Published Monday, November 18, 2024

FINAL MEETING of 2024

DECEMBER 4

Featuring:

Comedian Brad Stine

Blue Bell CEO (RET) Ricky Dickson sings

Soprano Elizabeth Fischborn

The Starlight Carolers

FREE BLUE BELL ICE CREAM

See below

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BOB LINN

Moving Past Mickey Mouse

Today is the 96th anniversary of Mickey Mouse, an America cultural icon.  It was many years ago, but I still remember an O.U. college student from Africa telling me that Africans referred to Americans as Mickey Mouse.

Somehow, this mega super-star little rat’s name is, on occasion, used to indicate amateurish mediocrity.

Today, on Mickey’s anniversary, I would like to suggest that the morally austere & subdued little animal’s persona has been created in the image of a national culture fixed in secular ideology.

America’s little mouse drew the attention of Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes académiques, Harvard Ph.D., Walter Ong.  Professor Ong (1912-2003) authored many serious books touching on history and cultural issues, but, in 1944, felt compelled to comment on the cultural and moral identity of Mickey Mouse.

Professor Ong drew parallels between Mickey’s persona and the trajectory of American education.  To make his point, he draws on the history of literary protagonists from the animal kingdom.

Mickey Mouse, of course, never teaches us lessons in morality. The little guy just has adventures. He is entertains but does not preach.

Members of the animal kingdom who preceded Mickey were not only entertaining critters but also presented moral lessons.

Ong notes Aesop’s The Tortoise and the Hare.  It was a slow prodding turtle whose perseverance has taught our children to remain focused and to endure to the end.

Aesop used The Ant and the Grasshopper

to teach the value of preparation.

Aesop used The Lion and the Mouse

to teach the benefits of kindness.

Hans Christian Anderson’s Ugly Duckling teaches children to trust the creator’s design of them and their intended trajectory in life.  To understand that it might entail a unique trajectory that for some will take longer to develop than most.

Dr. Ong states that these writers:

. . . were incapable of the studied secularism which Mr. Disney's characters, in accord with our public-school tradition, so carefully affect . . . It is late now to start to rehabilitate the deliberately secularized and emasculated set of values which we have allowed to spring up and flourish in our nation and especially in our public schools. But we had better begin. We cannot erect a defense of democracy [sic] on a set of national ideals where the things for which Mickey Mouse stands find place so near the top.

That our academic institutions have bitten the apple of Godless secularism is old news. While our Oklahoma legislature and our Governor have taken steps to remove Marxism's secular ideology from academia, our leftist administrators have often been non-compliant.

This past weekend, I received a text from the Governor’s office noting the current struggle in Oklahoma’s academic institutions regarding the use of secular ideology at the University of Oklahoma.  The secular ideology of Marxism still appears in the classrooms at the University of Oklahoma in the form of Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI).

Last weekend, the Daily Caller published the

evidence that in defiance of Oklahoma

law, it continues to thrive at O.U.

Read the article here.

The images below represent some of the topics

being taught to students at Oklahoma

University in defiance of state law.

There is no more demoralizing and dehumanizing element of this formula than the “E” in this formula.  To the element of equity, the political left means to also ensure equal outcomes by means of government force.

Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect was published in 1959.  Professor Barzun was valedictorian at Columbia and internationally recognized as a scholar in many fields.

Among the many cultural forces he addresses in his book, the Marxist pressure to achieve sameness of all mankind is prominent.  “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) has been outlawed by eighteen state legislatures, including Oklahoma.

Mandating equal outcomes requires the evisceration of human liberty.  Ideologically, it is a Mickey Mouse fantasy.  It is contrary to the reality of God’s creation and contrary to the nature of mankind.  Barzun anticipated that the quest for an egalitarian society of sameness would impact academia.  He anticipated that anti-intellectualism would increase as equalitarian sentiment increased and culture would decline.

Twenty-five years ago, Dr. Herbert Schlossberg published his literary capstone, Idols for Destruction. 

Late in the book, he writes a section called “The Breakdown of Intellect.”  There, he remembers Orwell.  He summarizes:

“Orwell had the good insight to realize that the future totalitarian regime could only flourish by eviscerating the exercise of the intellect and replacing it with something else.  Crimestop, for the servants of Big Brother, is a means by which their minds ignore errors in logic and pretend not to understand basic arguments if doing so would lead one to an understanding that is antagonistic to the interests of the regime.  It is, in short, “protective stupidity.”

Much has been said about the tyranny represented by the DEI movement in academia.  Well before DEI became so well known in America, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn touched on the academic tyranny it represents in his June 8, 1978 commencement address at Harvard.

Speaking of the trends of thought and ideas in the university that are allowed because they are the current fashion, he says to the Harvard graduates:

Your scholars are free in the legal sense, but they are hemmed in by the idols of the prevailing fad.

In the March 2011 edition of the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (JETS), Old Testament scholar, Eugene Merrill, speaks of the commitment to secularism in the American classroom.  He writes:

Secularism fostered a spirit of humanism, the notion that the universe is anthropocentric rather than theocentric. This being the case, all religions grounded in the metaphysically transcendent (which include virtually all) were banned from the classroom

As we rejoice in the massive sea change coming to Washington, our divine assignment is to pray and work to see restoration of the nation.  To see the Kingdom of Christ reign on earth, as he taught us to pray.  And to disciple the nations.

Only Christianity restored to the American

classroom will accomplish all that.

Thank you all for being a part of the

preservation of truth in our Oklahoma culture!

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LAST WEDNESDAY . . .

RODNEY SCOTT

Watch the presentation here.

Watch the entire meeting here.

Soprano Elizabeth Fischborn closed the meeting with this anthem dedicated to a Godly Oklahoma and a firm foundation for our children's future.

Watch the presentation here.

Watch her video presentation here.

COMING!!!

WEDNESDAY

December 4, 2024

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