| Show Voice of ofA A worm in into the bicentennial apple By Dy Arch Booth executive vice fee president of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States The New Left seems to be acquiring one quality it has so conspicuously lacked subtlety If 11 we expect to be listened to they have learned we have to take a fresh look and build our own own plan abandoning all the e old sacred texts on what is to be bedone done I t have on my desk a packet of material from an outfit calling itself the Peoples Bicentennial Commission The pamphlets and tabloid style newspapers it contains are well designed and for the most part skillfully written The illustrations are illustrations we associate with the American Revolution Some of oC the rhetoric is rhetoric rheta-Ic of the American Revolution And yet LET ME give you a little of the flavor of this material From their publication entitled Student and Teacher Programs for a Peoples Bicentennial In the end the patriots of 1776 should teach us not only patience but that revolutionizing individual institutions in society without a societal revolution is ism m meaningless Three guesses what they have in mind by societal revolution Elsewhere in the same publication high school students are advised to issue a Declaration of Student Independence Independence In In- dependence to dramatize the oppression common to all students Get the Principal I Students are also given helpful how to hints on taking over the school newspaper coercing the school administration and faculty and dominating the selection of textbooks PUT SO bluntly this outfits outfit's program may sound ludicrous Unfortunately it is far from that It is propaganda as skillful as any Ive I've seen So well done is the material that if one of your children brought it home from school and you just glanced at you would probably notice nothing wrong Further the reasoning though specious has a sur sur- face plausibility that wilt wilf appeal to the gullible and the unsophisticated The rights of school students for example are compared Unfavorably to those of adult citizens The propaganda is not all aimed at students There is a little something for everyone Society's very real problems are cited as proof that Americans are oppressed by bya a conspiracy of the rich and the powerful ACCORDING TO leftist theory people who work to alleviate these problems are at best fools and at worst traitors to the true cause because the problems are an Inherent part of an evil system and can be cured only by changing the system Therefore says the Peoples Bicentennial Commission lets let's continue with the American Revolution Who Pays for It The material is heavily larded with quotations from the Founding Fathers and their contemporaries most of them carefully selected to create an impression that the old boys were really a fire-breathing fire bunch of egalitarian collectivists collectivism Ironically the U. U S S. S taxpayer evidently footed the bill for at least some of the research on this project The received a small grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities a federal agency in the summer of 1972 for scholarly research on the views of the non-leadership non element of the American people during the period of the American Revolutionary War I CANT CAN'T really fault the National Endowment however for two reasons First I dont don't think its staff had any idea what wha t the young scholars who received the grant planned to do with the fruits of their research Second wouldn't buy much of the kind of material the is offering The group is obviously well funded Where it comes from would be interesting to know The ultimate irony is that the young scholars research does not go far enough back into our past to tell them what they really need to know GO ALL the way back and you learn that both the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies began as communes of ofa a sort It didn't work It it never has and to save themselves they tried a genuinely radical idea economic freedom That worked Keep an eye out for the material in your community especially the schools Dont Don't make martyrs out of them b by overreacting They'd like that Just demand that partisan political propaganda in the schools be labeled as such and that none of It be distributed or otherwise subsidized at public expense Be prepared for attempts to take over or otherwise disrupt Bicentennial events In n your community Th The hands out a yellow lapel button with a symbol that was used on several flags of the Revolutionary War era The symbol is a coiled colled ra rattlesnake It fits |
