The next program (a 3:00 A.M. rerun), was part of their series on evolution -- the program on midarians.  (Or, perhaps "mydarians."  I will use the first spelling, here.) It began with sponge-like creatures who battle to the death for a location in the sea currents.  Then, it leaped to elysian rhetorical reference when it discussed the pinnacle of midarian evolutionary accomplishment, the communal variety of cooperation which results in a coral reef. 

Can it be true that these PBS clowns, like sponges, have no conscious awareness of what they do or say?.  Like motile sponges, they seem to lurch through life reacting to stimuli at the most basic level.  Yet, the attribution of political theory to sponges is quite clear, here..  Sponges which compete are bad capitalist sponges.  They would attend a football game if they were human.  Sponges which cooperate are good socialist sponges. The very essence of communalism.  They would support a no-grade system in a public school -- thus relieving union (communally-acting) teachers of the necessity of lowering standards to the point that A-students are anybody who doesn't drool on their test paper.

So Phleming, in her essay prior to the program about your relatives, sponges, portrayed her version of the American coral reef of her dreams.  As she talked about her "concern" for the graduating highschool seniors of her Amerika, who because of rising costs cannot all go to Harvard or U.C. Berkely (ED: Thank God), something odd passed across the screen.  Or, I should say, didn't pass across the screen. 

I had expected it to start that way, and it did.  But, it kept on that way. Ask not what your country can do for you, she said, but what you can do for yourself.  (Translation: we do not have universal government subsidy of higher education, shame on us.)  Some students are required to work for their college education.  These are the battling midarians who sting and kill instead of cooperate. Making people work for their education is teaching them the wrong lesson. We saw one on the screen as she spoke.  He was an imperfect, deformed human -- white and male -- but trying to be properly black.  His baseball hat was on backwards.

Minute by minute as she advanced her theme of letting our children down because evil white male conservatives refuse to become communists, the visual segments floated by, over time combining into a moving collage of evidence that the unsuspecting victims of capitalism were a multiculturalist's epic vision of a politically correct nation. 

A collage that almost entirely eliminated white males. (Virtually all the graduating students shown were women or minorities.)

I doubt if there were ten other people in this country who while watching this noticed what I have described.  If you sent for a transcript, you would never realize what happened, for the words did not identify the selfish, evil, mean-spirited class that is holding back the good young people.  And, even watching this anti-white-male propaganda piece, you could only identify the favored class by what I have described above -- its nearly complete absence from the screen! 

Which is the final irony, because the entire piece, and good old socialist Anne of Red Gables, then became the new predatory midarian, hiding like a road bandit behind non-dangerous coloration, quietly approaching with harmless-looking message polyps full of toxic stings. Full circle the Phleming point came, perfectly representing her message -- destruction by the use of a poison labeled compassion.  Bigotry in the name of inclusiveness. 

You pay for this crap via your taxes.  Corporations pay for this crap via their donations.  I will never cease to be amazed at that. 

During pledge breaks, I see middle Americans sitting there at the phones, proudly working to bring down every principle they hold dear. Eagerly donating their time to financing the abrogation of equal opportunity, equal justice -- in the end, their very republic.  They are laughing and joking as they fund the racist and sexist propaganda that is designed to promulgate the birth of a new nation, conceived in anti-white-male bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that all white conservative males are racists, and endowed by their capitalist white fathers with certain unalienable rights, among which are privilege, oppressive power and the maintenance of unfair economic dominence.

As I see it, this is all clear evidence of a great victory by our public school system, and clear evidence that without vouchers this nation risks internal dissolution and descent from its external role as purveyor of freedom and economic development for the oppressed people of the world.

Why do you people support PBS?  Are you really that stupid? 

© 2002 Oregon Magazine.