Better to Remain Silent and Be Thought a Fool Than to Speak Out and Remove All Doubt
There are a lot of ignorant people who end up being politicians. Most of them are ones that you may never even know their names because they don’t represent you or because they don’t speak their very ignorant positions on subjects. Unfortunately, in the State of Alabama, those politicians don’t like to sit around and keep their mouths shut. No, they speak up. And they speak loudly. What they say ends up being so horrifyingly stupid that you wish that they would just duct tape their mouths shut.
Today, when I got home from getting my thumb checked out, I had an email from Raw Story with today’s big stories. One of those stories had the headline: AL Republican outraged at teaching of ‘The Crucible’ because ‘McCarthy was right’. Obviously, being the geek that I am, I had to check this out. I wondered which one it could possibly be, if it was a politician or a wannabe politician. I guess it was a little of both.
Scott Beason told The Anniston Star that it was inappropriate to “compar[e] the McCarthy investigations of the 1950s, in which he turned out to be right, with the Salem witch hunts.” Apparently, a textbook was under the mistaken impression that people being wrongly accused of witchcraft and losing their livelihoods (and sometimes their lives) went through similar struggles that the people who were wrongly accused of being communists endured. Well, I guess that they are a little different different. On the one hand you have 20 people who were executed (most by hanging, one by being pressed-to-death) for being witches–something that we now know was total crap; on the other, you have a Senator leading trials accusing thousands of Americans of disloyalty, subversion, and treason or sympathizing with communists. Aside from the Rosenbergs, no one else was executed for this sort of crime during the rest of the Cold War. In terms of deaths, they are different, but if you look at them as examples of injustice brought on by irrational fears, well, then you realize that they are so similar that it is scary. Actually scary.
A lot of innocent people were victimized by the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy. And they weren’t simply put on trial. They were imprisoned. They lost their jobs. Being subpoenaed by McCarthy’s committee was considered a valid reason to be fired. They could be targeted not just for possible political leanings but for things like being gay. Homosexuality was considered a psychiatric disorder during that time, but it was also considered to be a subversive behavior and indicative of perverts. So you could be called on trial because someone thought you might be gay and that could lead to you losing your job or going to prison. That sounds like a modernized version of the persecution that went on during the witch trial era. And if State Senator Beason actually studied both eras and the play The Crucible, then he might get why they are linked in that textbook.
Maybe he wouldn’t, though. He also complained about Hiroshima by John Hersey as undermining American values and The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, which he felt portrayed Americans as “the bad guys” and goes against his belief that we were the good guys in the Vietnam War. John Hersey wrote Hiroshima from the Japanese view. He went to Hiroshima and interviewed the six “characters” of the book. Each one explained what they witnessed to him within a year after the bomb was dropped. Tim O’Brien’s book had a story about a soldier feeling guilty for killing a North Vietnamese soldier. Guess what? Tim O’Brien was a soldier. He fought in Vietnam. The story may be something he personally felt. I guess that Beason thinks that all soldiers like to kill & never feel bad about their actions. Well, many don’t enjoy war. And if they feel absolutely no remorse or regret, then I would feel worried. Personally, I don’t want the military full of sociopaths. Maybe State Senator Beason does, but that’s not the kind of people I want out there fighting.
Either Mr. Beason isn’t well versed on history or he’s hopelessly xenophobic. Whatever the reason is for his ignorance, it is disgusting that this is the man who is wanting to reform the education system in the state. He wants the State Superintendent to be an elected position instead of appointed, which would mean politicians and not educators would be in charge of decisions–people who could be bought very easily by PACs and who may have absolutely no knowledge of how to teach young people. He wants the state to opt out of using the Common Core curriculum. And his reasoning is that he wants everyone to be taught conservative American values, but the reality is that he’s afraid of the initiative because he links it with Obama. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that the standards for Common Core were created by state-based agencies, not by the federal government. He likes to talk about parents who have complained about the program, but he misconstrues the realities of the program. And, of course, people believe him.
I wish that he would quit spreading his foolishness. There are already a lot of people who are uninformed or misinformed. His interviews and speeches that spread this kind of ignorance only makes things worse. People think that he must be informed because he’s a politician and he’s read the law, but when he says this kind of stuff, it becomes pretty evident that he’s lacking when it comes to reading comprehension.
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