The recent student demonstrations in Colorado against curriculum changes that present a more positive view of America don’t bother me at all.  Dollars to donuts they were organized by the teachers.  Last year we had some Liberal protest demonstrations by high-schoolers in my area  got local TV coverage, but when the camera panned wide (accidentally?) you could see the teachers positioned at various locations on the school ground directing the march.  Plus there’s the fact that these “spontaneous” demonstrations usually take place during school hours, the signs are fabricated in class, and students don’t get marked absent for missing third period Powerful Gay Women In History II.

So come on!

And while we know many, many of these kids go on to buy into their indoctrination in college, many don’t, a fact which, given the pervasive and relentless nature of that brainwashing, gives me some hope for the future of this country.  Besides, when you remove the coercion, the dependence upon a teacher for a grade, a letter of recommendation for college entrance, help with getting the classes one wants, and of course, a really big one, the teacher or professor being able to ridicule a student’s beliefs in front of classmates, you often get a star. 

Much like the young high school coed I watched skewer an unctuous college professor some years ago.

The setting is the Town of Rosendale, New York Recreation Center on July Fourth weekend where several dozen families have come to picnic together in the shade of the big pavilion.

The afternoon sun is low in the sky, my children winding down in the pool, and I’m visiting other tables.  Around one I find the husband of an acquaintance has captured an audience.  He’s a tenured college professor at the State University at New Paltz whom I’ll call Dren Dravrah, PhD.   A man who after snoggling up most of the expensive stuffed mushrooms his wife’s sister brought, decided that the rest of the people gathered at his table would like nothing better than to end the afternoon by listening to one of his lectures.

And in that selfless spirit he stood up and set us all straight about celebrating patriotic holidays. 

As near as I can remember, these were his opening words in what turned out to be a very, very bad ten minutes for Professor Dravrah.

“Celebrate what?  The rich getting richer?  The theft of Native American’s land?  The destruction of the environment? The oppression of women?  An imperialist foreign policy?  Wars of aggression against people of color.  Slavery?”

The evil legacy of that last point he then expanded upon as Zell Miller would say, “own and own and own” until the  table’s attention began to flag and a  demure little high school coed from among those listening diffidently raised her hand with a question.

And with a dismissive “come-on- let-me-help-me-out-here-little-girl” wave Dravrah indulgently invited her to speak.

Whereupon she cut his legs off.

“I dunno, Dren, but don’t you feel blessed to live in the only country in the history of mankind which fought a war with itself, its costliest, bloodiest war ever, simply in order to free the least thought-of race among them.   A people which many of the hundreds of thousands of American boys who gave their lives had never laid eyes on before the war, but whose freedom and dignity as human beings they still valued above their own lives.”

When the professor finally got his jaw up off the ground he began shouting “no, no, no, you don’t understand.  The American Civil War was about the clash of money interests not slavery.  The Emancipation Proclamation was a sham.  Lincoln himself a dyed in the wool racist….”  and after calmly waiting until he paused for breath she repeated herself word for word (I suppose because somebody in the small audience may have missed what she said the first time) then jumped up with a smile, turned away and strutted over where her mother was laying out slices of carrot cake.

Leaving him toast.

Because in the minds of those listening, the story he offered of a bad, bad, bad America morally flawed and crippled since its founding, now had to fight with the vision of selfless American goodness that the student had painted in the heavens over their heads.  A couple of the men and women even risked Dravrah’s scowl and clapped.  Her story had hit a chord inside them, touched on a certain truth about the American character they themselves could never put into words, but like me, would now glory in forever.

And while there is a curious double duality to any deep understanding of the American Civil War, or more properly the motivation of the people who fought it, she didn’t get into those weeds did she?  Instead she stuck to the fundamental story.  That slavery wouldn’t have ended without those men willingly sacrificing their own lives and that no other people in the history of mankind had ever done something like that.  Ever.

The story, the one story among all the others we should keep close to our hearts.

Of course it was an ambush.  The young woman had been sitting either at the same table as Dren Dravrah, PhD and so must have either known him or be related in some fashion.  But either sick of his preachiness or having been publicly put down by him at some point in the past, probably the latter, decided to nail him.   So perhaps remembering that Winston Churchill once said that “there is nothing as well rehearsed as an extemporaneous speech,” she prepared herself for some of his common routines, practiced what she was going to say and then when the public opportunity presented itself, struck like a cobra.

But there’s a lesson in that too.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs at richardfminiterblog.com and can also be reached at miniterhome@aol.com