A Continent Of Clownsby Fred Reed
WASHINGTON (AP) – Bursting into tears, eighth-grader Anurag Kashyap of California became the U.S. spelling champ Thursday... Tied for second place were 11-year-old Samir Patel, who is home-schooled in Colleyville, Texas, and Aliya Deri, 13, a Pleasanton, California, student. Indian kids have won first place in five of the last seven years. Might be there’s a pattern here? Nah. A friend in California has an Asian wife (which both he and I recommend), and so is among the few whites plugged into the state’s Asian community. He reports that the Asians are contemptuous of whites. (“Lazy, not very smart.”) The evidence supports them. They also believe that the chief aim of schooling in America is to coddle blacks and Latinos, which baffles them. Me too, but it isn’t my problem. Top twelve students
on the USA Math Olympiad 2003: Take Asians and Jews out of measures of high intellectual performance in America, and you aren’t left with much. The foregoing doesn’t look much different from staffing lists I have encountered for such things as research teams at Bell Labs. A friend, writing a book on Harvard, calculates that Asians and Jews make up about forty-five percent of the school. The Asians know this, of course. They figure the future is theirs. So do I. "Houston Chronicle, May 19, 2005: HISD [Houston Integrated School District] sees its passing rates [on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills] fall in every grade and a racial gap grow even wider." The contempt of the Asians for witless round-eyes is understandable. They, in my considerable experience, are intensely competitive and look toward results. Whites just don’t care. I remember staying with a friend in Canada who had rooming with her a Chinese woman who was working on a degree at a local university. She only barely spoke English, but among other things was also studying French, a required course I suppose, and passing it by brute force. She needed that degree to bring her family over. She was going to get it, and that was that. She seldom came out of her room, because that was where her books were. Might be hard to compete with. Winners of the 1964 William Lowell Putnam mathematics competition, a very high-end test: Reid W. Barton, Daniel M. Kane, Emanuel Stoica, Ana Caraiani, Suehyun Kwon, Mihai Manea, Nikifor C. Bliznashki, Oaz Nir, Lingren Zhang, Olena Bormashenko, Ralph Furmaniak, Michael A. Lipnowski, Po-Ru Loh, Mehmet B. Yenmez, and Rumen I. Zarev. American schools lurch after “diversity” like drunks who have discovered a bottle of Night Train on the sidewalk, and collect what educationists call “minorities.” By “minority” they mean of course non-performing minorities: Anglo-Saxons, Chinese, Jews, and Greeks are all minorities, but they are not failures, and so aren't really minorities. The Asians, all that I know, all that anyone I know knows, do not give a wan, etiolated damn about non-performers. Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans are very racially conscious. They quietly regard whites as inferior, blacks as barbarians. Ah, and the Asians are smart, and do not come out of their rooms until they have finished. New York Daily News, May 10, 2005: A stunning 81% of the city's eighth-graders flunked the state's basic social studies exam last year – and the scores have gone down annually since the test debuted in 2001. The comedy of the thing is that the United States has deliberately chosen to convert itself into a continent of half-literate iPod-carrying dolts. To me it is entertaining; to the rising Asian nations it is an inexplicable gift: The US, their competition, has put its children into the hands of simian gurglers mewling about diversity, which, while positively weird as seen through slanted eyes, bodes well for Asia. It is a bit like watching an opposing running back set off in the wrong direction. The slave coders of Mumbai don’t worry about diversity. They are busy writing computer code. Our code. Even better: “CLOVIS, N.M. (April 29) – A call about a possible weapon at a middle school prompted police to put armed officers on rooftops, close nearby streets and lock down the school. All over a giant burrito.” A kid brings his lunch wrapped in a newspaper so the school goes crazy and puts snipers on the roofs. I love this stuff. It’s better than The Simpsons. Do you suppose they do that in Tokyo? The Mad Burrito Assassin isn’t unusual. Little boys often get suspended or led out in handcuffs by cops for things like pointing and saying “Bang,” because heavily womanized schools can’t maintain order. The Weekly Standard, 05/09/05, writing of the politicization of textbooks in American schools: “Thus, a chapter on climate in a fifth-grade science textbook in the Discovery Works series, published by Houghton Mifflin (2000), opens with a Native American explanation for the changing seasons: "Crow moon is the name given to spring because that is when the crows return. April is the month of Sprouting Grass Moon." Students meander through three pages of Algonquin lore before they learn that climate is affected by the rotation and tilt of Earth – not by the return of the crows.” Oh, baby. I love it when you talk like that. Crow Moon, yet. All that neat stuff about crows will definitely impress Japanese guys designing supercomputers. I imagine: Teacher to classroom full of Asian kids: “Wun Lung, given
two functions u(x) and v(x), the first derivative of uv with respect
to x is u(dv/dx) + v(du/dx). True or false?” From Gene Expression
(gnxp.com) Gosh, do you reckon the Singaporeans give phony doctorates to the dimmest dregs of their already bus-station schools? Detroit News, Tuesday, January 18, 2005: Forty-seven percent of Detroit’s adult population is functionally illiterate. Come on, we can do better than that. Let’s try for eighty percent within five years. Meanwhile I’m going to get my eyes done and break out my old Mandarin books. Hey, the Chinese are smart, the food’s good and the women are splendid. “Ni hau? Jende, wo mei-you kan-gwo numma hau-kan-de syau-jyeh.” Used to work. Might still.
Fred Reed is author of Nekkid in Austin: Drop Your Inner Child Down a Well. Copyright © 2005 Fred Reed |
