Kevin Marshall's America » rick santorum

Rick Santorum vs. education: where have we heard this before?

kevinmarshall — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:11:10 +0000

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” said the former senator from Pennsylvania. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

– Rick Santorum this past weekend in a speech given at a Detroit rally (The Washington Post)

This sort of batshit populism seems familiar somehow…

The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains but its shit.

– Lenin in a 1918 letter to Maxim Gorky.

Huh. What do you know. Wait, there’s also…

“Fascism combats…not intelligence, but intellectualism…which is…a sickness of the intellect…not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much…it derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life…”

— Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925

I’m noticing a pattern…

“The youthful brain should in general not be burdened with things ninety-five percent of which it cannot use and hence forgets again… In many cases, the material to be learned in the various subjects is so swollen that only a fraction of it remains in the head of the individual pupil, and only a fraction of this abundance can find application, while on the other hand it is not adequate for the man working and earning his living in a definite field.”

– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

OH C’MON. We can’t…we can’t evoke Hitler. Even though it fits. We just can’t.

But it is disturbing, isn’t it? And apt. I’m not saying Santorum is Hitler. Of course I’m not. I am saying that anti-intellectual and anti-science attitudes are often cornerstones of authoritarian beliefs. It’s the shared link between fascist dictatorships and totalitarian Soviet-style communist governments and betrays the true nature of both: that despite all pretenses, the sole philosophy is destruction and power at any cost. No body, government, or civilization has ever improved when such aggressive attitudes have been taken against something as beneficial as education. Rick Santorum is not a monster, per se, but his position and poll numbers should frighten anyone with half a brain, regardless of their political leanings.

Isaac Asimov put it best:

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

Couldn’t have said it better.

Reflections on tonight’s GOP debate

kevinmarshall — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 02:08:12 +0000

There’s one bus stop in downtown Troy which, like so many stops in so many cities throughout the nation, is one that you avoid. The reason being is that for whatever unknown reason, the most morally bankrupt, drugged-out individuals congregate there. It is a place where if you’re, say, reading a book, you’ll get harassed and when you tell the guy to fuck off, he calls you a queer and hits the newspaper vending machine as he skulks away (true story and it happened tonight).

There’s a better bus stop if you’re just willing to walk a couple blocks North. There, you can read and not be called a queer, not be harassed, and not have to listen to wild theories, tall tales, and factually inaccurate accounts of their day to day lives.

And this is why I don’t bother watching the GOP debates anymore. You know that you’re just going to hear some crazy shit and get yelled at for being smart. So why even go there when you can go anywhere else?

Besides, the reaction on Twitter is much more enthralling.

Rick Santorum, gay soldiers, and sexy sex in the military

kevinmarshall — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:00:22 +0000

A small controversy erupted at the Fox News/Google GOP debate in Florida last week when a now openly gay soldier submitted a YouTube question to the panel.

“In 2010 when I was deployed to Iraq, I had to lie about who I was because I’m a gay soldier and I didn’t want to lose my job. My question is, under one of your Presidencies, do you intend to circumvent the progress that’s been made for gay and lesbian soldiers in the military?”

This was, notoriously, followed by a small portion of the live audience booing loudly with no small amount of derision and hostility.

What was more disconcerting to me, though, was Santorum’s response. Firstly, he did not acknowledge those very loud boos for an American soldier and did not chastise that very vocal group for their treatment of the man and his question, which for anyone with any semblance of decency should have been first and foremost on their agenda.

Instead, he began with this:

“I would say that any kind of sexual activity has no place in the military and the fact that they’re making it a point to include it as a provision and that we’re going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to-and-deh-in removing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”

The video, a little over two minutes in length, is below.

Okay, let’s back up.

Firstly, “any kind of sexual activity has no place in the military.” What exactly does this statement mean? What he wants to say is that sexual orientation has no place in the military. However, Santorum’s pathological bias against homosexuals can’t be hidden. He’s a guy that wears his feelings, and his insecurities, on his sleeve. Homosexuals are deviants. And they are a verb, not a noun, and that verb is a vile act.

The repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” provides soldiers with the ability to acknowledge that they are gay, particularly if they are confronted with it, without fear of retribution from superiors and peers in the military. Rick Santorum, however, seems to think that it means that not only will gay soldiers go around yelling about how gay they are all the damn time, but they’ll follow it up with “and now we will have butt sex in front of EVERYONE.”

I jest, but his phrasing is important because it betrays a very outdated and somewhat warped sense of what being a homosexual is: it’s not an orientation or who you are, but rather a fetish akin to someone who smells shoes or sucks toes. So for me, I wasn’t bothered by the booing, because it really was a small handful of cranks that were quickly shushed, and there were just as many others (if not more) in the audience that applauded the soldier for his question and his bravery. What I was and continue to be bothered and deeply concerned by is not only Santorum’s nervous, blustery bigotry, but the undue sensitivity granted to him and his archaic world view by pundits and the general public. The mainstream media took a small handful of anonymous, boorish crowd members to task, but not the Presidential hopeful who champions the rhetoric.

Rick Santorum complained last week about the search engine Google and how it wasn’t doing anything to eliminate the horrible and offensive search results that come up when you enter his name as a query. I was curious, so I entered his name myself. The second entry is to his Wikipedia page, but the first entry was to Spreading Santorum, a site that lists the new definition of “Santorum” provided by a reader of gay columnist Dan Savage in response to Santorum’s description of pedophilia in priests as a “homosexual relationship.” I felt and do feel for him, and honestly wish Savage had never done it. It’s imbecilic and childish, and only lends the man the appearance of being a victim himself.

It also distracts from what I assumed he meant when he complained about offensive search results: all the terrible things he’s said and believes about gay people.