[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Strike up the band for one more spirited chorus of Auld Lang Syne as the newspaper shifts its base of operations this weekend from the wonderful Culver Hotel, which is renovating, to the Washington-Overland business district, at 10722 Washington Blvd.
No need to search for funny stage plays or films to amuse us in our off-hours as long as we can watch liberals playing on our lawns with their brightly colored plastic toys.
Consider the routinely obsessive Paul Cummins, who has been taking bows since co-founding the renowned Crossroads School in Santa Monica 37 years ago.
First time I noticed him, and it may have been close to 37 years ago, I was struck by his foppish appearance that appeared calculated down to the last hair strand.
Mr. Cummins, who later founded a second private school, long has been touted by noisy acolytes as one of the keenest educational minds on the Westside. There is ample evidence to show that Crossroads is a marvelously successful experiment in unapologetic “progressive” education.
The slender philosophical distinction between a “progressive” private school and a standard public school that teaches the same agenda is that a private school admits of its one-lane curriculum in neon in advance.
Darn the Rich, Darn the Rich
When I read Mr. Cummins’ weekly railings against “the rich,” the central plank of the modern liberal platform, I wonder, being a sincere liberal, how he ever morally justified penthouse-level tuition for his students while calling the rich close to God’s filthiest creatures.
Only God’s filthiest creatures could have afforded to line Mr. Cummins’ golden pockets in the days when he ran the campus or now. Present tuition is $22,000 for the lower grades and $26,000 for the upper.
Mr. Cummins’ liberal musings have been carried in the weakly Santa Monica Mirror for about a decade, and his honesty is to be admired. He does not mind admitting when he is correct.
In today’s edition, he provides a tasty dash of provocative philosophical fodder:
“Liberals, I believe, lean heavily toward collective welfare while conservatives seek unrestrained opportunity for the individual.”
Mr. Cummins would have been safe if he had stopped there, but he couldn’t help himself.
“It was, however, this lack of restraint that allowed for such disgraces as slavery, child labor, the subjugation of women, the exploitation of workers in many fields, and absurd disparities in wealth: i.e., worker to CEO compensation ratios, homelessness amidst opulence, and the like.”
How would you like for your children and their sponge-like minds to be educated in an environment where these obsessions inform the belief system of the Head of School and his faculty.
This I Believe
Briefly consider a skeletal list of the curious beliefs of Mr. Cummins, who is hardly a historian or even a researcher:
Too much individual freedom is unhealthy, almost unavoidably leading to societal chaos.
Government knows what is best for the individual rather than the person himself.
Too much personal freedom caused slavery.
Too much personal freedom led to child labor.
Too much personal freedom led to the subjugation of women.
Perhaps Mr. Cummins has launched a late-life career as a humorist.
Mr. Cummins, admired for his imagination and vision, was merely flamethrowing this time, an easy tactic that passes for erudition in the academic world.
He was unable to cobble together evidence for any of his claims.
Spreading the Wealth Where?
Buried, but not obscured, in Mr. Cummins’ ladder list of unsupported but sweet-sounding accusations is “absurd disparities in wealth.”
This is latter-day code for a redistribution of wealth, a wheeze that socialists have been flogging throughout American history. Put a cap on individual wealth, a cap on individual earnings, they say. Mr. Cummins calls that compassion.
As he strides toward the sunset, Mr. Cummins has earned a comfortable lifestyle. But I am not aware of any of his wealth that he is redistributing. I see. He was sermonizing about what is best for others, not himself.
