Dueling marches in Washington

WorldNetDaily readers may be interested in finding out more about the Washington, DC, Free Republic — sponsored March for Justice, which is to take place at noon on October 31st, 1998, in Lafayette Park by the White House. Speakers are to include Alan Keyes, Lucianne Goldberg, Larry Klayman, Gary Aldrich, Dr. Paul Fick, and Jonah Goldberg.

Also, here is a release about the March in email-friendly format, which you can copy straight off its Web page and forward around.

A pro-Clinton March on Washington has also been arranged. Sponsored by the Committee for the People’s Choice and the National Coalition of Concerned Clergy “in support of President BILL CLINTON,” its slogans will include, “Stop the Inquisition! Emergency: Vote Democrat! God Forgives, Republicans Don’t!”, and lots more in the same vein. Here follows their schedule:

Saturday, October 31, 1998, in Washington, DC

9:00am — PRESS CONFERENCE at Ken Starr’s office — 1001 Pennsylvania Ave (near 10th St.) NW

10:30am — NATIONAL WORSHIP SERVICE Greater New Hope Baptist Church, 8th and I Sts. NW

2:30pm — MARCH from Capitol steps to White House (Lafayette Park)

3:00pm — RALLY AND OPEN-AIR MEETING in Lafayette Park

And here are their Web sites:

http://www.peopleschoiceforprez.com

http://www.freeyellow.com/members5/peopleschoiceforprez/cocccall.html

Notice that these folks are going to march on the same day and in the
same place as the Free Republic marchers — only two and a half hours later.

Those of our readers who plan to participate in the Free Republic march
may wish also to plan upon staying a little late that day, just to make life more interesting for their pro-Clinton counterparts.

Y2K: a few good links

For all the Y2K-related links you need — military sites, government hearings, news releases, a Y2K search engine, and much more — along with public and professional discussion forums and commentary, one of the best spots on the Web is Gary North’s links-and-resources page. North takes quite a dark view of the situation, pointing out, for example, that the problem may be simply too systemic to be fixed: the extent of interconnection among computer systems today means noncompliant computers will spread bad data and re-corrupt compliant ones. A sobering thought on an already plenty sobering subject.

A practical list of specific individual preparations for Y2K that you may want to consider making is available at the Cassandra Project Web site. This isn’t one of those lurid survivalist manuals about how to freeze-dry oats, salt your own fish, &c. At least, it does cover some of that where necessary, but it mostly includes the sort of nonthreatening, though potentially important, steps that you might actually convince your more ostrich-headed relations to consider: making sure your credit cards and mortgage are paid up for a couple of months in advance, keeping enough batteries around to run a radio for one or two weeks, and so forth. In other words, this is a link you can go ahead and send around to the unalarmed. (If, contrariwise, North’s analysis has shaken you deeply and you’re ready to get serious about laying in those freeze-dried staples, click here.)

Progressive education’s most frightening hour

Even as I type these words, students at a Brooklyn public high school are learning how to write graffiti for academic credit. At El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice (as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up), there is a course entitled Hip-Hop 101 (I’m not making that up, either), which teaches students “not only how to write graffiti but also how to deejay at parties, break-dance (a once-popular form of street gymnastics), and emcee or rap.”

The class looks like a natural for El Puente’s curriculum, which is apparently organized around “large, politically correct themes, like sweatshops or the connection between sugar and slavery.” Its average SAT scores in 1997 were 385 in verbal, 363 in math.

This is, furthermore, a school which evaluates students on their commitment to “social and economic justice,” which calls its teachers “facilitators,” and which, wouldn’t you know it, believes in “collaborative” rather than individual learning — an idea I first encountered in graduate school, an idea that is utterly corrosive to excellence, to thinking, to humanity itself, and that I consider nothing more nor less than evil.

I could go on at some length here, believe me, but I’ll stop there. You can read all about this travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty at your leisure in Heather MacDonald’s full and trenchant City Journal coverage while I put some ice on my head and try to calm down.

(One final note. According to MacDonald’s article — in addition to your tax dollars — El Puente boasts foundation support for this madness in the form of “thousands of dollars” from the Annenberg Foundation. Let us all abominate this asses’ collective, freely and at once, please, in the old-fashioned manner: Annenberg Foundation, St. Davids Center, Suite A-200,150 Radnor-Chester Road, St. Davids, Pennsylvania 19087, telephone 610-341-9066. Or you can email them — though in this case I’d advocate phoning and writing, since I don’t like addressing substantive epistles to plain-vanilla “info@” email addresses.)

Empty pockets in the cybertopian economy

Even as the upscaling of the American work force in the new brain-based economy is celebrated, all those intelligent and lucrative jobs are being widely and quietly replaced by burger-flipping positions. True, the fastest-growing occupations are computer-related, but Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections show that the greatest number of actual new jobs created during the 1996-2006 decade will be in the no-qualifications-required position of “cashier.” Today’s young adults are generally worse off than those of 1979, with pay lower both in real terms and relative to older workers.

It’s a state of affairs regarding which the hiply designed, Seattle-based Working Stiff
has plenty to say. This pugnacious little Web ‘zine is a breath of air from the old left, stumping for working people rather than post-sixties cultural malcontents. (Site editor and coproducer Jennifer Vogel is the writer of an October 14 Salon article featured by WorldNetDaily last Wednesday, exposing the threat to consumer privacy posed by supermarket bonus cards.)

Tug of war over “Little House”

Television and Michael Landon made a simpering, syrupy mess out of the beloved “Little House on the Prairie” children’s books about girls growing up on the Western frontier. The more recent feminist “celebration” of their author, Laura Ingalls Wilder, has not improved matters. Read Weekly Standard books and arts editor J. Bottum’s assessment of the current Little House situation in his Commentary review
of John E. Miller’s recent book, Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Woman Behind the Legend.
In it, Bottum points out approvingly how “Miller poses the kind of facts genuine historians like himself gather — demonstrating, for example, how the harshness of pioneer life derived not from patriarchy but from droughts, floods, and locusts.” (Don’t miss, however, a glancing characterization of Wilder’s daughter and helper-editor Rose Wilder Lane, who apparently made the mistake of associating with Ayn Rand in the 1940s, as a “wild-eyed libertarian” who had the gall to object to FBI harassment.) The review and book should, at any rate, interest those of us who spent a little time as a child breathing the air of the prairie and the Big Woods.