Sunday, October 18, 2009

My Little Red Book

Roger Kimball has the last word on the lesson for the Anita "Carrying Pictures of Chairman Mao" Dunn controversy: The Maoist Explains Herself
This is the point: last November, the American people thought they were electing a “post-partisan,” “post-racial” President who would work to restore unity and self-confidence to the country. They woke up on November 5, however, to find that they had elected someone who was deeply ambivalent about America, who distrusted its founding principles of limited government, individual liberty, and local responsibility. Like his radical friends — Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, Anita Dunn — Barack Obama wishes to transform the United States according to a model whose basic shape was supplied by the utopian schemes of the 1960s. That’s why Anita Dunn said that Mao was one of the thinkers she most often turned to for wisdom about big-think political problems. It’s not that she admires his penchant for industrial strength homicide: rather, she admires his success at fomenting an egalitarian revolution. It’s not what we bargained for when we elected Barack Obama. But that’s what we’ve got. The question is how much worse will things have to get before the penny drops, before the scales fall from the collective eyes of the electorate? When will voters begin that long countermarch through the institutions in order to take back the country? If not now, when?
Also, when will we realize how little our supposed elites know about their world? Dunn's clueless Maoism is as much a result of an elite education system that literally has no time to discuss the deadly effects of Mao's "reforms" and a cultural environment that "remembers" Kent State, but forgets the tens of millions of dead in Red China.

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