Mother Jones and public schools
Topics: Education
10 Jan 1995
From: "DG Ervan Darnell"
Today, I received an ad to subscribe to Mother Jones (generally a sort of
green-left publication). Part of their ad punch was a short cartoon that
was reportadly a true story of one of their subscribers. It went like this:
-----------------
Father (while holding daughter): What? He told you that dinosaurs existed on
the earth at the same time as man!
Mother: Yeah! He called it ...uh...creationism! It's the latest in
scientific findings!
(Caption): We'd just moved to this town, but what our babysitter told us
made us ask questions at the next school board meeting.
Person behind lecturn: Doctor Chittick is a *scientist*. It was a
*scientific* presentation.
(Caption): And we started looking into who was running the town.
Father (on phone): Superintendent Ray Reid, Assistant Superintendent Greg
Johnson, and another board member go to the Camano chapel? What? A second
board member goes to another fundamentalist Christian church?
-----------------
Welcome to democracy where the idiocy of the majority rules. What I found
so amusing about this is that Mother Jones never even contemplated the
possibility of privatizing schools. If that were done, it would not matter
what the fundies did. The good liberal parents could send their kid to a
school that said the earth is 4.6GA old and geometry was discovered by
blacks in Egypt. But, no, it was just inconceivable that such a fine
institution as the public schools could be abandoned. The cartoon went on
with some campaigning to elect a good liberal to the school board and that
fixed all of the problems of course. Such believers in Democratic Socialism
should have their advertising budget put to a vote on the next national ballot!
Dave Barry in a recent interview with Reason had a similar comment that I
thought was cleverly phrased. He said that the first objection people
raised to libertarianism was that it would suddenly be legal to have sex
with dogs. His first response was 'so are you going to rush out have sex
with a dog just because it becomes legal and do you think the law stops
anyone now who wants to?'. His second, and deeper, response was 'what kind
of a pathetic system is it that just as easily could say you *must* have sex
with dogs as you *cannot* because 51% of the people say so?'.
Home