The problem is that Americans insist on thinking of government as something separate from themselves, even though, corrupt and annoying as it may be some,times, it is still a democratic government by for and of themselves

Possibly there is a good Lockean idea in there somewhere, but this bit of modern School of Education dogma — learning only occurs through games or craft projects — did not sound like Ben Franklin to me.  He was all about learning by reading about things, as well doing them.  He started one of the world’s great libraries, the old-fashioned kind full of papery things! (The phraseology did not very 18th-century either, like having Franklin mention his learning curve.)  The speedy search feature of the online Franklin Papers revealed nothing close, and apparently even fans of this quotation have some doubts about whether anyone historical actually wrote it. They think maybe it is ancient Chinese proverb, no fooling. Like “Stay thirsty, my friend!” But perhaps I sell the proverbists short.

The simple fact is, this building is private property, and the owners have a right to use the building as a house of worship, and the government has no right whatsoever to deny that right. And if it were tried, the courts would almost certainly strike it down as a violation of the U.S. Constitution.

Whatever you may think of the proposed mosque and community center, lost in the heat of the debate has been a basic question: Should government attempt to deny private citizens the right to build a house of worship on private property based on their particular religion? That may happen in other countries, but we should never allow it to happen here.

This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.

It is hard to see how anyone with real conservative principles could take much issue with that private property argument. Not that I assume most of the criticism has come from principle — fear and fear-mongering are easier on the brain, and get a lot more attention.

Of course, Bloomberg’s speech was not free of historical mythology, especially about New York as the birthplace of religious toleration. (His cited basis for this claim is the locally semi-famous “Flushing Remonstrance” of 1657, in which officials in the titular Queens village begged Director General Peter Stuyvesant to permit a Quaker meeting. In response, Stuyvesant jailed the officials and abolished the town government, so it was not really a big win for religious freedom.) This site’s esteemed co-founder painted early New York as something completely other than an island of peaceful pluralism, and even Bloomberg himself covers the fact that New York did not in fact have religious toleration until after the Revolution: the Catholic Church was not allowed to open its doors until the 1780s.

All of which points up the problem with most claims that the United States was “founded on” any particular modern idea we might choose to advocate. There were multiple moments of founding, and all of those were the product of political processes that participants could and did ascribe many different meanings to. One does not have spend much time reading the founding generation’s constitutional debates and newspaper essays to realize that they never fully agreed themselves what the nation they were founding was being “founded on.”

As a for instance: the principle Bloomberg cites is certainly present in Jefferson’s Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom (1786) and Madison’s first amendment to the Constitution, but many of the Founders (especially those who identified with the Federalist party) continued to believe that government needed to embrace and employ Protestant Christianity. It also seems safe to say that at least some founding lids would have flipped if someone had tried to open a mosque next door to Federal Hall in 1789.  On the other hand, some might not have. The early presidents were all aware that the U.S. would be contact with cultures around the globe, and took occasion to single out Muslims as a group that Americans were not set against, at least in theory. Either way, it is not clear that the Founders and their colonial forebears really have much guidance to offer us. We in this century have to make these decisions for ourselves.

I am a sucker for old school public art where they try to express some local civic value by putting up a sort of giant greeting card. Anyone recognize this one?

One of the most famous populist crusades against the modern medicine of its time was in 1721 when young Ben Franklin and his older brother James went after the smallpox inoculation policy favored by colonial Boston’s ministerial elite. The Massachusetts Historical Society has an excellent online presentation about the controversy, including images of Ben’s pseudonymous essays from the New England Courant. (Historians help me with some less well-known examples).

But historical context only goes so far, and just because some Founder did it, does not necessarily make it right in every case. So quite likely Dr. Andrew Wakefield really did need to be drummed out of the medical profession [original link to AP story no longer works]:

LONDON — The doctor whose research linking autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella influenced millions of parents to refuse the shot for their children was banned Monday from practicing medicine in his native Britain.

Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 study was discredited — but vaccination rates have never fully recovered and he continues to enjoy a vocal following, helped in the U.S. by endorsements from celebrities like Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy

Wakefield was the first researcher to publish a peer-reviewed study suggesting a connection between autism and the vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella. Legions of parents abandoned the vaccine, leading to a resurgence of measles in Western countries where it had been mostly stamped out. There are outbreaks across Europe every year and sporadic outbreaks in the U.S.

“That is Andrew Wakefield’s legacy,” said Paul Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “The hospitalizations and deaths of children from measles who could have easily avoided the disease.”

Wakefield’s discredited theories had a tremendous impact in the U.S., Offit said, adding: “He gave heft to the notion that vaccines in general cause autism.”

In Britain, Wakefield’s research led to a huge decline in the number of children receiving the MMR vaccine: from 95 percent in 1995 — enough to prevent measles outbreaks — to 50 percent in parts of London in the early 2000s. Rates have begun to recover, though not enough to prevent outbreaks. In 2006, a 13-year-old boy became the first person to die from measles in Britain in 14 years.

“The false suggestion of a link between autism and the MMR vaccine has done untold damage to the UK vaccination program,” said Terence Stephenson, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. “Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that it is safe.”

Unfortunately, even when the British totally discredit you, there is always Texas, as Brian Deer of the London Times explains.

The Career Education Corporation, a publicly traded global giant, last year reported revenue of $1.84 billion. Roughly 80 percent came from federal loans and grants, according to BMO Capital Markets, a research and trading firm. That was up from 63 percent in 2007.

The Apollo Group — which owns the for-profit University of Phoenix — derived 86 percent of its revenue from federal student aid last fiscal year, according to BMO. Two years earlier, it was 69 percent.

These numbers are far higher than most of the ones I have seen for the percentage of public funding in public university budgets, and it is notorious that the levels of government support for higher education have been dropping. What we seem to have here is a massive transfer of public funds from major educational institutions where there is some public control and scrutiny of its use, into corporate pockets where its use and outcomes become proprietary information shared only in advertising and financial reports. It turns out that the risks these brave educational entrepreneurs have run — such as loaning tens of thousands to culinary students whose  future careers as dishwashers or line cooks or sawers of novelty ice sculptures can never possibly allow them to pay back their massive student loan debts — are considerably surer things when the federal government backs the loans. Students pay, Feds pay, Career Edu Corp profits either way.

So the next time some politician or pundit tells us we should run the universities more like businesses, the answer should be, give us more taxpayer money, and maybe we will give you a few email addresses of former students to tell you how much they loved us. (As the companies did in this story.)

[Hat tip on the post title to Citizen Freneau.]

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Now playing: The Soundtrack of Our Lives – The Passover

"George Washington" collecting signatures for the Mount Vernon Statement

After months of non-stop, often costumed stalking by the hysterical far right,  the Founders finally caught a break this week, thanks to the  Mt. Vernon Ladies Association. It seems that the keepers of George Washington’s estate did not let the conservative promoters of the so-called “Mount Vernon Statement” hold their big media event on the premises mentioned in its title. The far right has long enjoyed projecting its obsessions on the Founders, of course, but the Tea Parties have made the phenomenon a full-on reactionary fad lately. No conservative gathering or press release seems complete unless dressed up in Ye Olde Colonial drag. The substance of the statement is only historical in the sense of being rooted in the politics of the late 20th century, rather than the 21st or the 18th. The real point of bringing poor George Washington into this vague farrago of conservative pieties would seem to be keeping longtime Beltway rightists relevant in the Tea Party era.

There have a number of enjoyable stories on the MVS debacle, but the best headlined has to be the Christian Science Monitor‘s  “A fake Hitler outdid conservatives.” That’s only the middle of the headline, actually, but that phrase is what jumped out at me from Google.
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Now playing: The Young Republic – She’s Not Waiting Here This Time