Why Bet On A Plug To Win A Horse Race? - How Public Education Fails The Best And The Brightest

Henrietta Jameson, was a teacher at the Kinney School, considered one of the best elementary schools in the city despite an influx of 'out of bounds' students from the inner city, an effort by the school board to promote diversity.  The initiative had indeed increased black enrollment but esulted in a precipitous drop in academic performance. 

 

Ms. Jameson took the situation in stride.  She was a strong advocate for diversity in education.  There was no reason, she said, why wealthy white children should benefit where the more challenged but no less talented students fall farther and farther behind. 

To accommodate the new numbers of students from east of the Anacostia, the blackest of Washington's neighborhoods, and to ease the transition to a competitive, aggressively academic environment, the school board decided to assign former inner city teachers to Kinney.  Black children would feel more comfortable, more at home with one of their own teaching them, giving them breathing space and time to get their bearings in the strange white environment. 

Miss LaShonda Proffitt was the teacher selected for this elision.  An educator who had spent ten years at a number of schools in Anacostia, was a hardened disciplinarian - more of a prison warden than a teacher, for those students who actually came to school (the truancy rate in Ward 8 was over 70 percent) were a disruptive, harassing, violent group who only bothered to come to school to hookup with others 'in the trade' - cogs in the great Fentanyl business of the city.  Administrators had ceased to supervise or patrol playgrounds.  During the early enforcement years, so many school officials had been knifed or threatened with worse that administrators backed off, deciding to focus on 'inside voices'. 

Miss Proffitt was know to brook no indiscipline in her classroom, and even the most unsocialized students paid attention when she stood before them, all 6'1" of her, black as the ace of spades, heavily muscled, and ready for battle.  Keeping order was not only her first priority, it was her only one. There was no point in trying to get these students to learn anything when even coloring between the lines was a challenge, and a quiet classroom earned her merit points for promotion.

So, needless to say, for Miss Proffitt, deserving as she was of a sinecure - the calm, peaceful, results-oriented, behaviorally socialized environment of Kinney - it was as though she had been parachuted into into northern Norway, the whitest place on earth.  

'We are so glad you are here, Miss Proffitt'. said the principal, and handed her the three volume set of curriculum (1), rules, regulations, and authority (2), and educational guidelines (3).  'A bit of light reading', smiled the principal, who warmly embraced her new educator.  

Now, the Kinney school in anticipation of the inner city newcomers, not only recruited the likes of Miss Proffitt, but restructured their educational system to assure congeniality, support, and individualized learning for those students who were academically 'disadvantaged'. 

To assist them, the Kinney School got thousands of dollars per student in generous remedial education programs. Of note were the Special Needs programs designed to assist children with learning disabilities. Because all the children coming from Anacostia hadn't been able to learn a lick no matter through how many grades they advanced, they were all learning disabled - as dumb as stones as the only conservative member of the school board had said.  

Although he was quickly shouted down by the other all black liberal majority and branded as racist, he, legitimately elected by the city's wealthiest and most influential Ward, could neither be removed or silenced. 

The councilman was an advocate for 'free and fair education' - and lobbied for a reallocation of taxpayer monies from the worst of the city's students to the brightest among them.  It was their special needs - the needs of high intelligence, high intellect, and high motivation - which required attention, and schools should give them the high octane, super-challenging academic courses they needed. 

'We are failing the city's best and brightest', he said, 'forcing them to do penitential service in the name of cooperative education, boring them to tears, putting them off education instead of encouraging them, and wasting the taxpayers' money.  Why bet on a plug to win a horserace?'. he said.  'Why not thoroughbreds?'

When news of this statement was made public, the calls for his head were loud and insistent.  How could he say such a thing, disrespecting poor black children with such racist animus, white supremacist invective and venomous black hatred?

He, of course did not back off, and only increased his demands.  He was not advocating for the dismantling of special programs for the educationally disadvantaged; just providing room for the intellectually most gifted.  If the administration ignored his pleas, the best and the brightest would never again be seen in the corridors of Kinney.  

'Multiple intelligences? What is that, exactly?', he asked at a board meeting, 'and since when is coloring between the lines equivalent to quadratic equations?'

'Cooperative learning? Nothing more than a socialist gulag mentality.  Why should the smartest students waste their time teaching dumb bells how to count?' 

Calls for his head increased, but he was simply putting a legitimate argument in the crudest of terms, all to call attention to the utter stupidity, political arrogance, and educational vacuity of city education administrators.  As before and always, he was cheered by his constituents and urged to run for City Council. 

Miss Proffitt's first day on the job was a nightmare.  For starters she was barely able to get through the preface to the three-volume instructional materials provided by the principal and more importantly had no clue how to teach.  It had been years since she had done anything except keep her Anacostia classrooms locked down and secure.  Teach? What was that all about?

'Let me help you', offered Henrietta Jameson seeing that poor Miss Proffitt was badly overmatched.  Henrietta felt close to black people, for in her extracurricular life, she was an active social reformer, demonstrating for black, gay, and transgender rights, taking a principled stand on climate change, and voting her conscience in hyper-critical letters to the editor about 'capitalist predation'.

Taking Miss Proffitt under her wing would be a privilege, and a chance to finally really know a black person; but Miss Proffitt was having none of it.  It was bad enough that she had to spend half the morning getting to this white redoubt, so no interracial sisterhood was the least bit tempting.  

'These crackers don't know shit', she told Pharaoh Jones.  'Give me Attica', the local name for her old school, P.S 34, as locked down, policed, and secure as the infamous New York state federal prison, scene of violent uprisings and endemic murder. 

Henrietta was miffed.  Here she had spent her whole life fighting for black people, and the first real one she got to know tossed her aside like so much litter. 'How dare she!' Henrietta vented to her husband who for years had watched his wife's progressive febrility and kept his distance.  Better eighteen holes of golf than her foul moods. 

Nothing much changed.  Miss Proffitt went back to Anacostia after the Christmas break.  Henrietta Jameson soldiered on, a bit fatigued with all the special needs children but staying the course; and the conservative politician left the city entirely and began a successful political career in his home state of Iowa, a place where people listened to reason. 

The Circus, A Metaphor For Politics - A Lifelong Liberal Finally Finds The Holy Grail At A Side Show

Although Vicki Chalmers had grown irritated and touchy about the increasingly wild excesses of the Left, she remained in lockstep with their causes.  The Gestapo SS troops unleashed by Donald Trump to round up law-abiding asylees, slam them in cattle cars, and ship them back to the oppressive, inhuman regimes from which they admiringly fled were signs of a growing fascist dictatorship in the White House.  

The President's wholescale dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, sending hardworking, concerned civil servants packing, and his demonic, arrogant machismo forcing LBGTQ Americans to scurry for cover were unconscionable.  His loosening the fetters that reined in a predatory, greedy capitalism was tantamount to a perilous consignment of the poor into a dismal, hopeless purgatory. 

Vicki had spent her whole life doing good, engaged in charitable causes, on the faculty of a historically black college, the only white woman to be granted such an honor and a tenured position, and a frequent contributor to The Nation, the Atlantic, and her own Vassar College Alumnae magazine.

Yet at her advancing age the placards, banners, and camaraderie seemed not only silly but comedic. A thousand hysterical, overweight women stomping like bull elephants up and down the National Mall, was a side show. She loved her sisters in arms, sympathized with their cause, but could never bring herself to actually rub shoulders with such an element. 

Despite her fervid liberal politics, she was sexually as straight as an arrow, and found the whole idea of scissoring, eating out, dildoes, fingering, and 'tit squash' frankly repulsive.  She never let on of course, always greeted her lesbian friends with warm affection and solicitude, but felt the need to wash up afterwards. 

 

She hated herself for such apostasy, but there it was.  Nothing she could do about it.  Nature had had her way, so time to buck up and get with the larger program. This wasn't about her. 

This infection - this growing cynicism, these persistent images of a herd of cows mooing and bellowing on the Mall - was becoming systemic; and as hard as she tried, she could not rid herself of the image of these Flossies on top of each other in some Dupont Circle basement sucking to the music of Radiohead. 

Epiphanies are by nature unexpected, and so when Vicki took her grandson to the circus, an independent production touted as the retro event of the century complete with lion tamers, clowns, trapeze artists, and a sideshow not to be missed, she jumped at the chance. 

She had loved the old Barnum & Bailey circuses of her youth, had walked around the fairgrounds after school to watch the tents being put up, the roaring animals assigned to their cages, the flags and festoons placed on the big top, and to listen to the bang of hammers and the rasp of saws.  She couldn't wait for the spectacle, the cotton candy, the festivities, the jamboree of men, women, and animals from another planet. 

She was as excited as a schoolgirl when she stood in line to buy her tickets for her and her grandson, one for each of the big top events, the fun house, and of course the side show which, she knew, given the vastly changed cultural standards of the day would unhappily not have the freaks she remembered. There would be no two-headed babies, ape-men, and bearded ladies.  It might in fact be better this way, for her grandson was a quiet, timid boy whose parents had told him that no one was stupid, 'so please, let me not hear you use that word' and that 'everyone has a place in the world'.

 

The circus was as hoped, a real retro show.  How the producers were able to run the gantlet of animal rights, faux humanist, and inclusivist alderman and come out with a show as authentic as this one, was a minor miracle. The circus grounds even had that smell of hay, urine, and animals that she remembered.  It was all there as she remembered - tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, lion tamers, clowns, and trained seals. The Master of Ceremonies wore a top hat and tails and was as convincing and exciting as those of the old days. 

The fun house, usually a feature of amusement parks, had been added to the circus, and she clung tightly to her grandson as the carts rattled around dark corners, as spooky goblins and witches popped out of nowhere, and as ghouls stood on the tracks before them. 

With great anticipation and excitement, Vicki and the boy entered the freak show.  She held tightly to his hand in case he got a case of jitters and they had to leave. This was what she had come for. 

For a moment, she thought that her interest was prurient and shameful.  After so many years of inclusivity and diversity according to which there were no such thing as freaks, only otherly- dimensioned, -statured, or -configured people, she was delighted at the prospect of seeing the deformed, the weird, the barely human. 

Why, she wondered? Was it some kind of final resolution - once and for all looking at human deformity in all its shapes and sizes, realizing that even this menagerie of unusual people belonged to her society and would be welcomed everywhere, invited to the Cosmos Club, and invited to join as honorary members of The Society of the Cincinnati, the DAR, and Patriots of America?

What she saw was at first shocking, then stunning, then brilliant.  There were dwarves, midgets, bearded ladies, and elephant men, but they - in a masterful ironic transformation - had become caricatures of the most exaggerated, fag ends of the gender spectrum and icons of protest she had joined on the Mall.  These tattooed, fat, tarted up cretins were the very images of women she knew. Noses were misaligned, ears were pendulous, and elephantine lips were as large and distended as baboons'. 

'Ah,' said Vicki to no one in particular, 'I get it'; and by that she meant the Holy Grail of human creation.  The horrible distortions she was used to seeing on the Mall had simply been displayed in the nth degree at the circus.  There were cross-dressing midgets, transgender dwarves whose proportions were all wrong - huge, oversized tits, and bulging cocks barely contained by circus cod pieces. They were all painted like harlequins, their hair spraypainted blue, rings and studs from tongue to toe. 

She was unsure how she felt. At first it was hilarity - such a marvelous freak show could never be duplicated, a work of production genius, a one in a million worth the price of admission and then some. Then it was shame - the old diversity training returned, and she should have nothing but respect and humility before these othered people; but finally it was the aha! Eureka! moment.  God's supreme irony, his devilish sense of humor on the Sixth Day before he rested. 

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina wonders at God's irony, having created an intelligent, sentient, creative, willful being; granted him but a few decades on earth, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold hard ground of the steppes. 

That was nothing, thought Vicki.  A better irony was that He created a side show and said it was in His image,  a freak show of generous proportions, a menagerie of poseurs, queens, dykes, sexual half-breeds, buggering midgets, and swishy 8-foot giants; let alone the marvelously outrageous pimps and ho's, the barking women of Capitol Hill, the bald-faced liars, cheats, conmen, touts, and snake oil salesmen of middle America, and the hallelujah Baptist preachers, the holy rollers....Jesus Christ, the list was endless. 

Now that she had seen God's humor, how could she not laugh at everything else?  She smiled, hugged her grandson, bought him a chocolate ice cream cone with jimmies on top, and drove home to the exhilarating music of J.S. Bach. 

The next day was a new day, the first day of her life. She scrapped her rainbow Hate Has No Home Here signs, cleared the decks of all iconic tchotchkes - a small, clay bust of feminist Gloria, a Che Guevara poster, images of San Francisco's Folsom Street S&M fair, photos of wild gay boys atop Mardi Gras floats.  It was a clean sweep.  The whole marvelously fantastical progressive thing was dismissed with a brush of the hand, gone, over and done with.   

It was time for sense and sensibility, the literary canon, exegesis, simple prayer, and finally trimming the hollyhocks which were overrunning the back yard.  'Free at last', she shouted out the French doors to the garden. 'Free at last'. 

'War Is The Continuation Of Policy By Other Means', Clausewitz, Machiavelli, And Donald Trump

Former American President Harry Truman was a geopolitical master. The nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not to bring an end to the war (by the time the bombs were dropped Japan was already a destroyed, defeated nation) but to send a message to Russia - 'Look what we've got'. 

Donald Trump follows in his footsteps.  Yes, the ousting of the Venezuelan dictator, Nicolas Maduro removed an oppressive, communist tyrant; but it also secured for the US the vast oil reserves of the country, thus keeping them out of the hands of America's arch-enemies, Russia and China.  

Yes, the toppling of the Islamic regime of Khamenei and the mullahs is an effort to free the Persian people from nearly five decades of religious oppression, anti-Israel hatred, and sponsorship of Islamic terrorism in the Middle East; but it is also  a means to secure Iran's equally vast oil resources, thus keeping them from Russia and China. 

The American president plays 3-D geopolitical chess.  He has a master plan that goes farther than the obvious, but his short-term objectives are equally important.  Who but the most fevered, Trump-hating Left can object to America's ridding two countries of their longtime, oppressive dictators?  The people on the streets of Tehran are shouting 'USA', American flags are being proudly carried, and pictures of Donald Trump festooned on Israeli-destroyed government buildings. 

Yet perennially ignorant, limited, and hardened liberals are protesting in front of the White House.  Protesting what?  For decades Iranian women have been deprived of their rights, forced to live under hijabs and burkas, denying their femininity and their rightful place in society.  The Morality Police enforced bans on dress, expression, and behavior, and forced millions into compliance with harsh religious law, all of which has been or should be the rallying cry for regime change. 

But progressives sit on their hands, weeping for the wanton destruction of brown people by the American dictator, an arrogant adventurist with only his rise to supreme power guiding his assault on world order. They see the waves of Israeli bombers over Tehran as another example of Jewish hegemony and the might of the international Jewish conspiracy.  Iran was the only militant bastion against Jewish expansionism. 

If there was any more proof necessary of the endemic, virulent anti-Semitism within the ranks of the American Left, it is this outcry - this hysterical claim to Iranian sovereignty despite the regime's continuous, persistent, murderous control over its people. 

'War monger...jingoist, belligerent predator' progressives shout, denying the geopolitical savvy of Trump, America's long overdue entry into the Machiavellian world of Putin and Xi, the world of realpolitik, nationalism, and a fearless use of force. 

For years, especially under the craven Biden years, America was still lashed to the idolatry of moral exceptionalism. America always does the right, moral, and ethical thing.  We toppled the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but we respectfully declined to impose a harsh, necessary martial law on the grounds of civility and respect for democratic due process. 

The results were as everyone should have expected - the rise of violent militias, turning the country into a fire zone, an ungovernable, Islamic-leaning chaos. 

The Taliban in Afghanistan could have been obliterated by American airpower.  Lessons should have been learned from the Soviet defeat decades before, and absolute military dominance followed by years of American occupation and martial law should have been the policy.  Instead, America in the interest of human rights, respectability, and moral exceptionalism took its foot off the gas, and the Taliban are now back in power. 

All this conciliatory concern, this political myopia, this ignorance of history, this 'hearts and minds' mentality, this overconcern for civilian casualties went out the window with the second election of Donald Trump.  Israel was given free rein to obliterate Gaza and Hamas, remove Hezbollah from Lebanon, and to destroy the Islamic regime in Iran all with American support. 

History has proven Clausewitz right again and again.  The world has known only war since the first Paleolithic human settlements, and will continue to beholden to its temptations. To ignore the use of war is to deny the imperatives of history and human nature.  It is an ineluctable, irrepressible feature of the human condition.  Peace results only if there is military parity - the peaceful Cold War period is the prime example - or overwhelming imperial control, e.g. Pax Romana.  Otherwise territory, influence, supremacy, resources, influence must be assured through the threat or use of the force of arms. 

'Diplomacy...negotiations' insist Europeans who have forgotten the lesson of Neville Chamberlain and his dalliance with Hitler.  'Peace in our time' was nothing but ignorance, idealism, and distorted assumptions of human goodness. 

Iran has never once in the mullahs' near fifty year regime considered negotiations.  They with impunity developed a nuclear program designed to annihilate Israel, sponsored terrorism to promote radical Islam throughout the Middle East and to extend their geopolitical hegemony.  They never once held their fire when citizens protested their actions. 

Former President Obama concluded the worst possible 'Peace' Treaty with Iran. If Iran would promise to cease the production of military grade uranium and desist from its intentions to use its nuclear power to threaten Israel and the United States, America would eliminate all sanctions and Iran would be welcomed back into the commonwealth of nations. 

Obama asked only for a ten year moratorium on the refinement of fissionable material and said nothing about state-sponsored terrorism; so the mullahs went deep underground, kept building just enough to stay ahead of international inspectors, increased its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, and emerged after ten years stronger than ever.

'Basta!' said Donald Trump and with Israel destroyed Iran's underground nuclear bunkers, and now with Israel has launched a full-scale air assault on the country itself. Policy by other means, said the American President, eliminating a world threat and a national, shameful, regime. 

Like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Gaza, and Venezuela, this military response to Iran both addresses immediate social and geopolitical issues, but also sends a message to Russian and especially China - 'You're next'.  No more clear statement of American resolve concerning China's avowed expansionism could be made. 

Progressives, the party of appeasement, conciliation, and idealism, cannot help themselves. The wailing, breast beating and rending of garments continues while a new world order is being established. 

Gone are the days of internationalism and world compromise.  The United Nations is dead.  Woodrow Wilson's dream of a league of nations only a footnote in history.  In their place is what the world throughout human history has known - force. 

This is not a setback, a retreat into xenophobic militarism; but reality of a world where the force of arms backs up policy but which in a world of either parity or empire will not be needed. 

The Machiavellian triumvirate - Xi, Putin, and Trump - are at the core of this new world order, all understanding the need for military power and not hesitant to use it.  Yet the world, with the exception of a few holdouts - the European and American Left - understands this quite clearly.  Competition is hardwired, innate, indissoluble, and permanent and only through an understanding of countervailing power can it both assure progress and encourage parity.