A Voice for Freedom

So, has anyone heard of this new show Aliens in America? Basically, it's about a kid in some little midwestern town who's having a hard time in high school, a guy without much of a social life, so his mom signs up to host an exchange student in the hopes that'll at least give him one friend. The exchange student turns out to be a Pakistani Muslim named Raja who's even more out of his element in an American high school than the American kid, so of course they become fast friends. Which all sounds like a decent concept for a sitcom. But - you knew there was a "but" coming, right? - leave it to Hollywood to wreck it.

I've just seen a "sneak peak" of the show at the CW Network website. And three guesses what all the American characters in the show have in common. That's right, they're all racists.

It starts when the family first finds out that their exchange student is a Muslim; they try to "return" him, saying he's "not what they ordered", and complain to the principal of the school, who made the arrangements. The principal says that another family pulled out of the program when they found out they were getting a Muslim student, which is why he didn't mention it. Soon enough, Raja finds himself in a class with a teacher introducing him as a "real-life Pakistani who practices Muslimism [sic]". The teacher asks the class how they feel about "Raja's differences", whereupon a girl raises her hand and says she's angry at him because of 9/11. The teacher asks "who else is angry with Raja?", and every hand in the room goes up.

I'm sorry, but what the hell is wrong with the media? I'm used to subtle and not-so-subtle accusations against whites, men, Westerners, conservatives, and Americans in general interspersed throughout television programs these days. In fact, other than Stargate, I'm not sure there's a program I watch these days that doesn't make snide little comments every now and then. But an entire series - a series meant to be a comedy, no less - which hinges on assuming that almost all of its characters are racists? Since when is that funny? Are they really expecting people not to notice that this is all just an exercise in propaganda? Wait, I can answer that...yes, they are. And they're probably right.

Pop quiz: name five major figures of the twentieth century. If I were asked that, I would probably say Joseph Stalin, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Adolf Hitler, and Winston Churchill. All pretty major people, right? Then would it surprise you to learn that three of them have just been removed from the list of key historical figures recommended for teaching in secondary schools in the UK? Since two of the people on my list are American presidents, you can guess it's not them. Yep, that's right; high school teachers in the UK are no longer being recommended to teach Stalin, Hitler, or Churchill.

The History Curriculum Association says the move "promotes ignorance".

One person who remains on the list of key British historical figures is William Wilberforce. "Who?" you ask? Apparently, he was one of the lawmakers instrumental in ending the slave trade. I guess leaders in the fight for freedom are only important if they lived before 1900. Martin Luther King Jr has also been removed from the list.

It's hardly confined to the UK. I already seem to be the only person in the College of Education who's ever heard of the Cambodian Killing Fields. Ten years from now, I shouldn't wonder if half of American high school graduates have never heard of World War Two. Heck, if you take "Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader" as evidence, they already think New York to Chicago is a transatlantic flight.

Ever feel like you're standing on the Titanic bailing water out the porthole with a dixie cup? That's my feeling as a teacher.

I thought this was a joke when I first heard about it, but apparently not. In what has to be the most ludicrous totalitarian act in history, China has officially banned Tibetan Buddhists from reincarnating without government permission. The Chinese government calls it "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation".

It appears that China is attempting to stop the exiled Dalai Lama from reincarnating in Tibet. As the Dalai Lama refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese occupation, however, this seems to be rather pointless.

Oh, and also, there is the small matter of it being totally insane!!

There are two options when it comes to reincarnation: either it's real or it isn't. If it isn't real, this is all totally cuckoo. And if it is, then I think it's quite unlikely the Chinese government can actually control the ingress and egress of departed souls through its borders. How are they going to enforce this law? Maybe they'll post a sign at every port of entry: "ATTENTION: If you are a spirit seeking reincarnation, you MUST have a Rebirth Visa (form #38905-B). Violators will be warded off with sage."

For those who don't know, I spent my first year of college at Cornell University, a place with 25,000 students and about six and a half Republicans spread amongst the loony majority. And I mean loony - Ithaca, New York, which contains both Cornell U and Ithaca College, is the only community in the entire United States which returned a Green Party majority in the 2000 federal election.

Anyway, today, I found a very interesting article online, which was published in the Cornell Daily Sun which was published not long after I left Ithaca in 2004. The Daily Sun is generally a centrist newspaper (the Cornell Review and Cornell American are conservative, while the other twenty-five-plus student publications are liberal). The article, reproduced here on the website of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is a response to a challenge to send in "concrete examples" of anti-conservative discrimination in academia. Amusingly, within two days of this challenge being issued, the Student Assembly attempted to defund the aforementioned Cornell American. This action was spearheaded by the Student Assembly vice-president, who also happened to be president of the Cornell Democrats. Hmm...conflict of interest much?

A few lines from the article tell us things we shouldn't be surprised by:

96.8 percent of presidential campaign contributions made by Cornell faculty went to John Kerry

To [Professor Arthur] Bellinzoni, the incarnation of evil is George W. Bush.

When Wells [College, Aurora, NY] Republicans last year published their study on the faculty's political makeup, Prof. Jonathan Vawter responded with a campus-wide e-mail labeling Republicans "stupid," and calling for "lobotomies" for all Republicans. Shortly thereafter, Wells' version of the SA denied the Wells Republicans' request for recognition as an official club, which would have qualified them for funding.

However, the article also revealed some things that even I, your cynical and chronically jaded host, find shocking:

At Ithaca College, faced with the evidence that there was not a single Republican in the politics department she chaired, Prof. Asma Barlas boasted "we have a range of progressive views in our department." Apparently for Prof. Barlas, intellectual diversity means spanning the spectrum from liberal to Maoist.

In 1997, when some students took issue with articles in another conservative publication, The Cornell Review, they stole and burned hundreds of copies of the newspaper. The administration meted out no punishment for such blatant trampling of others' free speech. To the contrary, as former Sun columnist Joe Sabia has noted, the only official reaction was an attempt by the Student Assembly (notice a trend here?) "to defund the Review, ban it from campus, and send all of its editors to the Judicial Administrator for sensitivity training."

At Ithaca College, Time Magazine recently reported ("The Right's New Wing," Aug. 22, 2004) that "you don't have to spend much time at the college to see that liberals run the place. It posted a website after 9/11 devoted almost exclusively to critiques of the U.S. The site includes the text of a talk by Professor Asma Barlas, who chaired the politics department last year, in which she blames 'Jewish groups' for 'introducing modern forms of terrorism into the Middle East' and suggests that capitalism 'provided the breeding grounds for much of modern day extremism.'" When Time asked politics professor Charles Santiago whether he assigned conservative thinkers, "he responded, completely without irony, 'I am teaching Hitler.'"

An exposition of blatant discrimination at the University of Miami and the University of Colorado at Boulder rounded out the article:

Until public outcry forced the university to back down, white students at the University of Colorado at Boulder were barred from taking the popular School and Society course on Fridays. The school had reserved that class period for "students of color" in order to provide "a much safer and open environment."

Former Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala, now President of the University of Miami, permitted the denial of recognition of a new conservative student group on the theory that the College Republicans speak for all conservatives, despite the fact that Miami recognizes six liberal groups.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'll be out of the academic world soon. Every time I hand an essay in these days, I feel like there's a club hovering over my head waiting to come down the moment someone shouts "CONSERVATIVE!".