Ron DeSantis has lost his mind – and every single Florida state legislator and Florida citizen who thinks his thinking is sane has gone bananas, too.
But will falsehood rule the day? Any intelligent person who even has a past knows that truth, crushed to the earth, will rise up, will not die. Truth will survive and it will rise. It must.
So we can only hope that Ron DeSantis, like falsehood, will eventually fade like ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
5 February 2023 (Crete, Greece) – – FROM THE DESK OF FLORIDA GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS:
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Florida demands revisions of woke AP calculus, chemistry curriculums
As we in Florida celebrate “Month” (what other states call “Black History Month”), it has come to our attention that woke ideologies have penetrated not just the African American Studies AP course framework but also every other Advanced Placement class.
We were heartened that the College Board updated its curriculum for the African American Studies course for what it claimed were unrelated reasons after we raised objections to the inclusion of Black queer topics and works from thinkers such as bell hooks and Angela Davis. It was so nice that their unrelated edits coincided with our specific complaints; we feel like we’ve won, even if they insist that is not what happened.
But we cannot stop here. These same woke ideologies have penetrated every single AP offering. We would like to see the following changes made to these additional courses as soon as possible.
AP European History: Lots of talk about “allies” and “allyship.” Seems unnecessary in a history course. Mentions allies (including communists) working together to defeat Nazis — this, again, feels needlessly political. Describes book burnings as definitively negative. Also, there are references to France, the French. Jesus wept.
AP Human Geography: Existence of Ukraine as a sovereign nation presented as fact. Teach the controversy, please!
AP Chemistry: Students are urged to call some things “basic” as a judgment — this must stop. Instead, say that a chemical compound “enjoys Starbucks” or “favors the music of Taylor Swift.” Stop students from titrating; this is not something they should be doing at school. Singling out some gases as “noble” because they are “less volatile” has the potential to hurt feelings and should be stopped. Okay to study DNA but not mRNA.
AP Calculus: Omit positive references to integration and change. And in order to understand Calculus, you need Algebra. But that’s Arabic. We propose Christian Nationalist math.
AP Art History: Filth! Put fig leaves on all those statues, and then we can reevaluate.
AP Comparative Government and Politics: Description of voting as an unalloyed good is misleading.
AP Physics: “Resistance” and “resistors” have no place in a science course. And “charmed quarks”? Please. It’s one quick step to groomed quarks. I’m telling you. Danger there. And – acceleRATION? Whoa. Isn’t ration a part of socialism?
AP U.S. History: Mentions events from the American past. Unacceptable. And “Civil War”? No, it was “The War Between the States” But we will accept “the War of Northern Aggression”.
AP Statistics: This whole course seems engineered to make anti-vaxxers feel “wrong” and “lesser.” Need to stress that there is more than one correct way to interpret statistics.
AP Latin: Every word of this seems obscene. “Cum gladiis et fustibus”? “Homo bulla™? “Dix”? These are the same people who gave us all those nude statues, and it shows.
AP English Literature: Includes books. We can’t stand books.
AP Biology: No objections, but see attached 95-page complaint from Texas which has some issues.
* * * * * * * *
Yes, the above is meant to be tongue-in-cheek, started on a blog post by the Washington Post columnist Alexandra Petri, but then supplemented with her readers’ “suggestions” — plus a few of my own suggestions thrown in. What is somewhat funny is when you first glance at the title of the press release it is a headline you imagine to be real in the United States.
But it is pretty amazing how DeSantis has the power to simply dictate what books are allowed in Florida schools, that Florida school districts have become powerless. But it is an expansion of Florida conservative power. Last year DeSantis signed into law a measure that gives parents and guardians more freedom to challenge the types of books that are in their school communities, with the power to overrule local school boards. Court challenges are not expected.
And it’s not just in Florida. A teachers organization in Oregon has developed a course in “ethnomathematics”. The basic premise is that “insistence in normal math classes that there is only one correct answer is culturally insensitive”. Yes, in America this shit never stops.
But all humor aside, it is actually quite serious. Alexandra Petri is channeling George Orwell quite well. Unfortunately, there is far more than a grain of truth in what she writes.
And as for “woke”, it is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. It began to be used by the political left to refer to progressiveness and social justice, and so those on the political right have weaponised it as a way to denigrate those who disagree with their beliefs. It has been distorted, appropriated into the language of dominant culture and conservatism – as an invective.
At its most crude, one of the key tools autocracies use in order to keep the population in line is eliminating facts and the truth from our society. Books, schools, science and those who teach anything other than State sponsored bullshit are all considered a threat. A society force-fed falsehoods passing for facts is hopelessly ignorant by design and subservient to the autocrats whom they view, thanks to being deprived of knowledge, as their saviors. Florida seems to be regressing to a raging QAnon den.
Fear has always been the weapon of choice for tyrants to impose conformity, stifle imagination and crush hope, and specifically, fear of execution, imprisonment or exile. Or, in the case of the state of Florida and her teachers, it is a third-degree felony for possessing a book on school bookshelves that is not approved by the state and Ron DeSantis.
Books are a canvas for art. Words are magical when conveying a picture, an image, experience, feeling, love and fear. Books are a gateway to myriad other art forms, from painting, to theater, to motion pictures. Without books the world becomes small and dark. With books the world becomes full of possibility with learning, dreaming and imagination lifted to glorious places. Books are the vessels of ideas — good and bad, righteous and evil, grand and petty. There is no freedom without them. Whatever wonder will be invented in the future, it will always be a descendent of the printing press, which lit the world far more powerfully than did electricity. As Stephen Schmidt notes in his book “Destiny of the Republic“:
“One lesson of history that should not be forgotten about Nazi book burning is where the bonfires raged. They raged at universities, and the people fueling the fires with the works of great philosophers, musicians, writers and artists were young people. How does book burning start? Simple. With book bans. That’s the first step”.
And in Florida it is brutal. All that matters is that Florida teachers could be charged with felonies for having books in a classroom that are not sanctioned by the state. Period. Fear has been institutionalized. Yes, the Florida book banning law is un-American, probably unconstitutional – and a disturbing insight into the fragile and unprincipled id of a Florida governor who has created his own bread and circuses for our age of distrust.
When Adolf Hitler put a bullet in his head, the global war he started had killed more than 85 million people. The American rebuilding of Europe and Germany into stable democratic societies was the greatest act of beneficence and generosity in world history. Yet, the past is never far away in Germany. The swastika became illegal in Germany – as it should be. When the war was ended nearly every vestige of Nazi rule was eradicated. The symbols of the 1,000-year Reich disappeared. They were turned to dust.
Yet history always knocks at our door.
There is a museum in Munich, Germany that Stephen Schmidt told me about. It’s called the Haus der Kunst (“House of Art”). The Nazis used it to display examples of “Jewish” and other degenerate art. The museum survived the war. After German reunification in the 1990s it was refurbished and somebody decided to look up one day at the inlaid ceiling mosaic under the portico. There were the swastikas. Every person who walked through the doors of the museum walked under those swastikas for more than 50 years, but few people ever looked up, Stephen said.
It’s good to look up. It helps give perspective. It helps orient an individual to what is happening in plain sight around them.
When you look at that ceiling today, you expect to see something beautiful. I wish that was all there was to see. But it isn’t.
I’ll end with something Stephen Schmidt wrote on his blog over the weekend:
“There is danger all around us, and it comes from the extremists amongst us. Looking up helps remind you what it is you are looking at. It’s something very ugly and very evil. It has nothing to do with books, sculpture, painting – or even those non-sexy M&Ms. It has to do with power and control”.
The best way to be controlled today is to keep your head down and eyes looking in. That way you’ll never see what’s hanging over you – at least until it’s too late.
It is sometimes difficult (and sometimes pointless) to follow the political and social machinations going on back in the land of my birth without a spirit of disgust. But even though I am a verified cynic and no longer a U.S. citizen, I find myself irrevocably tangled in America’s hopes, arrogance, and despair. Anti-American? No. Just anti-the-social-and-the-politics. Because once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they are heard, and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.
But the disintegration of the social construct in America has to do with geography – it explains the United States. About 10 years ago I wrote a short piece for a French newspaper about how geography explains the U.S. and I said in part:
Sigmund Freud argued that in the human enterprise, anatomy is destiny. In the affairs of nations, geography – what it wills, demands, and bestows – is destiny too. It can’t explain everything, to be sure. Britain and Japan are both island nations. That might explain their reliance on naval power and even their imperial aspirations. But what accounts for their fundamentally different histories? Other factors are clearly at play, including culture, religion, and what nature bestows or denies in resources. Fortune, along with the random circumstances it brings, pushes them in different directions.
Still, if I had to identify that one thing that – more than any other – helps explain the way Americans see the world, it would be America’s physical location. It’s kind of like in the real estate business: It’s all about location, location, location.
The United States is the only great power in the history of the world that has had the luxury of having non-predatory neighbors to its north and south, and fish to its east and west. The two oceans to either side of the country are what U.S. historian Thomas Bailey brilliantly described as “its liquid assets”.
An English language version of the edited piece (for my American readers) can be read by clicking here.
Because America’s geographical position is so unique in the world, it has led to its worldview being unrealistic and riddled with contradictions. It is why Americans (as a whole), no matter how well-intentioned they may be, cannot grasp what is happening in Europe, in Russia, in Ukraine, in the *real world* of global politics. It does not have the requisite geographical history.
Nor does It does not have the requisite knowledge of its own history to realize how it has laid the path to its own destruction. C’est dommage.