The Unrounded Well Is Not Worth Drinking From

Dear Dr. Bones,

¡Happy New Month! (( ¡¡Twenty more NYTC freebies per browser!! ¡¡¡Alleluia!!!! )

To get the _Kaisermonat_ started with a rousin’ whimper, sir:

Don Davidito de Brooks has divined , presumably by skillful deployment of his freelordship’s customary homebrew social-scientisin’, that our (not his) _Schulführer und Schulführerinnen_ are to be blamed for the sad lack of that _geistige Eifer_ with which all young skulls full of mush obviously ought to be inflamed. [1]

What the Bolshevik Ravitch makes of this toplofty, though factious, drool it will be interesting to learn.

Meanwhile Thersites and I have agreed privately that what we have here smells a lot more like _Klassengeist_ in Old High Prussian than "school spirit" in our own vernaculars.

The French, however, might want to recycle _¡Qu’ ils mangeant des brioches!_, should they find this particular _señorito derechíssimo_ worth attending to. Don Davidito is quite as oblivious as was Her Austrian Majesty to what educational pastries cost nowadays. I wonder if his freelordship knows about those supermarket scanner gizmos that ao amazed George XLI Bush.

There is, I suppose, the possibility that Don Davidito understands the fundin’ side thoroughly, but thinks it dreadfully ungentlemanlike to gossip about Trade. Also a darker possibility: ¿How if his freelordship were deliberately tryin’ to distract our attention from the fact that _geistige Eifer_ only *looks* like being a a freebie? [2][3]

Happy days.

__
[1] Plus please don’t forget the _belebende Sittlichkeit_ ("invigorating moral culture"): _sine quâ non_, *that* ingredient is.

**

[2] Suspicion can darken fast if one abandons one’s mind to it. It would be positively nasty of his freelordship, for example, to despise all those unsatisfactory Leaders of Schools for their tacky greed an’ ‘materialism’ (in the vulgar pseudethical sense) as if every last individual spiritual slacker an’ cultural lazybones among them were a card-carryin’ Unionthug. Better skip the Trade angle altogether, I guess, than ever get started off in that direction.

Not quite so nasty, but pretty bad, would be if his freelordship wants us not to remember that residential segregation has a good deal to do with these things. _Klassensegregation_ first and foremost, but the other kind too.

Perhaps Don Davidito has some personal excuse for dodgin’ that one, though: if his freelordship expressly announced that he wants uniform (an’ uniformly high, an’ seriously enforced) standards of _belebende Sittlichkeit und geistige Eifer_ nationwide, his own Party neocomrades at Rio Limbaugh/Port Ste. Lucie an’ thereabouts would go ballistic at once. I mean, ¿what did they move to the ’burbs for in the first place, if not to get away from that sort of scheme? The sort of scheme that picks the pockets of decent, clean-cut, redstate-blooded selfservatives who "obey the law an’ play by the rules" (&c. &c. -- you must know the full lyrics to that one) in order to throw money at the Bad Poor.

To throw money at ’em by way of ... lemme see ... of "the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports." Setting aside the kiddie games at the end, perhaps, that is blatantly a proposal to sell the Party base an’ vile a product they do not want at a price they would think outrageous if they did. A ‘conservative’ ‘intellectual’ like his freelordship may sincerely care to almost any extent about that thoroughly elitist brand of well roundin’, but, over on the far side of the abandoned railroad tracks, Wingnut City is not often ashamed of their wells bein’ square. Of bein’ square themselves, too. It is very questionable if trailer-trash wingnutettes an’ wingnuts want much "history, poetry, art" for their own kids, and about as certain as anything Soc. Sci. can ever be that they will not be volunteerin’ to help finance such idle frills an’ frippery for the brats of the Bad Poor.

Even more fun than how Comrade Ravitch reacts will be the rebuttal barked out boldly by Neocomrade Dr. R. H. Limbaugh, who has dumped on poor little R.I.N.O. Davey Boy often enough in the past to make it likely that this, too, will not pass unbellowed at. As I said--as you can see for yourself--this morning’s Brooksian drool is so exquisitely toplofty that Himself would need the self-discipline of a Regulus not to mock it before the dittobrains.

***

[3] I will be amazed if the kiddiecons notice, but in a way the Brooksian ideoproduct is just what they oughtabe wantin’ over in Rio Limbaugh. To make Spiritual Toploftinesses the core of _Bildung_ an’ simultaneously leave it to be easily (though not quight whightly) inferred that they must hardly cost anythin’ at all makes the Bad Poors responsible for their own miseducation. If the B.P. only cared enough about "history, poetry, art and sports," teaches Don Davidito de Brooks y Podhòretz, they would see to it that these goodies get universally inculcated down in their slums. ’Tis not, insinuates his freelordship, as if they simply could not afford it. Were there but a will, there would be a way.

You don’t really need that Leo-Strauss-Brand Secret De©oder ®ing we found in the CrackerJack box once to work that much out. A critic might criticise that for whight-wingers like little Davey Brooks to look down on the dependent underclass for not valuin’ toney up-market cultural things that most whightists hardly value all that much themselves reeks of ... well, of ‘hypocrisy’ or ‘inconsistency’ or the like.

This argument, however, is of no use against rank-an’-file kiddiecons, who have no trouble at all esteemin’ themselves for belongin’ to that same ever-immortal Whight Civilisation of the Western Race™ that produced Giorgione an’ Rembrandt an’ Washington Allston (&c. &c.) whilst never themselves personally darkenin’ the door of a museum or lookin’ at the pictures in a coffee-table book. Though deeply interested in the FACT of their own collective self-wunnerfulness, the neokiddies hardly care exactly what it is based on.

Indeed, Dr. Bones, I ask you, "¿Hath not Their Ford proclaimed that History is bunk?"