Take this Walz
"When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction." (Mark Twain)
Боб Дорнан - один из самых придурочных конгрессменов в американской истории. В 1977 его выступление завершало анти-феминисткий митинг в Хьюстоне под фашистским лозунгом "Бог, Семья, Страна". В 1995, объявляя о своем решении баллотироваться в президенты США, Дорнан призывал к закрытию министерства образования:
"Under the circumstances, it is absolutely a no-brainer to abolish the Department of Education. Bob Dole has called for this, Lamar Alexander, a former Secretary of Education under George Bush, Bill Bennett after he left that position and went to another job in the White House. I think before this race is over, all nine of us will be calling for the abolition of the Department of Education, as are most people in the cloakroom that I have spoken to here on the Republican side of the aisle, the majority side.
Again, some of our friends who call themselves conservatives do more harm than good on this issue as they attempt to play to the very natural interests parents have in the education of their children. All we hear about from some so-called conservatives is how we need to train our children to compete in the world markets of the 21st century. More math, more science, more national goals and standards.
Well, whether we like to hear it or not, Mr. Speaker, it is just New World Order mumbo-jumbo in the main. All this talk of remaining competitive, the best, the best in the world, the best this, the best that, all of this for economic purposes only is global baloney. Global baloney. It is funny how we did not need this kind of political leadership to become the most industrious Nation that had ever existed. Only social engineers talk about America in macro terms as if they know better than parents what is best for their children and how to train them and how to educate them."
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1995-04-06/html/CREC-1995-04-06-pt1-PgH4401-3.htm
Конец его политической карьеры был несколько закономерным. Дорнана победила демократка Лоретта Санчес, которая через 20 лет после этого проиграла выборы в Сенат Камале Харрис.
Our younger readers may not know about Robert K. Dornan, which is a shame because during the height of his national notoriety in the 1980s and 90s the combative Orange County congressman would have frightened Donald Trump off political stages.
Combining a rightwing ideology with his Catholic faith, an enormous ego, angry temperament, theatrical instincts and DNA that allowed him to routinely answer unasked questions for 30 minutes or longer, Dornan took on women’s rights, abortion, gays, communists, Mexican immigrants, Democrats, Jews and Bill Clinton’s “dough-boy thighs” with unprecedented hostility. Clinton once observed that the New York City native whose uncle starred in the Wizard of Oz acted like a crazed street dog suffering rabies. From 1985 to 1997, Dornan employed a nasty attitude not just to defeat opponent after opponent. He annihilated them. As a result, we sarcastically called him the “congressman for life” from Garden Grove.
Then the impossible happened after a failed Republican presidential primary bid that won the attention of comedians across the nation. An unknown Latina Democrat named Loretta Sanchez startled the political world in 1996 by taking this bitter white man’s job. Dornan claimed nuns and “illegal immigrant” voters carried across the border by yours truly had stolen his seat. Two years later, he made that laughable crusade the centerpiece of his effort to return to Congress, failed again against Sanchez and retired to northern Virginia.
https://www.ocweekly.com/bob-dornan-discusses-donald-trump-diabolical-clintons-violence-traitors-art-and-boot-licking-7679817/
Но борьба со страшным "New World Order mumbo-jumbo" не умерла и продолжает жить, вместе со стремлением уничтожить министерство образования и публичное образование как таковое, в печально известном "Project 2025".
Project 2025 would make extensive changes to public schooling, cutting longtime low-income and early education federal programs like Head Start, for example, and even the entire Education Department. “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated,” the plan reads.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/12/project-2025-summary-trump/
As a former geography teacher and self-proclaimed GIS nerd, I’m thrilled to proclaim today as Geographic Information Systems Day.
Here in Minnesota, we are using GIS to make state government more effective - whether we’re replacing lead pipes or expanding homeownership. pic.twitter.com/9odRLPlU9I
- Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) November 15, 2023
Для контраста - рассказ из 2008 о том, как в 1990ых Тим Уолз, школьный учитель географии, рассказывал своим ученикам про Холокост и учил их распозновать признаки приближения геноцида.
For the global geography class, he devised something far more ambitious than what the curriculum easily could have been - the identification and memorization of capitals, mountain ranges and major rivers. It was more ambitious, too, than a unit solely on the Holocaust of the sort many states have required.
“The Holocaust is taught too often purely as a historical event, an anomaly, a moment in time,” Mr. Walz said in a recent interview, recalling his approach. “Students understood what had happened and that it was terrible and that the people who did this were monsters.
“The problem is,” he continued, “that relieves us of responsibility. Obviously, the mastermind was sociopathic, but on the scale for it to happen, there had to be a lot of people in the country who chose to go down that path. You have to make the intellectual leap to figure out the reasons why.”
So Mr. Walz took his students - Brandon Bell, the wrestler; Beth Taylor, the cheerleader; Lanae Merwin, the quiet girl always reading some book about Queen Elizabeth; and all the other children of mechanics, secretaries and a town dentist - and assigned them to study the conditions associated with mass murder. What factors, he asked them to determine, had been present when Germans slaughtered Jews, Turks murdered Armenians, the Khmer Rouge ravaged their Cambodian countrymen?
“It was different and unusual, certainly not a project you’d be expecting,” Mr. Hofmann, now 31, of Phoenix, remembered recently of the class. “The biggest part was just the freedom to explore things. No matter how abnormal or far-fetched an idea might sound, you can form an opinion. Instead of just going in and having a teacher say, ‘Here’s information, learn it, know it, you’ll be tested on it,’ it was, ‘Here’s an idea, run with it.’ ”
For nine weeks through the winter and early spring that school year, through the howling blizzards and the planting of the first alfalfa on the plains, the class pored over data about economics, natural resources and ethnic composition. They read about civil war, colonialism and totalitarian ideology. They worked with reference books and scholarly reports, long before conducting research took place instantly online.
Most, like Mr. Hofmann, had spent their entire lives in and near Alliance. A few had traveled to Washington, D.C., with the school marching band. A few had driven four hours to Denver to buy the new Nirvana CD. Mostly, though, the outside world was a place they built, under Mr. Walz’s tutelage, in their own brains.
When the students finished with the past, Mr. Walz gave a final exam of sorts. He listed about a dozen current nations - Yugoslavia, Congo, some former Soviet republics among them - and asked the class as a whole to decide which was at the greatest risk of sliding into genocide.
Their answer was: Rwanda. The evidence was the ethnic divide between Hutus and Tutsis, the favoritism toward Tutsis shown by the Belgian colonial regime, and the previous outbreaks of tribal violence. Mr. Walz awarded high marks.
Then summer arrived and school let out. The students did what teenagers did in Alliance over the summer. They water-skied at the reservoir, swam in the Bridgeport sand pits and mostly “cruised the Butte,” endlessly driving up and down Box Butte Avenue.
THE next April, in 1994, Mr. Walz heard news reports of a plane carrying the Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana, being shot down. He told himself at the time, “This is not going to end up good.”
It did not. Over the next three months, militant Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. The reports reached even The Alliance Times-Herald, the local daily newspaper. Mr. Walz’s students, now juniors, saw their prophecy made into flesh and blood. <...>
“You have to understand what caused genocide to happen,” Mr. Walz said, with those grim anniversaries in mind. “Or it will happen again.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/education/23education.html
