Monday, May 19, 2008

Those Who Don't Remember the Past Are Condemned to Repeat It.


One of the people at work who's actually speaking to me brought up an interesting point the other day. She said that every history teacher she's ever met has been a liberal.

Come to think of it, every history teacher *I've* ever met is liberal.

Those with a good grasp of our nation or government's history must naturally come to the conclusion that Republicans are daft and not worthy of leading a free people anywhere except maybe to the toilet.

You don't have to be a history teacher to know that, but it helps.

As a matter of fact, I only know one person who remembers US and World History and yet still stubbornly votes like a horse's ass. (Big ups, Michael.) The rest of the right wing voters in my life don't know much of anything except the final contestants on American Idol. And where to find Genny Beer south of Tonawanda.

But keep on keepin' it real, people. Real dumb.

4 Comments:

At 5/19/2008, Blogger Brett said...

As a person with one of the most useless degrees in the world (yes, history), my recollection of my professors is as follows:

Five were liberal. Most of them were nice enough, but there was one I wanted to pound with a shovel every week.
One was republican. Taught WWI and WWII, primarily.
One was libertarian. He was also my favorite instructor EVER - in his late 60s, he had just recently discovered Black Sabbath and listed to it every day. He was also of Belgian descent, which somehow made everything more entertaining. I miss Dr. Van Neste.

Now you've made me all misty eyed. How dare you.

 
At 5/19/2008, Blogger David Jenkins said...

Interestingly enough, I had an conservative Ex-Colonel Vietnam vet for a AP European History class, which was essentially a class on WWI and WWII when you really break it down ...

 
At 5/19/2008, Blogger QuakerJono said...

Now, come on. Republican/conservative != dumb. I take your point but I think you're leaving out an important component of our country's political system: the innate tension between conservative and liberal values.

While a country certainly needs liberal progressives to evolve it forward and meet the changing needs of its citizens, too much too fast can produce fractures and splinters that plunge the populace into possibly unrecoverable chaos. That's where conservatives come in. They act as a restraining force to moderate change to a level that is acceptable.

On the flip side, a country dominated by conservative stances seriously risks stagnation and an inability to adapt to changing world situations. Conservatives require liberals to pull them along and provide the grist for the mill of government.

That push/pull tension is what keeps the rate of advance in check. If either side lets down with its responsibilities, the country either rushes forward to plunge off the nearest cliff or stymies and stalls out, quickly becoming irrelevant to its citizens and the world.

The trouble right now in the U.S. is pre-packaged politics and the assumption that if you identify with a side, you must immediately adopt all positions of that side t the nth degree. There is also extreme polarization and the fact that both sides of this necessary equation have become so fractious and hard-line that it's seen as a sign of weakness to admit the other side not only has a point, but a legitimate function. It also doesn't help that the traditional rallying points for both sides, the Republican and Democratic parties, have been swarmed with special interest groups seeking to redefine the terms liberal and progressive to serve their own agendas and largely disenfranchising the majority of Americans who either lack the time, energy or desire to adopt far-left/right or just plain inappropriate positions.

While looking at history might give one a more liberal/progressive outlook as hindsight is 20/20, that in no way invalidates the conservative viewpoint or means conservative stances serve no purpose. At the very least they serve as a comparison model.

 
At 5/19/2008, Blogger superdave524 said...

The biggest reason conservatives look stupid these days, is that, because of the populist stance they have had to take to win elections, they aren't able to discuss the real reasons for their policy choices. Communism is no longer a threat, and it is no longer politically feasible to talk about maintaining military bases abroad to preserve "the American Way of Life", so to justify the bases we have to invent reasons like non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. The "My Country, Right or Wrong" crowd is left to believe obvious lies as a result.

Most of the serious problems- whether the economy, crime, loss of international presitige, whatever- don't have simple solutions for either conservatives or liberals, but to pander to the Common Man on the Streets, simple-sounding answers have to be propounded. Republicans sound dumber these days because they have to, just like the Democrats had to sound when appealing to a racist base in "the Solid South" when Democrats were populists. "Isms", whether liberal or conservative, need to exude simple truths. To that extent, they all sound stupid, because actual, real solutions, grounded in human experience involve tough choices and complicated answers.

That said, "Go, Obama!".

 

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