Paleo at Daily Kos notes a speech where Rick Santorum more or less called for the abolition of public schools. You say you're not surprised? Fine, but what I want to call attention to is an unusually upfront example of what I have called "retroactionary" ideology, the place that's so far right it's physically impossible—the belief that rather than just reverting to the way things used to be (the reactionary way) we should literally aim backwards in time.
It was in a talk yesterday, in Columbus: [jump]
The "frankly much less" is a rare example of a grammatical train wreck that is virtually unanalyzable; an expression that seems to be just on the edge of meaning something but vanishes when you try to figure out what the meaning is. It uses the classical Gingrich "frankly", which normally means "I'm about to double down on a really amusing falsehood," and "much less" looks like a blind man's bluff grab for the "still less" that follows a pompous negative: "I cannot accept that the federal government should be running schools; still less, frankly, that state governments should." But does the True Conservative really want to say that state control is much less acceptable than federal control? Or does he really want to say that it's much less anachronistic? Frankly? And how's that exactly?
"Anachronism" generally means two different things. In everyday media talk, it refers to things from the past that pop up incongruously in the present—the wigs, say, in an English courtroom. In the discussion of literature and art, it more typically refers to something from the present projected into the past, like the chiming clock in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, or the 15th-century German clothing worn by Aristotle in the picture above.
Which kind of anachronism is federal control of schools in the US? You might say neither, given that schools in the US have not been controlled by the federal government at any time, past or present (except I guess in DC). But what if Santorum is talking about the future as he envisages it, a hideous socialist orgy of baby-free sex and peculiar family arrangements in which everything is under federal control? In such a case federal control of education would be an anachronism projected into the now, to be fled from!
And where would we flee? Back, back, back to the 1840s, when the frankly much less anachronistic state control didn't exist much either, and perhaps John Tyler in the White House was home-schooling the little John William Dunjee, Tyler having found time during the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to impregnate a slave woman in the home of some family friends in the Richmond-Petersburg region?**
You see how it all makes sense this way? He's not holding out any hope to his voters that voting for him will encourage a better future. He's urging them to flee from the future, any future at all, and into the Pure Land of the past!
*In much the same way as last January, when he skipped the "ieve you can make Dunl" part of "I don't want to make believe you can make Dunlap people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money" (he was talking about Dunlap, a town not far from Council Bluffs which would no doubt be familiar to his Iowa audience), making it sound, scandalously, as if he meant to be talking about black (actually, "blap") people.
**No, John William Dunjee didn't get to live in the White House. And he may not have been Tyler's son for that matter. It's awfully hard to find any White House children at all before Teddy Roosevelt's brood, to tell the truth, and this was the best I could do on short notice.
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| Aristotle as depicted in the 1493 Nürnberger Chronik, from Wikipedia's article on "Anachronism" |
It was in a talk yesterday, in Columbus: [jump]
For the first 150 years, most presidents home-schooled their children at the White House, [Santorum] said. “Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.”
Now, this needs a little initial unpacking. First, in the second sentence Santorum has swallowed a few words,* a "with the idea" that should have gone between "up" and "that". Then, I'm not sure whether he meant to suggest that the only American children that needed an education were the president's children, from 1788 to 1938. He probably uses the presidents just as typical examples of the American family. I'll leave it to aspiring presidential historians to work out how true the statement is: Wikipedia, bless its heart, provides a list of presidents' children, but it will take a bit of arithmetic to work out which ones actually lived in the White House, and I honestly have other things on my mind.
“Yes the government can help,” Mr. Santorum added. “But the idea that the federal government should be running schools, frankly much less that the state government should be running schools, is anachronistic. It goes back to the time of industrialization of America when people came off the farms where they did home-school or have the little neighborhood school, and into these big factories, so we built equal factories called public schools. And while those factories as we all know in Ohio and Pennsylvania have fundamentally changed, the factory school has not.”
The "frankly much less" is a rare example of a grammatical train wreck that is virtually unanalyzable; an expression that seems to be just on the edge of meaning something but vanishes when you try to figure out what the meaning is. It uses the classical Gingrich "frankly", which normally means "I'm about to double down on a really amusing falsehood," and "much less" looks like a blind man's bluff grab for the "still less" that follows a pompous negative: "I cannot accept that the federal government should be running schools; still less, frankly, that state governments should." But does the True Conservative really want to say that state control is much less acceptable than federal control? Or does he really want to say that it's much less anachronistic? Frankly? And how's that exactly?
"Anachronism" generally means two different things. In everyday media talk, it refers to things from the past that pop up incongruously in the present—the wigs, say, in an English courtroom. In the discussion of literature and art, it more typically refers to something from the present projected into the past, like the chiming clock in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, or the 15th-century German clothing worn by Aristotle in the picture above.
Which kind of anachronism is federal control of schools in the US? You might say neither, given that schools in the US have not been controlled by the federal government at any time, past or present (except I guess in DC). But what if Santorum is talking about the future as he envisages it, a hideous socialist orgy of baby-free sex and peculiar family arrangements in which everything is under federal control? In such a case federal control of education would be an anachronism projected into the now, to be fled from!
And where would we flee? Back, back, back to the 1840s, when the frankly much less anachronistic state control didn't exist much either, and perhaps John Tyler in the White House was home-schooling the little John William Dunjee, Tyler having found time during the Nullification Crisis of 1832 to impregnate a slave woman in the home of some family friends in the Richmond-Petersburg region?**
You see how it all makes sense this way? He's not holding out any hope to his voters that voting for him will encourage a better future. He's urging them to flee from the future, any future at all, and into the Pure Land of the past!
*In much the same way as last January, when he skipped the "ieve you can make Dunl" part of "I don't want to make believe you can make Dunlap people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money" (he was talking about Dunlap, a town not far from Council Bluffs which would no doubt be familiar to his Iowa audience), making it sound, scandalously, as if he meant to be talking about black (actually, "blap") people.
**No, John William Dunjee didn't get to live in the White House. And he may not have been Tyler's son for that matter. It's awfully hard to find any White House children at all before Teddy Roosevelt's brood, to tell the truth, and this was the best I could do on short notice.
