The Asylum Is Being Run By the Inmates

SEE HERE Sometimes it just doesn't pay to get up. An extra hour of so of sleep might prepare you to meet the sheer insanity that is printed in the morning paper. Here in Harrisonburg we have a former mayor nutjob who's running for city council claiming that in a special election yesterday the computer glitch that got the day started was a sinister conspiracy on the part of the Republicans to limit the vote. This idea doesn't survive even the early smell test. No-one's vote was not counted and it was a new system. If there was any fault it was not having the manual back-up system in place. Then down the page was a story out of Rhode Island about a kid who came to school with a decorated hat, part of an assignment, and he decorated his hat to honor the military with little plastic soldiers. But since they were carrying little tiny guns they ran afoul of the school district's zero-tolerance weapons policy. This, as usual, is an example of sheer madness.

I'm not sure when it happened that we turned the media and the schools over to lunatic nutjobs, but that's the case these days. Instead of learning reading, writing, and mathematics the kids are learning or more accurately being indoctrinated into liberal social theory, sexual perversion and promiscuity, and to disrespect their parents and anyone that doesn't toe the superliberal mindlessness that passes for political correctness.

C.S. Lewis wrote an excellent essay called "On the Reading of Old Books" and in it he made the observation: "Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths, and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. ..." The essay is in God In the Dock for those who might be interested in reading the whole essay.

Our own period is more a tissue of fads and fallacies than anything else. Chris Matthews in the reading is an excellent example of a man who personifies this period's fallacies. It might be worth picking up Aristotle's "Politics" to see how far we have fallen. This sage of ancient Athens could teach the modern school system and folks like Chris Matthews quite a lot. But I'm afraid they have all forgotten how to read for understanding. Instead they read for talking points and elements that can be exaggerated into slanders or distorted into slurs.

SEE HERE for some resolution to the story of the RI boy with the banned hat.