Our local daily newspaper offers a great editorial rant this morning about an impending socialist menace, warning ominously of “the specter of a vast and sprawling federal bureaucracy [that] is too horrible to contemplate.”
Is the editorial attacking liberal health care reform ideas like single-payer or the “public option”? Nope – it’s attacking federal aid to education, and it came from the paper’s archives of 1961.
Specifically, the editorial is ripping the Crook County School Board for showing interest in accepting – horrors! – federal money to help with school construction and – double horrors! – teachers’ pay.
“There may be some justification for federal help in school construction, particularly in the more hard-pressed areas of the country,” The Bulletin conceded. “But the proposal to provide federal money for teacher salaries is a piece of political skullduggery.
“The specter of a vast and sprawling federal bureaucracy in control of America’s schools is too horrible to contemplate. We’re convinced that federal money for paying our teachers would be an opening wedge. This must not happen.”
It might be hard for anybody born after, say, 1955 to believe that federal aid to education was once hotly controversial, but it was. When I was on my high school debating team in the mid-1960s, the topic one year was “Resolved: That federal aid to education should be significantly increased.”
The argument on the anti side was that the eeee-vil, tyrannical federal government wanted to “take over” education and extend its slimy, socialistic tentacles into every classroom in America – just as we’re hearing today that the eeee-vil, tyrannical federal government wants to “take over” health care and extend its slimy, socialistic tentacles into every doctor’s office.
Of course conservatives have said pretty much the same thing about every progressive idea going back for more than a hundred years. They said it about Social Security, they said it about Medicare and, as we have just seen, they said it about federal aid to schools. Today only the lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe wants to abolish these programs, and it would be hard to imagine America without them.
For progressives, in addition to a good laugh, the 1961 Bulletin editorial offers some encouragement. It shows that change for the better does gradually happen – although the conservatives have to be dragged along kicking and screaming every inch of the way.
For conservatives, the lesson of the editorial is that they need a new line. Your old one’s getting mighty tired, folks.
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2009.
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HBM, you used the drawn out word/term “eeevil” several times in your blog. There is only one other media person I know who uses “eeeevil” like that.
It can only mean one thing. You listen to Rush Limbaugh don’t you? Like alot…you’re a ditto head. Come on now, admit it. It’s OK. You’re among friends and we welcome you into the shining light of truth. You needn’t be a closet conservative any more. There now, don’t you feel much better?
The schools are great when their actually open. 4 days a week of class, what a joke. What to do about hunger? We should get the government to take all the farms and ration all the food. The point is the government starts with good intentions and then 40 years later it starts to fall apart. In the meantime we lose more control of are everyday life.
The Bulletin in 1961 was right on the money as is evident on the state of our educational system today. By allowing the Feds into the classroom we are now forced to teach our kids a liberal federal agenda full of topics that have nothing to do with getting a quality education. Liberals have since permeated our educational system to the point where a conservative can’t even speak his our her mind without being chastised by a tree hugging, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-nanny state, anti-american so called professors. We should scrap the whole lot of them and start fresh with people who simply educate instead of brainwashing our kids with liberal, socialist crud.
“The schools are great when their [sic] actually open. 4 days a week of class, what a joke.”
Typical conservative — complains that the schools are open only four days a week but doesn’t want to spend enough to keep them open for five.
“The Bulletin in 1961 was right on the money”
I knew I could count on somebody to say that. Big fan of Joe McCarthy too, weren’t you?
I have to congratulate you, though, on working so many right-wing cliches into one post. I counted nine.