Tennessee Tea Party Demands Blind Founding Father Worship

[Edi]

Source

For a bunch of people who worship the Founders and like to play dress-up American Revolutionary War, Tea Partyers sure hate knowing anything remotely reality-based about the Founding Fathers. Tennessee Tea Party groups have introduced a proposal to take what few minorities there are in American history textbooks out of American history textbooks, along with any negative portrayals of the wealthy white men who led this young nation in its infancy.

At a press conference, two dozen activists presented their proposals -- I'm sorry, their "demands" -- for the new state legislative session. Among them are sweeping changes to school materials that they probably have not actually read.

Take it away, awful person:

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership."

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group's lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address "an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another."

OK, but ... I mean ... those guys did a lot of "intruding" and slave-owning, is the thing.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, they're just openly rolling back school desegregation. (Which is, I guess, more honest than quietly rolling back school desegregation, like everywhere else in the country.)

Seriously, that starts to take the cake. That's firmly into the "You put how much grandeur in your delusions this morning?!" territory. And supposedly leftists are the ones distorting history...

[Sea Skimmer]

This is the price one pays for having such a high level of local control of schools in the United States, crazy shit can be made to happen. But trying to change anything about that would be not only political suicide, all the more so because of how school funding works, it would also just open up the possibility that the crazy people might be spread to spread the bullshit nation wide in a single federal law.

[JME2]

And people wonder why I think this country has jumped the shark and gone insane.

[Talhe]

Maybe they'll go further, and distort the Founding Fathers to such an extent that they'll actually sound like they're endorsing the Tea Party positions.

[Patrick Degan]

Maybe they'll go further, and distort the Founding Fathers to such an extent that they'll actually sound like they're endorsing the Tea Party positions.

They started that long ago. Their predecessors started that long ago by flogging the view of the Founders as laissez-faire lolbertarians.

[SirNitram]

Source.

NASHVILLE — Members of Tennessee tea parties presented state legislators with five priorities for action Wednesday, including “rejecting” the federal health reform act, establishing an elected “chief litigator” for the state and “educating students the truth about America.”

About two dozen tea party activists held a news conference, then met with lawmakers individually to present their list of priorities and “demands” for the 2011 legislative session that opened Tuesday.

Regarding education, the material they distributed said, “Neglect and outright ill will have distorted the teaching of the history and character of the United States. We seek to compel the teaching of students in Tennessee the truth regarding the history of our nation and the nature of its government.”

That would include, the documents say, that “the Constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy.”

The material calls for lawmakers to amend state laws governing school curriculums, and for textbook selection criteria to say that “No portrayal of minority experience in the history which actually occurred shall obscure the experience or contributions of the Founding Fathers, or the majority of citizens, including those who reached positions of leadership.”

Fayette County attorney Hal Rounds, the group’s lead spokesman during the news conference, said the group wants to address “an awful lot of made-up criticism about, for instance, the founders intruding on the Indians or having slaves or being hypocrites in one way or another.

“The thing we need to focus on about the founders is that, given the social structure of their time, they were revolutionaries who brought liberty into a world where it hadn’t existed, to everybody — not all equally instantly — and it was their progress that we need to look at,” said Rounds, whose website identifies him as a Vietnam War veteran of the Air Force and FedEx retiree who became a lawyer in 1995.

The group also wants the state legislature to reject key provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 as “an insult to Constitutional principles.”

The activists also said they want legislators to either start the process of amending the state Constitution to provide for the popular election of the state attorney general or to create a separate position of solicitor general who is directly elected by voters and with much of the litigation authority now vested with the attorney general.

In Tennessee, the attorney general is appointed by the state Supreme Court.

The group’s printed material says the attorney general has reflected “views of the U.S. Constitution that conflict with those of the people of Tennessee.” It specifically says the current attorney general, Robert Cooper, has rejected “the call of the people and the General Assembly” to join with other states in contesting the constitutionality of “federal mandates, including ‘Obamacare.’”

The priorities also include terminating state subsidies for unfunded or unconstitutional federal mandates, and “enforcing constitutional law.”

Later Wednesday, the Tennessee Health Care Campaign said repealing the federal health reforms would mean repealing protections the law gives consumers against insurance companies.

There's always been an odd strain of Founder hero-worship in this country, but I think these folks might actually be crossing over into actual religion.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, already mentioned here.

[Edi]

Threads merged.

[Zaune]

They started that long ago. Their predecessors started that long ago by flogging the view of the Founders as laissez-faire lolbertarians.

Does Thomas Paine not count as a Founding Father, or are they just quietly filing Agrarian Justice and The Age of Reason under 'shit that never happened'?

[The Spartan]

That's "shit that never happened". Paine? Who's that? Did he sign the Declaration of Independence? The Constitution?

The exception being Common Sense, what with Beck trying to tout his horseshit as common sense and using the title to flog his sheep since they love that phrase.

[LadyTevar]

It is a Religion, if you want to be honest. They have raised the Founding Fathers to mythical Patriots and Heroes of the Revolution, and that is ALL that is taught to school children about it. They are held up like Christ on the Cross, but Bible class follows the life of Christ in more detail than the Founding Fathers are taught in schools.

[Simon_Jester]

Well, it depends on the school and the teacher.

But I agree that seems to be where this train of thought leads, what they want to see taught: the Founding Fathers as a sort of mythological blur, an abstract, faceless blob with no distinguishing characteristics aside from being The Men Who Made God's Perfect Country.

It seems to me that to this vein of Tea Party thought, that's the only real purpose of teaching children history- to promote a specific national narrative, though they wouldn't use that term to describe it. Why bother with the details, or with the facts on the ground, when that just serves to undermine the idea of the founding demigods as the people who created God's Perfect Country?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Oh, dear.

This is almost terrifying. They want the founding fathers venerated so thoroughly it's like they think Washington and Co are Jesus' Second Coming. It's disturbing on a basic level to see people viewing others in such a manner.

Would I be right in saying that their whole argument for honouring the founding fathers is nothing but a gigantic "appeal to history/tradition" fallacy?

[Simon_Jester]

I wouldn't even call it a fallacy. "Fallacy" implies that you're trying to present a logical argument:

A -> B -> C -> D

And something's wrong with one of the steps: B or C is messed up, so A does not imply D.

What we're seeing here shouldn't be mistaken for that kind of beastie. This is something different: an attempt to promote unthinking, unreflective, above all uncritical attitudes in the young. They're not merely making a faulty claim of some sort; they're actively trying to stop other people from thinking about things they don't want anyone thinking about.

And I expect they're probably conscious of this on some level, though I doubt they'd say it in exactly those terms. They'd say something more like "we shouldn't let people smear the greatest lawgivers in our nation's history based on some contrived attempt at libel by lying fake-historians like [insert name here]!"

Which, for practical purposes and with the rhetoric stripped out, boils down to "don't think too hard about what happened during this period, or else!"

They're trying to induce respect for tradition in others, not merely settle for claiming that everyone ought to have it and that the subject should now be closed.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Fair enough.

i was working from the premise that they were saying "we should do this, because thats what xyz would have done" or "xyz would have hated that idea, so you should too."

So it's an appeal to authority. oops.

[Zaune]

I wouldn't even call it a fallacy. "Fallacy" implies that you're trying to present a logical argument... What we're seeing here shouldn't be mistaken for that kind of beastie. This is something different: an attempt to promote unthinking, unreflective, above all uncritical attitudes in the young. They're not merely making a faulty claim of some sort; they're actively trying to stop other people from thinking about things they don't want anyone thinking about.

I hate to resort to anything so clichéd as a 1984 analogy (surely that's something equivalent to Godwin's Law by now?) but I can't help thinking of the words "newspeak", "doublethink" and "thoughtcrime" when you put it that way.

[Simon_Jester]

Fair enough.

i was working from the premise that they were saying "we should do this, because thats what xyz would have done" or "xyz would have hated that idea, so you should too."

So it's an appeal to authority. oops.

That's not it either, it's something more comprehensive than a specific 'fallacy.' This isn't just a bad argument. It's a deliberate attempt to rewrite history: to alter the evidence, and alter the way people think about the evidence, to induce them to behave in a particular way. Preferably, without them even realizing they're being manipulated.

Which is why no, Zaune, I don't think comparisons to 1984 are inappropriate. While this is nowhere near as large-scale as Orwellian Newspeak, it's driven by the same impulse that Orwell extrapolated into the idea of Newspeak.

Governments (and political movements) have a vested interest in tilting the playing field of how people think and talk about concerns related to the government. Even normal political parties in a democracy try to do this, usually restricting themselves to propaganda.

But political parties with fascist impulses* tend to indulge themselves quite a bit more when it comes to manipulating the language and areas like school curriculum. This is usually done only semi-consciously, as a desire to suppress ideas that they believe should be false and therefore is false. Such ideas are usually the ones that would undermine the collective narrative the fascist wants to present to the outside world. And, ultimately, wants to impose on the outside world.

*Leninist/Stalinist communist governments do this too, but I don't find it unreasonable to speak of this as a 'fascist' tendency, because there's significant overlap between political organization in Marxist-Leninist/Stalinist government and in fascist government, even if the ideology is very different.

[Prannon]

I find it amusing that they say the constitution created a Republic, not a Democracy, yet they insist on making the Attorney General's position a popularly elected one, which hearkens more to a democratic system than a republican one. All primarily because the attorney general hasn't challenged the constitutionality of the Health Care law like a good boy.

I think, honestly, they don't really care about whether the country is a Republic or a Democracy, so long as they get their way, and the term Republic is associated with Good (thus, Republican Party), and Democracy is associated with Bad (thus, Democratic Party).

[K. A. Pital]

The process of exclusion of an object from popular thought always starts from excluding said object from written forms. When people stop reading about something, they stop talking about something. It is a well-honed method. Once you remove a concept, it is hard for people to think about it and imagine it. Simon covered it well enough. This process is ongoing, in subtle ways - the Tea Party is just being less subtle. Removing more obscure historical events is much, much easier - like the Free Congo State or the horrible fates of American canal and railroad workers, or the Mexican "Repatriation" largest deportation of legal U.S. citizens... All these events went into what I'd say is nigh-oblivion, as far as popular history is concerned. American and First World historical science and obviously the media as well, for all their achievements, are guilty of creating and supporting this state of oblivion day-by-day.

It is a vast - not directed by a single entity, but still generally moving in the "right" direction, heh - attempt to create a national (and if that succeeds, move further to a global) state of objective illusion, wherein people observe and interpret facts and events in a rigid system of concepts that itself directs the process of thought to a desireable end.

[Skylon]

It is a Religion, if you want to be honest. They have raised the Founding Fathers to mythical Patriots and Heroes of the Revolution, and that is ALL that is taught to school children about it. They are held up like Christ on the Cross, but Bible class follows the life of Christ in more detail than the Founding Fathers are taught in schools.

That's actually pretty accurate. If you break down what New York State most wants 11th graders to know about the first three Presidents, its as follows:

George Washington - Demonstrated the new Federal Gov't would enforce laws (his response to the Whiskey Rebellion)/His Farewell Address warned against entangling alliances.
John Adams - XYZ Affair/Alien and Sedition Acts.
Thomas Jefferson - Contradicted his own views of the Constitution with the Louisiana Purchase.

And compared to where the tea-party people want to go, I'd call that critical thinking actually.

Teachers of course go over more to varying degrees, but those are the key points NY State seems to ask questions about.

[Simon_Jester]

Those are perfectly reasonable minimum standards for what students should learn about the administrations of those presidents. We have over two hundred years of history; teachers don't have time to spend a week covering each presidential term if they want to cover history from the Revolution to the present.

When the people who signed the Declaration and the Constitution are viewed as historical figures, not as mythical demigods, that's really about as much attention as they deserve on a 'first rough cut' approach to learning history.