Quote/Unquote 2006 Aug.

THE tide of postmodern education is receding in Australia. At this past week's history summit, a diverse group of thinkers and historians including Geoffrey Blainey, Bob Carr and Reconciliation Australia's Jackie Huggins issued a communique agreeing that history teaching needs to be reformed, that the subject should be taught as a separate and stand-alone course and that students learn best from a narrative, chronological approach to the past. If this sounds like common sense, it is. Yet it continues to elude most of the country's state education departments, which have spent years dismantling old history curriculums (which were far from perfect) to construct in their place a new postmodern establishment where history is sublimated within broad fields such as ''Studies of Societies and the Environment'', or SOSE. Just as in English courses where Shakespeare is forced through Marxist paradigms of race, sex and class, in such watered-down history courses students quickly learn to parrot approved ideas. Thus in opposing the narrative teaching of history as a stand-alone subject, education ministry bureaucrats have become an elite gang of establishment reactionaries, barricading the door against parents and historians revolted at what children are taught today.

There is no question that even after post-graduate training in history, I have emerged with a shaky grasp of the facts. I am a product of a thoroughly post-modern education, schooled to seek and interpret a multiplicity of voices, competing narratives and diverse texts. The order of Australian prime ministers is beyond me; the dates of even key events would see me flailing. But I am also a child of the Information Age. Isn't that why God invented Google?

History is not peace studies. History is not social justice awareness week. Or consciousness-raising about ecological sustainability. History is history.

During World War II, Winston Churchill sent a delegation of British intelligence professionals, including Ian Fleming (who would later turn his hand to writing spy novels), to visit the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover and to see if they could trust him to hold up his end of the deal in a transatlantic anti-Nazi intelligence network. They found him wanting and ended up going behind his back to work out a relationship with William Joseph"Wild Bill" Donovan, who they assisted in his running of the OSS.

Fast-forward six decades. Just as J. Edgar Hoover was in the habit of driving the UK's intel community nuts by making photo-op arrests of German spies the second they were uncovered on American soil, as opposed to listening into their transmissions and feeding them bogus information (a technique Fleming details in his James Bond short story"The Property of a Lady"), we now find out that Bush and his people have forced the British -- over the strong objections of the UK's intel community -- to spring the liquid-bomber trap far too early, thus allowing over half of the terrorists to escape.

Grass’s insistent, repetitive message to his fellow citizens was that they should never, ever forget. It seems that only now has he himself chosen to remember.

People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.

WEEK of August 7, 2006

Any death — enemy or friendly, accidental or deliberate, civilian or soldier — favors the terrorists. The Islamists have no claim on morality; Westerners do and show it hourly. So, in a strange way, images of the dead and dying are attributed only to our failing. If ours are killed, it is because those in power were not careful (inadequate body armor, unarmored humvees, etc), most likely due to some supposed conspiracy (Halliburton profiteering, blood for oil, wars for Israel , etc.). When Muslim enemies are killed, whether by intent or accidentally, the whole arsenal of Western postmodern thought comes into play. For the United States to have such power over life and death, the enemy appears to the world as weak, sympathetic, and victimized; we as strong and oppressive. Terrorists are still “constructed” as “the other” and thus are seen as suffering — doctored photos or not — through the grim prism of Western colonialism, racism, and imperialism.

In short, it is not just that Western public opinion won’t tolerate many losses; it won’t tolerate for very long killing the enemy either — unless the belligerents are something akin to the white, Christian Europeans of Milosevic’s Serbia, who, fortunately for NATO war planners in the Balkans, could not seek refuge behind any politically correct paradigm and so were bombed with impunity. Remember, multiculturalism always trumps fascism: the worst homophobe, the intolerant theocrat, and the woman-hating bigot is always sympathetic if he wears some third-world garb, mouths anti-Americanism, and looks most un-European. To win these wars, our soldiers must not die or kill.

I tend to read everything I can about Israel, including some of the far-right websites and columnists. They are always predictable. Israel is invariably right (except when it negotiates) and the Arabs are invariably wrong (no matter what they do).

Ned Lamont's toppling of three-term Democratic Senate incumbent Joe Lieberman is a political thunder clap, arguably the most important victory for the American left since the Watergate rout of 1974.

My brief and unhappy experience with the hate and vitriol of bloggers on the liberal side of the aisle comes from the last several months I spent campaigning for a longtime friend, Joe Lieberman.

This kind of scary hatred, my dad used to tell me, comes only from the right wing -- in his day from people such as the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with his tirades against" communists and their fellow travelers." The word"McCarthyism" became a red flag for liberals, signifying the far right's fascistic tactics of labeling anyone a" communist" or"socialist" who favored an active federal government to help the middle class and the poor, and to level the playing field.

I came to believe that we liberals couldn't possibly be so intolerant and hateful, because our ideology was famous for ACLU-type commitments to free speech, dissent and, especially, tolerance for those who differed with us. And in recent years -- with the deadly combination of sanctimony and vitriol displayed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michael Savage -- I held on to the view that the left was inherently more tolerant and less hateful than the right.

Now, in the closing days of the Lieberman primary campaign, I have reluctantly concluded that I was wrong.

Lebanon is a small country, with a population of on ly 3.8 million. A fourth of the country is homeless! That would be like a disaster that left 70 million Americans wandering around with just the shirts on their backs, living in shelters and schools, wondering where their next bite of food would come from, their homes in rubble, their lives destroyed.