For this fall’s college freshmen, standardized tests weren’t as crucial in determining their selection as they would have been before 2020. Hundreds of educational institutions waived exam requirements when COVID prevented on-site administration. Some even excised the tests from the application process entirely. Yet Jeffrey Selingo reports that “something strange happened: Teenagers continued to sign up for the exams” (“The SAT and the ACT Will Probably Survive the Pandemic—Thanks to Students,” The Atlantic, September 16).

This devotion to getting an edge into colleges has remained persistent even a year after the Operation Varsity Blues investigation revealed how much of the admission criteria were being exaggerated or outright fabricated. With colleges replacing their on-campus offerings by remote video instruction — and online course materials like those long made accessible for free by initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare — elite colleges have much less to offer in return for the tens of thousands in annual tuition they still charge. How has their draw remained so persistent?

Maybe it’s less that their wares are uniquely valuable than that they’ve closed off alternatives. Kevin Carey explains in The End of College that “the higher-education industry receives hundreds of billions of dollars every year in the form of direct appropriations, tax preferences, and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans. The only way to get that money is to be an accredited college. And the accreditation system is controlled by the existing colleges themselves, who set the standards for which organizations are eligible for public funds.”

Standardized tests provide the accreditation monopoly with the data the top-down system needs to function. As anthropologist James C. Scott observes, “those at the greatest distance from ground zero of the classroom” particularly benefit from having “an index, however invalid, of comparative productivity and a powerful incentive system to impose their pedagogical plans.”

When Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution became one of the earliest journalistic accounts of the culture of computer programmers, Levy noted their insistence on evaluating each other by the quality of their programs, eschewing what they considered “bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.” In an addendum to a 2010 reissue of his book, Levy found many of its personalities had retained that spirit, as expressed by Bill Gates: “If you want to hire an engineer, look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.”

Higher learning — and its certification — can follow computer power’s path out of elite institutions to everyday ubiquity. If its participants can win the freedom to choose, share and exchange, the process can become more equitable as well as less bogus.

The Garrison Center’s Joel Schlosberg wrote his SAT essay on freedom in the science fiction of Eric Frank Russell.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero” by Joel Schlosberg, The Citizen [Chicago, IL], September 11, 2020 (both web and print)
2. “Testing, testing, one, two, zero” by Joel Schlosberg, The Lebanon, Indiana Reporter, September 24, 2020
3. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero,” by Joel Schlosberg, OpEdNews, September 25, 2020
4. “Despite not needing to, college-bound students flock to ACTs, SATs,” by Joel Schlosberg, Greater Southwest News-Herald [Summit, IL], September 25, 2020
5. “Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero,” by Joel Schlosberg, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, September 26, 2020

A brigade of pearl-clutching, virtue-signaling, cancel-culture keyboard warriors wants you to know that Cuties (Mignonnes — it’s actually a French film) is a bad, bad movie that no one should watch and that Netflix should immediately remove from its lineup.

According to US Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) Cuties may be, and according to US Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) it actually is, child porn. It sexualizes young girls and, per Gabbard, will “whet the appetite of pedophiles & help fuel the child sex trafficking trade.”

In reality, Cuties is the moving story of an 11-year-old girl attempting to grow up too fast, at the most intractably confusing age, and across the lines dividing two conflicting cultures. There’s nothing remotely pornographic about it, and the “sexualization” part of the story line isn’t even close to approvingly wrought.

Amy (played by Fathia Youssouf), her mother, and her brother are Senegalese immigrants to France.

Culture Number One: As a young Muslim girl, she’s already being groomed by the family matriarch (a great-aunt) for the day when she’ll find herself swaddled head to toe in white and presented to a man as his property. Her father, not physically present in the film, is expected to arrive shortly from Senegal, bringing with him a second bride (to Amy’s, and her mother’s, distress).

Culture Number Two: As a young student in the secular French school system, Amy perceives the currency of “maturity” with her peers as encompassing how little clothing and how much makeup one can wear, and especially how suggestively one can pose. She discovers, finds herself intrigued by, and through sheer force of will makes herself part of, a dance troupe of other 11-year-olds who call themselves (surprise) “The Cuties.”

Naturally, family and cultural conflict ensue, as does adolescent acting out of various kinds.

Fortunately there’s a happy ending, which I’ll refrain from spoiling with detail but give you this simple gloss on: Amy ultimately decides it’s better to just roll with being eleven years old, both sets of cultural expectations be damned.

Cuties isn’t a comfortable movie. It’s not supposed to be a comfortable movie. Nor is it supposed to be titillating or obscene, and it isn’t those things either.

Is it a great film? That’s for you to decide, and I hope you’ll do so yourself after watching it instead of letting Ted Cruz or Tulsi Gabbard decide for you sight unseen.

In fact, I’m grateful to Cruz, Gabbard, and their “I saw Sarah Good with the Devil!” hangers-on for inspiring ME to watch it. If there’s any redeeming aspect to cancel culture (of either political wing), it’s that convenient and self-serving public outrage serves as a  reasonably reliable predictor of what might be worthwhile.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 09/15/20
• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 09/15/20
• “I watched ‘Cuties’ so you wouldn’t have to (but you should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Dillon, Montana Tribune [web and print editions], 09/16/20
• “I watched ‘Cuties’ so you don’t have to (but you should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Claremont, New Hampshire Eagle Times, 09/16/20
• “I Watched ‘Cuties’ So You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 09/17/20
• “I Watched ‘Cuties’ so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anderson Valley, California Advertiser, 09/18/20
• “I Watched Cuties so You Wouldn’t Have to (But You Should),” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 09/19/20

 

“Most voters in six 2020 swing states,” an early September CNBC/Change Research poll finds, “do not consider either President Donald Trump or Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden mentally fit to be president.”

In Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, 51% consider Trump mentally unfit for the office, while 52% feel the same way about Biden. Biden holds steady at 52% nationally, while Trump’s unfitness number ramps up to 55%.

Frankly, I find those numbers surprisingly low. No, not because both Trump and Biden are clearly narcissistic sociopaths. Nor because the two of them frequently and publicly behave and speak in ways consistent with dementia or brain damage.

Yes, those things are disturbing, but they’re not anomalous. Most if not all politicians are sociopaths, and at least one (Ronald Reagan) suffered from dementia while still in office and remains well-remembered by many.

The problem is the idea that any human being is even remotely “mentally fit” to the office of President of the United States as that office exists today.

George Washington presided over a federal government weaker than any of the 14 then-existing state governments, boasting a population smaller than that of Los Angeles alone today, lacking foreign territories or possessions, and for the most part eschewing foreign policy entanglements.

Donald Trump presides over a too-strong federal government and a sprawling global empire. He rules a population of more than 300 million at home — nearly 3 million of them employed by that government itself — and complicates the lives of billions around the planet with military interventions, economic sanctions, election meddling, etc.

Washington’s writ ran as far as he could plausibly (and personally) lead an army on horse.

Trump, like other recent presidents, can order a drone strike halfway around the world on a whim, and is never more than seconds away from a briefcase containing the codes for consuming the planet in nuclear fire.

Who can be trusted with that kind of power? Whose IQ and moral fiber are up to mastering it, using it wisely, resisting corrupt temptations, and exercising monumental self-restraint? No one, that’s who.

Even if the US Constitution’s original restraints on presidential power still held, and they haven’t for more than a century, the duties of the office are just too inherently complex for a single manager to do well, and  too lucrative and empowering to avoid attracting corrupt megalomaniacs like Trump and Biden and their hangers-on.

As a Libertarian who considers my party’s presidential nominee, Jo Jorgensen, a trustworthy human being who’s likely competent to any doable task, I’d like to believe that if elected she would (with the help of a hostile Congress) rein in the office, shrink its power to back within constitutional limits, and begin dismantling the post-World War Two imperial project.

But even a Libertarian president would merely be a stopgap solution to the problems the presidency itself represents. Until we rethink  not just who we allow power over us, but how much power we allow them, we’re increasingly exposing ourselves to both social and physical extinction.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Anchorage, Alaska Press, 09/14/20
• “No One is “Mentally Fit” to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 09/14/20
• “No one is ‘mentally fit’ to be president,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Richmond, North Carolina Observer, 09/15/20
• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 09/16/20
• “No One is ‘Mentally Fit’ to be President,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 09/18/20