Brooklyn Existentialism: Reviewed by E. Michael Jones

 

http://www.culturewars.com/2008/BrooklynExistentialism.html

Brooklyn Existentialism: Voices from the Stoop explaining how Philosophical Realism can bring about the Restoration of Character, Intelligence and Taste by Arthur DiClementi and Nino Langiulli. Immortalized by Hollywood films of the 20th Century, Italian Brooklyn became an icon of American culture. Brooklyn Existentialism shows that the culture of that time and place was more than just an icon. The oxymoronic combination of uprootedness and ethnic solidarity found in Brooklyn during the middle of the 20th century takes the reader not just back to Italy, not just back to Europe, but back to the sources of philosophical realism that made Europe, Italy, and America possible. Brooklyn Existentialism is ethnophilosophy with a vengeance: a take-no-prisoners attack on the bad ideas that corrupted the academy over the last century combined with an equally frank discussion of the moral mischief these bad ideas caused. Ethnophilosphy is not an oxymoron, it is the only philosophy worth doing. What were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle if not residents of an ethnic neighborhood, who became skeptical of the ruling ideas of their day and decided to do something about it by speaking out? DiClementi and Langiulli provide the same service in our day and age.

Reviewed by E. Michael Jones 

 

"School is the cheapest police," Horace Mann once said.

Excerpt:

In the early 1950s Stanley H. Kaplan, a graduate of City College of New York, who in spite of his good grades couldn't get a job, set up a small tutoring operation in a modest building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Kaplan capitalized on Jewish educational aspirations at a time when the SAT had firmly established itself as the official rite of passage for entry into the colleges that granted access to the top positions in the American meritocracy. The WASP ruling class under Henry Chauncey's direction had created what it thought was an uncoachable test that measured pure mental ability. The Jew Kaplan was smart enough to see through WASP pretentions and come up with a system that guaranteed better test results. The system was so simple that it hardly qualifies as a system at all. In the days when the blueprint for building the atomic bomb was an open secret compared to the questions on the SAT test,Kaplan came up with a simple but ingenious way to subvert the system. After each class graduated from Kaplan's school and took the test, he would invite them back to celebrate with hot dogs and root beer; admission to the party was gained by having each student tell Kaplan one question he remembered from taking the test. The net result of Kaplan's parties was a list of the questions that his students would face when taking the SATs. If Kaplan tutored five classes of fifty students in one year, at the end of that year he had 250 questions. By the time Kaplan sold his test-prep business to the Washington Post company in the '70s, for $50 million he had over 30 years experience in gathering questions, which meant he could tell his students with increasing accuracy the answers to those questions as well. Jewish scores on the SATs rose accordingly, as did Jewish admission to the prestigious colleges that had established quotas to keep them out in the early 20th century. It is unlikely that people like Conant and Chauncey and Brigham considered Jews from Brooklyn the candidates most likely to fulfill Jefferson's ideal of the natural aristocrat, but they were the main beneficiaries of the system that Chauncey and Conant put in place to rescue nature's aristocrats from the rubbish that the SAT was raking through in the period following World War II. The WASP faith in "science," based as it was on the idea of noblesse oblige they had learned at schools like Groton, proved no match for clever Jews from Brooklyn, who quickly filled the slots the WASPs had reserved for nature's aristocrats in the meritocracy.Harvard University can now boast of a faculty and student body that is between 30 and 40 percent Jewish. The type of people that Carl Brigham thought his test would exclude, because they weren't particularly intelligent, ending up using his test to take over America's elite universities. Once that happened it was only a matter of time before they took over American culture as well, something that occurred in the mid-'70s, just as opposition to the SATs was reaching a fever pitch. Perhaps the most visible Jew at Harvard is Alan Dershowitz, who grew up in Borough Park, Brooklyn, and is currently the world's foremost apologist for Zionism, torture, and targeted assassination. Dershowitz was recently involved in a knock-down-drag-out fight with Norman Finklestein, another Jew from Borough Park, when he waged a nation-wide publicity campaign to deny Finkelstein tenure at DePaul University in Chicago. 

[. . .]

As the '70s progressed the subversion continued, but because ETS refused to acknowledge what was going on, they played into the hands of Jews like Kaplan and his successor, the founder of Princeton Review, John Katzman. By refusing to acknowledge that people like Kaplan and Katzman could in fact raise test scores by their coaching, ETS unwittingly allowed a generation of cheaters into the meritocracy. This was most certainly not what Conant and Chauncey had in mind when they began promoting the test, but intention is no match for the cunning of reason or the cunning of history, which has its own laws that function according to ways high above human intention. 

In 1977, David Halperin, a state senator from Brooklyn introduced the New York State truth-in-testing bill because, as "one of the striving Jewish boys tutored for the SAT by Stanley Kaplan," he felt that it was unfair that he not only recognized many of the questions but also knew the answers to them when he took the SATs. Halperin's solution was to make the questions public, something which happened when the bill he co-sponsored was passed by the New York legislature. In doing that, Halperin effectively kicked over the secret ladder that had been used to subvert the tests and insured that no one else who took the prep courses after 1977 would have the advantages that the Jews had had up until that time. 

[. . .]

But the short and abortive career of Professor McGreevey as a Catholic intellectual brings up the further question, "what is anyone allowed to say?"What is the tattered remnant of the WASP ruling class allowed to say? What are Harvard professors allowed to say? John McGreevey was a professor at Harvard before he cast his lot with Notre Dame, the Realschule where Catholic bean-counters and FBI agents get their marching orders. But he was a Catholic, you say? Well, what about Professors Walt and Mearsheimer, certified members of the academic establishment who teach at Harvard and the Rockefeller-endowed University of Chicago. What are they allowed to say? What about Jimmy Carter, former president of the United States? What is he allowed to say? What about Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish pariah? What is he allowed to say? The answer to that question is, "Anything that Alan Dershowitz finds acceptable." The answer to all of the other questions is "Anything powerful Jews find acceptable." But even that falls short by way of explanation because the American imperial juggernaut at this point in time is the closest thing the human mind has come to creating the perpetual motion machine. Jews most certainly are "masters of discourse," as Israel Shamir claims, but the empire is a runaway locomotive with no one at the throttle. Think of public education for a moment. It is a juggernaut that has grown so big and powerful that no one is powerful enough to reform it. It has become a cancer in the American body politic and will only stop growing when the body nurturing it dies.

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Thank you and remember: 

Peace is patriotic!

Michael Santomauro

253 W. 72nd Street

New York, NY 10023

Call anytime: 917-974-6367

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