Tag: MAGAWeek2023

Lazy Sunday CCX: MAGAWeek2023 Posts

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

Well, another MAGAWeek is in the books.  It was a star-spangled affair, with biographies of four important historical figures (one of recent vintage, the others from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries).  $5 and up subscribers also got three bonus editions of Sunday Doodles (here, here, and here).

Of course, to get access to my four detailed biographies—as well as all past MAGAWeek posts—it’s just $1 a month.  One measly buck!  As of the time of this writing, there are 429 posts on my SubscribeStar page, over half of which are available for just $1 a month.  At $5 a month, it comes out to one cent per post as of right now, and I’m adding new content every single week (with rare exceptions).

Even at just $1 a month, and assume (conservatively) that you only get access to half of the posts (about 215 posts), it works out to just $0.0047 per post—less than a half-cent per post!

At $12 a year—the price of a single, one-topping large pizza—you can a.) support your favorite chubby content creator and b.) gain access to an ever-growing library of long-form essays.  For $60 a year—what most of us pay for Internet access for one month—you get everything—doodles (which often contain additional commentary), bonus doodles, bonus posts, exclusive election coverage posts, etc., etc.

Thanks to those who have donated and subscribed in the past.  Please help spread the word!

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

MAGAWeek2023: George Whitefield

The Portly PoliticoLeave a comment

This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

America is a Christian nation.  At least, it was.  The Christian roots of the nation run deep, not just to the Founding (if we take “The Founding” to be in or around 1776), but far back into the colonial period.  Most readers will know the well-worn story of the Pilgrims—a group of Puritan Separatists who, while not seeking religious freedom for others, at least sought it for their own peculiar version of Christianity—and their arrival in Massachusetts in 1620 (the Southerner in me will be quick to note that, despite the Yankee supremacist narrative, permanent English settlement began in 1607 with the founding of Jamestown in Virginia—the South; the earlier, albeit failed, attempt to settle Roanoke was also in the South, in what is now North Carolina, in 1585).

But there is more to the history of Christianity in America than the Puritans—much more.  The colonies of British North America struggled through some fairly irreligious times (colonial Americans were much heavier drinkers than we are), and while denominations abounded—Tidewater Anglicans, Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Catholics, New England Puritans, and Mid-Atlantic sects of various stripes—the fervor of American religiosity was at a low ebb in the late 1600s.  Economic prosperity following difficult years in the 1670s—King Philip’s War in New England, Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia—led many to move away from the church.  In Puritan New England, where voting rights and citizenship required church membership (and church membership was not as easy to obtain as it is today; it required proof of one’s “election”), the Puritan-descended Congregationalist churches began offering “half-elect” membership, as there were so few citizens who could prove their “election.”

Into this void stepped the revivalists of the First Great Awakening.  In the 1730s and 1740s (give or take a decade or two), a series of religious revivals swept throughout England and British North America (the colonies).  These men—Charles Wesley, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and George Whitefield, among others) took difficult, strenuous tours throughout England and the colonies to deliver the Gospel in a powerful, compelling way.

Their impact was immense:  preaching salvation and a personal relationship with Christ, these men united the profusion of denominations and theologies in the colonies with the universal message of Christ’s Gospel.  Granted, denominational and theological differences persisted—indeed, they proliferated, with John Wesley’s Methodism among the plethora of new denominations—but the grand paradox of the First Great Awakening is that, even with that denominational diversity, Americans across the colonies developed a unified identity as Christians.  Protestant Christians, to be sure, and of many stripes.  But that tolerance of denominational diversity, coupled with the near-uniformity of belief in Christ’s Saving Grace, forged a quintessentially American religious identity.

Most readers will be quite familiar with the Wesley Brothers, especially John, and we probably all read Jonathan Edwards’s powerful sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” in high school.  But most Americans know precious little about the revivalist George Whitefield, whose prowess as a speaker and evangelist brought untold thousands to the Lord.

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2023 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!

MAGAWeek2023: John Taylor Gatto

The Portly Politico5 Comments

This week is MAGAWeek2023, my celebration of the men, women, and ideas that MADE AMERICA GREAT!  Starting Monday, 3 July 2023, this year’s MAGAWeek2023 posts will be SubscribeStar exclusives.  If you want to read the full posts, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for as little as $1 a month.  You’ll also get access to exclusive content every Saturday.

It’s no secret that education in the United States—at least, formalized, factory-style education—is broken, and quite badly.  No one, however, quite understands why.  State politicians, federal Department of Education bureaucrats, and local schoolboards all pass more and more regulations and requirements, few of which actually address the root causes of this brokenness.  Instead, they merely treat the symptoms, symptoms they themselves have created, and the treatments usually just breed more symptoms, to be treated once again with another dose of “education reform.”

Naturally, these “reforms” and “treatments” fall squarely on teachers to administer.  Politicians and school administrators are like aloof doctors who are so disconnected from their patient, and so motivated by their own agendas, they don’t really care about the patient’s health, so long as they can say, “we did something.”  Parents—forced into long working hours and with little free time—foist their students into a system that is supposed to work, but ultimately is just government-funded daycare.  How else is mom supposed to work sixty hours a week alongside dad?  That’s progress, after all!

So students and teachers are caught in the middle.  Teachers become nurses in this sick system.  Like real nurses, most of them think they know everything, and know better than the doctors.  Typically, teachers are correct in assuming they know more than the doctors; the problem, however, is that most of the most strident nurse-teachers go on to become the doctors, and then proceed to prescribe the same medicines, only this time they think they know better.

The other teachers labor on with some quiet grumbling, making the best of an increasingly impossible situation.  Caught between parents who are by turns indifferent and meddling and administrators and politicians who are inflexible and demanding, teachers administer whatever prescriptions they are forced to deliver, and try to do some actual teaching in the process.

The results are clear:  the worst become whiney thorns that are absorbed into the administrative ranks.  The best labor on, looking forward to summer.  The rest burnout quickly, leaving the profession early.

Students, meanwhile, are alternatively coddled and hyper-micromanaged.  They spew obscenities in the hallways and locker rooms with abandon; they vandalize bathroom stalls; they vape (the gayest form of nicotine consumption) between classes; they show up late every day.  At the same time, their every movement is tracked—by cameras, by sign-in and sign-out sheets, by teachers roaming the halls.  It’s a bizarre form of anarcho-tyranny in which all the poor behaviors are allowed to run rampant like kudzu, a weed the administration timidly trims from time to time while blaming the teachers for not realizing Johnny was at the vending machine instead of in the bathroom.

Is it any wonder we live in a world with rampant cheating and arbitrary rules, which are just arbitrarily waived the moment anyone offers up a sob story?  We’ve bred generations of students who are paradoxically rebellious and conformist—as long as Johnny takes his shot and is a good little office worker, he can indulge in whatever lame vices he wishes, so long as he shows up mostly on time the next day.  Did Johnny sleep with the secretary or steal money from the till?  Well, he must have had a good reason—he had a rough home life, you know.

None of these problems are particularly new or novel.  We’ve all come to accept them as the price for modern living:  send the kids off to indoctrination daycare, because God forbid both parents aren’t working.  After all, that’s feminism—women are liberated when they can slave for some strange man eight hours every day.  That’s way better than staying home with her kids and maintaining a good home for her husband and children… right?

Into this Orwellian nightmare stepped the great John Taylor Gatto.  Gatto taught in New York City public schools for thirty years, and was a renowned teacher, author, and public speaker.  He was one of the pioneers and major proponents of the “unschooling” movement, a variation on homeschooling that emphasizes activities chosen by the learner.  He was also a major critic of the kind of factory-style public education we have today (itself an innovation from socialist German intellectuals that, unfortunately, glommed its way onto the minds of American education “reformers” in the late nineteenth century).  Gatto argued forcefully that modern education is not only broken, but actively destroys real learning.  Instead, it merely creates conformist worker drones who are educated simpletons.

To read the rest of today’s MAGAWeek2023 post, head to my SubscribeStar page and subscribe for $1 a month or more!