Vin Suprynowicz

Has it really been five years — Thanksgiving of 2009 — since I posted a “readers respond” column under this headline?

For those who’d like another gander at what passes for reasoned, well-documented debate among the defenders of today’s mandatory government youth propaganda camps, I believe it’s still posted at https://vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=374 .

I had the chance to vote “No” for more government-school bond sales — and ongoing taxation to retire them, with interest, of course — last month. Take yourselves hence, therefore, and do likewise.

“But Vin, while we all admit the public schools have their flaws, won’t you work with us to try and reform them?”

No.

Sixty-plus years of “reform” runarounds — of which the most memorable has probably been “the new math” — have generated hundreds of millions in grant funding for Ph.D. educrats to write “new curricula” to keep everyone confused, resulting in ever-worse results at ever-greater ongoing cost. And I can tell you why.

It is a waste of time and resources to attempt to “reform” an institution which is doing pretty much what the Prussians designed it to do (and which those who brought it to this country in the years following the Civil War and up through the 1930s KNEW it was designed to do) — reduce the offspring of the “lower classes” to complaisant, obedient soldiers and assembly line workers who can’t read and comprehend a meaningful critique of Ponzi-scheme economics or the systematic gutting of the Fourth, Sixth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments, but who will dutifully arise en masse and march to their next assigned work station at the sound of a bell — or a sergeant’s order.

(See www.lewrockwell.com/2010/09/john-taylor-gatto/the-prussian-connection/ , or just look up John Dewey, Horace Mann, and “socialization.”)

I will take this opportunity, however, to deal with one clear presumption of these Defenders of the Government Youth Propaganda Camps which I decided to let pass (for lack of space, if nothing else) the last time.

Note the sneering references to how our forebears were not merely “bare-foot, illiterate hayseeds,” but how they were also “gun-toting,” barefoot, illiterate hayseeds. Note the bizarre reference, in a discussion of the current state of America’s coercion-based, tax-funded “education,” to my wearing an “NRA hat.”

I have mentioned in writing many times that I have never been a member of the National Rifle Association, which occasionally does some good work but which is at heart America’s largest gun control organization, endlessly repeating that “All our current gun laws should be enforced” (presumably in order to paint themselves as “moderates,” since they thus merely argue we “don’t need any more”) rather than insisting all such laws are unconstitutional and tend to render us progressively less able to resist police-state tyranny.

(Am I saying the average American has the right to own and carry around a belt-fed machine gun or a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, with plenty of live ammo for each, without filling out some form and waiting for federal “permission”? Of course I am. Do you think if your state tried to secede from the union, the troops sent by Washington to re-conquer your town the way they did Vicksburg would leave behind all such weaponry, since using it “wouldn’t be playing fair”?)

So I’m afraid we can’t give these slack-jaws must credit for doing their homework.

But beyond that, what’s with this bizarre correlation of illiteracy and/or rural poverty with gun ownership?

*I* would not have chosen to seek such a correlation. If one is going to be forced upon us, though, a couple of points come to mind:

First, I would think anyone who’s demonstrated an ability to disassemble and re-assemble a Colt 45 or an M-1 Garand or M-1A or any other semi-automatic firearm (as you must, to clean it) has at least demonstrated a certain level of manual dexterity and ability to understand a moderately complex piece of engineering. One who does NOT possess this skill is not necessarily “dumber”; he or she has simply given us one less piece of evidence on which to judge.

Gun ownership by itself does not prove the gun owner “more intelligent” than the non-gun-owner. However, without even realizing it, I believe those who defend the government youth propaganda camps with such shrill hysteria have confirmed something important here: This is a battle between cultures — launched by those who consider themselves superior because they continually simper their support of “multiculturalism”!

If you angrily defend the tax-funded schools despite every concrete evidence that they’re producing (at ever greater expense) generations of young persons progressively less able to count change and file things in alphabetical order — let alone to read an electrical diagram or parse out even a few sentences in a foreign language — and you embrace the argument of our statist masters (who have an obvious interest in rendering the populace unable to resist by keeping them both dumbed-down and disarmed) that gun owners are stupid, that they display some psychiatric disability having to do with fears that their sexual organs are too small (or whatever), you thus reveal that you lack and actually despise the ability to re-examine and reject virtually any of the statist propaganda you’ve been fed.

This tells me that you will ignore any evidence that autism and other recently accelerating health problems of the young could have anything to do with children being given more and more inoculations (many when their immune systems are still too undeveloped to produce the desired antibodies), that you decline to do the reading and instead prefer to chant, “Get your kids all their shots! Parents who don’t get them all their shots are unfit wackos!”

This tells me that you will insist you are a “well-educated intellectual,” even as you watch television many hours a day but read fewer than three new non-fiction books each year. That you scorn and laugh at anyone who challenges the safety of any new product or technology, based on the smug presumption that “The government wouldn’t let them sell it if it wasn’t safe.”

In short, you have demonstrated to me that you are just what the government schools aim to produce: dumb.