Calloused Americans

Look! A working class white guy!

After a few hours of writing on my laptop, I need to get up, change my clothes, and do another kind of work that involves more than my brain and my fingers on a keyboard. I have to use tools invented and manufactured in previous centuries — tools like saws, hammers, drills, chainsaws, tape measures, rulers, squares, scrapers, and the like. I have to think and work in three dimensions. I have to feel my tools and materials, and smell things like earth, sawn wood, or paint. I have to move my body, lift things, climb ladders, set up saw horses — either fix something or build it.

There are callouses on my hands and I own a pickup truck. That makes me different from most Americans on the east or west coast. That I’m also a heterosexual, white guy (HWG) makes it very likely that I voted for Trump. When the uncalloused try to analyze what happened last November 8th, they refer to us as “non-college-educated white men.” It’s ill-concealed condescension, but if called out on it, the uncalloused hastily add a Seinfeldesque: “…not that there’s anything wrong with that” as a further effort to camouflage contempt.

They were the ones laughing last September 9th in New York City when a smug Hillary Clinton put half of Trump supporters into a “basket of deplorables.” We’re not nearly as sophisticated as she and her audience. We’re calloused, deplorable, HWGs. We’re “irredeemable” because we can never be as smart as they are — even though we’re the ones they call when something doesn’t work and they cannot figure out why, or something breaks and they don’t know how to fix it. They think our intelligence is limited, but we know it’s the other way around. We know more about their world than they know about ours, but they never suspect that.

NBC Pajama Boy in shock

We were the ones laughing on November 9th — at the shocked faces of the uncalloused sophisticates on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, as well as the tearful faces on college campuses. We’re still chuckling at pussyhat marches and the rest of the protests.

Non-college-educated white men didn't borrow against their future to spend years being inculcated with progressive pap. They don’t have to spend still more years learning that what they purchased with those tens of thousands of dollars was worthless, or that it could all have been picked it all up just be reading a few books here and there. We respect the college-educated who studied the hard sciences: physics, engineering, biology, chemistry, nursing, IT, and so forth. That kind of college is worth something. It’s grounded in the real world, unlike: sociology, education, art history, journalism, or any of the “studies” — like “ethnic studies”; “queer studies”; “women’s studies”; “gender studies”; and so forth.

In the interest of full disclosure, I had to get some degrees because they were necessary for a teaching certificate, thought they shouldn’t have been. They didn’t teach me to teach. To do that, one must know the subject matter, and then be able to impart it to others. There’s no need for college “education departments.” I endured dozens of worthless courses before I could get into a classroom, but I wasn’t brainwashed by them: I worked full-time in the real world throughout the process and stayed grounded. I knew academic baloney when I heard it, and that was more than forty years ago. It’s exponentially worse now. There was a gulf between academia and reality back then, but it’s an ocean today. The 21st century college campus is La-La Land, and you won’t find anyTrump voters there. You might be escorted off campus if you even utter his name without first issuing a trigger warning. Trump voters exist only in the real world.

"Black Bloc" leftist thugs

Leftists dressed in black and wearing masks are attacking people pro-Trump rallies and conservatives on college campuses with fists, clubs, and pepper spray. Last Saturday, however, they got their butts kicked in Berkeley, California. Videos indicate the butt-kickers belong to a demographic that might be described as non-college-educated, white men with callouses. Will the left escalate beyond fists and clubs next time? Let’s hope not, but as David French writes in National Review: 

We are now teetering on the edge of a truly terrifying incident, one trigger-pull away from a slaughter. Campus and urban progressives have a choice to make. Is this a nation of laws? If it is, then it’s time to grow a backbone, protect free speech, punish rioters, and expel those who disrupt the educational environment regardless of ideology.

Okay, enough of writing. Time to go outside and move my body — do something in three dimensions, stay grounded.

Progressive Fruits

“Death to America! Death to America!” shouted a million Iranians in the capital square. Every year they would gather to chant, and every year I would show film clips to my students. It was always instigated by Iran’s government in a country that calls itself “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” which, I’m sure, President Obama would insist has nothing to do with Islam as he negotiates with the ayatollahs.

My teaching ran directly counter to what was being taught in the vast majority of American public school classrooms. Most American students hear that Islam is a religion of peace. A majority of the world’s muslims are peaceful, most teachers claim. About the latter, they are correct. About the former? Fourteen hundred years of history gives lie to any assertion that Islam is a religion of peace. Yes, it was relatively peaceful between the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 to the Iranian revolution in 1979, but in virtually every other period since about 600 AD, Islam has been anything but.

But I was an anachronism. Those calling themselves Progressives have been in charge of education in America at all levels for almost two generations and the results are coming in. During the span of just two days I read about the following:

Students at the University of California at Irvine voted to ban the American flag in a portion of campus because they want to be “inclusive.” I figured: Oh well, that’s California — the left coast — the land of fruits and nuts — run yet again by Jerry “Governor Moonbeam” Brown. No big deal. Par for the course.

Then a dean at Cornell University was asked by an undercover conservative posing as a Moroccan student if he would welcome ISIS on campus. “Sure,” he said. Then he was asked if the “student” could invite “a freedom fighter [from ISIS] to come and do like a training camp for students.” And the response? “You would be allowed to do something like that. It’s just like bringing in a coach, to do a training, a sports trainer or something,” said the dean. Perhaps the dean doesn’t know that ISIS is at war with western civilization - which isn’t a required course anymore at Cornell, or at 86% of all other American universities either. Students at Cornell are instead required to take a course in a non-western culture.

Then Meredith Shiner, a reporter at Yahoo News, commented on Senator Ted Cruz’s announcement that he was running for president, by tweeting: “Bizarre [for you, Senator Cruz] to talk about how rights are God-made and not man-made in your speech announcing a POTUS bid? When Constitution was man-made?”

Hmm. Shiner graduated from Duke University, worked at Roll Call and Politico before Yahoo News, yet she’s a progressive who clearly doesn’t know much. She doesn’t know, for instance, that the concept of God-given rights isn’t in our Constitution. It comes from our Declaration of Independence, which was written shortly after the “shot heard ’round the world” was fired in Lexington, Massachusetts. But things have changed even there. After students at Lexington High School voted a theme of  “American Pride” for a school dance, their progressive school administrators cancelled it because it excluded other nationalities. “People consider America to be a melting pot, so the fact that it was even considered offensive is what people are a little surprised about,” said student Sneha Rao. I’m not surprised. That’s progressive education in action.

This was a little closer to home. I grew up less than twenty miles from Lexington. Yes, I know it’s in Massachusetts, sometimes referred to as “The People’s Republic of Massachusetts” and it’s a famously progressive state like California, but still. American pride is offensive? In America? What have we become?

Fryeburg Academy

Even closer to home, I read that a lacrosse coach at Fryeburg Academy was encouraged to resign because he posted a letter on his Facebook page. This guy coached some of my former students. The Conway Daily Sun reported: “The letter, written by ‘An American Citizen’ was about Obama’s speech given in Cairo in 2009 [in which he] said that Islam has long been a part of American history.” The letter goes on to criticize Islam, saying Muslims are still the largest traffickers in human slavery, which the US State Department reported in 2009. It claims Muslims were allied with Hitler in World War II, which they certainly were. Hitler’s Mein Kampf remains a best seller in Turkey and across the Middle East. In Arabic, it’s called “My Jihad.” My former students know all this.

The letter claims Muslims were either silent on or pleased with the September 11th attacks. That’s dismaying, but also absolutely true. For years I showed students video of Muslims dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem, which progressive mainstream media outlets quickly squashed. Visiting there in 2005, I was advised by my Palestinian guide not to leave the hotel by myself — because it wasn’t safe for Americans.

The Sun reported that although Coach Lees was to meet with top administrators about the letter, “athletic director Sue Thurston told him a decision to fire him had already been made,” so he resigned. Unless there was something more damning in “the letter” than the Sun reported, it looks like Fryeburg Academy officials should bone up on the history of Islam.

Academia As Humpty Dumpty

How can so many college kids afford to party during spring break? Plane tickets, hotel rooms, alcohol, food, marijuana, all cost a lot of money. Do their parent’s pay for it? Do they use their government Pell Grants? Their taxpayer-subsidized loans? And where do they get the time? Don’t they have to study? Don’t they have to write papers? Don’t they have work-study jobs?

Coed Dorm Life

Millions of our young people believe they’re entitled to party - not just for a week in spring, but every weekend or even every night - for years. Most take five or six years to complete a four-year degree and then graduate with six-figure debt and few if any job prospects in this “new-normal economy.”

Remember the “Occupy” demonstrations? Many participants were students who spent lots of time protesting capitalism and holding up signs demanding their student loans be forgiven, not to mention trashing up whatever city they were “occupying.” How did they find time for that?

Occupy Wall Street

College is hugely expensive now, and too few of us ask why. In the late sixties and early seventies I was able to pay my own way through undergraduate and graduate school at state universities working part-time and full-time jobs that weren’t particularly high-paying. I was a hospital orderly on the second shift while an undergrad. I went to classes in the morning and worked the 3pm-11:30pm shift and scrounged for study time. After that I taught school all day and attended classes nights and summers for graduate school. I got no help from parents or from government for any of it other than the subsidies Massachusetts paid directly to its state universities. I got no grants and no loans - and graduated with no debt.

Studying for Anatomy Class in the dorm

It is this writer’s considered opinion that the discipline and time-management skills learned by juggling work and school will be more instructive than whatever is learned partying in Fort Lauderdale, Virginia Beach or in dormitories. Keeping a foot in the real world of work helps a young person maintain some realistic perspective while immersed in the liberal/political/social, grade-inflated cocoon of the 21st-century college campus. Much of what is learned there must be unlearned anyway to succeed outside the bacchanalian dormitories and frat houses of academia, where serious students are impeded in their study by the non-stop partying all around them.

Harry Crosby

The late Harry Crosby, an acquaintance from the WWII generation, told me he got his undergraduate degree from the University of Iowa in the late thirties and he was able to pay for a whole year’s tuition, books and fees by working six weeks in summer. Then he became a navigator on a B-17 and got his graduate degrees on the GI Bill after the war. What has happened in the past four decades to drive up costs so much? Has a college education gotten so much better? I don’t think so. There’s plenty of evidence that it’s become much less rigorous. Students pay more these days - to learn less - as for decades, tuition and fees have risen an average of 7.5% annually - far in excess of the cost of living and with little or no justification from the so-called intellectuals on our campuses. Some of those geniuses at Duke University, for example, where it costs more than $50,000 in tuition and fees for one year already, are raising the fees still more to cover sex-change operations for students.

If you can’t figure out whether you’re a man or a woman, it wouldn’t seem likely you’re going to learn too much at a university no matter how expensive it may be. Many economists predict a trillion-dollar education bubble about to burst when millions stop making payments on their student loans. Will the academic establishment come tumbling down like Humpty Dumpty? Looks like a real possibility. As economist Herb Klein put it, "Trends that can't continue, won’t." But what will replace it? Expansion of community colleges teaching real-world skills and online courses away from the La-La Land of the modern college campus would be my guess.

If you’re graduating from high school and you don’t have a firm idea about what you want to do, my advice would be: don’t go to college. Join the military or get a job until you know what you want for a career. If college will help you get there faster, fine - then go. You may learn, however, that on-the-job training will get you there more quickly and much less expensively.