Now that you mention it, the names of Mr. Parker and Mrs. Arvin sound familiar, but I don't remember taking any classes with them. When I think of history classes at Gage Park, all I can recall is Fred Sears. We called him "Fred" behind his back, but of course it was always "Mr. Sears" in his presence. Fred had the reputation of being a mean prick because he sometimes filled in for
Mr. Stevens. Remember him? His official title was "Attendance Councilor", but he was basically the discipline guy. Willie P. Hearne was the principal, but we seldom saw him except at assemblies. When you got sent to the office, it was Mr. Stevens that you had to deal with. Fred Sears was a lot easier to take as a teacher than as a discipline guy, but he still had kind of a haughty personality. He frequently played "devil's advocate" in class discussions. He would pretend to advocate a position just to see if anybody could intelligently challenge it. Of course I was one of his favorites, and you must have been too. I seem to remember that you said you didn't remember Fred, but you must have been in at least one of his classes because I distinctly remember you presenting a report on Atheism as part of our "Great Religions of the World" study. You reported on the book "This Believing World" by Isaac Azimov. I read it myself years later and, I must say, it made a lot of sense.
When I think of American History, the only teacher I can remember is Mrs. Baker at Sawyer. She was an old fashioned patriot and proud of it, a big fan of the Constitution and the rule of law. She was no fan of FDR, but she dutifully taught us the politically correct version of him from the textbook. Then she told us to close our books and told us what the opposition had to say about FDR. She didn't try to recruit us to the opposition, she said that she just wanted us to know there were two sides to that story. When I went to my sister's graduation ceremony, I learned that Mrs. Baker had recently died and they dedicated the whole program to her memory. Too bad, I would have liked to hear her take on the Vietnam Era.
I don't think that the American experiment was "home free" after the revolution. There was the War of 1812, which the British won on the battlefield, but they let us off the hook because they had decided by then that they'd rather have us as an ally than an enemy. Then there was the Civil War, and everything that led up to it and followed it. Meanwhile, Napoleon was running roughshod over Europe. That kind of turned in our favor when France conquered Spain and subsequently sold us the Louisiana Purchase for cheap. I don't think they had any plans for it, and probably didn't even know how big it was. Too bad for them! The more I think about it, the Napoleonic wars might have been what saved our bacon. Those guys were so busy fighting among themselves that they didn't have time to bother picking on us. If it wasn't for that, we might all be speaking French, or Spanish, or even English today.
I'm not sure why we didn't end up with a parliamentary system like most of the world's democracies. I know that the Founding Fathers got some inspiration from the pre-empirical Roman Republic, and maybe the ancient Greeks. The British had a parliamentary system, but they also had a king who still had some real power. Maybe our guys, wanting to avoid that, decided it was easier to just start over from scratch, take a little of this and a little of that, and put their own spin on it.
I saw something about Hilary's email scandal today on the news today, sounds like a tempest in a teapot to me. If she gets elected president we'll have a lot more than email to worry about. It's hard to imagine a worse president than Obama but, in my experience, nothing is so bad that it can't get worse. So far the Republicans have got, like, nobody. Rand Paul is fine for a protest vote, like his daddy before him, but he'll never get elected. It has occurred to me that John Boehner might not be a bad choice, but I don't think he is even running, at least not yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment