Posted November 12, 2012: Dissident Prof is sad. She is sad about what has happened to the office of the presidency, as witnessed by the photo of the bus at a polling place in Tampa, Florida. It's funded by a super pac and reads, "Stop disrespecting my president!" It was taken by fellow dissident Tina Trent.
Dissident Prof is saddened by the anger still evident more than fifty years after the passage of a number of civil rights bills. She is saddened by the fact that Chris Matthews on MSNBC said during the debates that the President was due "deference" by his opponent. In other words, the American president should be above questioning.
In this past week of mourning Dissident Prof taught George Schuyler's essay, "The Reds and I," and wishes that his opening words would eventually reach the denizens of the bus with the angry face glaring out on its side. Schuyler begins his 1968 essay this way:
"How is it, the sincerely curious have asked, that an American who is colored can be simultaneously a 'Conservative' and unalterably opposed to the Communist rumble-bumble?
"In such matters, of course being colored is only incidental--like being right-handed, green-eyed, or sleeping on one's left side. The important thing is being an American . . . born, bred, and nurtured on the native soil, and having affection for and allegiance to its basic customs and beliefs; its manners, ambitions, and its goals . . . . "
She is dismayed by the identity politics being promoted in our schools and universities. She despairs that many presumably conservative pundits now advise appealing to various groups, like blacks, Hispanics, and Asians.
She wishes they would read the patriots like Schuyler, whose words have been buried by the tenured, pony-tailed radicals in our universities:
"To be an American is to know that, for better or worse, you could not be, and do not want to be, anything else--however persuasively disgruntled emigres may sing the praises of other continents. . . ."
Schuyler met his share of discrimination, while he served in a segregated military, was passed over for jobs by whites who had scored lower on tests, and suffered degrading personal encounters with people who could not even speak English. Yet, he remained a patriot to his dying day. He had traveled the world, sometimes packing a gun, and saw that America was, indeed, the "last best hope."
In contrast to the angry man adorning the bus in Tampa, Dissident Prof is reminded of our first president, George Washington, and his departing words in his Farewell Address:
"In looking forward to the moment which is intended to terminate the career of my public life, my feelings do not permit me to suspend the deep acknowledgement of that debt of gratitude which I owe to my beloved country for the many honors it has conferred upon me; still more for the steadfast confidence with which it has supported me: and for the opportunities I have thence enjoyed of manifesting my inviolable attachment, by services faithful and persevering, though in usefulness unequal to my zeal. . . ."
George Washington referred to himself as a "dutiful citizen." He was more concerned that a future president would disrespect the American people than the other way around.
Dissident Prof was saddened that four Americans were killed by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11 and the entire nation was not up in arms about it. Nor did they seem to much care about our government's illegal gun-running operation that resulted in the death of a border patrol agent. Or about the roving gangs--emboldened by a biased media and attorney general--attacking innocent Americans on our city streets. Many, many good Americans were concerned, but were accused of political exploitation. It seemed a larger number could not be bothered and were more concerned about getting the latest phone or I-Phone--sometimes at government expense.
Sadly, racial identity politics trumped economic concerns this election. See PJ Media: "It's Not the Economy, Stupid. " People relying on government benefits are not concerned about "the economy."
But knowing the "social justice" curriculum being used in schools, Dissident Prof is not much surprised. This curriculum, which does not give due to George Washington, much less George Schuyler, could be called more accurately "social revenge"--on the streets and the voting booth.
In a day and time when radical educrats and big business Republicans seem to make common cause for teaching "informational texts" under a national, deceptively named Common Core curriculum, she remembers these lines of poetry:
All men, in law, are equals.
Free of Pisistratus,
We choose a knave or a eunuch
To rule over us.
At this time one is tempted to doubt our form of government and the electoral process, and to resolve (once again) to read Gibbons' The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
She is not ready, though, to give up on her adopted country. She remembers well the day she turned 18 and then drove with two sponsors from Holley, New York, to Buffalo, New York, and took the oath of citizenship. She remembers going to visit Slovenia in 1969, when it was still part of communist Yugoslavia, for a first-time extended vacation with her parents and sisters. She did not remember the country, for her parents had escaped with her over the border into Austria when she was not yet two years old.
Even as a 12-year-old, wont to listen to adult conversations, she remembers the whispers and quick change of subject in her uncle's house when her father asked about Tito's communist government. In 1969, the one family in the village that owned a car and a washing machine had those privileges because of their connections to the Party. She remembers watching the American men land on the moon, an event watched by half the village in the only house with a television set. She remembers everyone looking back at her and her parents and sisters and saying, "Americanci," Americans. That is only one of the points of pride that has been lost in these past four years, as NASA becomes a part of a UN muddle--doing Muslim outreach and joint explorations with ex-KGB agents and softer socialists.
Dissident Prof remembers coming back from Virginia for a get-out-the-vote effort sponsored by Americans for Prosperity recently, when one of the patriots, much-maligned by media and academic elites as a member of the Tea Party, led a busload of tired and aching patriots in a rousing rendition of "God Bless America." She also remembers the words of a preacher close to our current president who railed on about not "God bless America," but the opposite. She is sad that such a sentiment is one accepted--perhaps not in such crude terms, but accepted nonetheless--in many churches that have abandoned their worship of God and substitited it with the worship of Marxist leaders of "social justice."
She knows that the people on the bus pictured above have been led by the educated elites to hate their country. These elites, like Howard Zinn and Bill Ayers, have profited handsomely and have abused their positions as professors and teachers to keep the already disenfrancised in states of ignorance, resentment, and hopelessness. To the Ayers and Zinns who now rule our schools and universities, these students are only proletariat pawns to be used in the Revolution.
It was a revolution begun deliberately--its latest iteration in the 1960s--and carried out methodically. These radicals did not have the courage to die for their convictions as the men of the Revolutionary War did. These evil, cowardly men, instead, preyed on children and adolescents and abused them emotionally and with lies about history.
The one ray of hope is that parents, at least in Georgia, on some level are recognizing that the Bill Ayers "urban education" approach is not working. They voted for charter schools, and across racial lines. Let's hope that these too are not run by anti-American radicals.
In response to radicals' divide-and-conquer strategy by race, class, and gender, she hopes that the young will learn about George Washington's and George Schuyler's calls for unity in a common American identity. She hopes that the words of George Washington will be taught far and wide, as he asks that
"heaven may continue to you the choicest tokens of its beneficence; that your union and brotherly affection may be perpetual; that the free Constitution, which is the work of your hands, may be sacredly maintained. . . ."
God bless America.
