Published 2002-02-13T00:00:00Z”/>

Ted allen<br>Orion Columnist

Julian was a frog, but not just the average fly eater, no! Julian was an exceptionally intelligent frog. Consequently, he decided to enroll at a state university. Having paid the required fees, Julian attended classes and studied a variety of the exciting subjects available. He eagerly signed up for the spring semester, but just before classes began that January, an amazing thing happened to Julian. To his surprise, he became human. Super! This was even better, no hopping to classes. Julian began ingesting the information passed on to him, but this semester something had changed. Instead of all the wonderful things he had discovered in the fall, he now began to understand something altogether different.

In one of his required texts, “The Tao of Physics,” by Fritjof Capra, Julian found the author placed all the ills the world suffers at the doorstep of western civilization and the capitalistic system. He discovered that Capra, by deliberately ignoring several thousand years of recorded history, blamed a “mechanistic world view” for “racial, religious and political upheavals” that have “brought a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources creating economic and political disorder …” Julian knew from studying ancient history that Capra conveniently forgot to mention that the human race had been slaughtering each other and inflicting “a grossly unjust distribution of natural resources” on a global scale, long before western civilization or capitalism devised a “mechanistic” view point. As to the “racial, religious and political upheavals,” China and Japan were warring with one another centuries before western civilization had anything to do with them. The Africans had practiced slavery within their own race well before they began to sell their own people to Western European slave traders.

Politically, what of Assyria, the Mongols and, more recently Japan in World War II against America, Josef Stalin with his millions butchered or Chairman Mao of Communist China and the bloody purges of his Cultural Revolution? The hands of the non-Western world are covered with more blood than those of the West. Capra’s contempt for the truth is just as obvious.

Not long after this, Julian thought he would help other students as a tutor in the writing center. As a prerequisite, he had to enroll in a semester-long class to learn the techniques utilized by the center. One of the texts entitled, “Good Intentions,” authored by Nancy Maloney Grimm, was shocking in its blatant Marxist ideological format. In the introduction, Grimm stated that the “arbitrariness of academic practices … oppress some students.” She explained that English departments expecting foreign and minority students to adhere to the expectation of learning to speak and write English is unreasonable. Julian did not think so, simply as a matter of safety while driving in America. Neither did it seem untoward for the simple fact of taking pride in becoming a part of the culture those students had chosen to join. Grimm justified this and a multitude of her other ideological attacks on Julian’s culture by “insisting that writing center workers need to theorize their practice in terms of political and ideological issues” (read that term, “workers,” as the Proletariat). One had only to read the “Works Cited” section of Grimm’s book to discover a veritable who’s who of Marxist ideologues and New Left Progressives. Being of high intelligence, Julian recognized hysterical, “politically correct” injustice, as well as racism, when he saw them and knew both were wrong.

Prior to his transformation from that of an oddity, Julian had believed that he was being afforded an unbiased education. This is what the arbiters of truth, the Progressives, had told him. Now, as a human being, with an even higher intelligence quotient, Julian realized that he had been lied to. Instead of running away from the lies as a frog, Julian chose to resist them as a thinking human. Look for further insights on academic bias and other subjects from the accursed frog/prince in future issues of The Orion. In the meantime, rrribbit, I’m outta here!

Ted Allen can be reached at:

<a href=”mailto:[email protected]”>[email protected]</a>