"Education is dangerous - every educated person is a future enemy."
- Hermann Goering
When a state elects a foreign born, transplanted chicken fried motherfucker like Ted Cruz as one of its U.S. Senators it is immediately understood that the voters there aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed. Texas is steeped in all of the worst types of Americana including militant Christian Zionism, the carpet-bagging Bush crime family, the John Birch Society, big energy bandits, the Dallas Cowboys and more deranged holy rollers than you can shake a serpent at. It is the latter along with generous helpings of the historic anti-government sentiment in the state that led to the abomination of the recent approval of a bizarre series of ‘educational’ textbooks for use.
According to a story from the website of The Atlantic entitled “Was Moses a Founding Father?”:
Last Tuesday, the Texas State Board of Education held a public hearing to choose which new social studies textbooks will be recommend to school districts in the state. The board was expected to vote to approve the majority of proposed textbooks and smooth the way for what should have been a final procedural vote on Friday. Instead, complaints by right-wing groups torpedoed the adoption process. The board didn’t approve a single textbook and left the door open to 11th-hour political meddling.
Because the 15-member board voted not to adopt any books, publishers were forced to ignore historical fact and make last minute changes to their books to cater to the conservative activists. When the board voted on Friday, many board members (and the public) couldn’t respond to the final changes made to the textbooks they were approving. They hadn’t even seen them—changes that totaled hundreds of pages.
The problems with this textbook adoption process began in 2010, when the education board passed new history standards that require students to “identify the individuals whose principles of laws and government institutions informed the American founding documents, including those of Moses,” and establish how “biblical law” was a major influence on America’s founding.
Other standards also placed states’ rights and sectionalism ahead of slavery as a cause of the Civil War; claimed that Joseph McCarthy’s blacklists of Americans were justified because communists had infiltrated the government during the Cold War; and in a section on the influence of art, music, and literature on American society, hip hop was removed for being culturally irrelevant and replaced instead with country music. (An aside: Despite disliking hip hop, Board Member Pat Hardy argued that it should be included because, “These people (hip hop artists) are multi-millionaires … There are not enough black people to buy that. There are white people buying this.”)
Even the conservative Fordham Institute called Texas’ standards “a politicized distortion of history.” Distortion or not, textbook publishers must abide by these standards if they want to secure board approval. For example, McGraw-Hill’s U.S. Government textbook says Moses and the Covenant “contributed to our Constitutional structure.”
I mean what else can you say about such a story other than Jesus Fucking Christ?
In a state as saturated with religion as Texas it is understandable that parents would want their progeny to be marched to the Kool Aid vat and forced to drink Jesus Juice in public schools. However, it is not exactly setting children up for future success in a modern, technological society to indoctrinate them so as to be so butt-fuck stupid that they will be unable to get jobs outside of Wal-Mart or McDonalds. They are even too goddamned dumb to succeed in the military now that it requires more mental prowess than simply being cannon fodder. It all seems to be very self-defeating. There is one thing about cracker cultural conservatism though and it is a deeply embedded, recalcitrant form of willful ignorance that adherents were on their sleeves as though it were a resplendent badge of honor rather than the shameful excuse to not adapt to modernity that it truly is.
Such choking ignorance benefits nobody more than demagogic nincompoop Texas politicians the likes of Cruz, Rick Perry and Steve Stockman and legions of other lesser named yahoos but having a moronic electorate is the really the point isn't it?
Indeed, the Lone Star State is in a league of its own when it comes to gun-totin’, bible thumpin’ southern-fried dumbassery and the rest of America is missing the boat by not acquiescing to the constant carping of right-wing freaks to let the state secede from the U$A. I say let em go but first every mouth-breathing, snake-handling, Mexican hating, armed to the teeth wanna be insurrectionist freak in America should be strongly encouraged to move there first. Then we can finally push through the belated federal gubmint approval for that massive, electrified border fence and put it up around that gigantic fucking lunatic colony.
But hey, it’s not like I really hate Texas or anything like that. I have been there a number of times and it has it's good points. The state is the home to the best damned BBQ in the entire land, ZZ Top still kicks ass and are those are the two best things to ever come out of Texas outside of Interstate Highways 10 and 35.
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