Reading, Writing, and RuPaul

The headline in the Christian Science Monitor pretty much says it all: “Could California lead nation in teaching of gay history in schools?” On July 5, the state’s Democratic-controlled assembly passed the FAIR Education Act by a 49-25 vote. The bill would “require California public schools to acknowledge the accomplishments of gays, lesbians and transgender Americans to be included in its teaching materials,” according to Time.

Color us old-fashioned, but transgender Americans? The Scrapbook eagerly awaits the shrieks branding parents that object to this as demonic bigots, but far from intolerance, there are other good reasons to be skeptical. While California implements its new reading, writing, and RuPaul curriculum, perhaps the state’s Democratic legislators should consider that it’s not exactly coincidental that California does not lead the nation when it comes to the first two subjects. According to the latest statistics, California schools have a 32 percent dropout rate—35 percent for African Americans and 39 percent for Latinos.

Frankly, students in California are lucky to learn anything, let alone gay history. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is the second largest school district in the nation employing 33,000 teachers—and an L.A. Weekly investigation last year concluded that LAUSD fired only 7 teachers for poor performance in the last decade. Thanks to the state’s powerful teachers’ union, the legal bill for trying to fire these 7 teachers amounted to $3.5 million. (Note that the absurd job protections California teachers enjoy were engineered in 2000 by ambitious state assemblyman Antonio Villaraigosa, now L.A.’s mayor.)

Politics are clearly responsible for the poor quality of education in the state. But California’s regrettable politics may, in fact, lead the nation here—whether the rest of America likes it or not. The state is such a large textbook market that the new law may force textbook publishers to change the standard texts that are used elsewhere in the country.

And California’s not alone in its chronic desire to lard the curriculum with politicized nonsense. Maryland just became the first state in the nation to add an environmental literacy requirement that must be completed to graduate from high school. Democratic governor Martin O’Malley also said the requirement will lay a “foundation for green jobs.”

There’s nothing wrong with teaching kids to be respectful of the natural world. But the moment Democratic leaders start throwing around loaded phrases such as “green jobs” in this context, you just know it’s going to be an opportunity for political indoctrination.

The truth is, the essential foundation for jobs is basic literacy —not environmental or gay rights literacy. And you can’t have the latter without the former. How about public schools focus for a change on teaching kids the basic skills and doing it well? Once they can read, write, and do enough math to figure out how much their state government is taking out of their paycheck, then they can decide what they think about politics. ♦

The Achievements of Otto

A touch of the Old World intruded on the everyday last week when it was reported that Otto von Habsburg, son of the last emperor of Austria-Hungary, died at his home in Germany on the Fourth of July. He was 98 years old.

As The Scrapbook has suggested more than once, the death of anyone who has lived for nearly a century—especially in relative comfort and prominence, as in this case—can hardly be described as tragic. Yet The Scrapbook was slightly startled by the tone-deaf headline in the New York Times: “Otto von Habsburg, a Would-Be Monarch, Is Dead at 98.” This is a little like describing Abraham Lincoln as a “failed Senate candidate” or Ronald Reagan as the “ex-husband of Jane Wyman”—especially in a publication which is governed by a family dynasty.

It is true that von Habsburg, as son of the last emperor, Karl I, was pretender to the long-dormant Austro-Hungarian crown, and as such, great-nephew of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Sarajevo fame. But he was also the last person to have expected (or aspired) to reclaim the throne his family lost in 1918, or to rebuild an empire that included present-day Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and parts of Italy, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, Serbia, and Montenegro.

Since Otto von Habsburg was a little less than six years old when the Habsburg dynasty fell, his life was spent almost entirely in exile (including the United States during World War II), and he was not permitted to set foot in Austria until 1966. But rather than leading an aimless existence in luxury, or holding forth in a make-believe court, the Habsburg heir devoted his life to the cause of freedom and democracy in Europe. Armed with a doctorate in political science from the University of Louvain, he was a tireless agitator in the 1930s against the Nazis—who derided him as “Otto the Last,” and very nearly succeeded in murdering him for his vigorous opposition to the Anschluss.

After World War II he settled in Bavaria, overlooking his ancient homeland, where as a staunch democrat, free-marketer, and anti-Communist he was a leader of the movement for European unity and elected member of the European Parliament. In 1989, three months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, his Pan-European League sponsored a symbolic protest—a “Pan-European Picnic”—against the Communist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe which attracted hundreds of participants from East Germany and Hungary who had escaped across their borders.

For a lifelong public advocate of human rights and prolific author such as Otto von Habsburg, it might well be said that the fall of Soviet communism and the unification of Cold War Europe was the culmination of his life’s work—by any measure, no small achievement for a “would-be monarch.” ♦

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Catch ‘The Wave’

Congratulations and a tip of The Scrapbook homburg to Reuel Marc Gerecht, a Weekly Standard contributing editor, whose latest book has just been published by the Hoover Institution. The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East is part of a Hoover working-group series co-chaired by Fouad Ajami, who writes in the book’s foreword:

A former case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency’s Clandestine Service, Gerecht belongs to a long trail of illustrious intelligence officers, “spies,” drawn to duty in distant lands. A line runs from T. E. Lawrence to Reuel Gerecht, Westerners who venture into Arab and Islamic lands and never really quit them. This kind of sensibility is special, and gives rise to works of intense engagement. We are richer for these works, because there runs in that genre of writing an eye for the intimacies, and twists and turns, of these societies.

Coming from one of America’s foremost observers of the lands of Islam, and among the most distinguished of our prose stylists, this is high praise indeed—and hardly news to fans of Reuel’s writing in these pages. As his article on Syria elsewhere in this issue reminds us, we’ve all come to understand developments in the region in the context of his panoramic perspective—encompassing not only the politics, history, and religion of the Middle East but also the sweep of U.S. policymaking there.

The Wave, published in April but completed more than a year ago, essentially predicted the Arab Spring. Reuel recognized that the regional status quo was shot through with stasis and decay and was bound to change. Accordingly, over these last six months—starting with the ouster of Tunisian president-for-life Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and continuing up to the present with protesters filling the streets of Syrian cities to demonstrate against Bashar al-Assad—his work has been more indispensable than ever. With dictators toppling and the region twisting toward democracy, even as it seems to tend to chaos, The Wave takes up the major and most timely concerns—the chances for democracy in the Middle East, the agents of change, and what the United States should do to encourage a sane transition.

Buy a copy and take it to the beach—there’s no better place to read about the Middle East than while lying in the sand! ♦

More Must Reading

The summer issues of two of our favorite quarterlies have arrived in The Scrapbook’s overflowing mailbox—and unlike the bulk of our mail, periodical and otherwise, we snatched these out, took them home, and have been reading both with great enjoyment and appreciation.

National Affairs, edited by our friend Yuval Levin, goes from strength to strength. The Scrapbook of course has to note two excellent contributions from fellow denizens of the masthead here at The Weekly Standard: Fred Barnes on “Lessons from Canada”—yes, there really are some, and yes, they’re really quite interesting—and Jay Cost on “The Party of the Full Dinner Pail.” That would be the GOP, if they had a better understanding of their history and the present moment. We’ve also very much enjoyed “The New Commanding Heights” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz, and are looking forward to moving on this weekend to interesting articles by Seth Lipsky on the dollar, Avik Roy on Medicare, and more.

Jewish Review of Books is also a feast—even for non-Jews like The Scrapbook! There are fascinating essays on Jewish greats like Hank Greenberg (by Eitan Kensky) and -Irving Kristol (by Meir Soloveichik). Jerome Copulsky considers the thought of Moses Mendelssohn, Robert Alter the poetry of Yehuda Amichai—and, again, there’s much more, all of it high quality, lively, and thought-provoking.

Subscribe! You’ll have a better summer with these two journals in hand. ♦