They want us to “pledge to be a servant to our president”?
by Mark Steyn
NationalReview.com
September 5, 2009
…In 2003, motoring around western Iraq a few weeks after the regime’s fall, when the schoolhouses were hastily taking down the huge portraits of Saddam that had hung on every classroom wall, I visited an elementary-school principal with a huge stack of suddenly empty picture frames piled up on his desk, and nothing to put in them. The education system’s standard first-grade reader featured a couple of kids called Hassan and Amal — a kind of Iraqi Dick and Jane — proudly holding up their portraits of the great man and explaining the benefits of an Iraqi education:
“O come, Hassan,” says Amal. “Let us chant for the homeland and use our pens to write, ‘Our beloved Saddam.’”
“I come, Amal,” says Hassan. “I come in a hurry to chant, ‘O, Saddam, our courageous president, we are all soldiers defending the borders for you, carrying weapons and marching to success.’”
Pathetic, right?
On Friday, August 28, the principal of Eagle Bay Elementary School in Farmington, Utah — in the name of “education” — showed her young charges the “Obama Pledge” video released at the time of the inauguration, in which Ashton Kutcher and various other bigtime celebrities, two or three of whom you might even recognize, “pledge to be a servant to our president and to all mankind because together we can, together we are, and together we will be the change that we seek.”
Altogether now! Let us chant for mankind and use our pens to write, “O beloved Obama, our courageous president, we are all servants defending the hope for you and marching to change.”
And, unlike Saddam’s Iraq, we don’t have the mitigating condition of being a one-man psycho state invented by the British Colonial Office after lunch on a wet afternoon in 1922.
Any self-respecting schoolkid, enjoined by his principal to be a “servant” to the head of state, would reply, “Get lost, creep.” And, if they still taught history in American schools, he’d add, “Oh, and by the way, that question was settled in 1776.”…
Read the entire article at NationalReview.com
