Don't ask why the "news" is all a-flutter for Meghan McCain, but earlier in February, she issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, on a forum ? ABC's "The View" ? that is a fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity:
The Tea Party Movement was "innately racist," Meghan said. This was why "young people were turned off by the movement." And , in her most grating Valley-Girl inflection: "I'm sorry ─ revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word vote in English." The rude reference was to Tom Tancredo's observation that people "who cannot spell the word vote or say it in English" are determining elections in America.
The former Congressman and 2008 Republican presidential candidate was on to something. The Founding Fathers decided in their wisdom that only propertied males would vote. To justify distaff disenfranchisement look no further than "Meghaan." As to the other limitation: The founders were not democrats; they foresaw today's pillage politics ─ and they understood that, unchecked, overbearing majorities would be more malignant than monarchs. And all too well did the founders know that, granted a vote, the unpropertied masses would help themselves to the belongings of the propertied.
But what would "Meghaan," a member of the millennial generation, know about a group of truly great revolutionaries whose average age, in 1776, was 44?
Millennials are a generation of youngsters that reveres only itself for no good reason. They have been unleashed on America by progressive families and educators (Democrat and Republican alike) who've deified their off-putting offspring and charges, and instilled in them a sense of self-worth disproportionate to their actual worth.
These "'Trophy Kids" are entering the workforce just as America's economic power is receding. The outcome is not nearly as positive as Wall Street Journal writer Ron Alsop would have you believe. It transpires from Mr. Alsop's lighthearted article titled "The 'Trophy Kids' Go to Work" that Meghan is a member of a studied cohort, born between 1980 and 2001. They "have a stronger sense of entitlement than older workers," and, as "some research studies indicate," unfounded feelings of superiority that feed their great expectations.
Even more illuminating for longstanding advocates of a traditional schooling such as this writer is how uncreative this generation of youngsters truly is. Meghan and her peers are everywhere, loudly dispensing mind-numbing clichés as though they were Socratic sayings. The uniformity of opinion among these mediocre and frightfully monolithic minds is scarier than its uninformed nature.
Still scarier are their dangerously elevated self-esteems. Drumming up ignorance can be risky business. In a 1997 monograph (which I reviewed in 2000), Marilyn Bowman, a Canadian professor, forewarned that "there is a dark side to self-esteem. The prototype aggressor is an individual whose self-appraisal is unrealistically positive."
Needy and narcissistic, these dullards were nurtured by pedagogues, parents, and politicians (again, Democrat and Republican; liberal and "conservative" alike) who were convinced that loosey-goosey schools would produce free thinkers and geniuses. Instead, attests Alsop, the "high-maintenance rookies," dreaded by human-resource executives across America, "flounder without precise guidelines." Millennials "want loads of attention and guidance from employers," and they "break down in tears after a negative performance review."
The removal of the burdens of a core curriculum, a literary canon, the hardest of sciences, discipline and moral instruction ─ this has helped to mold the penetrating intellects of The "Meghaan" Millennials. Content-based, top-down, analytical and explicit teaching was replaced with pop-culture friendly, non-hierarchically delivered flimflam. The educational emphasis has long been on cooperative experiences and groupthink over individual achievement.
Nevertheless, Hollywood and the rest of the glitterati and literati make abundantly clear in all their tired scripts and messages ─ that the older generation has nothing on the youth. Especially when it comes to technology smarts. That's false. The electronic toys our dim, attention-deficient darlings depend on to sustain brain waves are made, for the most, by "older people."
The hybrid, hi-tech workforce ─ comprised as it is of local and outsourced talent ─ is manned, generally, by terribly smart older people with advanced engineering degrees. Yes, the people designing gadgets for our grandiose gimps are often Asians, many of whom are older. They beaver away under fewer, also terribly smart, older Americans. The hi-tech endeavor is thus all about (older) Americans and Asians uniting to supply twittering twits with the playthings that keep their brainwaves from flatlining.
My source in the industry tells me that the millennial generation will be another nail in the coffin of flailing American productivity. I am told too that for every useless, self-important millennial, a respectful, bright, industrious (East) Asian, with a wicked work ethic, waits in the wings.
Let the lazy American youngster look down at his superiors, and live-off his delusions and his parent. His young Asian counterpart harbors a different sensibility and skill; he is hungrily learning from his higher-ups with a view to displacing artificially fattened geese like Meghan McCain.
