Friday, August 06, 2010

Today in Unintentional Irony

Dennis Prager, in a column called "A Speech Every American High School Principal Should Give":
I am reorienting the school toward academics and away from politics and propaganda.
Dennis Prager, later in the very same paragraph:
We will have failed if any one of you graduates this school and does not consider him or herself inordinately lucky -- to be alive and to be an American.
No politics or propaganda here, nosiree. (But "global warming" is on Prager's list of exemplars of what would count as politics and propaganda. Oi vey.)

The very next (and final) paragraph reads, in full:
Now, please stand and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag of our country. As many of you do not know the words, your teachers will hand them out to you.
Good thing that pledging allegiance to "the flag of our country" has nothing to do with either propaganda or politics.*

Better conservative commentators, please.

Plus! Extra! Bonus self-contradiction within a single paragraph -- from the very same column! From early in the paragraph [emphasis added]:
My only interest in terms of language is that you leave this school speaking and writing English as fluently as possible.
Shortly followed by:
We will learn other languages here -- it is deplorable that most Americans only speak English...
I say again, in the American English vernacular: oi fucking vey.

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* Yeah, I know I just lost a few of you here. But I have long thought that pledging allegiance in a public school is kind of creepy. And even if you support it -- and I am well aware that most Americans probably do -- you can't deny that it's propaganda, albeit propaganda you believe in. (Just causes can have propaganda too.)

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