EXCEPT THAT THE GREEKS WERE THE WEST:

Herodotus' Histories & David Horowitz: Tales of Hubris, Ancient & Modern (Jimmy Cantrell, Texas Mercury)

Back when the elder Bush (a common moderate cultural-liberal Yankee Imperial Conservative badly playing at Texan) was leading us into the First Gulf War, I had a typical college student (more interested in beer and sluts than any academic subject and concerned ultimately only with a job paying enough to maintain his party lifestyle) assert that my belief that the Classics provided instruction applicable to every life and set of circumstances was a bunch of nonsense. The contemporary problems of tyrants in the Middle East and savage customs of the region served as proof indisputable to this prototypical (save for his being a Republican) TV trained Gen X undergraduate that we must have education focused on what's happening now.

Contrary to my student (and the vast majority of his peers-and of two generations of academics who eliminated both many of the dead-white-men from the curriculum and most of the live ones who would teach the dead ones properly, eliminations required to secure pedagogic prominence for various non-whites and non-Christians), some unmentionable racist-sexist dead-white-man was correct in asserting that to remain ignorant of what transpired before you were born is to remain forever a child. Thanks especially to the liberalizing educrats and their legal system creations, the intellectually lazy, tantrum-tossing, short-attention-span, Western Christian Civilization denigrating children of diverse hues, religions, and sexual preferences are now in charge. If you think MTV is the extent of the problem, spend time with the National Review according to Rich Lowry and Jonah Goldberg.

Though those children will pay no attention, save possibly the attention required to feel the need to silence me, a few others-the remnant-will take heed. And so I write.

One can't help but feel that Mr. Cantrell has gotten rather confused when he compares us to the Persians and the Islamists to the Greeks, but those opening paragraphs are well worth the price of admission. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 27, 2002 10:40 AM