More people messing up our country

Okay, it's time again to look at people who are screwing up America, according to Bernard Goldberg. Here are a few more who deserve to be on the list.

Barbara Kingsolver is a writer and left-wing social critic. Right after September 11, 2001, she wrote an op-ed piece about her daughter, who came home from kindergarten and announced that the entire class would have to wear red, white, and blue to honor the country. But Barbara was concerned, saying that she feared the sound of saber-rattling. She asked her daughter why she couldn't wear black. But Kingsolver relented when her husband said to her, "You can't let hateful people steal the flag from us." Of course, most of us would assume that the hateful people must refer to the terrorists. But Kingsolver says he meant Americans. What Americans? She said there was a man in a city near their family who went on a rampage and shot at foreign-born neighbors. So that was proof for her that the real enemy of this country, the one we need to fear, is patriotism. Here's what she said: "Patriotism threatens free speech with death... it despises people of foreign birth... in other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder." Wow, I had no idea.

Ward Churchill, a college professor, had bizarre things to say about the United States shortly after the World Trade Center was attacked. He compared the people killed in that building to Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust who masterminded the slaughter of 6 million Jews. Here are his comments: "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it." When this came to light, he refused to apologize, and besides, the politicians and other yahoos calling for his dismissal ought to mind their business and let him teach -- at the taxpayers' expense, of course. But Ward Churchill is just the tip of the iceberg. Goldberg ends this section with a comment from another scholar who said, "What will remain as a problem for our society is the political atmosphere on many American campuses, where zealots like Mr. Churchill are hired and tenured, ever after free to inflict their one-sided rants on their hapless students." Amen to that. I've read enough other stories to say that this is unfortunately the case on so many American campuses today.

Katherine Hanson wrote a book called Gender and Violence, in which she peddled a lot of politically motivated misinformation. She believes that in this country we "socialize males to be aggressive, powerful, unemotional and controlling," and that such activities as Little League baseball "encourage aggressive, violent behavior." She claimed that every year nearly 4,000,000 women are beaten to death in the United States and that violence is the leading cause of death among women. Of course, the statistics are untrue. The total number of female deaths annually in the United States from all causes is approximately 1,000,000 with the total number murdered around 4000. The real leading cause of death for women as heart disease, followed by cancer. What's really discouraging is that Katherine Hanson headed up a group called the Women's Educational Equity Act Publishing Center, which became the national clearinghouse for so-called "gender-fair" educational material bound for American teachers and school children. Her organization produced more than 350 publications and distributed material to hundreds of educational conferences. This group had received by the year 2000 more than $75 million in federal funds (our tax dollars). In one of the publications, the group instructed teachers on how to socialize little boys away from typical little-boy behavior: "Before going outside to play, talk about how students feel about playing a game of tag. Do they like to be chased? Do they like to do the chasing? How does it feel to be tagged out? Get their ideas about other ways the game might be played." Hanson has now started something called the Gender and Diversities Institute. Can you imagine what damage she is inflicting from this new post?

Randall Robinson is a Harvard Law grad as well as founder and former president of a group called TransAfrica, which attempts to influence American policy toward African and Caribbean countries. He wants the United States to offer reparations to all African-Americans. After all, he says Germany paid billions to survivors of the Holocaust and the United States compensated Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. But the problem is, slavery ended more than 140 years ago. Slavery's actual victims are long gone, as are the people who kept the whole nasty system going. Does anyone really think that reparations would end the matter? Would reparations fix what ails African-Americans? Would it get rid of the terrible out-of-wedlock birth rate? Would it help African-American kids do better in school? Goldberg says his case for reparations cast black Americans as perpetual victims, unable to make it in this country on their own merits. Robinson says white people are the problem because they "once well inside the place of another's different, less pugnacious, more welcoming culture, destroy it, root and branch. For inexplicable reasons, they are seemingly constrained by some aberrant force of nature to disparage all culture, all history, all religion, all memory, all faces, all life not theirs." He says only white countries are capable of killing so many people at one time. He seems to have forgotten African racial wars that have killed millions.

Unfortunately, there are many more people in Goldberg's book, but I will save them for a future blog.