When the Shoe Fits
Wednesday 12 May 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + Education + Government + Legislation
It seems that Arizona has gone off the deep end and in to the Conservatard pool of utter stupidity. Last week they signed in to law a very controversial immigration enforcement bill which effectively makes racial profiling legal, along with various other KGBesque tactics for “dealing” with those eeeeeeevil brown people. Now they’ve made studying one’s cultural history illegal. According to Julianne Hing at RaceWire,
Yesterday, Brewer signed HB 2281 into law, a bill that prohibits schools from teaching classes designed to teach students of color about their heritage and history because such classes promote resentment and encourage students to want to “overthrow” the U.S. government. Such classes, the bill says, advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating students as individual people.
Reading Octavio Paz or Juan Rulfo will incite one to “overthrow the government”? How about Frederick Douglass or Maya Angelou? Seriously? I wonder if they’ll be cutting Shakespeare, Chaucer or Twain out of the curriculum since they too are a study of one’s cultural heritage. None of those guys were all that forgiving of government institutions. Oh, they only mean people who aren’t white are forboden to seek out their heritage. I understand.
Now, I’m no proponent of throwing the racism card around all that much, but when the shoe fits . . .
Between hopping from institution to institution for my undergraduate degree, moving up north for my MA and starting my PhD, I was a university student for about 15 years. I know too well some of the drawbacks of a university education and the philosophies it oftentimes thwarts upon students. But, as far as I remember, SPEECH IS FUCKING PROTECTED BY THE FIRST AMENDMENT. And anyone who might argue that teaching is not a form of speech protected by law is either a complete idiot or simply full of shit. Either way they are an enemy of freedom loving peoples everywhere.
What I suggest is that the clueless lawmakers of Arizona sit the fuck down and read Milton’s Areopagitica for a little bit of goddamned perspective. He’s white and is a prominent figure in English history (presumably an avenue of study still available to the students of Arizona). Maybe they’ll listen when he writes,
Besides another inconvenience, if learned men be the first receivers out of books, & dispredders1 both of vice and error, how shall the licencers themselves be confided in, unlesse we can conferr upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the Land, the grace of infallibility, and uncorruptednesse? And again, if it be true, that a wise man like a good refiner can gather gold out of the drossiest volume, and that a fool will be a fool with the best book, yea or without book, there is no reason that we should deprive a wise man of any advantage to his wisdome, while we seek to restrain from a fool, that which being restrain’d will be no hindrance to his folly. For if there should be so much exactnesse always us’d to keep that from him which is unfit for his reading, we should in the judgement of Aristotle not only, but of Salomon, and of our Saviour, not voutsafe him good precepts, and by consequence not willingly admit him to good books; as being certain that a wise man will make better use of an idle pamphlet, than a fool will do of sacred Scripture.2
Though I doubt it because, if we can agree with Milton’s basic premise that good men will gather whatever good from books they can extract, and that bad men can only interpret the bad in a text, we can just jump to the conclusion that the lawmakers in Arizona won’t find anything redeeming in Milton’s work. For these douchebags, the text, in whatever form, is the problem, and they see the suppression of speech as the answer. Good job Arizona. You’ve effectively brought us back to 1644. I wonder how quickly until they ban white supremacy groups considering they too “advocate ethnic solidarity.” I won’t be holding my breath.
It seems painfully obvious that the fucktards who wrote and passed this bill seem to “assume to themselves above all others in the Land, the grace of infallibility, and uncorruptednesse,” yet I imagine that there are those who would have some serious issues with government co-opting control over our reading lists, and I imagine that those voices will be loud from both the left and right. This bill alone is enough to justify the idea that these politicians are anti-freedom.
I’m no supporter of the leftist policies and sociologies proliferated throughout universities nationwide. That’s one of the primary reasons I left the academy rather than finishing my PhD in Medieval English Literature. But we MUST adhere to the idea of academic freedom if we can claim at all to be supporters of liberty. If we can dictate what teachers teach and limit the kinds of courses that students might take, then we can accomplish any number of abominations against freedom.
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1. Spreaders of news, distributors of information.
2. Milton, John. Areopagitica in The Riverside Milton. Edited by Roy Flannagan. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 1008.
2010-05-12 » madlibertarianguy