In the spring of 1986 I was a senior in high school. My honors English teacher, Mrs. Bollmer, assigned our class Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play, Cyrano de Bergerac. As part of the study of the play, we also watched the 1950 film adaptation starring José Ferrer.
Since I was a 17-going-on-18-year-old boy, I naturally focused on the play’s romantic plot, the homely Cyrano’s pursuit of the lovely but vapid Roxane, who is in love with the handsome but vapid Christian de Neuvillette. (Note for male readers: Cyrano’s method of wooing Roxane is not likely to yield any more satisfying a result in the real world than it did in the play.)
The awkward love plot is a necessary contrivance for a stage drama. What Cyrano de Bergerac is really about, though, is finding your individuality—and personal integrity—in an anonymizing world that seeks to crush both.
And in this regard, the play is relevant to everyone: men, women, the old, the young, and everyone in between.
This theme was certainly relevant in 1986, but that was long before the internet, social media, or the culture wars as we know them today. American culture, politics, and intellectualism were not without their flaws in those days, but they were generally better than they are today.
Take politics. When I was a young man, I thought that I was a liberal. As I entered full adulthood, I thought that I was a conservative. In the political landscape of 2026, I am simply an outsider. My opinions won’t please the personality cult of the MAGA base; nor would I fit in among the lemmings on Bluesky, who compliantly use unnecessary neologisms in the name of political correctness.
In the words of Shakespeare’s Mercutio, “A plague o’ both your houses!”
Listen to Cyrano’s monologue above (from the 1950 film adaptation). Now, more than ever, you need to find your inner Cyrano. Acquiescence to the whims and default opinions of the crowd probably wasn’t a good idea even in 1986. But today such acquiescence is toxic, and destructive to both the individual and society.
The internet has officially declared that Two Minutes Hate will be exercised daily for Keith Ervin, the Tennessee school board official who hugged a 17-year-old female student and told her she was “hot”. Ervin has also been charged with assault.
The incident itself (you can watch it on video) was certainly eyebrow-raising and inappropriate. Did it rise to the level of assault? The hugged girl subsequently gave a speech about how offended she was, and this is not the first time Ervin has been in hot water over similar actions. Make of it what you will.
I’m not here to defend Keith Ervin, or to brand him a combination of Osama bin Laden, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Attila the Hun (as so much of the internet seems intent on doing). I’ll address this from a more practical perspective.
Modern life requires one to read the zeitgeist. In 1985, the year I turned seventeen, 17-year-olds were considered “almost adults”. We did not want to be classified as “children”.
Also in 1985, an older man could have gotten away with referring to a 17-year-old girl as “hot” without a national emergency being declared. (But even then, it would have raised some eyebrows.)
This is not 1985. This is 2026. Older teens are now widely regarded as “little children”. The country is in the throes of pedophile hysteria, with the definition of “pedophile” being expanded weekly. A 50-year-old man who expresses amorous appreciation for a 25-year-old might well be branded a pedophile in the current climate; so what the heck did Keith Ervin think he was doing, making such a remark to a 17-year-old?
I graduated from college in 1991, the year of the Tailhook scandal, and the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings. I have heard that corporate workplaces were freewheeling, Wild West environments in the 1980s; but I was a teenager then. Sexual harassment avoidance indoctrination was part of my workplace training from my very first day on the job.
The message I received in such training was simple: when in doubt, don’t do it. Don’t say hello to that pretty coworker who ignored you the last time. And—for Heaven’s sake—don’t tell her she’s pretty. That’s an immediate firing offense. Keep your eyes forward at all times. Adopt the air of a polite eunuch.
And this is in a workplace environment with only adults. I haven’t been in a K-12 classroom since 1986. But the behavioral standards in an educational environment, with minors present, must be all the more stringent.
In other words, there is really no excuse for making a mistake like this in 2026—not unless one has been living under a rock for the past 35 years. Keith Ervin is around sixty years old. He had plenty of time to get the memo. What was he thinking?
A large number of school levy issues were on the ballot throughout Ohio this past Tuesday. Most of them were rejected by voters. Reading the comments on Facebook, I noted that those who voted against the levies were largely unapologetic.
There is a general dissatisfaction throughout America with public schools: their management, their methods of (taxpayer) funding, and the instruction that is taking place within them.
This dissatisfaction with public education has fueled a concomitant rise in homeschooling. When I was a kid, during the 1970s and 1980s, one never met anyone who was homeschooled. (Fewer than 1% of Gen Xers receive their education this way.) But nowadays it seems that every other young adult one meets is the product of homeschooling. Every young couple with children is at least talking about educating their kids at home. The percentages rise as the neighborhoods become whiter and more affluent.
I understand the dissatisfaction with twenty-first-century public schools. It seems that no news day is complete without a fresh report of some weirdness being taught in public schools, or some flagrant example of teacher misconduct.
And yet…I had a very different experience in the 1970s and 1980s. I attended both public and working-class Catholic schools, both at the grade school and high school levels. I received an excellent education. And while I liked some of my teachers better than others, almost all of them were intelligent adults who were deeply committed to their calling.
What happened, then? Sometime during the mid-1980s, one began hearing the catchphrase, “if you can’t do, then teach”. The careerism of the 1980s taught young people that teaching was a second-rate profession. If you were smart, if you were a capable student, then you didn’t want to be a teacher. No, that simply wouldn’t do. You had to be an attorney, a CPA, or a CEO.
Another important trend occurred during the Gen X growing-up years: a decline in the number of capable young women entering the teaching field.
As recently as the 1970s, teaching was considered a top career choice for the most capable young women. While some of my teachers were male, they were disproportionately female. Many of my female teachers were absolutely brilliant. My junior high science teacher, a woman named Mrs. Tierney, was as knowledgable as many college professors.
That all began to change in the 1980s, with the rise of “girl power”, and the idea that the brightest young women must compete in all traditionally male careers. The result was more intelligent young women working in law and finance, but fewer intelligent young women becoming math and science teachers.
Did society benefit most from more intelligent young women entering law firms…or from more intelligent young women entering the field of education? I’m going to let you draw your own conclusions on that one. (I don’t want to deal with the hate mail.)
What I will say is that there are trade-offs to all societal changes. Forty years ago, we began subtly denigrating the teaching profession (“if you can’t do, then teach”) and we began telling young women that they were passively accepting the patriarchy if they didn’t go toe-to-toe with their male classmates in the corporate boardroom.
Forty years have come and gone since all of those trends began. The excellent teachers who provided my education during the 1970s and 1980s are all retired. After casting the teaching profession as a second-rate career choice for four decades, many people are shocked to discover that—lo and behold—the field is now populated by mostly second-rate people. (In one of their Freakonomics books, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner documented the decline in teacher IQ within my lifetime.) Many parents are also shocked to discover that a disproportionate number of those teachers are left-wing ideologues who shouldn’t be trusted with anyone’s children. But that tends to go along with the second-rate thing.
And now many of those affluent white suburbanites have decided that public schools must be abandoned wholesale. Parents who once believed that a teaching career was beneath them have decided that they should take a break from their law firms and corporate offices to…educate their children at home. Can no one see the irony here?
I reiterate: I experienced public, industrialized education during the 1970s and 1980s. It really isn’t that bad when the right adults are in charge. The problem is that the right adults are no longer in charge, because the right adults are off doing other things. Among those other things (note irony once again) is now homeschooling their kids, because they no longer trust the people working in education.
I am grateful that I wasn’t homeschooled. I loved my mother dearly, but she would not have been capable of teaching me Spanish and algebra at home. In my experience, very few parents are well-equipped to provide competent instruction beyond the fifth- or sixth- grade level. Teaching at the junior high level and above really is a task that is best left to trained professionals.
The proof is in the pudding. I’ve met many of these young adults who were homeschooled in recent years. Most of them are nice enough, but there are noticeable gaps in their knowledge and social development. I would not have wanted to trade places with them.
Another important factor is the socialization and people skills that the organized educational experience provides. I was neither the captain of the football team nor the most popular kid in my school. But my high school experience was anything but four years of living hell. In fact, I rather enjoyed it.
More germane to our discussion here, my school years taught me about friends, enemies, rivals, and conflict management. These are skills that many screen-bound Gen Z young adults sorely lack.
The solution to the crisis in public education is not for a million concerned parents to isolate their children and retreat behind suburban walls. The solution is for a million concerned parents to become involved and take back their public schools.
This is not like trying to take back the national government. Education is still largely managed at the local level. It is possible for organized groups of adults to bring about substantial changes.
This would be a lot more beneficial (for their children, most of all), and practical, than for every parent to try to become a do-it-yourself calculus teacher.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.
Clarke based her letter on…race science.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.
“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.
“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].
“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.
Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.
Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.
Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.
Kristen Clarke
Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)
This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.
This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.
Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.
Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.
What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.
We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.
I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.
I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.
Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.
Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.
Kristen Clarke, Biden’s nominee to head the DOJ Civil Rights Division, penned a 1994 letter to the Harvard Crimson, stating that African Americans have “superior physical and mental abilities”.At the time, Clarke was an undergraduate at Harvard, and the president of the university’s Black Students Association.
Clarke based her letter on…race science.
Here are some excerpts from the letter:
“One: Dr Richard King reveals that the core of the human brain is the ‘locus coeruleus,’ which is a structure that is Black, because it contains large amounts of neuro-melanin, which is essential for its operation.
“Two: Black infants sit, crawl and walk sooner than whites [sic]. Three: Carol Barnes notes that human mental processes are controlled by melanin — that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.
“Four: Some scientists have revealed that most whites [sic] are unable to produce melanin because their pineal glands are often calcified or non-functioning. Pineal calcification rates with Africans are five to 15 percent [sic], Asians 15 to 25 percent [sic] and Europeans 60 to 80 percent [sic]. This is the chemical basis for the cultural differences between blacks and whites [sic].
“Five: Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities — something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
Obviously, this is complete hooey, dressed up in the sort of pseudo-scientific language that passes for erudition at places like Harvard.
Obviously, the mainstream media would be shrieking, Twitter would be exploding, if a white nominee to any senior federal government post had made similar claims about whites, based on “race science”.
Nevertheless, I’m of two minds on this one.
Clarke’s age is not available online, but her Wikipedia entry states that she graduated Harvard in 1997. Backing into the numbers, this would mean that she was about 19 years old when she wrote the above words.
Kristen Clarke
Most people don’t reach full adulthood until they are about halfway through their twenties. (This is why I would be in favor of raising the voting age, rather than lowering it, but that’s another discussion.)
This doesn’t mean you should get a blank check for everything you do when you’re young, of course. But there is a case to be made that all of us say and think things during our formative years that will make us cringe when we look back on them from a more mature perspective.
This is certainly true for me. I was 19 years old in 1987. I am not the same person now that I was then—both for better and for worse.
Secondly, let’s acknowledge environmental factors. Being a student at Harvard is likely to temporarily handicap any young person’s judgement and intellectual maturity. Even in 1994, Harvard University was a hotbed of pointy-headed progressivism and insular identity politics.
Clarke was also involved in the Black Students Association. There was a Black Students Association at the University of Cincinnati when I was an undergrad there during the late 1980s. Members of UC’s BSA were known to write whacko letters like the one above. Most of them, though, were nice enough people when you actually talked to them in person. They just got a little carried away when sniffing their own farts in the little office that the university had allocated for BSA use.
What I’m saying is: I’m willing to take into account that 1994 was a long time ago. A single letter from a 19-year-old, quoting pseudo-academic race claptrap, shouldn’t be a permanent blight on the record of a 47-year-old. And I would say the same if Kristen Clarke were white, and had taken a very different spin on “race science”.
We all need to stop being so touchy about racial issues, and so preoccupied with them. That goes for whites as well as blacks, and vice versa.
I’m willing to give Clarke a fair hearing, then. But I’m skeptical. Her 1994 Harvard letter isn’t an automatic disqualifier; but it’s a question that needs to be answered.
I’m also skeptical of Biden. Biden may be a feeble old man; he may be a crook. He is not particularly “woke” at a personal level. In fact, some of his former positions on busing and crime suggest that he’s anything but “woke” on matters of race.
Yet Biden is now head of a Democratic Party that is obsessed with race. This means that Biden may try to overcompensate, by filling his government with race radicals. This recent selection supports that concern.
Given the time that has elapsed between the present and 1994, given Kristen Clarke’s age at the time, I want to hear what she has to say in 2021 before I outright condemn her as a hater or a looney. But this recent personnel selection doesn’t make me optimistic about the ideological tilt of the incoming Biden administration.
