What happens after fifty years of Leftist control over institutions of higher education

This morning, I was emailing back and forth with my friend Kim Priestap, who blogs at the wonderful and charming Up North Mommy.  We were discussing Jews who view Israel, not as a victim, but as a predator.

Never mind the fact that Israel lays claim to a tiny patch of land in the midst of vast hostile Muslim territories; never mind that the historical record establishes that Israel has ties to that land going back 3,000 years; never mind that Israel fights to minimize her enemy’s deaths and injuries, while the enemy fights to maximize Israel’s; never mind that Israel’s acts are in accordance with international law; never mind any other items in the laundry list all of you can create justifying Israel’s right to exist and the righteousness of her actions (never mind that Israel, too, like any nation comprised of living, breathing human beings, sometimes errs).  These facts are irrelevant to the animus the Left feels towards Israel, and so many American Jews are Leftists first, and Jews second.

Political theory aside, one has to ask why American Jews are so comfortable abandoning historical facts and on-the-ground reality.  (12,000 rockets fired into Israel is reality.)

It occurred to me that the “root cause” (see, I’ve learned liberal speak) is higher education, something that American Jews embrace disproportionately to their numbers.  That is, most American Jews consider it a moral imperative to go to college or university.  They head to institutions of higher learning like lemmings leaping for the cliff’s edge.  Their parents send them there operating under the mistaken belief that these institutions do actually educate.  While that may be the case in the sciences (although the global warming scam indicates otherwise), it’s certainly not true in the liberal arts programs.  The purpose of these programs is to indoctrinate.  I know whereof I speak.

It was the liberal inability to think logically, to recognize the world as it is, not as the theories demand it should be, that slowly but steadily separated me from liberalism.  And this separation, although it took way too long to reach fruition (about 20 years too long), started back in 1979, when I hit U.C. Berkeley.  I was in the liberal arts programs — history and English — and, consistently, I griped that the classes made no sense.  Egotistical to the last, I knew that the problem wasn’t me, but the classes themselves.

I suffered through several years of slow drip idiocy and Marxist poison, which I won’t even try to describe here.  Why should I?  One class sums it all up for me.  It was in that class that my  professor insisted that Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray was a scathing Marxist indictment of British class structure.  Apparently I have some resistance to indoctrination, because I grasped reality enough to know that this was an insanely stupid statement.

I was aided in my insight about professorial idiocy by the fact that I found laughable a student statement (made to great professorial applause) that the flowers Wilde described so vividly in the book, were to create a Gothic atmosphere, not to make us ruminate (and I quote) “on the phallic symbolism of the female sexual organs.”  As Forrest Gump said, “stupid is as stupid does.”

I’ve never liked cognitive dissonance, and was happy to walk away from the whole intellectual garbage bag.

Of course, I wasn’t the only student sitting through such classes at Berkeley, and I had peers spread out over the country attending schools that taught in precisely the same way.  Indeed, decades of liberal children, especially liberal Jewish children, have been educated in this stupidity.  As today’s politics show, this education has poisoned their brain’s capacity to see that, not just sometimes, but often, a cigar is just a cigar — and a crazed killer is a crazed killer regardless of root causes.

I was lucky in that I loathed Berkeley.  I loathed the old hippies, and the filth, and the unfriendliness, and the anger, so I was not inclined to embrace the group think.  Other liberals, however, were not lucky enough to be miserable.  They loved Berkeley’s freedom, or Harvard’s history, or Wesleyan’s charm, and desperately wanted to fit in.  Rather than resist the propaganda, they embraced it.

When I was growing up, I was told by my parents that Turkish soldiers, in days of old, couldn’t be brainwashed, because their sense of self was so inviolable.  Apparently my sense of reality had some Turk in it, at least insofar as my brain fought back.  Most liberals, however, just cave to the illogic and live in a world of cognitive dissonance — with liberal Jews, sadly, having traveled furthest up that river called “Denial.”