THE DUMBING DOWN OF AMERICA
Camille Paglia, the renowned social commentator, almost gets it right.
In fact, she nearly stepped on the answer herself … in her very own words.
It is true. There’s a new generation that loathes America … and they don’t even know why … because they’ve been more indoctrinated than educated.
“… these young people … have no sense of history … No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history … they think that the whole world has always been … a … comfortable world … They have no sense … of the great civilizations that rose and fell … and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America … and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe.”
(http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/paglia-dumbing-down-america-began-public-schools)
Current academics don’t produce scholars. They graduate sensitively schooled historical tip-toers who have, at best, popcorn knowledge. They prefer to search for historical sins rather than for historical truths … because they are in the indictment business. And America, it seems, is very easy to accuse.
Chances are very good they’ve been voodooed by some crunchy college hall of fame radicals … or their liberal apostles. These disciples of the Sixties guarantee the college adventure will be very expensive …. but also extra-rich in micro-aggressions, safe spaces, free speech zones, segregated dorms, Play-Doh therapy sessions, canceled exams, gender-neutral pronouns, and anti-reality-siestas … because the real world disrespects their air-brushed lives.
The Sixties is the decade that just won’t go away.
Camille Paglia admits that this mess began fifty years ago … just as The Sixties came to its chronological end … but not its influential end. And she’s right … it was was all down hill from there.
That decade still pollutes our politics, excuses our immoralities, disparages success, violates the arts, absolves generations of economic inertia … and blesses mother-government as the healer of all that ails society.
Some of my own friends were swallowed up in those Sixties’ moments … which then morphed into a life-style. Then an ideology. And then a religion. Colleges became their cathedrals … and classrooms their pulpits. Odd-ball preachers who never left the past behind.
Over the years they’ve altered history, devalued literature, maligned scholarship, and discovered cultural indictments in every American success story. Those anti-war hippies became anti-culturalists, anti-Americans, and anti-realists.
No decade in American history has had a longer life than the Sixties. And none has been more toxic.
I know this first-hand because I lived that decade … and as a teacher, I taught the school’s most popular senior elective called … yup! … “The Sixties”. The perspective is there.
High school utopians would arrive with the dreamy notions of lava lamps, flower power, loosey-goosey morals, and long, luxurious locks. They fantasized over pot parties, idyllic communes, Woodstock wonderfulness, peace rallies, bra burnings, and ‘come as you are’ wardrobes.
Totally romanticized … and totally inaccurate.
Today, your sons and daughters are tutored by these oblivious caricatures and contaminated with wincing opinions of America … and life in general.
And very fine families … with big dreams for their sons and daughters … go into high-hock to pay extortion-tuitions … hoping and praying their kids will return home prepared for a real career rather than a life of pissy-pouting and fault-finding. It’s a $50k a year crap-shoot.
Finally … the right questions are being asked.
Why must hard-working Americans dig a deep pit of debt so their children can be warped by over-the-top liberal zealots who think it’s their right to contort impressionable kids into their image?
More than one generation has been perverted by alarming crap-nonsense, scrubbed free of reality, and tenderized into easily-offended wussies … finally graduating with a jokey view of politics … and the intellect of middle schoolers. But they hardly lack for self-esteem … self-importance … or self-righteousness.
And they are given to cringey, public exhibitions as clowny members of the Anti-Fa UnderRoo Army. Or as silly, hyperbolic politicians. Or kneeling millionaire-jocks. Or college morons easily triggered by imaginary threats.
They expect the world to be a well-stocked Eden … in which all of life’s comforts and satisfactions are there for the picking.
Nothing’s real anymore. It’s all a big, shitty blur.
Millions of American now grasp that they’re in the midst of a hopeful upheaval. A long-desired disturbance of an unhealthy status quo. And they also sense they’re in a position of cultural advantage … at long last.
The ambition is not to restructure America. The intent is to resurrect America.
Denis Ian
Missives Worth Reading 
If wordsmithing can find its metaphor in medicine, this piece is the shock-trauma unit necessary to save a life…the American way of life…which is unquestionably on life-support and sorely in want of massive Marshall Plan intervention of common sense.
Unfortunately, the bombers necessary to fly in the meds we need were turned into butterflies years ago by the same Joni Mitchell who now laments there are no more real men left in America!
Goddamn right, Joni! …and YOU were one of those counter culture cockamamie doodle doos with posies in your pompadour, urging them to take that Easy Rider journey of eternal adolescence and toke-stoking disdain for the American heartland!
This is beyond good writing, Denis…a superior expose’ with historical perspective of the steaming bowls of maggot broth the Left has been feeding to our post-millennial dunderheads and calling it bouillabaisse!
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The Current administration and family with aspirations of education being ingested by these nightmares called eduators,professors of know nothing,You can’t give what you don’t possess.They are airheads.
Your article is so BRILLIANT and digestible.
Now is the time to induce vomting from these mindless maggots.You really refresh and educate me and others daily.
Blessings as you share wisdom humor and facts.
I was a young mother in 60s.
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