[Editor's Note: Women of Washington is a group of conservative women in
Seattle whose members meet regularly to discuss issues, enjoy one
another's company, and raise money for worthy causes such as the USO. This
year WOW invited American Thinker contributor Herb Meyer to speak at the
group's annual dinner on July 30. Here's what Herb said.]
Finding myself in a room full of conservative women is always a treat;
here in ultra-liberal Seattle, it's a miracle. Thanks so much for inviting
me this evening.
Once again election season is upon us, and at every level - local, state,
and federal - the gap between candidates has never been so wide. Something
is going on here that's deeper than merely a difference of opinion over
tax rates and spending priorities. And it isn't just the war that's
dividing us; our division over the war is a symptom rather than a cause of
our discord.
A gap this wide is unhealthy, because it's left us so politically
paralyzed that moving forward on any of the issues we face is just about
impossible. Since a paralyzed country cannot survive, we've got to figure
out what's causing this paralysis so we can cure it. Let's start by
conducting what philosophers would call a thought experiment:
Imagine that tomorrow afternoon you're at a barbecue, telling your friends
about this evening's dinner, when someone asks you what the speaker looked
like. Most of you would reply that the speaker was an average-looking man
-- about five-feet-seven-inches tall, reasonably fit for his age, with
fair skin and blond hair going gray. One or two of you might add a few
more details: a dark cashmere sports jacket, white shirt and red tie. You
could even add more details if you chose: black shoes, and a wristwatch
with a brown leather strap.
But all your descriptions would be similar, because you're all looking at
me -- and this is what I look like tonight.
Now, imagine that half of you were looking at me through a prism - one of
those long, triangular bars of glass. A prism refracts and disperses
light, so everything you see through a prism is distorted. Those of you
looking at me through a prism might see a tall man with purple skin. My
sports jacket might look green instead of brown, and my shirt might look
red instead of white. In short, if you're looking at me through a prism
you'll get everything wrong.
Well, just as there are real prisms -- those long, triangular bars of
glass - there are intellectual prisms, in our minds. And if you're looking
at the world through an intellectual prism, you'll also get everything
wrong.
Let's go back to that barbecue, and now imagine that you find yourself
chatting with a couple from overseas who are making their first trip to
the US. The wife turns to you and says, "I've never been here before.
Please tell me, what's this country like?"
You might reply:
"This is a marvelous country. Obviously, it's huge. Like every other
country, we have our economic problems. But by and large we provide a very
high standard of living for most of our people. The majority of us live
comfortable lives. In fact, this country provides more opportunities for
people to lead the kinds of lives they want than any other country in the
world. We're a religious people, and we tend to be generous among
ourselves and to countries less fortunate than we are. Our armed forces
are the most powerful in history, and we're all so proud that they defend
us here at home, and that overseas our armed forces have liberated tens of
millions of people from tyranny."
Of course, you could add more details: American workers have a higher
level of productivity than workers in any other country. We hold the
leadership in most of the industries that will drive progress through the
twenty-first century, such as software, pharmaceuticals, aerospace and
entertainment. We are home to 25 or 30 of the world's finest universities,
and five or six of the world's best symphonies and opera companies. We
even produce wines that win tasting competitions in Paris.
Whatever the details, all your descriptions would be similar, because all
of you would be describing the United States -- and this is who and what
we are.
But if that woman had asked her question of another guest -- someone who
had one of these intellectual prisms in her mind -- the answer would have
been very different:
"This is a horrible country, and I'm ashamed to be an American. It's
controlled by a small group of rich people who made themselves rich on the
backs of the poor, and who stay rich by keeping all the rest of us down.
Rich people don't pay taxes at all. You wouldn't believe how many
Americans are still caught up in religion, and nearly fifty million of us
can't even afford basic health care. We're very racist. Our industries
pollute the environment, and our military drops bombs on people all over
the world to help the oil companies make obscene profits. Nobody overseas
likes us or respects us, and I don't blame them. Why on earth have you
come here?"
A Domestic Cold War
Let me put this as starkly as I can: What's going on today in our country
isn't normal politics. In normal politics honorable people will disagree,
sometimes fiercely, about how best to deal with the issues that confront
us - national security, border control, healthcare, education, energy, the
environment, and all the rest. What's going on today is a kind of domestic
Cold War -- a seemingly endless standoff, with the occasional hard
skirmish -- between those of us who see the US for what it really is, and
those of us who are seeing the US through a prism. And remember, unlike
real prisms these intellectual prisms -- or, if you prefer, these
political prisms -- are invisible. If you're looking at the US through a
political prism, you don't know you're seeing through a prism and you
won't believe anyone who tries to tell you that you are.
This is why Americans who see our country and the world through a prism
are impervious to facts. For example, if you say to one of these people:
"Whether or not you support the war in Iraq, it's obvious that the
surge is working and that the Iraqi government is finally starting to get
its act together. The level of violence in Baghdad is down about 90
percent since May, and Prime Minister al-Maliki has been sending Iraqi
armed forces into battle against al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, against the
terrorist infiltrators from Iran, and even against that creep al-Sadr's
Shi'a militias. Despite all the mistakes we've made -- and we've made a
lot of mistakes -- it looks now like we're on the verge of genuine
victory. Iraq is very nearly a functioning democracy that doesn't threaten
its neighbors."
The prism-afflicted American will reply:
"The surge is a failure. We're less safe now than before Bush launched
his war in Iraq. Bush lied about weapons-of-mass-destruction, and this war
is about oil."
Or, if you say:
"I'm increasingly skeptical about this notion that the earth is warming
because of human activity. It turns out that back in the 10th and 11th
centuries our planet was about four degrees Celsius warmer than it is now
-- and that couldn't possibly have been caused by human activity. And the
new numbers just published by NASA suggest that the current warming trend
stopped back in 2000 -- while our use of hydrocarbon fuels has actually
increased since then. So how could human activity be responsible?"
The prism-afflicted American will reply:
"Human activity is warming the earth and leading us to catastrophe. Sea
levels will rise, crops will fail and people will die by the millions.
We've got to take radical measures right now to cut back our use of
energy. It may already be too late."
Well, you get the point.
No one is born with a political prism in his or her mind. It has to be
implanted there. And for more than 40 years, since the mid-1960s, this is
what the Left has been working to do. While we've been arguing with them
about issues, they've been working -- steadily and stealthily -- to
implant political prisms into the minds of Americans. They've done this by
seizing control of our public education system, and of our mainstream
media.
Today, our schools and universities are less designed to educate our
children than they are designed to indoctrinate them into believing that
the United States is an evil country in which the rich oppress the poor,
in which business pollutes rather than produces, and whose armed forces
wreak havoc around the world rather than keep us safe while liberating
entire populations from tyranny. And the mainstream media is less focused
on informing than on reinforcing what our schools and universities are
teaching.
Forty years of hard work by the Left have paid off. Our schools, our
universities, and the mainstream media have successfully implanted
political prisms into the minds of nearly half our population. That's why
so many of our elections are so close, why so many key Supreme Court cases
are decided by five-to-four votes, and why we always seem to be split down
the middle on whatever issue confronts us - the war, the economy,
immigration, healthcare, energy, the environment, and all the rest.
Playing Defense
So far, our response has been to focus on the issues while ignoring the
Left's efforts to implant these political prisms. In effect, we've been
playing defense. We go about our business, we contribute to the campaigns
of those political candidates who seem to be competent and on our side,
and when we do speak out on issues we base our arguments on history,
logic, and on facts. We form groups like WOW so we can get together to
talk about the issues -- and to debate among ourselves about how best to
deal with these issues - without the annoying presence of prism-afflicted
people. We tune our radios to Rush and Bill Bennett, we watch Fox News
instead of CNN, and we read The Wall Street Journal instead of
The New York Times.
And we're losing. The momentum is on their side, not on ours, and the
November elections won't change this no matter who wins. (Since you ask,
I've no idea how the upcoming President election will turn out -- and
neither does anyone else. I used to be in the intelligence business, and I
learned a long time ago that there's a fine line between a brilliant
prediction and a lucky guess. Anyone who tells you how this election will
turn out, and who gets it right, is more lucky than brilliant.) Regardless
of who wins in November, the Left won't cease working to implant political
prisms into the minds of Americans. And when they've succeeded in
implanting these prisms into more than 50 percent of us -- and they're
getting close -- our country's ability to cope realistically with the
world will have ended.
It's time to go from playing defense to playing offense. Our objective is
to reduce the percentage of Americans in whose minds these political
prisms have been implanted.
Our first target is those among us in whom these prisms have already been
implanted. It's hard to remove one of these political prisms, but not
impossible. So let's never stop debating the issues with those among us
who are prism-afflicted. Every so often one of them - and there's no way
to predict who it will be -- suddenly "gets it." In my experience, when
you're talking with a group of these people the one among them who
suddenly "gets it" doesn't blurt out, "My goodness, I see now I've been
wrong about everything." Human nature doesn't work that way. When someone
begins to suspect that everything he's been told is wrong, he tends to go
quiet. Usually, you never even know that a fact you mentioned, or a point
you made, has changed someone's intellectual outlook forever. So you just
keep going on faith that sometimes -- not often, but sometimes -- this
happens. It's worth the effort.
Meanwhile, from time to time a prism-shattering event will come along. The
9-11 attack was such an event; it forced some Americans who had believed
that the US is always wrong, and our adversaries are always right, to
recognize that there really are enemies out there who are so vicious and
crazy that only military force will stop them from killing us all. Another
9-11-type attack will shatter more prisms, and so would, for instance, an
Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. Let's all pray that none of these events
will happen. But if they do, let's use the opportunities they provide to
teach.
Our second target is those among us in whom these political prisms haven't
yet been implanted. I'm talking about our kids. We've got to win back
control of our schools and our universities. More precisely, we've got to
force changes in the curricula starting with the elementary schools,
through the middle schools and the high schools, and into our
universities. Only by forcing our schools to develop new curricula --
which really means returning to the curricula our schools used to teach
before the culture war erupted - can we insure that our children will be
educated rather than indoctrinated.
Nothing will do more to end our current paralysis than changing what our
children are being taught. If I had to choose between winning control of
the US Senate, and winning control of our country's local school boards --
I'd choose the school boards. By the way, I've no idea who our own state's
commissioner of education is -- and I'll bet most of you don't know
either. Perhaps we should make it a point to find out, and to recognize
how important this job and others like it are to our country's future.
Of course, in all our schools there are some wonderful teachers who are
working very hard to give their students a clear understanding of our
country and the world. They are like soldiers fighting behind enemy lines.
Let's make it our business to learn who these heroes and heroines are in
our own communities -- and to give them all the help and support we can.
For example, in my community I served for several years as president of
our local public-schools foundation. We raised money for grants to
teachers who wanted to do something extra and educational for their
students, and for which the money otherwise wasn't available. And let's
not forget that there are some terrific private schools out there, and
also colleges such as Grove City and Hillsdale, where students get a
first-class education; these schools and colleges deserve our support
whether or not our own kids are enrolled.
Three Cheers for Home-Schooling
Let's also throw our political, moral - and financial -- support behind
the single most encouraging, most under-reported development in American
education. I mean the home-schooling movement. Today, between two and
three million American children have been withdrawn from public education
and are instead being educated by their parents. Armed with curricula
material that is vastly better than what our public schools are using,
these parents are giving their kids a first-class education in history,
economics, literature, math, and just about everything else. No wonder
that so many home-schooled students are winning national spelling bees,
acing college-entrance exams -- and being offered scholarships by
universities that previously looked down their noses at these students.
By the way, you can spot a home-schooled kid in a second. It isn't just
that he or she is so well-behaved, and so comfortable in the company of
adults. It's that these home-schooled youngsters have their heads screwed
on so straight; they love our country, know how lucky they are to be
Americans, and have a genuine intellectual interest in learning how the
world works. As these kids grow up and start their careers, they'll run
circles around young Americans who were indoctrinated rather than
educated.
The mainstream media is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself.
Profits are dropping catastrophically at The New York Times and at
other leading newspapers, and over at CNN they're panicking over their
falling audience-share. Good. Meanwhile, new outlets for news and analysis
such as American Thinker and Lucianne.com are booming along
and gaining new readers every day. We need to support these new outlets,
and others like them, by talking them up among friends and, of course, by
making the financial contributions they need to keep growing. It will be
money well spent.
One thing we learned during the Reagan Administration is that the very
fact of visibly switching from playing defense to playing offense has a
huge impact. From where I sat during those remarkable years -- on the
seventh floor of the CIA, with access to intelligence far above the "Top
Secret" level -- I watched the Kremlin's leaders lose more confidence
every time President Reagan took another step forward, for instance by
boosting our defense budget, throwing the Commies out of Grenada,
supporting democratic insurgencies in Central America, and launching the
Strategic Defense Initiative. And the more confidence the Kremlin's
leaders lost, the more mistakes they made and the more ground they lost
until by 1991 the Soviet Union had ceased to exist.
Once we make it clear to our country's education establishment and to the
mainstream media that we're onto their efforts to implant political
prisms, and that we intend to stop them from implanting more of these
prisms and even start removing some they've already implanted - they'll
start losing confidence. Then they'll start making mistakes and losing
ground. And just as the Cold War ended sooner and more peacefully than
anyone had expected, my guess is that this domestic Cold War of ours will
end sooner, and more successfully, than you may think possible tonight.
How will we know that our domestic Cold War has ended? That's easy: We'll
know it's ended when Americans start doing what we ought to do in
politics, which is to debate the issues that confront us fiercely and
forcefully, but on facts and logic -- and with a shared recognition that
this is a wonderful country filled with wonderful people working hard to
make things better for ourselves, our families, and for all humanity.
And when there's no one left out there who thinks I'm tall and purple.
