The guy refers to Ayers as a "school reformer"?
'On Meet the Press Sunday morning, Tom Brokaw—who will be moderating tomorrow’s debate between the presidential candidates—picked up this now conventional wisdom and described Ayers as “a school reformer.”'
That from a City Journal article that I have seen noted at Instapundit and others. Always read City Journal.
More of that article below but RTWA:
"Calling Bill Ayers a school reformer is a bit like calling Joseph Stalin an agricultural reformer. (If you find the metaphor strained, consider that Walter Duranty, the infamous New York Times reporter covering the Soviet Union in the 1930s, did, in fact, depict Stalin as a great land reformer who created happy, productive collective farms.) For instance, at a November 2006 education forum in Caracas, Venezuela, with President Hugo Chávez at his side, Ayers proclaimed his support for “the profound educational reforms under way here in Venezuela under the leadership of President Chávez. We share the belief that education is the motor-force of revolution. . . . I look forward to seeing how you continue to overcome the failings of capitalist education as you seek to create something truly new and deeply humane.” Ayers concluded his speech by declaring that “Venezuela is poised to offer the world a new model of education—a humanizing and revolutionary model whose twin missions are enlightenment and liberation,” and then, as in days of old, raised his fist and chanted: “Viva Presidente Chávez! Viva la Revolucion Bolivariana! Hasta la Victoria Siempre!”
As I have shown in previous articles in City Journal, Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for “social justice” in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive. As a leader of this growing “reform” movement, Ayers was recently elected vice president for curriculum of the American Education Research Association, the nation’s largest organization of ed school professors and researchers."
Regarding Duranty:
A Stuttaford article on the execrable Times man here.
A book here.
A note on his Pulitzer here.
A letter to the Times below:
Walter Duranty's Pulitzer
Regarding Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s suggestion to the Pulitzer Prize Board that revoking Walter Duranty's 1932 prize recalled the ''Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories'' (''Times Should Lose Pulitzer From 30's, Consultant Says,'' news article, Oct. 29):
Those targeted for ''airbrushing'' were already murdered, languishing in the gulag or forced into exile after having been falsely accused of espionage, treason, sabotage and other ''crimes.''
The N.K.V.D., the predecessor of the K.G.B., then ordered libraries to expunge all mention and to relegate them to the status of non-persons, a fate that persisted for most until the Gorbachev era.
Revoking Mr. Duranty's prize is another matter altogether. He was never prosecuted for any crimes. His articles remain available in the archives of The New York Times, and his books on the shelves of major libraries.
Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty's prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.MARK VON HAGEN
New York, Oct. 29, 2003
The writer, a professor of history at Columbia University, was hired by The New York Times to make an independent assessment of Walter Duranty's reporting. "
The Times is proud that it's lies brought Castro to power (February 24, 2007):
'"Still, as former Times executive editor Max Frankel has written, it "practically invented Fidel Castro for the American people." Without it, Castro might well never have risen to power in Cuba.
Now the ailing Communist dictator is formally acknowledging the big favor he got from the Times.
The Cuban state news agency Prensa Latina reported last week that the government has unveiled a marble plaque commemorating Matthews' interview at the remote location where it took place in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
There's no denying that Matthews was infatuated with the 30-year-old revolutionary, who granted his first-ever interview to the Times. "Thousands of men and women are heart and soul with Fidel Castro and the new deal for which they think he stands," wrote Matthews.
Yet as Castro later gleefully admitted, his entire force at the time consisted of just 18 men. Matthews never caught on to the fact that he was seeing the same people, who kept going past him in circles."'
More on Matthews in a book review at Reason here. He has received mention here before.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Regarding "American Usage": resort to it often enough that people cannot absolutely know that you are invoking it to weasel out of being wrong.
Take the time to enjoy David Foster Wallace's "Tense Present." I side with him and the Snoots but have not the skill or the ethics to resist that "American Usage" dodge. I also look forward to reading the Bryson material:
'"We regular citizens tend to go to The Dictionary for authoritative guidance.[10] Rarely, however, do we ask ourselves who decides what gets in The Dictionary or what words or spellings or pronunciations get deemed "substandard" or "incorrect." Whence the authority of dictionary-makers to decide what's OK[11] and what isn't? Nobody elected them, after all. And simply appealing to precedent or tradition won't work, because what's considered correct changes over time. In the 1600s, for instance, the second-singular pronoun took a singular conjugation — "You is." Earlier still, the standard 2-S pronoun wasn't "you" but "thou". Huge numbers of now acceptable words like clever, fun, banter, and prestigious entered English as what usage authorities considered errors or egregious slang. And not just usage conventions but English itself changes over time; if it didn't, we'd all still be talking like Chaucer. Who's to say which changes are natural and which are corruptions? And when Bryan Garner or E. Ward Gilman do in fact presume to say, why should we believe them?
These sorts of questions are not new, but they do now have a certain urgency. America is in the midst of a protracted Crisis of Authority in matters of language. In brief, the same sorts of political upheavals that produced everything from Kent State to Independent Counsels have produced an influential contra-SNOOT school for whom normative standards of English grammar and usage are functions of nothing but custom and superstition and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language authorities boss them around. See for example MIT's Steven Pinker in a famous New Republic article — "Once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the writing establishment, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations" — or, at a somewhat lower pitch, Bill Bryson in Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way:
Who sets down all those rules that we all know
about from childhood: the idea that we must never
end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with
a conjunction, that we must use "each other" for two
things and "one another" for more than two ...? The
answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does,
that when you look into the background of these
"rules" there is often little basis for them. In ADMAU's Preface, Garner himself addresses the Authority Question with a Trumanesque simplicity and candor that simultaneously disguise the author's cunning and exemplify it:
As you might already suspect, I don't shy away
from making judgments. I can't imagine that most
readers would want me to. Linguists don't like it,
of course, because judgment involves subjectivity.[12]
It isn't scientific. But rhetoric and usage, in the view
of most professional writers, aren't scientific endeavors.
You don't want dispassionate descriptions; you want
sound guidance. And that requires judgment. Whole monographs could be written just on the masterful rhetoric of this passage. Note for example the ingenious equivocation of judgment in "I don't shy away from making judgments" vs. "And that requires judgment." Suffice it to say that Garner is at all times keenly aware of the Authority Crisis in modern usage; and his response to this crisis is in the best Democratic Spirit rhetorical."'
and this with it's footnote:
"...The most obvious problem with it is that not everything can go in The Dictionary. Why not? Because you can't observe every last bit of every last native speaker's "language behavior," and even if you could, the resultant dictionary would weigh 4 million pounds and have to be updated hourly.[20] The fact is that any lexicographer is going to have to make choices about what gets in and what doesn't. And these choices are based on ... what? And now we're right back where we started.
1 comment:
It seems they've already begun airbrushing Obama's past.
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