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Monday, January 10, 2005
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BUNCOMBE
A leftwing British journalist based in Washington DC, a writer for the Independent newspaper and for Counterpunch, gets in his car one afternoon and drives toward the monastery in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia that UD and her husband like to visit on occasion. He turns off of Route 7 shortly before he gets to the monastery and heads for a less rarefied religious institution -- Patrick Henry College, the small new college composed largely of home-schooled evangelical Christians. He spends some hours walking around the campus and talking to students. Horrified by what he has seen and heard, Andrew Buncombe drives home and writes “The Bible College that Leads to the White House,” an article first published by the Independent, but picked up by a number of other outlets concerned about what Buncombe calls the “cultish” takeover of America by colleges like Patrick Henry. (“THOU SHALT BE LIKE BUSH” is the headline The New Zealand Herald chooses for the piece.) Since in structure, style, and content, Buncombe’s article is an instructive example of propaganda, UD will fisk it. FASCIST ROBOTS ON THE MARCH The point of Buncombe’s article is to frighten you into thinking that fascist robots are being manufactured in pleasant totalitarian higher education settings and then infiltrated into the highest reaches of the American government. Buncombe does this quite effectively. UD will show you how, in case you’d like to do it too. Buncombe’s short article only has about twenty paragraphs, but almost each one of them features adjectives like “clean-cut,” “cheerful,” neatly-kept,” “close-mown,” “extraordinarily pleasant,” and “terribly pleasant,” to describe the demeanor of the students and the tidiness of their setting. The students and the administrators are always “smiling” and “charming,” and everything’s neat, neat, neat … And after all, what could we or Buncombe object to in such attributes? Did Buncombe get in his car seeking a collegiate sewer with turds floating in it? Yet each reiteration of these adjectives somehow feels a bit more eerie, a bit creepier … you can’t put your finger on it exactly, but at some point in the article all this good stuff morphs into what Buncombe identifies as “bland, unquestioning niceness;” these “suited,” “attentive” students turn out to be living in “the 1998 film Pleasantville,” a landscape of McCarthyite conformity and barely suppressed viciousness: “For all the warm welcomes, for all the smiles, for all the openness, there is something a little unsettling about Patrick Henry and the cultish devotion of its students. This is, after all, an establishment that claims to challenge its students to think for themselves, and yet establishes a fixed, rigid framework - both culturally and intellectually - in which they are to operate.” SCARED TO DEATH A “little” unsettling? Buncombe is an objective reporter and all, so he doesn’t say what we’re thinking at this point, but he quotes Nancy Keenan, from People for the American Way: “The number of interns [from Patrick Henry] going into the White House scares me to death. People have a right to choose [where their children are educated], but we are concerned that they are not exposed to the kind of diversity this country has. They are training people with a very limited ideological and political view. If these young people are going into positions of power, they have to govern with all people in mind, not just a limited number.“ Possibly Nancy Keenan has also expressed fear about the lack of intellectual diversity at secular American universities, where students are likely never to be taught by anyone who’s not a liberal democrat, but UD doubts it. Similarly, she doubts that Buncombe, who worries about a “statement of faith” students at Patrick Henry sign, has expressed anxiety about the loyalty-to-diversity pledges some students in Women’s Studies and other courses are asked to sign before they can participate in mainstream American university classes. As for the “alarming” overrepresentation of Patrick Henry students in significant internships at the White House and in other high-profile government positions, UD wonders whether Buncombe found the overrepresentation of Harvard’s best and brightest in the Kennedy administration equally alarming. They too, as Buncombe says darkly of Patrick Henry students, were “on a mission to change the world; indeed to lead the world.” But unlike the students at Patrick Henry, the Ivy Leaguers were not, for instance, required every morning to go to “chapel” (Buncombe puts the word “chapel” in quotation marks, as if we do not know to what it refers, or as if the students say they‘re going to “chapel,” but are really going someplace else). IN PLAIN VIEW What’s most horrifying about Patrick Henry is that even though it’s placing its zombie students “in positions of authority and influence,” it’s doing it “in plain view,” with “utter transparency,” Buncombe concludes. It doesn’t, in other words, have the decency to be a hidden conspiracy. But there is a long tradition in America of such plain view political conspiracies. UD’s husband graduated from a private school in Boston in 1968. Out of that school’s very small graduating class -- 24 people -- 7 were accepted to Harvard. That’s thirty percent. Among those students were children of Harvard faculty who had worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and who would themselves go on to become Democratic party activists. An impressive number of this second generation’s children in turn have gone to Harvard and been important in the Democratic party, etc. UD is describing a well-established culture of feeder schools representing the liberal elite of the United States as it replicates itself in our government. Shocking, isn’t it, that the workings of this expansive legacy program are utterly transparent and in plain view… TOTALITARIAN ROBOTS BEAT OXFORD UNIVERSITY AT DEBATE Six months after Buncombe’s scary evocation of its cultish devotees and its fixed, rigid framework, Patrick Henry’s debate team went to England and defeated Oxford’s moot court team: “There were extraordinarily impressive performances,” said Andrew Graham, master of Balliol College. “They were good. If I would’ve been in my mid-20s and had to appear in front of Supreme Court judges and be cross-examined by them, I imagine it would’ve been terrifying.” The Patrick Henry students “had a month to prepare their arguments and learn the intricacies of British contract law.” How in the world did these cultists manage to worm their intellectual way into something as alien as British contract law, I wonder? Or is British contract law indistinguishable from Biblical prophecy? Buncombe’s British. Maybe he knows. |