One Lonely Man Redeems Alabama-- But It's Not Who You Think It Is
After the Alabama senatorial election, the prevailing media opinion is that the state is Yahoo Central, a boiling cauldron of humanity’s worst instincts. The highly regrettable candidacy of Roy Moore, 40-year-old charges of sexual indiscretion, six-shooters, confederate statues… the special election had all the clichés beloved of the coastal elites.
Sanity finally prevailed, with significant portions of the state’s Republican party saying even they couldn’t put an X beside Moore’s name. And now the circus has moved on.
But Alabama also is home to one of the wisest men in America. Adam J. MacLeod is an associate professor of law at Jones School of Law at Faulkner University in Montgomery, Alabama. And, until the hysterics target him for censorship, he has words of wisdom and temperance for a culture that is currently short on both.
McLeod has come to prominence based on his introductory speech to his incoming law hopefuls. (http://newbostonpost.com/2017/11/09/undoing-the-dis-education-of-millennials/) His bracing welcome to the world of intellectual rigour points out all that is deficient in the current culture tantrums being pitched by a spurned Left, a scattered Right and their media wind therapists.
It is McLeod’s duty to inform his eager legals just how ignorant they are. “Before I can teach you how to reason, I must first teach you how to rid yourself of unreason,” McLeod tells his charges. “For many of you have not yet been educated. You have been dis-educated. To put it bluntly, you have been indoctrinated. Before you learn how to think you must first learn how to stop unthinking.”
The remedy: “Reasoning requires correct judgment. Judgment involves making distinctions, discriminating. Most of you have been taught how to avoid critical, evaluative judgments by appealing to simplistic terms such as “diversity” and “equality.”
Professor McLeod goes on to tell them that, in the perspective of history, they’re not as important as they feel. “One of the falsehoods that has been stuffed into your brain and pounded into place is that moral knowledge progresses inevitably, such that later generations are morally and intellectually superior to earlier generations, and that the older the source the more morally suspect that source is. There is a term for that. It is called chronological snobbery. Or, to use a term that you might understand more easily, “ageism.”
He also warns that this classroom will not be a safe space. “One of my goals for you this semester is that each of you will encounter at least one idea that you find disagreeable and that you will achieve genuine disagreement with that idea. I need to explain what I mean by that because many of you have never been taught how to disagree.”
Finally he warns that, "if you ever begin a statement with the words “I feel,” before continuing you must cluck like a chicken or make some other suitable animal sound.”
Were Professor McLeod in charge of the political and media process featured in the Alabama sense race, there’d have been enough chicken clucking to keep KFC afloat for a generation.“Indoctrination” and “un-reason” ran rampant as both sides doubled down on their partisan talking points.
At a time when it’s evident to anyone who can order a pizza that the future belongs to the party that reaches across the aisle, the GOP and Dems played slavishly to their bases with divisive messages that only alienated further the moderate voter. The clown car known as the Alabama GOP pitched a fit when it thought the DC elite was ordering them around. Enter Roy Moore, the most unloveable candidate anywhere, as their poison pill.
If this is how you register your indignation, feel free to begin making chicken noises.
The Democrats, too, brought their Airing Of Grievances to Alabama, pushing the usual hobby horses of apocalyptic economics, race baiting, third-generation radical feminism and media toadying— all in the service of “diversity” and “equality.” Their assumed moral and intellectual superiority to earlier generations defines cultural snobbism.
This unloved pig was covered with its usual zeal by the men, women and others of the press who ventured forth from DC to find hillbillies and crackers to fulfill the dreams of their dinner-party conversation. Even as their hot scoops were systematically debunked (you know who you are CNN), they continued to operate from a moral pedestal high above the masses.
As Professor McLeod says, the roots of today’s dysfunction are the substitution of I Feel for I think. Few in the public sphere now choose reason over moral preening. Hence, the frantic Hanging Judge mode being employed in cases of sexual assault. Aggrieved women make often-untested claims against former bosses or colleagues. The media gins it up into an indictment. The accused is given the choice of blindfold or cigarette.
Like that, Al Franken hits the floor. Robespierre would be happy to see it all. Even if he couldn’t have found Alabama on a map.
Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy.is the host of the podcast The Full Count with Bruce Dowbiggin on anticanetwork.com. He’s also a regular contributor three-times-a-week to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also the best-selling author of seven books. His website is Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com)