PrintDecember 12, 2009
Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson Are Gay?
Jeopardy sometimes offers insights into American culture, if simply by eliminating the really dumb from the contestants who make the cut and provide a clear look at the more educated in our society. But there is a problem. I remember an excellent example of the negative effect of imposed educational theory since the 1960s showing up in the answer to the Final Jeopardy question: "Hannibal crossed the Alps on what animals?"
A twenty-something contestant wrote down his answer quickly and confidently -- llamas. He was surprised that he was wrong because he had been taught to "think" rather than "know," a commonplace of modern pedagogical methods. He figured that if the question featured mountains, then the only logical answer could be llamas. He is one more on the ever-growing list of college graduates who don't know they have been screwed by their colleges -- until they open their mouths in front of traditionally educated colleagues and older adults.
In lower grades, public education today borders on child abuse. In the university ranks, it becomes a scandal. The march of the radical scholars has extinguished proper education and replaced it with junk curricula, politically correct clap-traps, and the ominous mist of multiculturalism, in which the great cultures of the world (including ours) recede to near-invisibility in order to illuminate the less achieving peoples of the world.
As proof, this week on Jeopardy, another culturally significant scenario unfolded. The money-leaders going into Final Jeopardy were a former Navy officer and the commander of a U.S. Air Force base. Watching them, I sensed that one positive consequence of American wars over the past twenty years has been the addition to society of well-trained servicemen and women, as well as and squared-away veterans who endured training, absorbed discipline, and honed the desire to get the job done.
In stark contrast, the third contestant, a woman playwright, exhibited a flouncy and vain demeanor that symbolizes the free-form milieu so prominent on college campuses today. She was petulant, overconfident, and condescending -- and obviously a product of a curriculum that offered the usual array of transsexual, gender, race, and women's issues.
It was no surprise that her latest play dramatized a homosexual relationship between -- of all people -- Sherlock Homes and his friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson. She was cocksure of her thesis and offered, "I can prove it."
From her perspective, the leap to homosexuality was short: two grown men hanging around together constantly in a male-only world -- symbolized by the famous flat on Baker Street -- could mean only one thing. With a little more proper education, she could have learned about the tradition of the bachelor type in Victorian times, not to mention the important role of the "amateur" in the development of British knowledge in an age when so-called "professionals" were regarded with disdain.
Most significantly, who cares if the Holmes/Watson creator Arthur Conan Doyle intentionally or unintentionally wove homosexual hints into his famous stories? Is it part of the manifesto of the radically educated cadre to "out" famous characters? And anyway, Holmes and Watson are fictional -- a distinction the budding playwright may not have discerned, considering the sorry state of education today. My take is that Doyle went out of his way to introduce female characters that, in some obvious cases, became chivalric objects of unrequited love to Holmes.
As an editor and publisher in a university-dominated community, I was among the first to write about the coming debacle in education in the early 1980s. Graduates from the nationally ranked public and private universities here began turning out ill-equipped. I wanted to know why. Upon investigation, I realized that many radical students who graduated in the 1960s remained in academe -- the favored lair of revolutionary socialists.
By the late '70s, they were professors, and by the mid-'80s, the usurpation of traditional education was well on its way. Back then only a few people outside the academy knew what I was talking about when I explained that the radical scholars had highjacked higher education. The terms "radical deconstruction" and "multicultural curriculum," as well as the rise of the politically-correct-speech gauleiters, were unknown.
Now they are quite well known, but it's too late to do anything about them. The radical scholars -- now called "critical" scholars -- have finally occupied the dean's office permanently over forty years after their efforts in the late '60s and early '70s. They hire only their own types, and woe to the rising scholar seeking tenure who dares teach or publish against the radical orthodoxy. Even students are intimidated by the regime, fearful that disagreeing with their professors prevents future graduate school or employment opportunities.
At the heart of the radical revolution on campus is the continuing belief in the propaganda of the Soviet Union these professors adopted during their movement: America is racist, chauvinistic, homophobic, and imperialist. Cold War scholars Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, in their important book In Denial (an examination of why scholars refuse to recognize the existence of thousands of newly declassified documents that expose the USSR as "the bloodiest ideology of human history") realize the dangers of the deeply embedded radical scholarship that holds education hostage.
Say the authors in reference to the radical scholars: "Continuing to fight the Cold War in history, they intend to reverse the victory of the West and convince the next generation that the wrong side won, and to prepare the way for a new struggle."
The new regime in the White House is their victory.
Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.
Bernie Reeves is editor and publisher of Raleigh Metro Magazine.
