Excerpt: The First Lecture: First Principles of Being American

Tags

"Vets in Class", American Exceptionalism, Veterans' Tales

Castle Beaumaris Source:cadwWales.gov, Wikipedia (ogl)

Veterans’ Tales by Vassar Bushmills

“Can you tell me how many nations…in the History of the World…have sent armies, and sacrificed their men’s lives, to rescue the people of other countries?”

16-17 year-old kids are a tough room in any generation. That’s because every generation is different, so you never know what you’re going to get when you meet them as a group. They are often very smart but also skeptical about older people who try to tell things they don’t know, unless presented to them under special circumstances.

A classroom is one of those circumstances, So one you have them there, you have to reach up and grab them.

The good news is that Veterans, unlike almost anyone else in America, have  street cred no other group of Americans have.

This “First Lecture” is designed to demonstrate how you can do this simply by 1) being a Veteran and having seen and done things they haven’t and 2) telling them something really extraordinary about their country and their heritage they would never have heard anywhere else, and possibly never believed had it not come from a Veteran or at least a certified teacher.

And you will have done your country a favor, for they are learning these things anywhere else.

These kids are almost old enough to enlist, so think about how you looked at the world your junior-senior year in high school. Most will come to your class because they have to be there, not because they want to be there.

I went down that road for a few years in a small city college with some tough inner-city kids in the early 90’s, who also didn’t want to be there. They knew they had to be there or they couldn’t get their degree.

This opening lecture is how I grabbed them. Over five years, it worked every time.

In order to win them over you need to make what you are teaching them to be relevant in their lives, as they see it now, as 16-17 year olds. You need to plant seeds that will stay buried in their sub-conscience forever, arising only when the subject arises again in later years.

You will be teaching those kids things that were taught to generations of Americans in public schools before 1970, in basically this same way, but are hardly mentioned any longer. And there are colleges today that openly refute all sorts of things about America’s history that you must know to refute.

If we do this right, in another generation, those anti-American professors will be washing dishes at TGI-Fridays.

People who don’t like “America-as-founded” have tried to put a stop to that process of passing our heritage on, which the people of America, since the early  1800’s, demanded be a part of public school curriculum.

You first task is to get the students in front of you hooked, since if you can get them hooked, they won’t have to be pushed out the door to come back a second time.

*    *   *   *   

There are no rules as to how to handle your classroom. I like the lecture method, where I stand and they sit. There are hundreds of years of reasons why this is the chosen best way for people to teach people younger and less experienced than they are.

Expect there to be adults in the classroom as well, both observing you and how the kids react to you.

The things I have written for you here they will have never heard it before. And the things you will teach them will beg several questions. And some future lectures will be based on those. Spin-offs. At the end, below, I’ve listed some of those topics, previews of coming attractions.

We are not just teaching American history and American government, but also American culture and its moral foundation, and how those things have blended to make America unique.

It’s the American culture and moral foundation we are trying to save.

This is not a script, unless you want it to be. With any luck you’ll get to give each of these lecture 5-10 times a years.

*   *   *   *

Walk into the classroom, write your name on the board, and introduce yourself.

They’ll already know you’re a Vet. That’s your street cred with them. So act military and stand tall (unless you’re in a wheelchair). Kids have a high degree of respect for wounded Vets but are also conditioned to have a certain level of pity, too. Your enthusiasm for what you’re teaching will disabuse them of this notion.

State you are a Veteran, and tell them your branch of service, and also the number of years you served. Remember, 17-year old kids were born after 911, so even the blowing up of the Two Towers are ancient history to them. If you served in a war zone tell them where. But don’t go into too much detail, for kids love war stories. You’ll have plenty of time to tell them your MOS and the sort of things you did or saw there in chat sessions after class. They’ll have all sorts of questions[…]

Continue Reading

Editor’s Note:  The above excerpt of this lecture is in follow up to Vassar Bushmills’ earlier posting, Instruction Page for Veterans’ Lecture Series Originating Source: Veterans’ Tales  Category: (Vets In Class) Please feel free to visit Veterans’ Tales to view the above lecture in its entirety, future lectures, etc. In addition, please share and direct any comments, feedback or questions that you might have to VassarB@gmail.com,

 

The Eternal Left’s War on American Exceptionalism

Tags

American Exceptionalism, Barack Obama, Communism, Progressives

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

You know me and my thing with Lucifer. Still,  I’m not one of those who believe that Satan personifies himself in any man. We are too quick to say that so-and-so is “pure evil” when in fact, that is likely not the case. For one, that is not how Satan works. He uses people, especially the vain and arrogant who think they are too smart and too clever to be beguiled by any ancient superstition. Marxists, lawyers, and academics, are all among Old Clootie’s most prized and juicy possessions for that very reason; that they don’t even believe He exists. I remember that line delivered by Tom Hanks, as Professor Robert Langdon in the Da Vinci Code sequel, “Angels and Demons’ where an archbishop in the Vatican asked him if he was religious and he answered, “No, I’m an academic”. (More on that at another time.) So-called cult Satanists are joyriders only, poseurs. Satan doesn’t seek worshipers, but only to stand between God and His.

If you study politics, remember this, for the Modern Left does the same; stand between Men and Liberty.

Most people, when they think of pure Evil, think of Adolf Hitler first, more often than Stalin or Mao, (which has always bothered me), but I can find nothing about these men that makes me think they ever gave Evil a second thought. They did evil things, for sure, but because they were types who were disposed to behave in that way in the first place…if only they could get away with it.  It was only for them to beat the odds by choosing politics than other forms of crime, to get where they could kill millions instead of just killing puppies with a ball peen hammer. These were people with holes in their souls. Satan didn’t put those holes there, they were just “easy marks” to do his dirty work. It was always just a crap shoot whether they would be end up in a reformatory, prison, death row, or some day become Senate majority leader. Both Nature and civilized society have always set seine nets out to capture these poison fish before they got too big, and remove them from the gene pool, but some always escape it, and have since Attila first learned to ride a horse. The law of averages.

Which brings me to the Modern Left.

I actually dislike Bill Clinton more than I do Obama, in part because I was a couple of  law school classes ahead of him, and recognized the “type” always instantly once he thrust himself onto the public stage. In those days every class had at least one Bill Clinton. But I’ve never thought of Bushel Britches as “evil”, although he clearly has enabled Satan to do his works at several levels in American cultural and political life. Obama, on the other hand, while I don’t consider him to be evil either, does seem to have been “placed’ in certain circumstances and positions that seem to have been laid out for him in advance; part of a larger scheme. Clinton’s rise I considered “fortuitous” like Hitler a naturally draw for every kind of deviant thinking their respective societies could produce, and probably something of a fluke which probably won’t happen again, while Obama seems to have had the road to power paved for him, a slot-filler, just as Josef Stalin was and who mass killed in the ordinary course of political necessity, not hate.

I could write a book of all the things Satan hates about America. In fact, I’m working on one now. But highest among them is this idea of  American exceptionalism. Obama’s distaste for America isn’t just elistist (French) it’s almost religious (olde French, even pharaonic), which is why I think Obama’s being “handled” in this regard.

There are three components to American Exceptionalism, all three of which Lucifer, and the Left, despise: 1) our ability to arise above our common origins, 2) our selflessness and 3) our sense of reciprocity with one another[…]

Continue Reading

 

American Exceptionalism or American Freak show?

Tags

Abraham Linclon, American Exceptionalism, Conservatism, Education, race and culture, Richard Brookhiser

Source: Obama White House/Flickr

Unified Patriots by Vassar Bushmills

I recently watched an interview of Barack Obama in which he discussed the parallel views of reality in American politics. (It was undated, so I don’t know if it was made during his term in office or part of his post-presidency schtik, about the upheaval we’re seeing unfold in America now that Donald Trump has forced those separate realities into bolder relief.

In doing a little research on this single subject “Obama and separate realities in America” I found that this had been a common thread in many of his canned remarks, especially when acting professorial in a one-on-one sit-down.

It dawned on me that Barack Obama is exactly right.

America is divided almost down the middle by two entirely separate realities as to what comprise fundamental fact and truth. Even the most common human equation is determined by who is asserting it, them, or us. And this is no longer restricted to the low-end Twitter troll, it has entered the language of scholarship, especially in soft sciences, but also hard ones, such as climate science, where, no matter which way you lean about the bottom line, the evidentiary road to those conclusions are a minefield, not of misinformation mind you, but of separate realities, where only one can be true in a sane world, but two are clung to, the deciding factor—politics, not science.

This trend only appears recent in hard science, but it is not. What makes it appear new is the cacophony, the rising decibel level, and the curious notion that somehow high school juniors and college freshmen are entitled to equal time in venting their spleens about what “teacher” said. Now in my 70’s I have the advantage of being able to watch what was garage banter over whiskey out of a bottle in the 60s elevated to serious papers presented in symposia in the post-Clinton era, so can suggest we may be in the middle of a “quickening” where everything is about to come to a head, simply because it has to come to a head.

Frederick Hayek, in his 1963 Capitalism and the Historians, which he edited, gave some gravity to the notion that this “two-reality” phenomena has been around a longer time. The essays presented were from the late 1800s, and about the rise of the factory system in Britain. From distinguished economic historians of the era, they showed the highly distorted accounts of the social consequences of that system from Marxist historians, and the inability of the academy or political establishment to ever force a head-to-head confrontation, putting factual cards on the table side-by-side with non-facts.

That is now the norm, and carries with it a giant risk to civilization in that truth has been made captive to the political process, something the Modern Left declared to be their ultimate goal at the time of the Carter election in 1976. “Modern liberalism stands for the proposition that all human behavior shall be subject to the political process.”- Mary McGrory, via an  “Arizona Republic” op-ed. (I remember that day well, for that day was the day I ceased calling myself “liberal”.)

[…]

Continue Reading

To be American: American Exceptionalism and Assimilation

Tags

American Exceptionalism, assimilation, Free Market, Liberty, rule of law

1930’s STEEL WORKERS

Unified Patriots by VassarBushmills

I think there is a general misconception of just what assimilation means to the ideal of “to be American”.

To understand American exceptionalism you must first realize that it was created by the American  people, not scholars, nor political theoreticians. It is a product of common sense as applied by the American people, any of them, all of them, individually and collectively, as to what people naturally do when they see “opportunity” and a map has been laid out that will lead them there.

Americans, once shown, took to the opportunity like ducks to water. Actually anyone would given the chance. And America has proven this too….that no matter how poor, backward, or the skin color, people can achieve anything if they’ll just sign onto the basic rules. The process is easy to understand, but the work is hard. It usually takes three generations to learn the basics from the time one’s ancestors first get off the boat, but can be accomplished in as few as one-and-a-half for the quick learner.

From the earliest times in America, it was understood that if people behaved in certain ways, the vast majority of the people could reach a measure of success in being able to pursue any opportunity that lay before them. That map had been drawn and proved for many years before it was finally engraved into law as the Constitution of the United States. To succeed the people had only to learn to play by certain rules, to be polite with their neighbors, and keep Old World hatreds indoors.

By definition, this formula had to be fairly simple, as the trail was blazed by ordinary men and women for the use of other ordinary men and women. The three cornerstones of this new social arrangement were 1) sets of laws which applied to everyone equally, the Rule of Law, and another 2) was  a marketplace in which people could engage freely, the Free Market, principally in buying and selling (trade) but later in the production of goods, and even later the selling of services. The final leg, being largely a religious people, 3) was the belief that the rights we enjoyed were Natural Rights endowed by a Higher Authority, so that no man-made laws could come between the people and those rights. If you’ll recall the founding Federalists (Madison and Hamilton) thought these rights were so universally accepted they didn’t need to be written down, while others, the founding anti-Federalists (Patrick Henry, Sam Adams, George Mason) thought they should write it down. So the Bill of Rights were tacked onto the Constitution to seal the deal, the most important 1436 words of fine print ever tacked onto a contract ever written by Man[…]

Continue Reading

Debating Bill Ayers, Dinesh D’Souza Responds w/ Well-Deserved Zinger

Tags

American Exceptionalism, Bill Ayers, debate, Dinesh D'Souza, University of Michigan, Young Americans Foundation

 

screenshots

During a debate last night at the University of Michigan sponsored by the Young Americans Foundation between Bill Ayers and Dinesh D’Souza, the two were asked, “Do either of you feel that our criminal justice system has become too political?”

The exchange lasted for a few moments during which a response by D’Souza stunned the former leader of the Weather Underground.

Ayers’ the first to answer the question said:

“Our political justice system is a catastrophe. It’s a catastrophe. And what was exposed in Ferguson, that the criminal just system is kind of powered, the financing of it is powered by the kind of targeting of poor people. That’s true in Ferguson, that’s true in Chicago….”

But Ayers did not stop there.  Using D’Souza’s overnight incarceration and allegations of campaign finance violation to prove his point, Ayers further stated:

“One of the things that I also think is catastrophic in it, is that the political system is something that is now for sale — it’s on the auction block and Dinesh referred to his time in custody.

I offered to write him a letter to the judge asking him not to put Dinesh in prison, he turned it down — Because I was going to advocate that he go to North Carolina and register voters which would fit the crime of corrupting the political process in New York…I think the criminal justice system is deeply corrupt and it’s corrupted by politics.”

D’Souza pounced:

“The inequity of our criminal justice system is on full display right on this podium right here…So I gave $20,000 of my own money over the campaign finance limit. I got 8 months in overnight confinement. You bombed the Pentagon and tried to bomb all kinds of other things — how much time did you do in the slammer?”

ROUSING APPLAUSE FROM AUDIENCE.

While Ayers attempted to rebut D’Souza statement, he failed ending with D’Souza pointing out the Progressive double standard between the Obama administration with respect to campaign finance violations involving Hillary Clinton and Democratic fundraiser Sant Singh Chatwal, one of many Democratic donors skirted campaign finance laws.

In the case of Chatwal who plead guilty to skirting federal campaign-finance laws and witness tampering, Chatwal walked away with 3 years probation.

H/t The Blaze.

The debate on the topic “What’s so exceptional about America?” can be viewed in its entirety on Livestream here.