"History for dummies: 
"winnowing and sifting the truth""

Curtis Dahlgren
1/17/05

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN USED TO HAVE AN OFTEN-HEARD MOTTO: "winnowing and sifting the truth." That was then and now is "NOW" — in the era of A.S. (After Shalala), there is no such thing as Truth, only equally valid shades of "GREY" (plus out there on the "fringes," of course, are the unspeakable bigotries of the conservatives — WHO MUST BE SIFTED OUT OF THE INSTITUTION)!

IS THIS A PARADOX, OR WHAT?

Dan Rather, who used to be merely a reader of news stories, has become a news story! John Leo commented on the Rather philosophy of journalism:

"Another factor is the familiar peril of groupthink. If your newsroom is filled with people who think and vote the same way and who are convinced that Bush is a malevolent character who must be stopped, you are more likely to run through red lights than you would be if a similar half-baked story was about to be sprung on someone you cared about." — (September 27, 04)

THE SAME PERILS OF GROUPTHINK WOULD APPLY TO ANY OTHER ACADEMIC FIELD — from psychology to anthropology to history. At the University of California-Berkeley and Syracuse University, they have a combined total of 30 registered Democrats teaching sociology and ZERO registered Republicans.

At UCLA there are 53 history professors who are registered Democrats, and 3 Republicans. At Duke University, there are 32 Democrat professors in the history department — and ZERO Republicans! Though they are from roughly four differ! ent geographical quarters of America, the faculties of these institutions are as "cozy" and monolithic as the newsroom at CBS was. But when the professor or teaching assistant says, "That's the way it is," what makes the student think that they're being any more objective or accurate than Dan Rather was?

And here's another good question: what's the explanation, or the reason, for the imbalanced statistics in the preceding paragraphs? The question reminds me of an old joke. A professor took a trained flea and told it to jump. The flea jumped. Then he cut off the legs of the flea and told it to jump. The professor wrote down in his notes, "When you cut off the legs of a flea, it goes deaf."

An objective, open-minded student might challenge his conclusion, but the Higher Education "Establishment" has similarly dogmatic theories as to why there are so few conservatives on their faculties. Their favorite theory is that "conservative students, when you cut them o! ff at the knees, just go deaf to the "approved political positions," so they just can't "get" history or sociology "at the college level"!

Seriously, the "Establishment" believes that only those who are "intelligent enough" survive the "rigors" of Higher Education to attain tenure. IN REALITY, after two-to-four years of exposure to these teaching geeks, the conservative just says to himself, "I'm out of here — and THANK GOD there's a real world out there!" And so the "stupid ones" go into business for themselves and in general, make the real money.

"Mainstream" educationists think that the reason so many kids drop out of high school is because we've made school "so hard" for them. In actuality, lots of those drop-outs probably do so because they aren't challenged at all by modern "outcome-based" education that is aimed at "equality of results").

Besides, many of the more intelligent students become the most frustrated by dumbed-! down kindergarten and first grade "class work," so they're immediately weeded out by prescribed Ritalin. Then if their high school does have a "gifted and talented" program, liberal teachers no doubt direct only the most liberal ones into the program. For sure, being liberal doesn't "hurt" your cause when you're a "doctoral candidate." That's becoming obvious to almost everyone.

And if there is one subject in particular that the geeki have disdain for, it's History. There's a misunderstanding that the word means "his story" (castigated as sexist views of "Patriarchical" times long, long ago). In fact, if the concept is even addressed in secondary schools at all today, history is probably approached with Vietnam and the "sixties" as the starting point (when the subject began to evolve more into "her story." If World War II is even mentioned, there is a stress on Japanese internment camps, and anything else that can be dug up to "show" that America is no diffe! rent, no better, and no greater than any other nation in the world.

[i.e., an education that starts out as "outcome-based" kindergarten evolves into college courses on foreign policy that are also "outcome-based" — or aimed toward a global New World Order in which all nations have "one equal vote" and have absolute moral equivalency. Young Americans are almost never exposed to the opinions of our Founding Fathers — who saw America as special and exceptional (due in part to the personality types who chose to come to the New World — people with a positive entrepreneurial spirit and a love of independence)]

As the prophet Amos once said, the Lord would "winnow and sift" His People! President Reagan said, "No arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women."

YES! Those who chose to come here and leave behind their trades and professions, not to mention relatives they would never see agai! n, were a "different breed" of men and women. When they built the first real houses on this continent, their wives didn't scream, "You should have just let us die in England. Better that than to live in this wilderness!"

When the Lincolns moved beyond the Smokies, Abraham's mother didn't complain that "This house ought to be condemned." And when the next move came along for America, the pioneer women didn't say:

"You want to do WHAT? You want to go to Oregon in a WAGON? What are you -NUTS?" Both the men and the women understood that "all men are created equal in opportunity" (but with no guarantees for "results"). Boys and girls, the word-for-the-day is "HISTORY"!

As I said, there's a misunderstanding. John Ayto says, "Etymologically, history simply denotes 'knowledge'; its much more specific modern meaning is decidedly a secondary development. Its story begins with the Greek histor — or, 'learned man' . . . "[It comes from] a root word that produced the English word 'wit' and the Latin "videre" (see). From histor was derived historia [which means] "knowledge obtained by enquiry . . . " — Dictionary of Word Origins, Arcade

This is the word our lavishly-paid "learned men" have virtually abolished to oblivion!

And, as Maggie Thatcher said, just a few years ago: "Be warned. A powerful, radical left-wing clerisy is bent on destroying what every past generation would have understood to be the central purpose of education — that is, allowing (in the words of Edmund Burke) individuals to 'avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations, and of ages.'" [Nat. Review, 12/22/97]

I know high school graduates today who don't have a clue as to what the fourth of July commemorates. In 1978, a tabloid surveyed 103 people in Florida. They read the words, "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal . . " and then asked the people to identify the source. Only 14 people could do so! One man got huffy when told his answer was incorrect, and said, "Well, who reads it" [the Declaration]? He must have been a public high school social science teacher!

I suspect that if they did such a survey away from the coast and closer to the mountains, the results would be better, because people there aren't as far removed from their pioneer grandparents, and their culture hasn't been dilluted quite so much by the social engineering of post-modern education.

Today's educational "professionals" will only address the Founding Fathers if they can find some dirt that may or may not stick to the wall when they throw it. In her book, How to talk to a Liberal, Ann Coulter discusses the Jefferson scandal, the Thomas Jefferson "scandal," as in "Sally Does Monticello" (June 21, 2001):

"You might say [historian Joseph] Ellis had fancied himself the Thomas Jefferson of the twentieth century, except that Jefferson's reputation is shot, thanks in part to Joseph Ellis. Between [phony] 'Nam flashbacks and Freedom Rider reunions, Ellis coauthored the ground-breaking 1998 report "Jefferson Fathered Slave's Last Child." You might remember this report if you weren't on the moon when it was released — it was the Clinton defender's giddiest 'Gotcha' moment. It was unveiled to instant acclaim — just weeks before the House impeachment vote. ."

Remember that? The Dan Rathers of the boob tube were gleefully reporting that Jefferson had been proven to be a whoremonger (not in those words, of course, but you get the drift). The only flaw in the slaw is that nothing of the sort had been scientifically proven. Less than half a dozen newspapers reported the dirty little detail that DNA tests had only proven that Sally Hemmings' last child could have been sired by any number of Jefferson family members:

"Eston, the only Hemmings child who could be tied by DNA to some Jefferson, was born in 1808, when Thomas Jefferson was 64 years old [and in the White House]. Randolph — the Jefferson fiddling and dancing with the slaves — was twelve years younger . . . Guided tours of Monticello today include the false information that [Thomas] Jefferson fathered all of Hemmings' children"! Ann Coulter dryly adds:

"Apparently . . most people would prefer to be descendants of a former president, rather than, say, descendants of his halfwit brother."

The career of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "historian" John Ellis, sadly, has suffered no ill effects of such gaffes. I recently read a review of his latest book in a cover story in Book Page ("America's Book Review"). The headline says, "A real man, by George; New biography humanizes a mythic American hero." The gist of it — surprahse, surprahse — is that President Washington was a man of character:

"And he discovered sides of Washington — the man, not the monument we've made of him — that surprised him"(!) Before he retires from writing, perhaps Mr. Ellis could find some time to find some new "sides" to the Thomas Jefferson story — which he has so selectively sullied!

Someone once said that Jefferson's mind "was like an elephant's trunk in that it could pick up a pin or knock down a lion." By comparison, the "minds" of the 32 Duke University "history professors" are smaller than a pin head! Even Jefferson's own beloved University of Virginia has a faculty, no doubt, that parrots the impossible Ellis theory that TJ fathered six children by one of his slaves!

"Donna Shalala and friends" act more like crazy aunts than scholarly stewards of America's great tradition of Academic Freedom. They are trying to ignore the Elephant-in-the-Rooms of their ivory towers, but the charade is almost over, thanks to the internet and a lion-like new breed of books out there (to mention just a few):

The Politics of Bad Faith by David Horowitz (and The Heterodoxy Handbook with Peter Collier)

Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate Youth by Ben Shapiro

The Vision of the Annointed by Thomas Sowell

State of Fear by Michael Crichton

[and if I may, I would add NO MORE BULL: America, Please Phone Home, by yours truly, plus everything written by Alan Keyes]

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in the frozen tundra of Michigan's U.P., and his career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton. In the intro to The Fenton Bible, Fenton said:

"I was in ’53 a young student in a course of education for an entirely literary career, but with a wider basis of study than is usual. . . . In commerce my life has been passed. . . . Indeed, I hold my commercial experience to have been my most important field of education, divinely prepared to fit me to be a competent translator of the Bible, for it taught me what men are and upon what motives they act, and by what influences they are controlled. Had I, on the other hand, lived the life of a Collegiate Professor, shut up in the narrow walls of a library, I consider that I should have had my knowledge of mankind so confined to glancing through a 'peep-hole' as to make me totally unfit for [my life's work]."

Curtis is listed as a University of Wisconsin-Madison "alumnus" (loosely speaking, along with a few other drop-outs including John Muir, Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright and Dick Cheney). He has a website at  www.jcmquotations.com  and can be contacted at treeman1776@yahoo.com.  

© Copyright 2005 by Curtis Dahlgren
http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/dahlgren/050117




Curtis Dahlgren