Austin's Answer To Miami's Dave Barry?

Laugh-out-loud-funny. That was me at breakfast this AM when I read Austin humor columnist John Kelso's rant in the Austin fishwrap. All I know is that I'm a-headin' for Taylor as soon as possible. If this is (fair & balanced) porcine chauvinism, so be it.

[x Austin American-Statesman]
It's no longer Georgetown; it's Georgette-town
by John Kelso

GEORGETOWN — You know what drives me crazy about Georgetown?

It's that the Williamson County seat is obviously run by the women. It's gotten so bad that the statue of the Confederate soldier in front of the courthouse should be wearing a dress.

If you don't believe me, just take a look at the courthouse square.

It's just one chick gift shop after the other. Just about every business on the square hawks cutesy wares that only a woman would let in the house. This is a great place to come if you want to buy cutting boards, blown glass or scented soaps. In Georgetown, they don't have ozone action days. They have potpourri alert days.

I had some hope the other day when I heard that Georgetown had gotten its first liquor store near the square, a place called Vic's. But my hopes were dashed Thursday when I walked into the cigar humidor at Vic's and discovered the place sells a strawberry Phillies Blunt. Never trust a man who smokes a fruit cigar.

"I'll tell you what's really neat is these soap bonbons, if you've got any dry skin on you," said Doreen Franks, who works at Topaz, a gift shop on the square. "They go on like a wax, but they're moisturizer."

What you do is take one of these pieces of candy-sized pink soap bonbons, throw it in the tub and soak. When you come out, you'll smell like cotton candy. This is good if you want to draw ants.

There isn't a real beer joint in the city of Georgetown that I know of. But there are at least two businesses — one on the square, and one just off it — that have tea rooms. The Amoré Boutique carries a $10 beer coozie done in a black and white zebra design, with purple fuzzy stuff lining the top. Guys don't drink beer out of coozies ringed with purple fuzzy stuff. There is a restaurant called the Down the Alley Bistro. Down the Alley Beefstro I could go for.

It's gotten so bad that even Georgetown's director of economic development seems to have thrown his hands in the air.

"We have a really nice golf store over here in the next block, not that that's male-oriented," said Mark Thomas.

Praise the Lord for Berry Hardware on the square, perhaps the last bastion of maleness left, where wheelbarrows, hoes and rakes have been set on the sidewalk.

They were probably put out there by women to remind guys there's yardwork that needs doing.

Then there's Main Street Yoga, with clogging classes. Yoga's bad enough, but clogging? Clogging is like Riverdance for people who actually get in the river.

I just don't get it. Taylor, which shares the same county with Georgetown, doesn't have these problems. In Taylor, the guys are in charge. Taylor has beer joints and famous barbecue spots. When you drive into Taylor, you see business signs for guy things, like meat. Randy's Ice House has a sign out front that speaks of "Beer-Pool-Kegs" and shows drawings of a burger and a steak.

Back in Georgetown, it's a whole other story. Monica's 701 on the square sells escargots bourguignon for $9.95. Those, my friends, are French snails. They spray for those in Taylor.

Copyright © 2004 Austin American-Statesman

♪Don't Know Much About History....♪

Sam Cooke's anthem to adolescent bliss (cousin to ignorance) is confirmed by Thomas C. Reeves. Plus, the United States has a president whose life exemplifies ignorance of history and all that other boring stuff. If this is (fair & balanced) elitism, so be it.

[x History News Network]
How Little the Public Knows About History
by Thomas C. Reeves

In early March, the University of Pennsylvania’s National Annenberg Election Survey discovered that only 43 percent of 634 adults questioned could correctly identify President Herbert Hoover. Twelve percent confused him with long-time FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Four percent linked his name to Hoover Dam in Nevada. Three percent associated the former Chief Executive with a brand of vacuum cleaner. Among those closest to their school years, aged 18 to 29, only 38 percent could identify Hoover in a political context.

The same survey discovered that only one out of five could connect actress Jane Fonda with the Vietnam War. (So calling John Kerry “Hanoi John” is obviously falling on deaf ears.) Nine percent of those surveyed connected Fonda to her exercise videos. Seventeen percent gave no answer at all.

There was some huffing and puffing about these findings in the elite media. But as one who taught in colleges with open door admission policies for more than three decades, I yawned at the survey. Nothing new here.

I discovered over the years that in survey classes freshmen and sophomores knew virtually nothing of the past, even the history of their own country. Their knowledge of current events was almost as dim. They were not alone. Historian Paul Gagnon of the University of Massachusetts recently reported, “Secondary and college students, and indeed most of the rest of us, have only a feeble grasp of politics and a vague awareness of history, especially the political history of the United States and the world.” Studies of eighth-graders and seniors at fifty top colleges and universities reveal appalling ignorance. The new book Deliberation Day, by Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, concludes, “If six decades of modern public opinion research establish anything, it is that the general public’s political ignorance is appalling.”

For more than two decades, I gave a survey lecture on the meaning of Left and Right, telling students that this was vital knowledge in understanding the recent past and contemporary affairs. After explaining the basic differences for some 45 minutes, I would ask the class to submit names of famous people in our own time in order to place them on the ideological scale. Inevitably, there was silence. No one could think of anyone famous, outside of show business, except the president. Class discussion at this academic level was extraordinarily difficult to evoke.

Even worse, the vast majority of the young people in class had no desire to learn. Their approach to the survey course was quite simple: Tell me how much of this junk I have to memorize in order to pass. Linking the past to the present, one of the historian’s most valuable contributions, proved fruitless as virtually no one cared about either the past or present. What mattered was getting a degree, your ticket to the middle class, that indispensable sheet of paper that made you manager of the local MacDonald’s rather than just a lackey who asks if you want fries with the order. If the survey class involved any appreciable reading assignments, they either were ignored or students disappeared, often without even dropping the course. By the dawn of this century, my survey students were openly refusing to read even a single book.

The upper division history majors proved little better. They had seemingly forgotten almost everything they were supposed to learn in the survey courses. President Zachary who? Was McKinley before or after Coolidge? The New Deal was in the Thirties, right? They had firm opinions, of course, largely echoing the line virtually all of their professors had given them about sexism, racism, homophobia, and the like. But facts? Forget it. One senior told me, “I don’t do dates.”

One year, late in my career, I managed to fight through faculty roadblocks and offered a course in the history of American religion. I spent the entire semester explaining the most basic Sunday School terminology. Religion was something wholly outside student experience and of little serious interest. New Age was as foreign to them as Puritanism, Vatican II as strange as the Reformation.

On religion and the American public, see George Gallup, Jr. and Jim Castelli, The People’s Religion: American Faith in the 90’s, and One Nation Under God: Religion in Contemporary American Society by Barry A. Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman. The former book documents “a nation of biblical illiterates.” Only four in ten Americans know that Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount. Three in ten teenagers do not know why Easter is celebrated. Fewer than half of all adults can name the four Gospels of the New Testament.

For those who seek to consult the public on matters of grave importance to the nation, I suggest that they try to learn what it means to be an average American. Watch some prime time television. Spend a week in a local high school. Glean the topics of conversation in bars and barber shops. Visit a class in Mass Communications at the average college. (Of more than 4,000 institutions of higher education in America, only a couple of hundred, at most, have high admission standards). Find out what most people depend upon for their information. See how many people can correctly date World War II, give the population of the city they live in, or tell you where their grandmother was born. And then read the results of those polls that ask about the seriousness of global warming, America’s internationalist perspective, the image of France, proper levels of U.S. defense spending, and Richard Clarke’s testimony on counterterrorism. To judge American foreign policy, you should at least be able to identify the Secretary of State and locate Iraq on a map. How many can?

The above is not a general statement about public virtues, of which there are many. It is not a reflection upon the futility of democracy, for no system is preferable. This is a statement of fact about public knowledge. Let us not pretend that most people know more than they actually do. Politicians and media leaders, for example, should be less eager to whip out the latest public opinion poll about the role of America in the Middle East, because most of those polled surely could not accurately define the Middle East or give you a cogent sentence about Islam. This commentary is not about snobbery. It’s about reality.

Thomas C. Reeves is the author of A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy. His latest book is America's Bishop: The Life and Times of Fulton J. Sheen (Encounter 2001). He's a Senior Fellow of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.

Copyright © 2004 History News Network