Our Rulers Don't Have a Clue What to Do

Today, Victor Davis Hanson tells us that our rulers are lashing out at "Scapegoats, Boogeymen, and Hobgoblins" because they really don't have a clue why things have gone wrong. And therefore don't have a clue what to do about it.

Actually it's worse than that, because the Biden administration's American Families Plan is still throwing money at the problem. As though that worked. So the Bidenoids are Making Things Worse.

That's what rulers do when they are completely befuddled. They just keep on keeping on, punching the same old buttons and expecting things to work.

And the fact that we have a completely be-fuddled old gent as President of the United States right now in July 2021 is a "tell." It is God telling us that our rulers are completely be-fuddled and be-clowned. God is saying: Get a Clue, Kids!

Yesterday, in another proof of God's existence, I read a harrowing story on Quillette about the horrors of teaching in today's academia. Written by pseudonymous Gregory Hanson, "How All My Politically Correct Bones Were Broken" it tells the story a college English instructor that started in the trade 50 years ago .

In my first 10 years of college teaching, from the mid-60s to mid-70s, I modeled myself on my best teachers—men and women who questioned my ideas vigorously. They let me know that I mattered to them, they praised when praise was due, and they pushed me hard. Often I balked, and they continued to push. Indeed, the teachers who sternly, even at times angrily, called me out on my intellectual arrogance and sloppiness became mentors and, in several cases, lifelong friends. 

But, over his 50 year career, things changed.

But inexorably, questions of identity inserted themselves into teacher-student relationships. It became increasingly dangerous for me to question, to challenge, to push—let alone to betray frustration or even anger when a student was conning me or not working to capacity. Year by year, as I met each new cohort of students, I had to calculate how much my own disfavored identity (white, male, heterosexual, middle-class) made it risky for me to push—depending on whether or not a student’s identity was (given the political climate of the moment) favored. 

Because, you see, if you insist on high standards in English class with your average angry black male who has skated through K-12 without really learning to write, he would get angry, even threatening. And, of course, the administration would be no help at all. But that means that blacks -- who, remember, have lower average IQs -- don't get the special impetus they need to achieve competence in everything from English to Physics. But diversity!

You can see why our education system got ruined. All the right people assumed that the problem with blacks was discrimination. Slay the dragon of discrimination and racism and the world would be set to rights.

And if that didn't work, then slay the dragon of racism again. And then slay the dragon of white supremacy. And then the dragon of systemic racism. And so on.

Only it doesn't work. It will never work, and the reason is simple: discrimination and racism is only part of the problem, and maybe a very small part of the problem. The problem is that The Road to the Middle Class from rural peasantry to middle-class competence in the city is long and arduous. In fact, I would bet my nickel that the transition is harder than the previous transition, from hunter-gatherer bands to village horticulture and thence to agricultural peasantry.

Why? Well, I'll bet that the transition from hunter-gatherer-ology to agricultural peasant took thousands of years. But the industrial revolution is roughly 200 years old. It is proceeding ten times faster.

Put it this way. One of my great-grandfathers was a dairyman; another was a "maltster," a guy that makes sugar from grain. My grandfathers were both small businessmen; my father was an engineer; I was a computer guy. Both my daughters have master's degrees, and one is about to get her PhD.

And now we know exactly what the industrial transition is like, from Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China by Leslie T. Chang. We are talking about rural girls in South China leaving the farm for the big city sweat shop and being chucked head-first into a total individualist hell, where they have no-one to fall back on, except themselves. So, at the level of an individual life, the transition is immediate! One day you are living in your village; the next day you are on the bus and the day after that you are working in a factory and living in a dorm.

Hey There Rulers and Sycophants! The problem is not racism and white supremacy! The problem is that if a black kid from the inner city wants to get on in the middle-class world of jobs and marriage and home-ownership they have to utterly walk away from the culture of the inner city where they were born and raised. And that is the hardest thing in the world to do!

Gubmint entitlement programs ain't gonna help! Quotas and diversity ain't gonna help! Reparations ain't gonna help! Blacks in every ad and commercial and movie ain't gonna help! Critical Race Theory ain't gonna help! In fact all those things are Making Things Worse!

The only thing that is going to get blacks into the mainstream of American life is for each black youngster to walk away from the inner-city culture and the victim culture -- and, dare I say, the Democratic Party -- and submit, without complaint, to the rigorous cultural transformation that every person undergoes when they join the middle class. And It Is Hard!

Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.