It's said that if you can remember the 60s you weren't there, but I do and I was
/
Bulldog! Bulldog! Bow, wow wow, Eli Yale!
Roger Kimball; Thanks to tenured radicals, we are witnessing the retribalization of the world
Yogi Berra was right: it’s déjà vu all over again. Just turn on the evening news. If you are old enough, you might blink twice and wonder whether you are not back in 1968. The looting and mayhem, the promiscuous invocations of universal ‘racism’ and ‘non-negotiable demands.’ Haven’t we been there, done that? ‘We must recognize that justice is a higher social goal than law and order.’ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to some eager CNN reporter? No, that was William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Chaplin of Yale University, in 1972.
Remember Bobby Seale and the Black Panthers? When his trial for murder opened in New Haven in 1970, Yale’s President, the pathetic patrician Kingman Brewster, said that ‘I am skeptical of the ability of black revolutionaries to achieve a fair trial anywhere in the United States.’ That more or less guaranteed, and half-excused, the round of violence that followed.
Over the last few days, numerous policemen have been attacked, several have been killed, in the wave of domestic terrorism coruscating across the country. Seale would have been pleased. ‘If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club,’ he told a crowd, ‘you got to [shoot] that pig in defense of yourself! We’re gonna barbecue some pork!’ Tom Hayden, all admiration for Seale’s performance, told the crowd to ‘make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city.’
I use the phrase ‘domestic terrorism’ advisedly. Neither the New York Times nor CNN will tell this secret. The violence that is exploding across the country now has almost nothing to doing with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman. That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.
The moral is: ideas matter. For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our grades schools) have been preaching a gospel of cultural self-hatred. America, according to this gospel, is evil. The country is inextricably racist and beholden to an irredeemably exploitative economic system. The latest retelling of this creation myth is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning ‘1619 Project’ whose fundamental message is that America was started as a ‘slavocracy.’ According to this malignant fantasy, the Revolutionary War was fought primarily ‘to protect the institution of slavery.’ At last count, elements of this disgusting bit of historical revisionism were being adopted in the curricula of some 4,000 school districts.
More dangerous is the other contingent, the ‘intellectuals’ — pajama-boy, Soros-subsidized thugs who have been taught to hate their country and now have a chance to express that hatred unfettered by civic order. ‘After the Vietnam War,’ wrote one academic radical, ‘a lot of us didn’t just crawl back into our literary cubicles; we stepped into academic positions. With the war over, our visibility was lost, and it seemed for a while — to the unobservant — that we had disappeared. Now we have tenure, and the work of reshaping the universities has begun in earnest.’
