I thought conservatives would know some history.

[catsittingstill]

I've been staying at my Dad's house over the holidays.  This exposes me to reading material I wouldn't ordinarily see, like the Wall Street Journal.  Reading the Wall Street Journal is a valuable reminder of why I generally don't.  For example there is this piece by David Horowitz.

The part that caught my eye was this:

"My life experience had led me to conclude that not only was changing the world an impossible dream,..."

Changing the world is an impossible dream.  This is apparently so well accepted by his conservative audience he doesn't even need to mention why he thinks so, he just tosses it off on the way to something else. 

Changing the world is an impossible dream.

Thomas Jefferson, Fredrick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King will be devastated to hear that.  John Snow, Louis Pasteur, Edwin Chadwick and Margaret Sanger will grieve over their wasted lives.  Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Alfred Hershey and Martha Chase; John Dalton and Antoine Lavoisier; Wilhelm Rontgen and Marie Curie, have not advanced human understanding one iota.  Henry Ford, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and Bill Gates have not changed one single thing about the world we live in.

Except, there was a time, not that long ago, actually, when slavery was an accepted fact, women were effectively owned by their male relatives, more than half of all people died before they turned ten, and nobody had the faintest idea why the sun came back in the morning. 

Changing the world is not just possible; changing the world is inevitable.

Comments

[catsittingstill.livejournal.com]

I understand how a writer could get carried away and write something silly like that. What I don't get is how nobody at the Wall Street Journal caught it before publication. Don't they have editors over there?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yes, they have editors. It is the editors' job to make sure that nothing which challenges the preconceived notions of the writers or of American "conservatives" in general makes it onto the page.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

I think computing has overall been bad for editing. When the whole text of an article had to be rekeyed and composed at considerable expense, publishers were more careful about what got through the process.

<croak>Or maybe Rupert Murdoch fired all the editors, sort of like killing all the lawyers.</croak>