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Another blow in the culture wars?
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by Susan Marie Kovalinsky | February 14, 2010 at 07:40 pm
174 views | 6 Recommendations | 1 comment
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At the changing of the guard, when Scott Brown took the Senate seat from the venerable New Englander, another blow within the culture wars took place.
As journalist Russel Shorto notes, this occurred with no fanfare and little notice. Albeit, it was a turning point of sorts: One that makes one question if the founding fathers were of one mind with the force which now speaks in their name.
Whence came this idea of the Christian “truth” about America‟s founding fathers and the constitution? It has, it is true, long been proposed by Christian, but not public, schools. Now, though, as a counterbalance and compensation to a secularized postmodern culture - the Culture which Capitalism has delivered to us - they see an opening: A weak link in the chain. The chain breaks. Stealth enters in. A turn can still be taken. The classroom becomes the government, it is said, a generation down the line. 15, 30 years, and it all can be transformed, reversed, made new.
America's history is a revisionist history. Now liberals, now conservatives, stamp their own present upon the past. Anyone who believes that the new conservative revisionism is not just as flawed as the '60s liberal revisionism is badly deluded, sorely in error about the sins within the human heart.
Rising too, in ever increasing urgency from the center is the voice of the historically correct scholar of Deism, of Unitarianism, who understands that our country's "Christian roots" were never monolithic, and who fear a movement which speaks in the name of the Founding Fathers, but does not represent them - and is even diametrically opposed to their genuine origins and philosophy. Ideology has been misunderstood, or so it would seem. . .
History is dependent on perception and ideology of the historians and revisionists who deliver it to us. It is to a large degree what we perceive it to be. Revisionism is not an exact science: Both sides have buried in silence that which does not promote their own ideology.
LAST MONTH, A WEEK before the Senate seat of the liberal icon Edward M. Kennedy fell into Republican hands, his legacy suffered another blow that was perhaps just as damaging, if less noticed. It happened during what has become an annual spectacle in the culture wars.Over two days, more than a hundred people — Christians, Jews, housewives, naval officers, professors; people outfitted in everything from business suits to military fatigues to turbans to baseball caps — streamed through the halls of the William B. Travis Building in Austin, Tex., waiting for a chance to stand before the semicircle of 15 high-backed chairs whose occupants made up the Texas State Board of Education. Each petitioner had three minutes to say his or her piece.
“Please keep César Chávez” was the message of an elderly Hispanic man with a floppy gray mustache.
“Sikhism is the fifth-largest religion in the world and should be included in the curriculum,” a woman declared.
Following the appeals from the public, the members of what is the most influential state board of education in the country, and one of the most politically conservative, submitted their own proposed changes to the new social-studies curriculum guidelines, whose adoption was the subject of all the attention — guidelines that will affect students around the country, from kindergarten to 12th grade, for the next 10 years. Gail Lowe — who publishes a twice-a-week newspaper when she is not grappling with divisive education issues — is the official chairwoman, but the meeting was dominated by another member. Don McLeroy, a small, vigorous man with a shiny pate and bristling mustache, proposed amendment after amendment on social issues to the document that teams of professional educators had drawn up over 12 months, in what would have to be described as a single-handed display of archconservative political strong-arming.
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Hugh Askew
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stejeb
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 07:27 on February 15th, 2010
I went and read the whole thing, his interviews with some of the people concerned were enlightening, and I find it as strange as he does that such a disparate bunch of people can be tasked with making such important decisions on subjects they know nothing about.
Frightening!