Star Spangled Banner by mrdonduck
I
wanted to write an op-ed attributing the rise of the Tea Party to the " the skills-based gap [. . .] because they [the Democrats]
don't want to tell the working classes that they're losing ground because they
didn't study hard enough."
In other words, I
wanted to say that the progressive [not in the political sense] declining
emphasis on higher education was an outgrowth of the Powell Manifesto, which
spawned a slew of conservative think tanks to counteract the creeping socialism
brought on by the overeducated late-sixties college students trying to activate
the values they were learning in school.
"The poor we will
always have with us," the far right might have responded, Romney's 47 percent--you
know, those people who need help because all of the wealth was being sucked
into the top one percent. I keep saying that destruction of the lower classes
isn't the answer, because the host will eventually die out--no secretaries or
janitors. And then what will happen to those CEOs helpless without them, the
ones who take invisible "business trips" on their yachts for weeks at a time,
unmissed?
One day without the
99 percent cleaning up and pushing papers around will do more damage than the
bursting of the real estate bubble. Or maybe a week without them anyway.
But we can't afford
to take time off from work. Too few unions survive to carry us through such
unpaid furloughs, which could result in lockouts because the unemployment rate
is so high--much higher than Obama's toothy stats inform us.
I wanted to say that
as early as 1984, twelve years after the Powell Manifesto was slipped to the
right/right people, a report came out, "A Nation at Risk," decrying the deterioration
of our educational systems that were graduating students unqualified to take on
the responsibilities for which they were supposedly qualified. I taught some of
them back then. Some were good, but others plagiarized. Others didn't want to
have to put together a sentence, saying that they'd leave it to their
secretaries. But my late father said that in the eighties he had to rewrite and
correct letters written by his secretary on his behalf. As an immigrant who
came here in his twenties, he spoke better English than the rest of his
American-born family combined.
I wanted to say that
because students were so burdened by debt from heavy loans they have to take
out to put themselves through our institutions of higher learning, they can't
even afford to take the jobs they studied toward, even if they're qualified for
them. So there's a massive surge toward Wall Street jobs, and science suffers
as that small segment of New York City geography sucks physicists away from the
creative research that so much more concerns our future than financial greed.
I wanted to say that
the decline in values is associated with the decline in the quality of our
public educational system--producing the Sarah Palins and Michelle Bachmanns of
this country, who don't know U.S. history from a hole in the ground. The latter
announced that the American Revolution began in New Hampshire and that there
was no slavery during the era that followed.
I wanted to blame the
decline in the quality of public school educators on the decline in the quality
of public education and that both were producing boobs like Palin and Bachmann.
An informed citizenry is necessary to keep democracy alive, said founding father
John Adams, who might have added that slavery was indeed in motion in his day.
George Washington was far less kind to his slaves than was Thomas Jefferson,
who had a long-term romance with one of his, resulting in generations of black
and mulatto Jeffersons. The Washington legacy is probably similar, though his
only ["illegitimate"] descendants I have met were whiter than white, blond hair
scarcely darker than their fair skin.
In other words, I
wanted to blame this whole mess on the Powell Manifesto, which indirectly, at
least subtly anyway, downgraded the quality of education so that only the upper
classes, educated privately, would be qualified to own the country, as many
ignorant conservatives if not Tea Party people blatantly betrayed ignorance undetected
by semiliterate audiences.
The "man on the
street," interviewed impromptu, doesn't know that Columbus discovered America,
let alone the damage done to the indigenous peoples upon his arrival.
All this I wanted to
say until I read that the majority of the Tea Party, excluding the African
Americans beginning to take on their values--move over, Clarence Thomas and
Herman Cain--are white males, well educated, and affluent.
Turns out that the "tea
party" movement sweeping the nation is disproportionately composed of
individuals who have higher-than-average incomes. It's also disproportionately
composed of men. And disproportionately composed of white people. . . . "but
not necessarily older
or
just from the South."
According to a Bloomberg poll, "[f]orty
percent are age 55 and over, compared with 32 percent of all poll respondents;
just 22 percent are under the age of 35, 79 percent are white, and 61 percent
are men. Many are also Christian fundamentalists, with 44 percent identifying
themselves as "born-again' compared with 33 percent of all respondents."
Keep in mind, all the above stats were
taken in 2010.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
