Three recent articles in the New York Times reminded me of why I no longer read that newspaper regularly.

The articles were so New York.  The subject matter was silly, pretentious, elitist, leftist, and, of course, obsessed with race and class.

The first article was titled, "The Russian Peasant's Workout."  It described the physical and environmental benefits of cutting grass with a scythe instead of a motorized device.    

One can picture trendy Manhattanites carrying their scythes to Central Park for their peasant's workout, with women wearing fashionable babushkas bought at Saks.  

It could start a trend.  Next could be the Soviet Gulag Workout, in which New Yorkers would don threadbare prison clothes and repair potholes in the street in the dead of winter.  The workout could be coupled with the Mao Starvation Diet, which would consist of a half-cup of maggot-infested rice per day—all organic, of course.

The second article was a negative reaction to Great Britain's exit from the European Union.   It was written by a spoiled British brat with an undeserved superiority complex—that is, it was written by a college philosophy lecturer.  If he is representative of the intelligentsia who voted to remain in the EU, it's a wonder that the working class didn't expressed their anger towards such elites with scythes instead of votes.

The elitist philosopher moves back in with his parents every summer when his teaching job is suspended until the fall.  He probably stays in a dark basement reminiscent of Plato's cave, where he thinks that the shadows on the wall are the real world.

So how does he show his appreciation to his parents?  The ingrate ridicules them and their rural English town for being homogenous and insular.  He doesn't realize that this is a perfect description of academia.

In his damaged mind, what's even worse about the town is that it is clean and orderly and has an attractive town square.

No doubt, residents of Upper East Side co-ops nodded in agreement as they read this lambasting of bourgeois values.  These would be the same co-ops that not only have doormen to keep out the hoi polloi but also have income requirements and other hurdles that prospective residents have to meet. 

The Brit's hatred of his bourgeois roots is reminiscent of the hatred felt by such radical terrorists as Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn (family name of Ohrnstein) for their bourgeois roots.  I mention this because the left has largely succeeded in burying this history as they exaggerate right-wing extremism and downplay Islamic extremism.  As a result, today's millennials don't know about the scores of bombings, bank robberies, and cop killings committed by the Weather Underground and its affiliates in the late sixties and early seventies.  Nor do they know about the poetic justice of an Upper East Side townhouse blowing up with bomb makers inside, after the spoiled brat daughter of the wealthy owners of the townhouse had allowed her fellow left-wing radicals to use it for bomb making.

Never being convicted of crimes, Dohrn and Ayers went on to become—surprise, surprise!—college professors.      

Anyway, to return to the British philosophy lecturer, another reason that he hates his parents' lifestyle is that they don't have access to public transportation.

One wonders if he has ever ridden public transportation, as I did for nine years in Chicago, long before it became the hip thing to do.  I fondly remember the good times on public transit, such as the several occasions when I was terrorized by thugs on the El, the time that a pervert in a facing seat on the commuter train exposed himself to my wife, the daily humiliation of being pushed and shoved as ill-mannered commuters tried to find an open seat on a bus or train, the physical bonding with strangers who were damp with perspiration or precipitation and thus smelled like wet sheep, the shivering or sweating on a train platform or bus stop in inclement weather, and the nightmare of a strike by rapacious public servants with rich pensions and poor work habits.

The most memorable experience was when an angry black student got on the El at the station for Malcomb X College and glared at me as he sat in the adjoining open seat.  Written in bold letters on his briefcase were the words, "Whites eat s**t."  Being a dark-skinned Italian and not a whitey, I nodded and smiled at him in agreement.

The incident shows that the Supreme Court was right about the value of diversity in enhancing the learning experience in college, as cited in the court's recent convoluted ruling on affirmative action.  I learned a lot from the incident on the El.  For example, I learned not to be seated next to an open seat when the El stops at Malcom X College.  Today, based on what I've learned from reading the New York Times, I now would know to carry a scythe on the El while pretending to be going to Lincoln Park for a peasant workout.

Actually, on a serious note, the Supreme Court was not right in its ruling.  Academic learning in college doesn't take place by simply mingling with other races.  It takes place by associating with people of any race who are more intelligent than oneself—which in my case is most of the population.  After all, students pay a lot of money to be taught by faculty members who know more than they do—well, except for lecturers in philosophy and former left-wing terrorists.

If those with low test scores enhance the college learning experience of those with higher test scores, then there should be college admission set-asides for poor whites from the backwoods of Appalachia who barely passed high school.   Why isn't there affirmative action for Goober, Gomer and Bubba?  Think of what they could contribute to a class on thermodynamics.

It is a corruption of the original goals of the diversity movement to suggest that those who get into college based on academic merit can gain intellectual knowledge from those who get into college because of their race.  Underlying the Supreme Court decision is the unspoken admission that college is now about something other than academics.  It's about social engineering and racial politics.

I know the original goals of the diversity movement because I was at the leading edge of the movement, which began with Roosevelt Thomas' landmark article in the Harvard Business Review.  Among other initiatives, I went on retreats with blacks to talk openly about our respective feelings on race and other social issues.   But this is key:  They were intellectually-gifted people, unlike the pseudo intellectuals of today who now propagate progressive pabulum and Bolshevik blather in the name of diversity:  From whites and Asians according to their merit, and to blacks and Hispanics according to their race. 

Oops, I've digressed.  Where the hell am I?

Oh, I was writing about recent articles in the New York Times.

The final article was a long and astonishing piece in the Sunday Magazine.

Written by an educated black woman who lives in New York City, the article described her travails and angst in choosing a school for her daughter.

She began her piece on a great note.  She explained that the New York City school system is one of the most segregated school systems in the country.  And she went on to summarize the ugly historical discrimination of separate but unequal schools for blacks, as well as the failed attempts at desegregation after Brown vs. Board of Education.    

But then she went against my Italian values about child-rearing.  She recounted how she had decided to send her daughter to a mostly minority school instead of a mostly white school, even though the mostly white school had better test scores.  By doing so, she would be showing solidarity with her race and living up to her dream of minority schools being just as good as white schools.

Kudos to her for sticking to her principles, but raspberries to her for taking a chance with her child.  I would've sent my kid to a Ugandan school if I had thought it would've given him a better chance in life.  To this Italian American, family comes before race, tribe, community, nation, and politics.  It was the same with my maternal and fraternal grandparents, who, despite being poor immigrants, sent their kids to parochial schools instead of the lousy public schools that served the Italian neighborhood.

Oh, sorry, I forgot that we can't celebrate the diversity of white people.  Under the government racial classification system, and by the rules of diversity, the myriad ethnic groups, nationalities, and socioeconomic groups of the white "race" are lumped together as if they are homogenous, privileged, and equally guilty of the exploitation of non-whites.  

Mea Culpa.

The author then recounted how the school district upended her plans by arbitrarily changing the school boundaries.

Her thinking and writing went downhill from there.

As with so many New York progressives and left liberals, she seemed to be unaware of the root problem:  that compulsory education is controlled unnecessarily by a government monopoly, which, like all government monopolies, is beholden to special interests, is insensitive to costs, is bloated and bureaucratic, and is held hostage by public-sector unions.  Why would she think that such a system would ever care about her needs as a consumer of education?

Not surprisingly, she was silent about vouchers and charter schools being a way for her race to escape the system.  She also was silent about:

how progressives had put outstanding black schools out of business, because the progressives held the racist view that blacks could only learn if they were in classes with whites;

how Catholic schools used to be a good alternative for blacks, until the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment of the latter nineteenth century hatched a plan to close "papist" schools and send Catholics to public schools, where they would be taught the King James version of the Bible;

how free blacks in New England had literacy rates as high as whites prior to the public education movement; and

how the epidemic of single-parent families is a major cause of black educational underachievement and high dropout rates.

In closing, I rarely read the New York Times anymore, because I have grown intellectually over the years, to the point that I'm embarrassed by what I used to believe.  That's not an egotistical statement.  Continuous learning is what all inquisitive people and institutions do.  It's nothing special or extraordinary.  But the New York Times has stayed stuck in intellectual amber.  Despite the overwhelming evidence of the failure of the policies that it has endorsed for decades, it still holds the same beliefs about race, education, economics, and government. 

Well, time for some exercise.  In honor of my grandpa who was a coal miner and privileged white person and oppressor when he immigrated to America from his peasant roots in Italy, I have been doing the Coalminer Pickaxe Workout.