J.
snitsnat wrote:
> heh. heh. what a card.
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/29/opinion/29brooks.html
>
> Karl's New Manifesto By DAVID BROOKS Published: May 29, 2005
>
> I was in the library reading room when suddenly a strange specter of a
> man appeared above me. He was a ragged fellow with a bushy beard,
> dressed in the clothes of another century. He clutched news clippings
> on class in America, and atop the pile was a manifesto in his own
> hand. He was gone in an instant, but Karl's manifesto on modern
> America remained. This is what it said:
>
> The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
> struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and
> proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to
> each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in
> which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought
> between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
>
> The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of
> production, the education system. The median family income of a
> Harvard student is $150,000. According to the Educational Testing
> Service, only 3 percent of freshmen at the top 146 colleges come from
> the poorest quarter of the population. The educated class
> ostentatiously offers financial aid to poor students who attend these
> colleges and then rigs the admission criteria to ensure that only a
> small, co-optable portion of them can get in.
>
> The educated class reaps the benefits of the modern economy - seizing
> for itself most of the income gains of the past decades - and then
> ruthlessly exploits its position to ensure the continued dominance of
> its class.
>
> The educated class has torn away from the family its sentimental veil
> and reduced it to a mere factory for the production of little
> meritocrats. Members of the educated elites are more and more likely
> to marry each other, which the experts call assortative mating, but
> which is really a ceaseless effort to refortify class solidarity and
> magnify social isolation. Children are turned into workaholic
> knowledge workers - trained, tutored, tested and prepped to strengthen
> class dominance.
>
> The educated elites are the first elites in all of history to work
> longer hours per year than the exploited masses, so voracious is their
> greed for second homes. They congregate in exclusive communities
> walled in by the invisible fence of real estate prices, then
> congratulate themselves for sending their children to public schools.
> They parade their enlightened racial attitudes by supporting
> immigration policies that guarantee inexpensive lawn care. They send
> their children off to Penn, Wisconsin and Berkeley, bastions of
> privilege for the children of the professional class, where they are
> given the social and other skills to extend class hegemony.
>
> The information society is the only society in which false
> consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university
> that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the
> more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed.
> The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate
> the views of the left.
>
> Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The
> Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated
> scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and
> Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power:
> the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means
> of education.
>
> More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons,
> the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the
> working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided
> over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They
> have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity
> for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower
> down.
>
> In 1960 there were not big structural differences between rich and
> poor families. In 1960, three-quarters of poor families were headed by
> married couples. Now only a third are. While the rates of single
> parenting have barely changed for the educated elite, family
> structures have disintegrated for the oppressed masses.
>
> Poor children are less likely to live with both biological parents,
> hence, less likely to graduate from high school, get a job and be in a
> position to challenge the hegemony of the privileged class. Family
> inequality produces income inequality from generation to generation.
>
> Undereducated workers of the world, unite! Let the ruling educated
> class tremble! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a
> world to win!
>
> I don't agree with everything in Karl's manifesto, because I don't
> believe in incessant class struggle, but you have to admit, he makes
> some good points.
>
>
>
> "Finish your beer. There are sober kids in India."
>
> -- rwmartin
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