Fahrenheit 451
by Ray BradburyThis book is about censorship and those who ban books for fear of creating too much individualism and independent thought. In late 1998, this book was removed from the required reading list of the West Marion High School in Foxworth, Mississippi. A parent complained of the use of the words "God damn" in the book. Subsequently, the superintendent instructed the the teacher to remove the book from the required reading list.
Also on that list was Twain's Huckleberry Finn (banned for the use of the word "nigger") and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (also banned for language--and, likely, by the current administration for its frank depiction of the Great Depression)
Now, a school library in Virginia has pulled Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition. Because she confesses, in her own words, that she has an affair with another young Jew being hidden in the same attic. Yup, she had sex on the attic stairs sometime before the Nazis found and murdered her, and some modern stick-up-the-ass-prude parent thinks it's not fit for modern kids to see a girl from Hitler's Germany stealing a few precious moments to lose her virginity before she dies.
These twits make me sick. They dare to carp about their first amendment rights while they do this in the name of decency and taste.
These actions are no better than what they howl about the left doing to silence conservative opinion.
Nobody has a right not to be offended. And nobody has a right to withhold the right to learn and the right to choose what to read from anybody else.
"This kind of result is inevitable. Let's be honest, nobody goes to medical school to learn how to kill people. Abortionists are the bottom of the barrel, not just in ethics but also in basic medical skills. As an anesthesiologist I've worked alongside them on non-abortion surgery, and to say their technique scared me is an understatement. For medical people who'd understand the terms: ever seen two hemostats clipped to the sides of a laparotomy to hold the incision open, because the attending surgeon didn't know how to use a Bookwalter? Or a second attending who botched a closure because he was too busy chatting with someone? Yet another attending (all of whom did abortions at the same institution) who did nothing about a ruptured uterus in a laboring woman for an *hour* because she didn't recognize it? Makes me wonder how many malpractice claims they can each get before Risk Management sends them packing."
Recently, I went to a meeting in the small, Midwestern university English department where I teach, and got reminded of one of the main reasons I like teaching online: my tenured colleagues. Though there are a few of them I don’t mind—specifically, the ones that care about teaching their students whatever the class’s content may be, rather than forcing their own pet literary theories and/or on the students in the guise of teaching—I really can’t stand most of them.
And believe me, the feeling is mutual. I’ve become the John Adams of my particular English department
.
My other half tells me that a lot of the dislike stems from jealousy. I don’t know what it is (though I have my suspicions), but I’ve come up with more new paper ideas and new ways to use technology than the rest of the department put together. For example, many of my colleagues have their students keep a writing journal; however, I’m the first one that has required mine to keep a blog. And read and comment on each other’s blogs every week. My colleagues in the meeting where I unveiled the idea (because I thought they might like to take the assignment and use it in their own classes) absolutely panned it. One couldn’t get past the idea that I’d listed Fox News as a credible news site (despite the fact that they use the same AP stories as CNN and MSNBC). Another said it was nothing but busy work, and “I’d drop your class if I were a student and got this assignment.”
Believe it or not, though, I’ve seen results: I’ve never seen a larger and more rapid improvement in coherence, grammatical correctness, and rational argument than I did last semester. My students told me, in the reflection essay I had them write about blogging, that they worked harder on grammar, sentence, and paragraph structure in their blogs than they do on their graded essays because they were more worried about what their peers thought of their writing than they were about the grade they’d get. When I brought that up in this most recent meeting, my colleagues kind of brushed it off to make fun of Fox News again.
I’ve seen the professional jealousy pop up in another way: my classes usually fill up before any of my colleagues’ classes, some of whom don’t even make the minimum enrollment. A lot of them think it’s because I grade easier than they do, but that’s often pretty much the opposite of the truth. According to my students, they want my class because they actually learn the tools they need for writing for the rest of their classes, rather than just whatever the instructor wants to teach. I’ve had more than one student come to me and ask to transfer into my class because the instructor gets up the first day and tells them that they can’t write about their faith, their political beliefs (if they’re not leftist beliefs), or their personal opinions because the professor doesn’t agree with them, and even if they write a superb paper, they won’t get better than a C because their opinions are wrong.
Case in point: a couple of years ago, I ran into a colleague’s Composition I student crying in the hall outside my class because my colleague told her that her paper sucked because it was too optimistic, badly organized, and didn’t have a thesis statement tying it all together. She was waiting for one of her friends, who was in my Comp I class. Her friend drug her into my classroom and asked me to help her. When I asked to see her paper, I realized that my colleague was right about the lack of organization and of a thesis statement, but I also realized that my colleague had given her no instructions on how to improve the paper she’d written.
So, I helped her. And she turned in the revised version, and got a C because “it was about marriage, and my teacher’s marriage failed, and so she doesn’t believe in marriage, and my paper is too ‘Disney.’” Despite the praise on the improvement in organization, and the addition of a thesis statement tying the whole thing together. And that colleague, when the student enrolled in my Comp II class instead of hers said “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t think you’ll learn anything in her class.”
Nice. I’m just glad the student didn’t tell that instructor that the improvement in her class was because I explained the things the student wasn’t understanding and my colleague wasn’t explaining. Otherwise, it likely would have gotten even more unpleasant in the department offices.
Another colleague’s student, who happened to be a friend of mine, walked into my office hours and threw himself into a chair in disgust. Why? Because said colleague was teaching The Scarlet Letter through gender and sexual political theory: she explained, in a class full of conservative Christian students, that the scene in the book where the minister is punishing himself for his hidden sin of adultery (using a flogger on his back in the closet where no one could see him and ask awkward questions) was actually referring to masturbation (something it certainly was not).
These instances have one thing in common: an arrogance bred by the knowledge that they cannot be fired. They’re tenured. I’m not.
Tenure was created to give college professors protection against a superior that doesn’t like them because of the way they teach, because of their personal lives, or because of their politics. I can certainly understand the benefits; however, as an untenured professional, I can definitely also see its downsides.
English departments in general are beginning to be seen by other departments and by the world at large as irrelevant, mostly because tenured individuals are teaching their pet theories and their pet politics instead of the content they’re supposed to be teaching. I’ve heard tenured colleagues complain about teaching composition classes because “there’s no content—how do we teach a class where there’s no content? We have to bring in our theories and politics to give content.” And that’s some of the best of them—the ones that actually try to increase their students’ knowledge. The worst simply assign papers without trying to teach, and pass the students with A’s and B’s because they don’t want to be bothered.
What these tenured idiots don’t seem to realize is that teaching writing—sentence, paragraph, and whole paper structure, organization, development, style, grammar, all of it—is the content. Our students have been coming to us less and less well prepared. Our students have to be taught how sentences work together to form coherent paragraphs, and how coherent paragraphs work together to form a cohesive whole, whether that cohesive whole is a persuasive essay, a narrative, a story, or an explanatory essay. Our students need to be taught that explicitly, not just assigned readings and writings with the assumption that “they’ll pick up what they need to know by reading good writing.” That is simply not so, not for the vast majority of students. Maybe we, who teach composition and literature, learned how to write well from our voracious reading habits, but that’s why we majored in and teach English to start with.
Our department’s tenured idiots are the reason why our department is losing relevance, and the reason why one area of the core curriculum—the section of the humanities requiring six credit hours of literature—has been halved and rolled into another requirement. Before they know it, there will no longer be an English department, because the other departments on campus are going to realize that they can teach their students what they need to know about writing, and do it far better, because they’ll be able to tailor the writing to their discipline. Better, they’ll be able to hire their own, non-tenured composition instructors, and hold the people they employ to a higher standard in teaching writing, rather than take the crap the English department passes off as writing instruction.
I’ve done all I can to reverse the trend, but as a non-tenured adjunct, there really isn’t much I can do. And I’m absolutely ready to bail out and try to get one of the other, saner departments to hire me on as a non-tenured, discipline-specific Composition instructor. I’m tired of dealing with the tenured idiots who haven’t re-evaluated themselves as teachers since they got ahold of the brass ring.
Our founding fathers thought differently. In the words of one of those very wise men: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
What a revolutionary idea! All men are equal! Governments exist to serve the citizenry, not the other way around!
These men were the liberals of their time.
Fast forward some sixty or seventy years. The United States has been a nation for a few decades, and there have been disagreements between the states over whether or not it is right and good for one man to be considered a free citizen who is capable of exercising his rights while another man is considered too foolish to care for himself and his family, and is enslaved “for his own good,” based on nothing more than the color of his skin. Some argue that Thomas Jefferson’s words—“all men are created equal”—do, in fact, count for all men, while others argue that Jefferson was an obvious hypocrite, owning slaves himself, if that was indeed what he meant.
Again, a revolutionary idea! Color doesn’t matter any more than class does! The blacks don’t exist simply to serve the whites!
Abolitionists were the liberals of their time, and eventually, the side arguing freedom and equality (and walking the talk) won.
Flash forward about another sixty years, to the start of what’s called the progressive movement. In the early 1900’s, a group decided that all alcohol was bad for people, and tried to convince people to stop drinking.
Needless to say, that didn’t work. So, since people wouldn’t stop drinking voluntarily, the progressiveists decided that they’d simply force people to stop drinking by passing a law. This is the same “we know what’s good for you better than you do” mentality that so defines the nobility, self-styled or otherwise. Thus was born The Noble Experiment of prohibition.
Which failed. Miserably. In fact, it failed so badly that crime skyrocketed, and the amendment forbidding the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages was repealed about thirteen years later.
Again, the nobility forgot to take into account that all men were created equal—and that means that every individual knows what’s best for them. Some choose to care, and to take care of themselves, and some choose to do what feels good at the time, but is destructive to their well-being in the long run.
(I’m really surprised that the progressives advocate promiscuity, ignoring how harmful it is to the bodies, minds, and souls of those who practice it. Not that I really want them poking around in people’s sex lives—it just struck me as an interesting, hypocritical double standard, that likely exists because sex distracts those who pursue it from the encroachments on their liberty.)
Fast forward another ninety years. Today, we see progressives attempting to draw tighter and tighter nooses around our individual liberties, all “for your own good, whether you want it or not.” They’ve succeeded in forcing another type of prohibition upon us, with the losing battle of keeping recreational pharmaceuticals out of people’s hands because of how dangerous they are (thereby making drugs even more dangerous, just as they did bathtub gin in the twenties, and making crime—really vicious, organized crime and other petty crime, both—skyrocket). They want to force everyone onto an absolutely identical insurance plan, one where everyone must be accepted and no one may pay a higher premium than anyone else, regardless of age, health, or lifestyle choices. This will bring about two results: first, the quality of health care will plummet (and since others have gone into why, I won’t bother); and second, our freedoms will be ever-increasingly eroded.
What do I mean by the claim that our freedoms will be eroded? Simple: the government will permit the insurance to raise rates on what the government deems “dangerous lifestyle choices.”
So, what does the government deem a “dangerous lifestyle choice”?
Having a BMI of 26 or higher, whether or not you’re large-framed, you work out, are a professional athlete, have just had a baby and are nursing, or are a regular couch potato. You’ll pay through the nose until you can’t afford it anymore or the government steps in with a live-in nutritionist that strictly rations your calories. You can kiss your steak and potatoes goodbye. They’re not good for you, you know.
Owning firearms. At all. Whether they’re assembled or disassembled, locked away, trigger locked—if you own a gun, you’re going to pay through the nose. Either until you can’t afford it anymore, or until the government bans them as a health risk. Because the law-abiding majority have no need to defend themselves from the lawless minority. And because your gun is just going to jump up and shoot a kid.
Being married. Because being married packs on the pounds, and because being married enslaves women.
(But if you’re gay, you can get married. Oh, heavens forbid the government sanctions anything about the most physically and mentally unhealthy lifestyle choices out there!)
This might not happen immediately. No, the way you boil a frog is you put it in a pan of cold water, and slowly turn up the heat. Frog doesn’t notice if you do it gradually.
Modern progressives have much in common with European nobility during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: though they claim to know what’s best for the “commoners,” all they truly care about is their own gratification. I mean, come on. We see the political Brahmins treating legislative seats as family or party property. We see them lamenting the literacy rates in the public schools while they sabotage any attempt to improve same (because they know that if they don’t, there will likely be a reckoning when better education pays off with the new voters booting their sorry selves out of office). We’ve had progressive presidents who’ve treated women of the non-political “lower classes” the same way the nobility treated their commoners and servants: bedding them wherever, whenever, willing or not. We see no other groups working so hard to force people through legislative fiat to do what they don’t want to do, all “for their own good.”
There are groups that oppose government interfering this much in people’s lives. Those groups—the Libertarians, the tea party activists, the grassroots conservative movements, and militias that the progressives fear so much and label “idiots,” “terrorists” “militias” and the ever-so-popular “teabaggers”—believe that each one of us has the right to make decisions. We, the people, are waking up. We hold these truths to be self evident: that all—men, women, black, white, yellow, red, brown, gay, or straight, rich, or poor—are created equal. Totally equal. With rights given to us by our Creator, not a government we created and consent to being governed by. Those rights include the right to choose our lifestyle, healthy or not, and to choose to buy or not to buy health insurance. We the people believe that we know what’s best for us better than any distant progressivist Brahman political nobility on the East and Left Coasts. We are remembering that they work for us. We are the classical liberals.
And they’re right to fear us.
