The Little Boy

Who never grew up.

I feel for the young boy Mr. Sullivan used to be (as described in this video.)

I too was a gifted kid who got stomped by the system (in my case I ran head first into a teacher who was a sadist and a school system which all but encouraged bullying because they were embedded in a community full of hyper-aggressiveness, hyper-competitive young executives, all on the fast track up, or on the fast track down.  The indifferent administrators and laughably inadequate "gifted" programs would come later...)

But to harbor that resentment all these years? To haul it all the way across the Atlantic ocean and project it onto another country and culture -- a country and culture which you clearly did not and not understand? And to get that transposition so dangerously, backwardly wrong?

This is what I cannot get past.

America was never England, Mr. Sullivan, and our Liberals and Democrats were not the Labor Party when it came to education or anything else.

In this country, it was not the Left who closed schools down to keep gifted outsiders from succeeding: it was a group of powerful Southern Democrats who, once upon a time and in pursuit of the very Conservative idea of maintaining the social order and stability of their racist society, wrapped bigotry up in a Bible to keep African Americans subjugated.

This they did in the name of Almighty God.

To keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated, these same people used the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and cited the authority of the same Almighty God to justify forging themselves into an aggregate paleo-fascist entity called the Confederacy, which seceding from the country and made bloody civil war on its neighbors.

Did your gifted school mention any of this when they were teaching you world history?

Did they bother to teach you that, having lost that bloody civil war, these same, damned people merely shifted from outright slavery to a system of brutal apartheid enforced by state-sanctioned terrorism to keep their way of life alive and African Americans subjugated?  That they justified it all once again using the same bigotry, wrapped in the same Bible and citing the authority of the same Almighty God?

Did they teach you that this depravity never went away?

That in America it has been passed from generation to generation like hemophilia?

That one of the "To Do" items on the very top of their list was to deny anything remotely resembling a decent public education to non-Whites, gifted or not?

That these are the people who redubbed themselves "Dixiecrats".  Who opened hundreds of "segregation academies" to keep their children hating the way they were supposed to.  Who rigged up property laws, election laws, marriage laws and state constitutions to deny, cripple and oppress non-Whites.  Who took the old Confederate battle flag out of the museum and incorporated into their state flags just to scream "Fuck You!" at the forces of justice and modernity a little bit louder.

I guess your school skipped all that.  Otherwise you certainly would have learned that the direct, lineal descendants of the proud practitioners of this Bible-wrapped bigotry migrated en masse into the  Conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Migrated en masse because they were invited by the leaders of the Conservative movement and the Republican Party to do so.

This is all happened, by the way, at around the same time you were getting out of diapers.

So how the hell did you miss it?

How in the hell did virtually all of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals fail to notice that these very people still grimly carry on their centuries-old struggle  to use the terrible power of government to oppress, thwart and cripple the groups they hate.  That they are defined by their hatred?  What whole religions, media empires depend on that hatred?

That your entire movement, Mr. Sullivan, long ago came to depend on that hatred?  A movement you crossed an ocean to join, and to which you have have devoted most of your adult life?

Honest to Christ, Mr. Sullivan, some day I really would like at least one of you Conservative exiles and expats to spend 1/100th of the effort you devote to parsing Ron Paul's latest verbal tic and give an honest answer this simple question:  How did some of Conservatism's leading public intellectuals get something this fundamental so massively wrong?  Is it a cognitive disorder?  Were you just that blind?  Or was it for the money?

Because it wasn't the those terrible Liberals who pulled their children out of American public schools rather than let the Socialist Kenyan Usurper "indoctrinate " their minds with his sinister "Orwellian" message of "Stay in school and do your homework".

No, as usual it was the brain caste of American Conservatism who dreamed up that bit of racist bilge, just as it was, once again, the rank-and-file of that movement who obediently lined up to hate whoever their leaders told them to hate.




It was, in other words, exactly the same sort of people who have been the heart of the Right since long before you joined their team.

How did you miss that?