Yesterday evening, while routinely watching the evening news, we were profoundly disturbed to be introduced to the revelation of a “new” and “advanced” institutional State program (“PragerU”) which seeks to promote the inculcation of young schoolchildren in the immovable tectonics of biased and reductive, populist ignorance. It presents a cartoonized version of Christopher Columbus telling the young student watcher that the enslavement of black human beings was beneficial and morally preferable to their being killed. The brief excerpt of this filmed program of atavistic instruction of young schoolchildren provided a uniquely distressing aperture to our distressing perception of stereotypically reductive ignorance and its atavistic promotion of dehumanizing racial bigotry.
The film snippet presented an affably smiling, plainly virtuous, and admirable Christopher Columbus, holding a spyglass while morally proclaiming that the preferable choice of black slavery was preferable to that of death. We were suddenly obliged to draw in our breath in shocked reaction to this reductive and pathological declaration, common to the substantial minions of hubristically delusional Americans, known as White Christian Evangelicals.
We were aesthetically and philosophically grateful that merely a short excerpt of this dystopian children’s animated film was presented; nevertheless, this revealing new aperture, focused on a dystopian and regressive policy employed in the instruction of schoolchildren, doubtlessly will be useful in our ongoing attempt to comprehend the MAGA-style delusions of history and its reductive attitudes.
We would begin with the presented smiling depiction of an animated Christopher Columbus as the avatar of traditional American virtue. History shows that such a purported discoverer of America never reached the American continent and brought only exotic infectious diseases as well as cultural homicidal prejudice to the “New World.” We have witnessed the traditionally restrained and conventionally dignified National Geographic, devote no less than two of its venerable issues to the subject of the ethnocentric, malign cruelty of Columbus practiced on the indigenous peoples of the Western hemisphere, Notably, our personal recognition and celebration of “Columbus Day” is exclusively a grateful recogition of the many ubiquitous contributions of Italian immigrants to our State and the Nation.
The animated image of a smiling Christopher Columbus, articulating the inane and condescending (sophomoric) message that black people were preferentially enslaved as opposed to being killed, is a nauseatingly repulsive and ignorant example of pathological hubris; and conceivably ranks as the most deplorable verbal example of pathological cruelty and hubristic ignorance. The animated version of this purported hero of American history, smilingly delimits the available, empirical choices of black human beings to slavery or death; what happened to the universally natural choice of life and self-realization?
This shocking view of the contextually reductive and arrogant program of recommended childhood education is not, to any rational degree, consistent with the history of the rectitude of the Nation’s humanistic aspirations, and must be decisively thrown into the nearest and most obnoxiously scented dumpster.
-p.
plinyblogdotcom 