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History Not Polls to Judge Bush John L. Perry America sleep-stumbled once again through the significance of July 4, 1776. Centuries more could elapse before it awakens to history's judgment of George W. Bush. That is the sour and sobering taste left after yet another Independence Day has come, been widely celebrated inappropriately, and then gone until next year. For a staggering disappointment, ask today's children — or their parents — what is in the Declaration of Independence, or even what it is vaguely about. Try inquiring of the living if they can, as so many of their forebears proudly could, recite from memory at least the opening passages of the very document that launched this grand experiment as a democratic republic, lighting countless candles of hope all across enslaved lands.
Not only do the publicly funded and mismanaged schools not require, or even encourage, such memorization of anything, they also do not bother to teach much American history anymore. Come to think of it, what really do they actually teach these days, other than shallow, vacuous, politically correct gibberish of self-awareness and dumbed-down diversification?
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Nearly purged from the curricula is once-revered knowledge about (horrors!) one's own country and native tongue, along with simple arithmetic, elementary geography, and historically accurate world history. In their place have sprouted up such odious intellectual onions as atrophied attention spans and acculturation according to the moment's latest masscomm obscenities and self-indulgences.
Scarce surviving concepts of common sense must be conveyed to and assimilated by undisciplined brains within 30-second sound bites, or it all goes whistling right over their heads. What was once a beautiful, lyrical, artistic and — above all — structurally logical language has now become a sputtering of parrot-talk text-messaging. And parents and grandparents wonder why the young can communicate only by grunts and shrugs or by insecure, tobacco-auctioneer, rapid-fire outpourings of nothing of substance worth saying or hearing.
Televised mysteries must be solved for couched potatoes in a single episode, else they click to less mind-taxing channels or reach for the latest, outrageously expensive, digitized thumb game — anything to avoid having to come to grips with reality and reason their way through. In such a society, manifest in its youth but created by their elders, a crisis must last for only a fast-forward set of a few videotape frames. Cultural and political judgments must be made in the blink of history's eye. If Americans are ignorant of what the Founding Fathers did for them a mere 231 years ago, how can they possibly judge the widely divergent historical values of eight years of Bill Clinton and six-and-a-half years of George W. Bush? Polls Do Not Tell the Whole Story Bush is knowingly said to be lower in the popularity polls than any previous president. (Not surprisingly, little is said of the even-lower poll numbers for the Congress controlled by the opposite party.) But who truly knows? Of course, the polls say so. Polls of how many of America's 300 millions? Those surveyed range from a few hundred persons to a few more than a thousand. Who selects that relative handful? (Did you ever know anyone personally who was polled?) Who writes the questions? Who asks the questions? In what tone of voice? At what times of day? Who funds the entire costly enterprise, and for what purpose? Assume the polls are, as the British say, spot-on. What has that to do with whether what a president or a Congress does is the right thing to do for this country in the long haul of history?
If you don't know anything much about history, especially of your own nation, how can you pass a valid judgment about this current president, let alone about any president's proper place in history? At various points in their public careers George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman, and Ronald Reagan were abused most vilely in the public prints. Years later, all are re-discovered as men of greatness — just as other presidents gained little, or sunk lower, in public regard as history unfolded. Is Paris Hilton admired today? At one time in her trivial life she was wildly popular. Are the now-popular Bill Clinton and his wife the same people they were in the depths of their scandal-ridden co-presidency just a few years ago? It is foolhardy to write off a public figure because of contemporary low repute, just as it is risky to proclaim others as guaranteed future historical giants. Right and Wrong, Good and Evil Reality in America is not a Hollywood-concocted, TV-shriveled, masscomm-manipulated, make-believe world, even though that mirage appears authentic to millions of clueless Americans. History is still what is real. There really are such things as right and wrong, good and evil. They change very little in history's balance scale. This can be said reliably of George W. Bush: He has not pandered to popularly perceived precepts of conventional wisdom. More and more, it is becoming clear that he is, with dogged courage, listening to the dictates of his own mind and heart. In the final analysis, is that not his overriding attribute that persuaded American voters to elect him? Put bluntly, he is one of the rare presidents who genuinely believes the right thing to do is the right thing to do. And he persists in doing that, whatever the cost.
Any conscientious reader and serious student of American history knows this rare quality is the one indispensable ingredient in history's stern requirement for greatness. Seldom is that a prescription for popularity, but neither is popularity essential to historical greatness. For George W. Bush, this should not matter either way, so long as he can go to bed each night in the calm assurance he did his best that day to do what he believes is right. Also ending each day of honest labor and quiet faith are Americans, by the millions, who recognize and appreciate that very quality in a president — and who never have been polled about it, and never will be. They are there, just the same. John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com. Read John Perry's columns here.
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