Beckship Troopers

During one of my occasional trawls through the blogosphere of the rabid left I came across a clip from Mr Glenn Beck's opinion show on Fox. Beck has hit on a genius formula of being so absurdly irrational and extreme that he is effectively beyond parody. He seems to frustrate the left in part because his arguments are not really arguments at all, but a series of disjointed assertions repeated in similar forms over and over again, like some kind of multi-layered conceptual jazz experience aimed at an audience of Neocon traditionalists.

Anyway, Beck is not very interesting any more. He's like a car alarm that's gone off outside your place of work and shows no sign of stopping; one just has to try to get on with things and try to ignore it. But he said something in the clip which actually made the sci-fi nerd in me laugh.

He was ranting about recent leftist groups who have been protesting against budget cuts in education. Apparently they've been waving suspiciously red banners and claiming that education is a universal right, and indoctrinating schoolchildren with such socialist propaganda.


Beck: Education is not a right, it's a privilege! How many of our students even look at that "right" as a privilege? They sit there, they don't listen! [dramatic pause] Because they don't have to earn it. Unless you earn it, you don't value it.

Leaving aside the fact that moaning about how children never listen in class rather undermines his claims that they're being successfully indoctrinated with anything, his words reminded me of the classroom scene from Verhoeven's classic 90s ultraviolent spacefest Starship Troopers, which, in case you haven't seen it, is set in a kind of Nazi Star Trek version of the future.


Michael Ironside: Let's sum up. This year we explored the failure of democracy, when the social scientists brought our world to the brink of chaos. We talked about the veterans, how they took control and imposed the stability that has lasted for generations since. You know these facts. But have I taught you anything of value this year? Hm? You - why are only citizens allowed to vote?

Student: It's a reward. What the Federation gives you for doing Federal Service.

Michael Ironside: No. No! Something given has no value!

He took the words right out of Beck's mouth. Beck strikes me as the kind of fellow who might watch Starship Troopers and not realise that the whole package is an ironic spin on Robert Heinlein's thoroughly un-ironic book.

It's bollocks, of course. None of us "earned" the right to be born in the first place. Does that mean we don't value our own lives?

We're not talking about university or college education here. The debate is about basic education. What kind of nutter goes on national TV and claims that no child in the country should have an automatic right to a free, state-provided basic education? What century is this guy living in? Not in the distant future century of Starship Troopers, sadly.

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Someone commented that my blog wasn't allowing anonymous comments, so I've fixed that now. Sorry.