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June 23, 2004

The Establishment Blues

It's fun to be the Establishment. You get to force your policies and your views down people's throats without having to ask permission from anyone. You get to control the media and the educational system, and you get to ban any thoughts or speech you don't like from the public square.

Being the Establishment, in short, rocks.

Except for one thing.

There's no energy in the Establishment. The Establishment -- whatever sort it might be -- always gets tired, lazy, and intellectually obese. It substitutes fiat for argument, because it can; it substitues bromides for reason, because it can.

And it really fucking pisses off a lot of people, who wind up having a lot of energy and passion and intellectual sharpness chiefly because the Establishment is such a fucking douchebag fat-ass of a thug.

And ultimately the Establishment winds up producing energetic and dedicated opponents like these kids, who are, bless them, the most magnificent pains-in-the-asses I've ever read about.

Note to the Liberal Establishment: Your thuggish tactics and repression of diverse thoughts are producing more conservative "terrorists" like these kids than you're successfully neutralizing. You're in a quagmire of your own creation.

This is an argument that should appeal to you. I've heard you make similar arguments yourself, Liberal Establishment.

Maybe you should stop fighting them and start appeasing them, granting them concessions and "reaching out" via constructive dialogue to find "common ground."

Isn't that what you're always urging on the rest of us? Why don't you take your own advice for once, Liberal Establishment?

Stop oppressing these kids and start asking yourselves: "Why do they hate us?"

.......

I usually don't find these protest reports too interesting, but I really liked this one. The narrator is a great writer, and he's got all sorts of pictures. He's cast his villain perfectly:

I mean: Come on. Just... look at her.

Fun stuff.

I don't know. I used to sort of worry about young people who were this committed to politics -- I know I wasn't at that age. But what the hell. All I know is that these kids are really, really pissing off their leftist teachers, and that's a less harmful past-time than other diversions favored by teenagers.

Thanks to Instapundit.

posted by Ace at 03:03 AM

Comments

It really is a brilliant little essay. I'm particularly impressed by the kid's (kid? He's 5 years younger than I am, most likely) restraint and persistence. I probably would have blown my top had people (especially someone's MOTHER) started assailing me in the halls and screaming "RACIST!"

Posted by: Jeff B. on June 23, 2004 08:57 AM

I protested against the nihilistic and depressing crap we were forced to read in English class. It wasn't just one book, but a steady diet of despair, pointless death, suicide, and deconstruction, as though American Literature offered no other point of view. The whole class was with me, and felt that there was just something weirdly wrong about the unrelenting emphasis.

The barking moonbat teacher had to relent and let us read one of Mark Twain's morality stories, a very meager bone to toss to us. We won our battle but lost the war when, in the end, the county promoted her to the School Board. She dissolved into the monolithic culture of public education, I suppose, doing her best to ruin young minds on a wider scale. Sigh.

Posted by: Joan of Argghh! on June 23, 2004 09:24 AM

What a shock it must be to the leftist teachers who thought they had eradicated conservatism in the young, to see it rise up again all these years later.

When I was a kid in school they were there, but we weren't 'onto' them. It took me years out of high school to figure out that so much of what I had been taught was leftist propaganda, and even longer to start recognizing it in the media. You know...the dog can't smell his own scent...

But the scales have fallen from the eyes of the new generation. This kid is amazing, I get the feeling he is the type who won't give a rat's ass if some marxist college professor tries to fail him for ideological reasons.

Posted by: lauraw on June 23, 2004 10:08 AM

Meet the new boss....Same as the old boss....

Posted by: Senator PhilABuster on June 23, 2004 11:19 AM

Here's a question: Can the establishment change if it refuses to accept that it is, in fact, the establishment?

Posted by: ccwbass on June 23, 2004 12:49 PM

I'm not gay, but I'd sleep with that kid if he'd have me.

Posted by: Jeff G on June 23, 2004 03:36 PM

I wonder if he'd let me adopt him?

What a freaking stud. When I was in High School, I knew a couple of kids who were staunch conservatives, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why. Not because I was a liberal (I wasn't), but because I couldn't see a reason to be staunch about much of anything.

I'm glad to see not everyone is as apathetic as I was.

Posted by: Aaron on June 23, 2004 04:20 PM

Wow, he's smart, articulate, sharply rightwing, brave, and totally cute. I could put him through school just for smiles and little kisses.

Hands off, Jeff G.

Posted by: Doug on June 24, 2004 09:37 AM

I stumbled across that yesterday, as a friend in NYC posts on the ProtestWarrior forum.

I was inspired by the kids story....so much so that I've sent away for my own pocket Constitution.

Posted by: Mbarek on June 24, 2004 09:49 AM

Very funny, and very disturbing. I hope that kid doesn't read this and think 'Why? Do I look gay? I'm not gay! Am I? Shit!'

He is adorable and if I weren't twice his age, married, and afraid of getting arrested....

Posted by: lauraw on June 24, 2004 09:50 AM

"afraid of getting arrested"

Don't fret, LauraW; Bryan's 18. You can cut your eros some slack on this one.

Posted by: Doug on June 24, 2004 11:34 AM

WOO HOO! Then I'm not twice his age either. Now all I have to do is scrape off the husband and we're all set.

Posted by: lauraw on June 24, 2004 03:18 PM

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Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
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A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
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A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
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LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
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In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
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I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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