stupid white men

I somehow managed to miss it when Fahrenheit 9/11 appeared in the big screen last year. Among my lefty friends it was a big hit, as it was with the general public. Chris Hitchens trashed it, Paul Krugman raved it, but I never really got around to watching it. I mean after all, I didn't need uber-left 'polemics' to convince me that the Iraq War is fundamentally flawed. It seems I didn't miss much.

The other weekend I had to attend a party. Normal people socialise at these things. I find that boring. So instead I found myself in a corner, with Moore's Stupid white men. I opened a page randomly. What did I read?

I read that a school library in the Smallville, USA had an atlas with a map of the Soviet Union. That's right, American school kids were learning about the Evil Soviet Empire in 2000. No wonder these ignorant Americans support Bush, you're thinking. See, Moore makes that point too. Fine, I have no problem with that.

But then Moore says it's all Dick Nixon's fault. Now I'm no fan of Nixon let me assure you, but it seemed a bit odd to blame Nixon for whatever ailed American schooling system at the turn of the century. No, no, it's all Nixon's fault, Moore persists. Why? Well, because Nixon in 1974 changed the funding arrangement such that the States, rather than the Federal Government, were given the responsibility to allocate various schooling related funds. As a result of this monumental treachery, American school libraries ended up with so little funds for their libraries that they failed update the atlas for the demise of the Soviet Union.

Right! I'm not even going to get into public versus private benefits of education. I am not going to argue about whether voucher systems are better. I'm not going to talk about parental choices. None of that. I accept that a bureaucracy handing over taxpayers' money for a state sponsored thought process is the right thing. And I take Moore's word that his example is not an outlier, that it is representative of the sorry state of the American schooling system.

Fine. But how the hell is it Nixon's fault? Moore doesn't say that Nixon cut funding. All Nixon did was to give the responsibility of funding to the States. So instead of some education expert in the DC deciding where the money would go, it would be decided by some education expert in Albany or Olympia. That the blame for all these 50 education departments making the same judgement to 'under fund' libraries lies with Dick Nixon is not bad polemics. It's just sheer stupidity.

Stupid white men? Indeed. Not only the lot that voted Bush because of his patriotism, but also the idiots who made Moore an icon of the left.