Clod and Man at Yale

Michael Kinsley proclaims the L.A. Times' first wikitorial a great success. Of course, he's also the frickin' idiot who publishes David Gelertner.

Gelernter starts his latest column with a paragraph of bullshit, follwed by an anecdote:

Not knowing history is worse than ignorance of math, literature or almost anything else. Ignorance of history is undermining Western society's ability to talk straight and think straight. Parents must attack the problem by teaching their own children the facts. Only fools would rely on the schools.

My son told me about a high school event that (at first) I didn't understand. A girl in his English class praised the Vietnam War-era draft dodgers: "If I'd lived at that time and been drafted," she said, "I would've gone to Canada too."

I thought she was merely endorsing the anti-war position. But my son set me straight. This student actually believed that if she had lived at the time, she might have been drafted. She didn't understand that conscription in the United States has always applied to males only. How could she have known? Our schools teach history ideologically. They teach the message, not the truth. They teach history as if males and females have always played equal roles. They are propaganda machines.

There's nothing from Gelernter's recounting of the anecdote which indicates the student believed women were drafted during the Vietnam War. The student reportedly stated what she would do "if" she had been drafted. She also stated what she would do "if" she had been living during the Vietnam War. Does Gelernter also believe the student thought she was alive in the 60s and 70s?

More importantly, do Gelernter, Michael Kinsley and the Los Angeles Times expect its readers to believe that Gelernter knows jack shit about what "our schools" are teaching? Has Gelernter spent one second investigating what all schools (or any schools) teach about the Vietnam war or the history of conscription? This tosser takes one dubious anecdote about one unnamed person at one unnamed school and extrapolates the existence of ideological indoctrination throughout all the schools in the land. It would be as if I declared the intellectual bankruptcy of Yale based on the evidence of one defective professor.

After this bogus opening, Gelernter engages in some dishonest and ahistorical Durbin-bashing -- one might call it "an astonishing, obscene piece of" deliberate slander -- and then demands that schools teach intellectual pablum which will allow Gelernter and his offspring to sleep undisturbed by facts:

There is an ongoing culture war between Americans who are ashamed of this nation's history and those who acknowledge with sorrow its many sins and are fiercely proud of it anyway. Proud of the 17th century settlers who threw their entire lives overboard and set sail for religious freedom in their rickety little ships.

So they packed their entire lives onto ships, then threw their lives overboard before setting sail? Wouldn't be easier just to leave their entire lives on the dock? And who was steering the ships after all this?

Proud of the new nation that taught democracy to the world. Proud of its ferocious fight to free the slaves, save the Union and drag (lug, shove, sweat, bleed) America a few inches closer to its own sublime ideals.

Damn those evil bastards who snuck slaves into to the country, the Constitution and the Founding Fathers' slave quarters when no one was looking.

Proud of its victories in two world wars and the Cold War, proud of the fight it is waging this very day for freedom in Iraq and the whole Middle East.

Someone send the Army Gelernter Jnr.'s address and phone number. Sounds like he's a hot prospect. Or, better yet, Daddy should drag, lug, shove, sweat and bleed Junior's ass down to the recruiting station. We can't count on the schools to do it.

Schools do need to teach American history, just not Gelernter's sanitized version of it. Otherwise, your children might mistake Gelernter's lies for the truth.