Why Are They Lying to Our Children?
Carlson, Allan C.
broadcast this poruon of the interview. Another aspect of CBS's increasing reluctance to abandon the substance of the charges in "The Uncounted Enemy" was its continuing insinuation of some...
...But what did CBS report...
...In short, the Army and CIA had agreed on how to count the enemy...
...Their heat would come from solar panels...
...This is just one example of the paradoxology inherent in the media's analysis of the war...
...She shows how sex and courtship since the American Revolution have operated in a complex and often enriching tension with religious, social, and economic mores...
...A man of common sense, London believes that the view of the future impressed on children affects their attitudes, actions, and morale...
...Justice would triumph...
...Nonetheless, a fantasy lurks in the back of my head...
...At the center of the dispute, Kowet writes, was the intricate question of "whether a pair of enemy organizations, Self-Defense and Secret SelfDefense units, were sufficiently potent to be included in the monthly military Order of Battle summary...
...intermediate forms of affection came to embody premarital affection...
...Outdated, inaccurate, biased, and absurd claims have entered our children's texts," he writes, "and, at least for the moment, nothing is being done about i t . " Most of the civics, history, economics, and "social problems" texts used in our secondary schools, he charges, combine "fire and brimstone logic" with "fear-anddoomsday psychology...
...In a foreword to the book, the late Herman Kahn even suggested that the recent dramatic rise in the teenage suicide rate may be due in part to depressing textbooks...
...HANDS AND HEARTS: A HISTORY OF COURTSHIP IN AMERICA Ellen K. Rothman/Basic Books/S19.95 Dinesh D'Souza We tend to behave today as if sex were invented by post-World War II America...
...that the world-wide per capita consumption of food has actually increased over the last thirty years...
...The idealistic: "No other state but that of happy and joyous sex relations can keep this world moving and progressing," as a manual advised in 1912...
...Unlike the authors, these people actually produce goods in big cities...
...He repeats the forgotten truths: that it is science which improves the material condition of mankind...
...economy is the cause of global disaster...
...Just as thieves have hands chopped off, these felons would be forced to live the ascetic lifestyle they're trying to shame our children into adopting...
...The novel, by creating heroines like Clarissa and Madame Bovary, encouraged women to luxuriate in their emotions and turn them into pretentious prose...
...Robert Komer, former special ambassador to South Vietnam...
...Herbert 1. London/Stein and Day/S15.95 Allan C. Carlson The troubled specter of the Parson Malthus haunts our land...
...Even Puritan families, when they did exercise control, influenced "more the matter of when than of whom their children would marry...
...That Westmoreland had imposed a ceiling of 300,000 above which his intelligence officers were forbidden to place their estimates...
...that there was a 4, O00 percent increase in known mineral reserves between 1950 and 1970 alone...
...for them, it would be exclusively whole grains...
...and even George Carver...
...Another aspect of CBS's increasing reluctance to abandon the substance of the charges in "The Uncounted Enemy" was its continuing insinuation of some base motive behind Westmoreland's estimates o f enemy strength...
...Children are taught that the U.S...
...In other words, sexual intercourse was seen as an expression of a marital, not merely romantic, relationship...
...Herbert London, dean of the Gallatin Division of New York University and chairman of the Hudson Institute's Visions of the Future Education Program, tries his hand at ghostbusting in Why Are They Lying to Our Children...
...But no chagrin is necessary for neglecting the experience of blacks, immigrants, and the mentally handicapped...
...Simply comtemplate these randomly selected excerpts from high-school texts: "There is increasing awareness that human beings, especially affluent human beings like the Americans, threaten to make the earth unlivable...
...They have no excuses...
...In applying this law, I would go easy on the authors of high-school textbooks...
...In offering ideas on how to improve the situation, he asks only for fairness, balance, and perspective: the chance to present the alternative to the dominant doomsday scenario...
...Discussions of environmental problems, London notes, range from " i n t e m p e r a t e to hysterical...
...Rothman's study is based on the diaries of 350 men and women who do not seem to have been at all laconic about their emotions...
...Surely these men exaggerate, some might reply...
...Although the Benjamin report had made it clear that "conspiracy" was out, Crile in responding to the TV Guide article continued to hint darkly at much the same thing, writing that Westmoreland suppressed reports " t o conceal this discovery of a larger enemy from the American public, the Congress, and perhaps even the President...
...Thus, they are able to temper the basically nomadic sexual tendencies of men...
...London's thesis is bold and simple...
...If there is a single sociological principle that emerges from Rothman's broad album of courtship experience, it is that morals develop from the tension between male aggression and carnality, and female modesty and restraint...
...They draw their arguments, he adds, almost verbatim from the Club of Rome's apocalyptic 1972 report "The Limits to Growth," from Jimmy Carter's nightmarish Global 2000 Report, and from the interminable "debates" on the "New International Economic Order" at the United Nations...
...Rothman .finds an unusual lack of parental surveillance over children's courtship conduct...
...Previously, the term "romance" had a negative odor: It suggested indiscretion, rashness, vulgarity...
...relatively few of their number kept diaries and notes and, as Rothman herself points out, those who did were such a small minority that they could not possibly be used as the basis for historical generalization...
...they know other people really engaged in productive activity...
...Dinesh D'Souza is the author of Falwell: Before the Millennium (Regnery-Gateway...
...Peter V. Sampo Thomas More Institute of Liberal Arts One Manchester Street Merrimack, NH 03054 Please send me information about this program...
...General Westmoreland's suit against CBS is still pending, but if he wins the only player guilty of under-estimating the enemy will be CBS itself...
...There is an effort, the author notes, to shame children into being "virtuous" and narrowly doctrinaire about the future, to adopt a new "demonology" in which students are asked to feel guilty, to suffer, and to sacrifice...
...rather small apartments with no more than one room per person would be assigned...
...More specifically, there's a law in this visionary world making it a crime to force neo-Maithusiasn moonshine down the throats of children...
...their electricity from a windmill...
...Given the overwhelming dominance of neo-Malthusian thought in public education today, there's wisdom in this moderate agenda...
...the practice became controversial when many a fiancee was discovered in the morning with her nightdress inside out...
...Global Geography, Macmillan, 1981) In an important insight, London shows that the purveyors of these textbooks actually have a distinct pedagogical agenda: "What educational philosophers such as John Dewey argued against--a pedagogy based on fear and guilt--has been restored as neo-Puritanism...
...The rationale for "bundling" was that it entitled aspiring life partners to get to know each other, but not physically...
...What happened might be called the invention of petting...
...World economic development is cast in Manichean terms, with the "North" being evil and the "South" being good...
...They are, after all, mostly "social scientists" who apparently learned their economics in the rarefied atmospheres of faculty lounges...
...But again, CBS's own evidence contradicted its thesis...
...that scarcity-not abundance--is the natural condition of humankind, a condition only overcome in this century through the wonders of science and industrialization...
...In my fantasy, those convicted of neo-Malthusian crimes against children would face pure Koranic justice, where the punishment is tailored to the crime...
...As Carver himself said at 1975 congressional hearings, the "lumping of disparate types together" that Adams espoused was "as unacceptable to most observers in the CIA as it was to those in military intelligence...
...Their washer-dryers would be traded for washboards...
...How can youth devote themselves to future-oriented actions if they're told there won't be any future, he asks...
...Westmoreland :thought riot, and had argued against the use of special political cadre figures in intelligence analyses since, in his view, their "inclusion . . . in an estimate of military capabilities was highly q u e s t i o n a b l e . . , they were no more effective in the military sense than the dozens of other nonmilitary organizations which served the VC cause in various roles . . . . " Westmoreland brought the same argument to George Crile and stated that there was a debate between "the theoreticlans--really statisticians--at the CIA who wanted to count every old woman and child" and his own troop of "practioners...
...Our children's textbooks are now engaged in those "educational" acts...
...Ellen Rothman is amused by these stereotypes, and at the same time dismissive of them...
...rape, cancer, and radiation are cast as the defining metaphors o f the American future...
...It involves a world of pure justice, where those who commit moral crimes are actually held accountable for them...
...During this time, Rothman reports, "Americans were beginning to make love between men and women a necessary rather than a desirable precondition for marriage...
...The strange thing about the whole affair, though, is that those who were once excoriated for inflating body counts are now attacked for minimizing enemy strength...
...Was President Johnson really so unaware of the intelligence controversy...
...American Civics, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) "Who would have guessed that within less than 200 years, a trackless, halfmapped continent could be crisscrossed by super highways, defaced by billboards and tin c a n s ? . . . Who would have believed that a continent, once frightening by its emptiness, would now terrify people by crowding them together...
...In another interview left on the CBS cutting room floor, Walt Rostow, former special assistant to LBJ, pooh-poohed the allegations, telling CBS that it was simply "wrong...
...He couldn't resist one punch below-the-belt, though, noting that "authors and publishers who take delight in a future world of diminished expectations may be helping to create a world without a textbook market too...
...that nature uncontrolled is not benign...
...As Prentice-HaU's The United States: Combined Edition (1982), referring to modern Americans, puts it: "Raised on the gospel of progress, few wanted to be t o l d . . , that they must lower their expectations and aspirations...
...Yes, on your bosom--that soft, delicious b o s o m . . . I shall tear you to pieces !" Ironically, between the years 1770 and 1830, men tended to be more prolix and self-conscious in their correspondence while women's replies tended to be curt, even impersonal in tone...
...Between 1750 and 1780 one custom that became widespread was "bundling," which allowed engaged couples to sleep together without being undressed...
...A History of the United States, Ginn, 1981) "Approximately 130 countries [apparently including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and South Korea] are referred to as developing nations . . . . They all have one thing in common: abject poverty...
...that they would need to exercise selfdiscipline and be prepared to make sacrifices...
...HighTHE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...they commonly read Fortune and the Wall Street Journal and have been exposed to events like oil gluts, the collapse of commodity prices, and the overabundance of food in the world market...
...As for checking these conclusions, several key members of MACV and the CIA never appeared on the show: Ellsworth Bunker, former ambassador to South Vietnam...
...Rothman apologizes for her skewed sample, which entirely consists of white, middle-to-upper class Americans...
...But this changed during the mid nineteenth-century, with the rise of the romantic novel...
...Unfortunately, London and Kahn actually understate the case...
...Contrary to conventional opinion, the sexual regulations imposed by parents, church, or society were never all that strict...
...No more penthouses or suburban estates...
...George Carver of the CIA, on the other hand, thought that they had "underestimated certain c a t e g o r i e s . . , a complicated structure the aggregate size of which was in the 500,000 range, but not 500,000 in the field . . . . " It is clear that Carver initiated a compromise with MACV in 1967, and in a private meeting with Westmoreland the two men mediated their differences...
...He frets that the pessimism and negativism dominating high-school texts is spiritually damaging a whole generation...
...In fact, in all areas of behavior, because of male expectations of female standards, women have a civilizing effect on men...
...The question of whether being engaged entitles men and women to marital prerogatives has always been hotly debated in the culture...
...This is not to say that women have feebler instincts, only that they have the moral strength to overcome them...
...The point is," Rostow explained, "Johnson did u n d e r s t a n d . . , there was a debate, and it was a debate essentially about whether, they had underestimated in the past the scale of that guerrilla category . . . . " In other words Westmoreland was not concealing anything from anyone, but simply participating in the legitimate debate that had raged throughout the war over just how the enemy might be counted...
...Still, John Adams defended "bundling" because it provided both "independence and protection," while many preachers regarded it as an invitation to debauchery...
...Their Mercedes would be turned in for pockets full of bus tokens...
...But the publishers of textbooks are a different story...
...Even within marriage, sex was said to be barely safe--lucky for its survival that it helped with the business of reproduction...
...that he had "blocked reports," fired or transferred intelligence deviants...
...and finally, that he had obliged the CIA to cave in to MACV's and, by implication, his personal demands...
...Name Address City State Zip Telephone THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984 43 school texts depict humankind as "fraught with original s i n , " desecrating nature and committing numberless crimes against the "third world" and future generations...
...History of a Free People, Macmillan, 1981) "Americans have covered the land with cement and asphalt, buildings and highways . . . . To meet our demand for goods, mountains have been stripped bare for lumber and for coal, copper, silver, gold, and other minerals...
...It will pay a high price for denying Westmoreland, at the very least, a fair hearing...
...In the books, overpopulation, eco-catastrophe, Western greed, resource shortages, environmental Allan C. Carlson is affiliated with The Rockford Institute...
...The reason there wasn't much premarital intercourse despite sexual autonomy among adolescents, Rothman discovers, is that "couples defined romantic love so that it included sexual attraction and gratification but excluded coitus...
...Philip Davidson--Westmoreland's chief o f intelligence--who CBS thought was dying of cancer (in fact, Davidson had just remarried and spent much of his spare time "playing lots of tennis...
...The correspondence of couples during the last two centuries reveals a variety of courtship styles...
...In the face of such environmentalist bilge, London strives to remain a gentleman...
...Rothman quotes the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison: 44 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1984...
...America...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...Mercy survives in my fantasy, I hasten to add...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS For Catalogue and Brochure Write To: Dr...
...Like children who commit felonies, these writers often don't know any better and can't be held fully responsible for their acts...
...and that air and water pollution levels are actually declining in most parts of the United States...
...There is the utilitarian: "As much as I love you," one gentleman said in 1808, "I cannot think of your ever giving yourself to me, unless you can rationally promise yourself that you shall by such a step increase your own felicity...
...Feelings, not rationality, became the official guide for amorous conduct...
...Women's role was to embody rather than articulate the sentimental ideal...
...No more posh meals at Four Seasons, Twenty-One, or Sardi's...
...Rothman blames this on what she calls "the prevailing stereotypes of men and women...
...Scott, Foresman, 1982) " . . . a rundown earth with a runaway population...
...This reflects the consensus of sexologists that, before the 1940s, the human libido lacked any vitality or spontaneity, simply saluting the official customs of the day...
...WHY ARE THEY LYING TO OUR CHILDREN...
...Perhaps the most startling omission was that of Gen...
...America...
...How can young people remain loyal to this nation when its past triumphs are labeled "wasteful, careless, and greedy...
...Kowet's contribution serves, if not as a buffer against, then as a reminder of how far afield some members of the press are willing to travel in order to avoid the real issues of Vietnam...
...And the overzealous: "How intensely do 1 long to see you--to feel you--to put these hands that hold this pen upon you...
...And the rest of us could get on with building a world where we could again anticipate our children being better of f than we are...
...essentially, most wanted to certify that the man was employable and not still dependent on his parents...
Vol. 17 • November 1984 • No. 11
