Mark Steyn - After America

The president was wrong: trains are not barreling by any classroom six times a day. And, even if they were, that’s fewer barrelings per diem than when the school was built in 1912, or the new wing added in 1957. Incidentally, multiple press reports referred to the “113-year old building.” Actually, that’s the building behind the main school—the original structure from 1896, where the School District bureaucracy now has its offices. But if, like so many people, you assume an edifice dating from 1896 or 1912 must ipso facto be uninhabitable, bear in mind that the central portion of the main building was entirely rebuilt in 1983.

That’s to say, this rotting, dilapidated, mildewed Dotheboys Hall of a Gothic mausoleum dates all the way back to the Cyndi Lauper era.

Needless to say, the Obama stenographers up in the press gallery were happy to take the Hopeychanger-in-Chief at his word on the facts of the case. But even more striking is how indifferent they were to the bigger question: “She had been told her high school is hopeless,” said the president.

But surely a school lavishly funded by world and historical standards that needs outside help from the national government for a paint job is, by definition, “hopeless”?

What of the students’ alleged ambition to “make a change to not just the state of South Carolina but also the world”? Well, why not start closer to home? Instead of “changing the world,” why not try to change your crummy school and your rundown town? Or does that lack the Obama-esque glamour of healing the planet? Come to that, why would the rest of humanity want to have the world changed by someone who can’t organize a paint job?

In practice, one-worldism conveniently absolves one of doing anything about more localized and less exotic concerns—such as peeling paint and leaking ceilings. And, if a schoolhouse is so afflicted, what’s the best way to fix it? Applying for federal funds and processing the building maintenance through a huge continental bureaucracy? Or doing what my neighbors in New Hampshire did when the (older than Dillon) grade-school bell-tower was collapsing? The carpenters and painters donated their time, and the materials were paid for through the proceeds of such non-world-changing activities as community square dances and bean suppers.

If that sounds sick-makingly Norman Rockwell, well, take it from me, small town life is hell and having to interact with folksy-type folks in a “tightly knit community” certainly takes its toll, and the commemorative photo montage in the restored tower of gnarled old Yankees in plaid looking colorful while a-hammerin’ and a-shinglin’ doesn’t fully capture many of the project’s arcane yet fractious disputes. Still, forget the cloying small-town sentimentality: it’s the quickest and cheapest way to get the job done.

It always is.

Dillon, South Carolina, is a city of about 6,000 people. Is there really no way they can organize acceptable accommodation for a two-grade Junior High School without petitioning the Sovereign in Barackingham Palace?

Like many municipalities with a significant black population, Dillon has an absence of men: in a quarter of its households, the only adult is a female; in the town as a whole, there are 80 men for every 100 women. Then again, painting walls does not require a burly old brute, and, with a county employment rate of 15 percent, there are surely residents of Dillon with time available. 3Wouldn’t it have made an inspiring tale if, instead of beseeching King Barack the Two-Coats, the people of Dillon had just got on with it and done it themselves? It’s the sort of thing they’d once have made a heartwarming TV movie about: The Little Junior High That Could .

Ah, but instead of the can-do spirit we now have the can-do-with-some-government-funding spirit. And it’s hard to get an inspirational heartwarmer out of that.

From The New England Primer to federally disbursed primer: Tocqueville would weep. “It is in the township that the strength of free peoples resides,” he wrote. “Municipal institutions are for liberty what primary schools are for science; they place it within reach of the people…. Without municipal institutions, a nation is able to give itself a free government, but it lacks the spirit of liberty.”

Even if the federal behemoth were capable of timely classroom repainting from D.C. to Hawaii, consider the scale of government and the size of bureaucracy that would be required. Once such an apparatus is in place, it won’t content itself with paint jobs. The issue is not the decrepitude of the building but the decrepitude of liberty. Maybe Big Government can spend enough of our children’s money to halt the degradation of infrastructure. But the degradation of citizenship—of the “spirit of liberty”—is harder to reverse.

As dispiriting as Miss Bethea’s letter was, Obama’s citation of it was even more so. How could any citizen-president of a self-governing republic quote approvingly a plea for remote, centrally regulated, continent-wide dependency?

Because that’s what he likes about it: the willingness of freeborn citizens to be strapped in to the baby seats of Big Nanny. Ty’Sheoma Bethea’s application for federal dependency justifies the ruling class’ belief in its own indispensability. That’s why it got read out in Congress. Almost two years later, in a strikingly whiney response even by his own standards, Obama pleaded to a liberal interviewer that he was merely the president, not the king. 4Well, how did large numbers of people such as young Miss Bethea get so confused on that point? For both the ruling class and a huge number of its subjects, it is not just routine but (as Obama suggested) somehow admirable to look to central government to supply your needs—shelter, sustenance, clothing, medication, painless sedatives both pharmaceutical and figurative. To Ty’Sheoma Bethea and her school chums, it sounds liberating: if the benevolent state takes care of all your needs, you’re free to concentrate on “changing the world.” In reality, you’ve already changed it—from a state of raw, messy liberty to one on the path to despotic insolvency. What would be the price of a gallon of paint once it’s been routed through a massive centralized education bureaucracy?

For the moment that remains a purely hypothetical thought. On the other hand, the first major item of congressional business after the Democrats’ midterm shellacking in 2010 was to pass a “Food Safety” Act, among whose items was federal regulation of schoolhouse bake sales. 5If the students of Dillon ever rouse themselves to do something about their peeling paint and train-rattled windows by selling blueberry pies and cranberry muffins, they can at least do so knowing their baked goods are now under the supervision of the Imperial Court in Washington.

“I think of Ty’Sheoma Bethea,” said Barack Obama. I think I think of her rather more than he does these days, and I wonder how two generations of American students came to think like this at all.

I doubt I’ll be invited to give the commencement address in Dillon any time soon. Even at the best of times, “upbeat and inspirational” isn’t really my bag. I went to one of those old-school English boys’ institutions where instead of prioritizing “self-esteem” the object was to lower it to imperceptible levels by the end of the first week. Still, I’ve spoken at enough American schools to know that you’re supposed to jolly ’em along with something uplifting like “You can be anything you want to be.” Here’s the problem, and here’s what I would tell the student body of Dillon in the unlikely event they book me for a motivational speech: