I
spent the first fourteen years of my life under communism. When my
parents got out in 1962, I realized to my utter astonishment that much
of academia was on the left, praising communism, rationalizing
increased centralization of powers under a variety of jfargons. Even
the US was not immune to these ideas, and that the left and academia
despised workers who wanted routine lives, rather than revolutions.
Before
the 1960s, those wanting to become journalists started as copy-boys
(“copy-persons”?), moved up to newsroom jobs, and eventually became
reporters and editors.
All this came to my mind during the last few weeks, both with Fidel
Castro’s death and when Mrs. Clinton made casual reference labeling
roughly fifty percent of her opponent’s voters “deplorables.” Although
she later apologized, her adoring crowd did not boo her at all when she
first uttered the word, the mainstream media neither. Parts of the
crowd, many students among them have either been demonstrating or
crying their hearts out on the laps of Mamma Universities, the latter
indulging them with puppies, play-dohs, coloring books, postponing
exams and “feel your pain” safe places. And these students indulged in
this nonsense shamelessly while their not-subsidized age group was
showing up at work and was being taxed.
How did much of the mainstream media turn so blind? And where does
their contempt for workers come from, that using the term “deplorable”
did not even instantly raise eyebrows?
The answer I found for the first question was the following: Academia
expanded suddenly and rapidly after 1958 when the US passed the
National Defense Education Act (provoked by the launch of the Sputnik).
The government threw money indiscriminately at universities, where
“social studies,” “humanities,” “journalism” and even the second and
third rate (and below) undergrad business schools became major,
accidental beneficiaries (predictably maths and engineering expanded
far less). These faculties grew significantly, while drastically
lowering the selection of both students and faculty.
It
is nice to be subsidized revolutionaries. But even “leftover” Bernie
Sanders must have noticed that his initial calls for “Revolution!”
frightened a bit his crowds and he toned down his rhetoric. Later, he
and Hillary just promised to get rid of students’ debts. Yes, why not
tax the already hard working kids of that age group even more, and give
demonstrating students more puppies and coloring books?
It did not take long for this vast majority of heavily subsidized,
expanded academia, detached from any non-paper-shuffling experience, to
rationalize and exaggerate their importance. They had to: subsidies, as
taxes, must be legitimized in countries where people vote on budgets.
So academics rationalized their “songs” — like in the Aesop Fable about
the grasshoppers and the hard working ants, the former singing and
hopping when times were good, and dismissing the hard-working ants
bearing ears of corn to their nests.
The changes in journalism happened since the early 1960s and are
related to these 1958, rashly-decided subsidies. Before the 1960s,
those wanting to become journalists started as copy-boys
(“copy-persons”?), moved up to newsroom jobs, and eventually became
reporters and editors. They gained experience through such
apprenticeship, mentored by older generations of seasoned journalists –
many at the time still shaped by WWII and its aftermath. Journalism was
a “trade” to be learned through experience and was not what it
subsequently became: an updated version of the fable’s sing-and-dance
grasshoppers.
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