July 4th Thread: Is the Idea of "America" in trouble

I'm not going to dissect your whole post. I will say that people of the past would be able to properly format the quote function on their BBS posts, so perhaps you are correct.

But this statement fairly well illustrates my point. The authors of the article don't actually have a problem with how things are then vs. now. It is generally about things they would like to change with society today. I guess if you are a conservative, you can't talk about changing society in a positive way, but have to invent some utopian past and claim you are just trying to restore it, so you won't be confused with those icky ‘liberals’ or 'progressives'.

Being born in 1980, your ‘personal experience’ doesn’t provide you with a referent point to judge how things have declined. There is a stupid person sitting next to you? There would have been the same stupid person sitting next to you in 1950.

The fact is that civic education is crap. Outside of a handful of elites, it has always been crap. If you want to argue that we should consider educating society on civic virtues, fine. If they wanted to write an article about how improving civic knowledge would be beneficial going forward, that would make a nice opinion piece.

But the article posits some precipitous historical decline as evidence of impending doom. It then fails to provide even the slightest bit of evidence of this supposed superior past. A number of the issues that it brings up, like language cohesion, can be proven to have actually been significantly worse in the past. The article, therefore, fails to prove any evidence of the impending disaster that it is claiming to herald.

 

You're being an ass. Quite simply, you've invented my argument, my terms, and then thrown in an ad hominem argument to top it all off, all while failing to recognize the one piece of empirical evidence I provided in the form of General Education requirements.

You assume a) I have the same beliefs of those in the article and b) I envision a Golden Age of American Education where every kid was walking down the street reciting the Declaration of Independence.

Bottom line, kids should learn American History, warts and all, better than they do now. The decline is evident in the education standards seen in every University across America. The ideas of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness are essential to our existence as a country and any resolution that helps teach that should be encouraged. This isn't a liberal/conservative issue. This isn't a Utopian push issue. It's a push to teach the very basics of our country to high school and college age kids.

The fact you want to turn it into a liberal vs. conservative issue is idiotic. Liberals should be schooled in the constitution to be able to know when the PATRIOT act has gone too far. Or maybe we can just say that Totalitarian government is just being progressive. That's usually the way they start.

 

I'm arguing about the article that started this thread which is where I get the terms and arguments. As you are defending the article, you assume the mantle of their historical revisionism. I'm sorry if talking about the article that started the thread seems unreasonable to you.

As far as your argument about general education requirements at the Ivy's, I'm not really sure you are entirely right on the specifics. My impression is that most of the Ivy's made the relevant changes well before when you seem to imply. If you could provide some specific information on what the General Education requirements were at each of the Ivy League schools were in the 1950's and how they've changed between then and now, that might be a good place to start.

Which is fine. Feel free to write an article about that for this conservative think tank and submit it. But don't frame it in an article about how great the past was and how we are suffering from a monumental collapse in the education system, unheard of in the history of America resulting in the impending end of the American Way as the article's authors did.

 

From liberation theologian to President, this is what the 4th of July is all about:


http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/paraguay-joins-shift-to-the-left-in-latin-america/2008/07/03/1214950959238.html

July 4, 2008

Paraguay has become the latest Latin American country to throw out a rightwing president in favour of a reforming leftwinger. But does former priest Fernando Lugo, a man with little political experience, stand any real chance of transforming his battered country?

Pastors of the faithful don't usually come like this. On the pavement outside the provisional headquarters of Fernando Lugo, the bishop turned president-elect of Paraguay, armed troops stand on watch. Outside the door of his office upstairs sits a beautiful secretary with long blond hair. The corridors are alive with the buzz of political power.

Lugo, who defeated the country's current president, Nicanor Duarte Frutos, in the April election, and who will assume office in August, is informally dressed and wearing mittens when we meet; he receives me with a bright smile. He has the aplomb of a man born to lead. No small talk. No clerical pieties. Straight to the main questions and the careful but unhesitating answers from a man who knows what he wants and has a fair idea of how to get it.

Paraguay's president-to-be is the most recent of a series of elected Latin American leaders committed to improving the lives of the region's poorest people - among them the native peoples, who have been subdued and exploited ever since Columbus arrived in 1492.

After five centuries, the discontent of the indigenous people is beginning to boil over. This is despite the efforts of the US, which for 50 years has tried to smother the drive for change: either directly, using boycotts and bayonets - as in Cuba, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Panama and Grenada - or indirectly, through the use of local military surrogates - as in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. The dangerous ideas of the Catholic liberation theologians were a particular target for Washington.

But recently the combination of increasing prices for the region's exports of oil, minerals and food, and a waning of the once strong US influence in the region has helped to throw up a generation of new, more confident leaders in Latin America. Hugo Chavez was elected and re-elected in Venezuela, as was Lula in Brazil. Cristina Kirchner followed her husband Nestor to power in Argentina. Veronica Michelle Bachelet was elected in Chile, Tabare Vasquez in Uruguay, Evo Morales in Bolivia and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. And now, Lugo in Paraguay.

Until he resigned in January 2005, Lugo - full name, Fernando Armindo Lugo Mendez - was the bishop of San Pedro Apostol del Ycuamandiyu. This is a poverty-stricken area of 380,000 people, more than 90% of them Catholics, somewhere in the wilderness to the north of Asuncion. Many of Lugo's flock were illiterate and went hungry most of the time. The native language, Guarani, is used in many homes, rather than Spanish.

These people, like most Paraguayans, got little support from the baleful one-party regime of the Colorado party, which had been in power for 61 years, ever since the late General Alfredo Stroessner took power in 1954.

Stroessner was president until 1989, bolstered by a large and efficient gang of spies, torturers and con men, and the unfailing support of the western powers. Stroessner lived in the gothic presidential palace where he maintained an insatiable appetite for pubescent girls. Under his rule, Paraguay became a byword for dirty deeds, filth and, of course, smuggling. Drug trading was rife for decades while babies were freely on sale for GBP25,000 a throw. The profits made maintained lawyers, judges and traffickers in style. Meanwhile Stroessner's enemies lived and died in prison (one, the communist leader Ananias Maidana, remained in the same cell for 19 years).

There followed a period of unstable rule under a string of Colarado chieftains, of which the current president is the most recent. Today, Paraguay remains a corrupt mess. It has also been a standing disgrace to the governments from Washington to Taipei and from London to Canberra - who cheerfully embraced a succession of Colorado presidents as welcome allies against the left - alongside Pinochet, Galtieri, the Somozas and the Trujillos.

Lugo could not be more different. His mother and father, Maximina and Guillermo, were near the bottom of the social ladder, though Maximina's brother, Epifanio, was a poet, artist and a big wheel in politics whom Stroessner forced into exile and death. Fernando, born in 1951, trained as a teacher when he was 17 but, by 20, had decided his vocation was the church. He joined the Divine Word Missionaries, a group of 4,000 priests and 6,000 lay brothers which has seen a bewildering variety of members - from moderate leftwingers, including Enrique Angelelli, one of the bishops murdered by the Argentine junta, to a rightwing Brazilian prelate who made Opus Dei look like a band of Trotskyites.

Lugo was ordained in 1977. The following year he went to Ecuador, where the majority of the population are indigenous, and where he came under the spell of the Bishop of Riobamba, Leonidas Proano, a leading South American liberation theologist. "We young priests were working mainly on youth work. But we were constantly going to talk to the man they called the bishop in the poncho, or the bishop of the Indians," he recalls. The parallels with his country and its Guaranis were never far from his mind.

Today, Lugo lays great emphasis on the resurgence of the indigenous peoples of Latin America. "Since 1992, the 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Europeans, there has been a rediscovery of the indigenous peoples' dignity. And it's got a long way to go yet," he says.

On his return to Paraguay, Lugo was sent off by the order to study in Rome. His course in sociology included a paper in English so he was dispatched to London for an intensive course at a language school in Soho Square. "I enjoyed being in a cosmopolitan city. At the weekend I helped out saying masses at parishes near the house. But," he confesses, "my English was virtually unintelligible."

When he returned, his superiors in Rome made him head of the Divine Word community in Paraguay. He was still in his mid-40s when in 1994 he was made a bishop and given San Pedro for a diocese. There he began to put into practice the sort of trenchant policies he had learned from Proano. The local landowners, who had grown sleek on their plantations while their workforce languished, found their match in the new bishop. Soon he was leading and encouraging landless country people to demand their rights and justice.

He became a national figure for his support for Tekojoja ("Life in Equality"), a socialist group keen on defending country people against the landowners whom the Colorados had backed.

He felt his commitment to life as a provincial bishop waning. When he told the Vatican of his decision to quit San Pedro, many cassocks were ruffled. But his decision was accepted - Rome had little choice - and he was given the title of Bishop Emeritus, one that in the Catholic church covers a multitude of irregular or embarrassing situations, but which he does not use. Relations with Rome grew colder as the calls for him to stand for the presidency mounted.

He eventually went forward as the candidate of an oddly mixed coalition of a score of parties and movements, from the traditional and very conservative Liberal party, to the more radical voices such as Tekojoja.

This produced a clerical explosion in Rome and, on December 20 2006, a serious "canonical admonition" from Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re arrived. "The Holy See with surprise has taken cognisance," his letter began, "that some political parties intend to present Your Excellency as candidate in the forthcoming presidential election . . . In the name of Jesus Christ I exhort you to reflect seriously on your behaviour . . . "

But Lugo stuck to his purpose. He wasn't excommunicated, and after his victory when he won 42% of the vote against the 32% gained by the Colorados, the Pope sent him a congratulatory gift of a pen.

The vote signalled that impetus for reform powered by liberation theology was not dead, but prophesies of gloom soon surfaced, based on his supposed inexperience in politics and on the organising power of the Colorados. These now look overblown: the Colorados are in chaos; the army, a possible source of a putsch, is hardly strong enough to keep public order; and Lugo's victory has boosted his already great popularity. Those who cite his political inexperience misunderstand his operational brilliance in the often Machiavellian world of the Roman church.

"He's got the immense advantage of being an honest man amid widespread corruption," says Jim Cason, the US ambassador. "He's not easily vulnerable".

Paraguay's gross economic indicators are healthy, its foreign reserves boosted by ever more valuable exports of soya and beef. Lugo has also set his heart on getting a better deal from the Brazilians over the hydroelectric power of the jointly owned Itaipu dam. With an economy able to absorb only the tiniest fraction of its half share of the dam's output, Paraguay has been selling most of its share to Brazil for what Lugo says is a pittance. If he persuades the Brazilians to quadruple its price for Itaipu power Paraguay's finances could be transformed overnight. Lugo is cheerful about his chances of success here. "President Lula of Brazil has shown himself open to discussion about our concerns."

Lugo carefully nurses landlocked Paraguay's relations with its neighbours. He gets on well with President Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay. Relations with Argentina present no immediate problems and he and Morales will operate on parallel tracks. He makes no secret of his debt to Ecuador and follows closely as the reformist President Correa boosts the indigenous majority in that country.

Perhaps reflecting Washington's need to make all the friends it can in a continent which is fast slipping from its control, the ambassador assured me he had been the first to phone and congratulate Lugo on his victory. Amid some grumbles from the left, Lugo has been booked into the White House sometime before the end of the Bush government.

"At the end of my five-year term," he says, "I want Paraguay to have changed its international image, to be seen as a serious country where laws and the constitution are obeyed and contracts respected. We're particularly seeking to cut down government corruption."

He makes no apologies for wanting to redistribute income in Paraguay. "We want to start - though perhaps we may not complete - a genuine agrarian reform. We want a fairer society, not one where a tiny group creams off the profits."

Guardian News & Media

 

To be American is to use selective facts to prove your case.

Nothing wrong here...