Aaron-d-wolf 
Aaron D. Wolf is Chronicles' associate editor.
Email this author
Articles and Posts by Aaron-d-wolf:
-
iDocile(5)
On my way to TRI Towers from my country estate this morning, I took a different route into the city. I started noticing something different in my peripheral vision, so I began looking more intently. Street corner after street corner had teenagers in ratty shorts and T-shirts waiting for a Rockford school bus. That was nothing different from what I remember from living in town.
The difference? Almost every one of them, block after block, was staring downward at a tiny box, face blank, thumbs jabbing at little buttons.
What I remember from just a few years before is that, on nearly every corner, at least two of them would’ve been shoving, fighting, yelling at each other. Not so any more. And the thing is, this change isn’t actually for the better.
-
Education Nightmares Revisited(5)
With the threat of a second, unfettered term for President BHO looming, one begins to wonder what sort of legacy he would try to cobble together. Well, smack in the middle of that second term would be the 60th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. A drumbeat from the left has been growing over the last year or so, pounding once again for education reform that would close the “achievement gap,” and Obama has done little, other than criticizing 43′s No Child Left Behind.
That can mean only one thing: a massive federal push for desegregation and busing. Right on cue, professional mischief-maker David L. Kirp enters, stage left, in the NYT Sunday Review:
The failure of the No Child Left Behind regimen to narrow the achievement gap offers the sobering lesson that closing underperforming public schools, setting high expectations for students, getting tough with teachers and opening a raft of charter schools isn’t the answer. If we’re serious about improving educational opportunities, we need to revisit the abandoned policy of school integration.
The piece is a real blast from the past, marshaling all sorts of refried arguments, but seasoned with new data that show, among other things, “black youths who spent five years in desegregated schools have earned 25 percent more than those who never had that opportunity. Now in their 30s and 40s, they’re also healthier—the equivalent of being seven years younger.”
Kirp’s bottom line: Poor black kids who are forced to be in the same room with rich white kids will be smarter, wealthier, and healthier! You will struggle to find political correctness that is more racist than this.
Lost in the shuffle once again are middle-class kids, about whose education our federal overlords could not give a flip. Whether it’s Romney or Obama, those kids will continue to learn tolerance instead of math. Neither the liberal arts that undergird civilization nor the vocational training that bolsters a strong manufacturing base is on the radar, let alone a priority. So get ready, America, to look more and more like Rockford, Illinois, where unemployment is staggering and the largest employer is the public school district. That’s what a decade of federally mandated desegregation bought us.
-
Zimmerman & Martin Lawyers Gouge Eyes on TV(0)
The news media love you and have a wonderful plan for your life, to borrow a phrase. And that plan is to ramp up your feelings of hate, which will fuel obsession over sensational news stories, which means better ratings.
In evidence today is one Bianca Prieto, who writes the following first paragraph on the website of the Orlando Sentinel (emphasis mine):
Lawyers for George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin’s family discussed the newly released evidence in the case this morning on the Today Show, ending with a heated exchange.
Watch the video, available here, then scratch your head and ask yourself: Where, exactly, is the “heated exchange”?
No, it all boils down to this: If you are a fan of Mr. O’Mara, obviously everything uttered by Mr. Crump is said in a fit of blancophobic rage; and vice-versa.
-
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Honkies(5)
The New York Times has delivered the unshocking news: “White births are no longer a majority in the United States.”
Using words like “milestone” and “tipping point” and “tectonic,” the Times wonders aloud whether greedy white folks will be willing to pony up the cash necessary to educate the burgeoning majority-minority generation. After all, the Maj-Mins (copyright ADW) will “look less like them.”
But wait: Are we (Honks) supposed to be colorblind and happy about our own decline all at once? Does the same paper that champions the Obama birth-control mandate also celebrate fecundity, so long as it is nonwhite?
Always looking on the bright side, America’s Newspaper of Record notes that Crackers should just be grateful that someone is willing to reproduce, given . . . the insolvency of Social Security.
“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. [Dowell] Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”
Professor Dowell makes his case for pragmatic amnesty in his Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, whose flap celebrates that,
In this compelling, optimistic book, Myers calls for a new social contract between the older [white] and younger [Hispanic] generations, based on their mutual interests and the moral responsibility of each generation to provide for children and the elderly.
So old white people should view young brown people as retirement-plan cash cows. That’s not racist at all.
-
Dreams of My Daughters(4)
President Obama has made it clear that babies get in the way of big dreams.
-
The McQuearing of America(15)
Yes, yes, curse the defensive genius and pedophile* Jerry Sandusky (author of Touched) and Joe Pa (who continued to employ him). But what about the grad assistant who happened to lock eyes with ol’ Sandusky when the latter was sodomizing a ten-year-old boy in the Happy Valley showers of Penn State?
-
Man of Middangeard(4)
September 2 is the 38th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien (1973). The man who inspired so many to see the real, enchanted world and not the sterile, imagined one of modernity was himself inspired by deeply Christian Anglo-Saxon poetry.
The very idea of “Middle Earth” came from a (likely) ninth-century poem called Christ or The Ascension, by a man named Cynewulf. In honor of the creator of Lord of the Rings, here’s the relevant passage:
Eala earendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended,
ond soðfæsta sunnan leoma,
torht ofer tunglas, þu tida gehwane
of sylfum þe symle inlihtes!
Swa þu, god of gode gearo acenned,
sunu soþan fæder, swegles in wuldre
butan anginne æfre wære,
swa þec nu for þearfum þin agen geweorc
bideð þurh byldo, þæt þu þa beorhtan us
sunnan onsende, ond þe sylf cyme
þæt ðu inleohte þa þe longe ær,
þrosme beþeahte ond in þeostrum her,
sæton sinneahtes; synnum bifealdne
deorc deaþes sceadu dreogan sceoldan.Charles W. Kennedy has translated this to read:
Hail Day-Star! Brightest angel sent to man *throughout the earth* [in Middle Earth], and Thou steadfast splendour of the sun, bright above stars! Ever Thou dost illumine with Thy light the time of every season. As Thou, begotten God of God, Son of the True Father, without beginning abodest ever in the splendour of heaven, so now for need Thy handiwork bessecheth boldly that Thou send the bright sun unto us; that Thou come and shed Thy light on those who long ere this, compassed about with mist and in the darkness, clothed in sin, sit here in the long night, and must needs endure the dark shadow of Death.
How boring is the world of Christopher Hitchens and his fellow science-worshipers! Tolkien, like Cynewulf, knew that reality is far more interesting than the mere visible world.
-
Mormon Apocalypse, Pt. 1(43)
Mitt Romney, Glenn Beck—and Cleon Skousen: Here’s Part 1 of Aaron Wolf’s analysis of American Exceptionalism as the fulfillment of Mormonism. (From the October 2010 issue of Chronicles.)
-
Pharmaceutical Holiday(6)
Can you imagine the FDA approving a drug that, say, increased the risk of blood clots, hypertension, stroke, heart attacks, breast cancer, and migraines for women? And fathom, if you will, the absurd notion that such a drug could be approved for the treatment of something that isn’t even a disease, a genetic abnormality, or a mental disorder but the very way that God designed women’s bodies to work.
-
Let’s Cheat on Our Taxes(3)
As I write, April 15 is still fresh in the mind, and the sting of death remains, combining the current pangs of tax extraction with the promise of a greater burden to come, thanks to the Barackification of heathcare.
So imagine my delight when I read in a back issue of a leading Christian magazine (call it Evangelicalism Now) that, come next April 15, I should just flip off Uncle Sam and cheat on my taxes.