I bought a cell phone with a better camera before I left for China two years ago. I lost a year’s worth of notes I’d begun jotting down for blog posts, reminders, ideas for potential books etc. Since then I’ve created another 300 plus such posts but utterly failed to organize them so as to be easily accessible. While sorting through them just now I found this one which I’ll share with a few proof reading corrections. I don’t know how I’ll modify or use it but its has the seeds of a much longer discourse. Its a good example of the random thoughts I’d like to make sense of:
Tyranny of the Elite
In public high schools there has long been something of a tyranny of the elite. It is loosely composed of kids with money, the football or basketball team and the National Honor Society.
In the years of Andy Hardy these were the crop of kids who were planted in universities that contained only 5 to 10 percent of any graduating high school class. World War II changed all that with the GI Bill that so horrified the elite. These men don’t belong in college!!!!!!!
In America a lot of the elite are the moderate Republicans who were too prissy to defend themselves when hustlers took over the Party of Eisenhower and began culling moderates by “primarying” them with alt right and pro life ideologues. Three and four generation Republicans like me were called RINOS (Republicans in Name Only) by folks who made Fox News the watch out world a radical negro is President of the United States. Be very afraid.
In Duluth such reasonable people were often pro-Red Plan. The were more interested in making schools better for their kids than they were about playing fair. Like Moderate Republicans who were being marginalized they said nothing when those doing their bidding tilted the level playing field that a fair referendum on the Red Plan would have offered. Winning was more important than winning fairly. As with America today, Duluth has suffered badly and will likely continue to suffer until the suffocating bond payments are finally paid off in ten to fifteen years.
In the case of today’s Republicans, sans moderates, they are content to control America despite ever shrinking minorities by fiddling with reapportionment, the courts and now the census. In other words, they were ceding America to power hungry and corrupt forces. The worst offenders are people are pro-lifers who put saving six week old heart beats ahead of democracy, majority rule and the rule of law.
