Please Don’t Teach Me, or Anyone Else!

Proud Fools..

So we received this on our web site chat window, this week..

This could be nothing but pure troll, of course, but the sentiment on display here actually circulates among the Year Zero neo-Bolsheviks who populate many of our cultural and educational institutions.  When Pol Pot began a killing spree in Cambodia, he demanded a new calendar that would be set to zero, so that no history, no culture, no tradition from the past could infect the communist paradise he had in mind for the country.  Books were burned along with the people who read them–by the millions.  When you eliminate the past, you also eliminate inconvenient moral axioms like “thou shalt not murder,” and vast arrays of Cambodian skulls bear witness to the results.

Whenever I see this demand for collective ignorance, it’s something like registering the antics of a Darwin Award winner, except that we’re not just being darkly amused by people jumping into a well to save a chicken.  We’re being ordered to jump in with them.  Low functioning minds and dictatorial urges are not a good combination.  You either have to try to be this stupid, or your mother drank two gallons of gin every day during her pregnancy.

A generous interpretation might take into account Please Stop‘s encouragement to “learn about this event from a minority standpoint,” but that seems contradictory on its face.  First off, all of us Oak Glen Rileys are of largely European extraction, and that means we are the minority in California. Second, how do we “please stop” and “learn” at the same time?  These request always come without a bibliography, courtesy of a phony email address.

So I’m not particularly worried about the sort of idiots who digest critical race theory without any remonstrance in public school.  Judging by the comments on our Instagram post, (many of them from people of color) we’re talking about a very small minority of willful obscurantists.

I’m far more worried about the timid institutional types who accommodate these requests — the national park rangers, the museum docents, the parks and recreation functionaries who instinctively react to “minority” history lamentations as though they were heading off a lynching.  One of our guests at Colonial Faire told me a Civil War event in Southern California was cancelled on the basis of one complaint by a person who didn’t want to see a confederate battle flag–even it was being carried by a reenactor.

An old friend who has been a living historian for more than 30 years told us his unit was invited to a National Park event — provided they brought no muskets.  That would be something like Steven Spielberg shooting a film about the 7th Cavalry by putting his actors on hobby-horses.  There really are people so puritanical about their gun control fundamentalism, they can’t stand even being in the presence of antique weapons.

Again, you can’t do anything about that sort of ignorance, but you can demand your schools, your national parks, your museums and your living history farms stop catering to the passionately uninformed.  Tell the Please Stop types to go to hell.

That’s what we do.

Categorised in: Farm Journal

This post was written by Jim Riley