ninme

You see, when the same people running the schools (liberals) are the same people talking nonsense about Vietnam (liberals), I start to wonder if they’re ruining the schools on purpose, because they want us ignorant, like some bad silent film with evil-doers in large mustaches and the hero with carefully brylcreemed hair and a noble brow.

LA Times – We Are Our History — Don’t Forget It, by DAVID GELERNTER

To forget your own history is (literally) to forget your identity. By teaching ideology instead of facts, our schools are erasing the nation’s collective memory. As a result, some “expert” can go on TV and announce (20 minutes into the fighting) that Afghanistan, Iraq or wherever “is the new Vietnam” — and young people can’t tell he is talking drivel.

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. 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. 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.

If you are proud of this country and don’t want its identity to vanish, you must teach U.S. history to your children. They won’t learn it in school. This nation’s memory will go blank unless you act.

Who saw David McCullough on Fox News Sunday last week? I wanted to send him flowers. He said:

I also think we ought to know about these people, because we’re taking stock, who we are, what do we believe in, what have we been through, at our own time of risk, danger, dark shadows hanging over the future, and come to the realization, others have been through worse, and this isn’t new.

Churchill came over after Pearl Harbor, when Hitler was running wild, almost to Moscow, when we had lost half of our Navy at Pearl Harbor, when we had no air force, when recruits were drilling with wooden rifles, and Britain was virtually on her last legs, and he came over, and he gave a magnificent speech, in which he said, “We haven’t journeyed this far because we’re made of sugar candy.”

And Churchill was an historian. He understood what our predecessors had been through in our behalf.

And I’m reading The Fountainhead, which, if you’ve read it, you’ll understand why this whole big argument we’re having is just messing with my head. It’s about the twenties and thirties, where all this crap came from, when “collectivism” was such a new idea it almost sounded like a good one, and if it wasn’t illegal to deface library books I’d start highlighting whole passages and tearing them out and mailing them to politicians with hastily scrawled notes screaming, “Can’t you see?! Don’t you see what’s happening?!” It’s messing with my head, man.