrases chosen from the Dictionary of Cultural Literacy. The rest of the class had the job of deciding whether or not the speaker was full of crap.

Suffice it to say that I got called for spouting a load of crap in desribing an archipelago as a “series of small islands, such as the Greek Archipelago.”

E.D. Hirsch wrote the definitive book about Cultural Literacy, which should be required reading in every school. In it he says:

To withhold traditional culture from the school curriculum, and therefore from students, in the name of progressive ideas is in fact an unprogressive action that helps preserve the political and economic staus quo. Middle-class children acquire mainstream literate culture by daily encounters with other literate persons. But less privileged children are denied consistent interchanges with literate persons and fail to receive this information in school. The most straightforward antidote to their deprivation is to make the essential information more readily available inside the schools.

Go ahead and read that again, ‘cuz it’s kinda important.

Were the founding fathers perfect?

No.

Did they allow for that?

Absolutely.

We’ve proven that 27 times. Two of which cancelled each other out. There had to be 10 of them before the Constitution was even ratified.

Seems to me that folks who put together a governmental framework with change as a constant theme (and possibility) were pretty damned “progressive.”

Besides, how much credibility can you give a guy who quotes one of the very “sexist, slave-owning 18th century white men in wigs and breeches” whom he decries at every turn?

The founding fathers were not perfect, nor could they see the future, and they knew that. But they were far-sighted enough to allow for it. That, to me, is pretty damn smart, and worth keeping.