Friday, December 31, 2010

Over 100? Shut up

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This is what passes for informed television and print journalism today. Is it even calculable to determine how many people saw this on MSNBC and agreed? Or how many took away from it the belief that our Founding Document is expired?

A twenty-something egghead gets on television these days and expresses as journalistic and academic doctrine the notion long harbored by our youth - myself included - privately for centuries; that "old people" don't have a clue. It was a conviction I held as sacred until I became older and wiser, and I'm sure all of us have learned the very same lesson. Well, at least those of us who have actually "grown up". We were young, and we were wrong.

Once there was a time when it was possible to avoid the trash of television without switching the damned thing off entirely. Watching the news or information-only channels - and avoiding the idiotic "sitcoms" - was safe ground. Then the commercials started to creep in. You know, the ones that increasingly depicted the parents as morons while the adolescent ran the spot. It was subtle, it was subliminal, and it was effective. It became accepted that the young had the answers in this new age, and the elderly - anyone over 40 apparently - were behind the curve.

Now the game has expanded. No longer is it about setting the clock on the VCR, or getting new "apps" on the Droid. Now it's about what makes this nation function, and suddenly Ezra Klein is the voice of the New World. To kids like him, "thou shalt" is a foreign language, and has "no binding power on anything". And I'm sure that those "F"-looking S's in the original draft of The Constitution have poor Ezra all "verklempt".

That is strange, since I'm willing to bet that at least once in his relatively new existence on Planet Earth, he has forwarded - via electronic mail - the Cambridge University study which has the letters all jumbled. Heck, even geezers like me are familiar with it.

This study found that the human mind is an incredible processor of garbled information. "According to research at Cambridge University, it doesn't matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be in the right place." As in:

Reading test: the paomnnehal pweor of the hmuan mnid.
So what does young Ezra find so confusing in The Constitution? Could it be the rules themselves? Perhaps people like Ezra - both young, impressionable, and tools of older enemies of freedom - are simply being manipulated by the "education" they have received at the hands of like-minded adults. One such educator - in the incarnation of William Ayers, and now a member of AARP - once advised his then-contemporaries to "kill your parents".

There can be no doubt that there is a segment of our society that has long held a deep loathing for our Founders, and an even deeper aversion to authority. Now, people like Ezra Klein exemplify the culmination of decades worth of the "education" that has been inflicted on our youth. This new generation is no longer content to merely parse the language and meaning of the Constitution. The bold, new tactic is to utterly declare it moot.

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