Posted on 12/11/2007 7:03:56 AM PST by bs9021
Peter Pan Nation
by: Malcolm A. Kline, December 11, 2007
If it seems that America’s establishment figures have been getting increasingly immature as the years go by, you are not imagining things. Gifted writer Diana West catalogues this trend to a fare-thee-well in her admirable book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.
“More than a syllabus is at stake; more than the ethnic makeup of college students is at issue; more than the feminization of the hard sciences is under consideration,” she writes. “Looking back, it becomes clear that there was a great luxury in fighting a culture war in the classroom or boardroom.”
“But if the settings were somehow artificial, the hits taken were very real, disabling faculties of judgment and discernment, and undermining confidence and authority.” The daughter of a distinct cultural minority—a conservative Hollywood screenwriter—West has fought those battles from a very tender age.
Currently, she is a columnist for The Washington Times. “In other words, it came as no shock to learn, for example, that in our public elementary school in Westchester County, New York, third-graders devote a hefty part of a semester to studying Kenya,” West remembers. “They don’t know who discovered the Hudson River, who is buried in Grant’s Tomb, or where the Battle of White Plains was fought, but they come home with plaudits for Kenya’s health care system—which, incredible as it may seem, I had never heard of.”
“This, I recognized, was par for the PC course, as were the stories that came home about cow’s-blood cuisine and earlobe enhancement, which the kids found relishingly disgusting.” West shows just how disabled our “faculties of judgment and discernment” have become.
We make F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Lost Generation look level-headed. Consider:
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
By design. The left wants us to not be able to, and to actually shun, judging one course of action, behavior, or choice as being better than another.
Not quite true. Such a position would be value-neutral, which might have some actual value in teaching.
Their true position is invariably anti-American or anti-Western civ.
Kenya or Cuba or Sri Lanka or Iran are not portrayed as being equal to America, but rather as being inherently superior.
And all of a sudden, the US started diminishing the church, weakening our schools, coddling our under-achievers, embracing feminism, raising children the Dr Spock way, initiating a sexual revolution, and normalizing all kinds of anti-social behavior.
We are not the country we used to be. Militarily, we are still the tops. But in so many ways, we are a weakened, and broken nation. It's almost like their was a plan to bring us down from our position of awesome strength.
I suspect Never Never Land would be under Marxist control.
Search on “The Frankfurt School” for some idea of why.
Back at ya.
Yes, they do, invariably, take the opposite side to American/Western civ, in all cases.
But, this is actually due to my assertion that the left despises the idea of making judgements, as their behavior would ultimately be judged.
Since Western civ, demonstrably, has a positive outcome, and, in their worldview, all cultures MUST be equal (to avoid judgements), it must be that Western Civ somehow is oppressing other cultures, and they must side with the oppressed and against the oppressors.
Here’s a great lecture by Evan Sayett on the topic:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-46%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=regurgitating+the+apple
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
Freep mail me to be added or dropped. See my home page for details and previous articles.
Have you read anything on the “mosaic generation”?
Google it. One of the interesting observations about the mosaic generation is that they are “comfortable with contradiction” and “incapable of making value judgements”.
Mal Kline is first rate, as always.
I work at a University. It is NOT possible to overstate this fact.
Anarthrous professional signifier ping!
The Soviet plan to subvert and destroy Western civilization was well under way at that point. They were able to steal our nuclear secrets and produce a working bomb in less than 4 years. More ominously, the Active Measures Directorate was hard at work sowing the seeds of subversion within academia, Hollywood, and the Democratic Party.
But now, almost 16 years after the hammer and sickle was lowered over the Kremlin, the ghost of the USSR lives in the West and saps our will to survive. Every 'politically correct' event that erodes the culture -- from something as minor as the removal of nativity scenes from town halls to something as major as the unwillingness to take the gloves off against our enemies in wars -- can trace its origins to the halls of the Lubyanka and the minds of evil men like Stalin and Beria.
If America doesn't wake up soon and throw off the 'Iron Web' of leftist poison that has descended upon us after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we're doomed.
All that was accomplished without millions of illegals!!
Even Franco and Salazar couldn't hold back free love and rock and roll, despite having cultural policies only slightly removed from the Taliban.
The post war era was highly unusual, as the European nations had been destroyed by war, and the Asian tigers were not yet a factor. That why the era of "good high payin' jobs" for the unskilled/semiskilled "werkin' man" only lasted from 1945-1972.
If this is Never Never Land, can someone pleas point me in the direction of the Mermaid Lagoon?
I think this factoid contradicts the author's point. No real adult would be caught dead watching CNN, except for its train-wreck attraction (and maybe Glenn Beck).
The US had rock and roll. And therefore, the world did.
The US had a flourishing drug culture. And therefore, the world did.
The US was the first country to have birth control pills. But soon after, the whole world had a sexual revolution.
I could go on and on. I don't think this was all a "group phenomenon" as much as I think the US led many nations down a single slippery slope.
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