Joe Sobran on the best way to teach your children civics:
“Because I write about politics, people are forever asking me the best way to teach children how our system of government works. I tell them that they can give their own children a basic civics course right in their own homes.
In my own experience as a father, I have discovered several simple devices that can illustrate to a child’s mind the principles on which the modern state deals with its citizens. You may find them helpful, too.
For example, I used to play the simple card game WAR with my son. After a while, when he thoroughly understood that the higher ranking cards beat the lower ranking ones, I created a new game I called GOVERNMENT. In this game, I was Government, and I won every trick, regardless of who had the better card. My boy soon lost interest in my new game, but I like to think it taught him a valuable lesson for later in life.
When your child is a little older, you can teach him about our tax system in a way that is easy to grasp. Offer him, say, $10 to mow the lawn. When he has mowed it and asks to be paid, withhold $5 and explain that this is income tax. Give $1 to his younger brother, and tell him that this is “fair”. Also, explain that you need the other $4 yourself to cover the administrative costs of dividing the money. When he cries, tell him he is being “selfish” and “greedy”. Later in life he will thank you.
Make as many rules as possible. Leave the reasons for them obscure. Enforce them arbitrarily. Accuse your child of breaking rules you have never told him about. Keep him anxious that he may be violating commands you haven’t yet issued. Instill in him the feeling that rules are utterly irrational. This will prepare him for living under democratic government.
When your child has matured sufficiently to understand how the judicial system works, set a bedtime for him and then send him to bed an hour early. When he tearfully accuses you of breaking the rules, explain that you made the rules and you can interpret them in any way that seems appropriate to you, according to changing conditions. This will prepare him for the Supreme Court’s concept of the U.S. Constitution as a “living document”.
Promise often to take him to the movies or the zoo, and then, at the appointed hour, recline in an easy chair with a newspaper and tell him you have changed your plans. When he screams, “But you promised!”, explain to him that it was a campaign promise.
Every now and then, without warning, slap your child. Then explain that this is defense. Tell him that you must be vigilant at all times to stop any potential enemy before he gets big enough to hurt you. This, too, your child will appreciate, not right at that moment, maybe, but later in life.
At times your child will naturally express discontent with your methods. He may even give voice to a petulant wish that he lived with another family. To forestall and minimize this reaction, tell him how lucky he is to be with you the most loving and indulgent parent in the world, and recount lurid stories of the cruelties of other parents. This will make him loyal to you and, later, receptive to schoolroom claims that the America of the postmodern welfare state is still the best and freest country on Earth.
This brings me to the most important child-rearing technique of all: lying. Lie to your child constantly. Teach him that words mean nothing–or rather that the meanings of words are continually “evolving”, and may be tomorrow the opposite of what they are today.
Some readers may object that this is a poor way to raise a child. A few may even call it child abuse. But that’s the whole point: Child abuse is the best preparation for adult life under our form of GOVERNMENT.”
Hi Lila –
I was greatly saddened to hear of the passing of Joe Sobran. A good man. I appreciate your tributes to him on your blog.
Hope all is well with you. Are you in the States or in South America?
Regards,
Caryl
Hi Caryl
Here in Baltimore.
I am actually reading Mr. Sobran’s columns now and learning many surprising and moving things..
including the saintliness of Bill Buckley..
I already knew he was a great literary talent and musician and full of fun, but to know how devout a man he was makes me sorely puzzled. How could he countenance what goes on in the name of government?
Lila
Not to eavesdrop, but…it is possible to be devout and yet be in basic confusion about what one’s proper duty is to the “constituted authorities”. Buckley had been a CIA agent, and like many Catholics of his era, was thrilled to see that Catholics were apparently being finally “mainstreamed” into US culture and institutions.
He underestimated the anti-Christian bias of the elite, which became increasingly secular Jewish during his lifetime. All in all, not that hard to understand.
His behavior towards Sobran at the behest of his neo-con friends was execrable. Sobran accepted the heroic duty to “love one’s enemies” in a more exemplary way by making things up with Buckley near the end.
Well, yes…
I think in bending over backward to be free of Catholic prejudice against Jews, Buckley seems to have became a tool of anti-Christian zealots, many of them Jewish.
It’s a difficult issue.
It’s interesting to me that it was conservative Christians (some of them, no doubt, would have had nothing to do with me) who actually unmasked the power elites first..Eustace Mullins (whose work was taken wholesale by G Edward Griffin) being one. Mullins I think held some very strong feelings against Jews, Judaism, african ams, asians and nonwhites in general.
But I still think it’s correct to give people their intellectual due, even if you part ways with their other opinions.
Griffin should have acknowledged Mullins in the introduction and clearly stated why he was distancing himself. It was intellectually dishonest that he didn’t and I think less of him for that. At least, he did give Mullins a foot note, though.
Mullins himself was a protege of Ezra Pound.
I think Buckley was running away from all that…in the process he became a stooge..
And allowed himself to attack people like Sobran for having the bravery and insight he lacked.
Pound’s life and work is probably due a re-consideration these days. Along with ‘anti-semites’ Eustace Mullins he had other disciples including the segregationist John Kaspar but even poets like Charles Olson and Guy Davenport. Not all agreed with Pound on his theories about Jews being the money power but the Mullins and Kaspar became passionate racists/tribalists but that’s not to say they were not fairly learned and even cultured men. Pound grew up in that era eugenics and works by Lothrop Stoddard. I’m sure many of his fellow white anglo-saxons shared his view. Henry Adams certainly did. White sumpremacy was implicit to their thought.
Still, though, you bring up a very interesting point that’s puzzled me as well about conservative christians being the first to spot the money power. It’s common these days to hear my fellow Christian yeomen in the south blaming it all on the jews. They won’t be able to explain how the jews are to blame but they’re in no doubt that, yes, they are the ones who pull the strings. Probably their grandfathers said the same thing. It’s racism but also tribal custom in a sense, knowledge from generation to generation. American racism, despite its often violent consequences, always tribal at is heart. Who knows? More and more it seems to me the human race was, is, and always will be a collection of contentious, fractious tribes.
Well –
The way I see it is if you are prejudiced against a group of people to start with, you’re more likely to look critically at what they’re saying and more likely to spot what’s going on wrong.
Which is why Repubs figured out Obama and Goldman Sachs before the Dems did….and why the Dems figured out Bush44 before the repubs did.
Which is why Jewish activists figured out Christian racism
and why Christian conservatives figured out the Zionist/Masonic banking scam