Dennis Prager

3-13-98

Dennis was away on vacation with his family and did not broadcast on Monday and Tuesday.

Dennis began his show relating the joy of taking a much needed vacation. Taking a family vacation, Dennis said, is sometimes an oxymoron. It certainly is different than going away with only your spouse. But, going away with kids is a joy that you could never get anywhere else. Dennis, Fran, and their two boys had a fantastic three days in Jackson Hole, WY. Dennis told his audience how wonderful it was to go dog sledding through the snow covered wilderness and that he absolutely fell in love with the dogs. The family also took a horse and carriage ride through an elk range where they saw 8,500 wild elk.

An important lesson Dennis shared was that his youngest boy, five year old Aaron, took his first ski lesson and was a natural. Dennis took his first ski lesson, and, well, was not a natural. Dennis told his listeners how important it is to teach skills to children at a young age. It's critical that you don't wait too long. When you learn something at five years old, it becomes effortless in adulthood. Dennis said that he learned biblical Hebrew starting at age five. Now, it is effortless for him. He reads it with as much ease as he reads English.

He emphasized that parents should impart skills to their young children that will enrich their lives, not merely help them eventually get into college.

Dennis brought attention to a Wall Street Journal piece today that noted the rising number of company executives (men and women) that are leaving their lucrative positions in order to spend more time with their families. People who reach these positions, Dennis explained, have learned that the money and trophies don't mean that much if you come home and have no one their to say "I love you." People who haven't reached that financial status, often times envy the executives because they haven't yet learned that important lesson.

Dennis then began his topic for the first half of the show. He read from a San Francisco Examiner article that reported that if a S.F. school board bill passes in two weeks there will actually be a policy in place similar to Nazi Germany. The bill needs only 4 votes to pass and it already has more support than that. The new policy limits the amount of books teachers can assign written by white authors. It calls for a maximum of three out of every ten books written by white authors. The board wants to pass this policy because ninety percent of the students are considered non-white. Dennis wants to know if Christian predominated cities in the South should only teach Christian authors? Should Japan limit their authors to Japanese? Dennis said that if non-whites can't relate to Romeo and Juliet because it was written by Shakespeare, then they are racist. The same way if a non-black can't cry when reading about black slavery. Dennis said that the Nazis used the same excuse to get rid of non-Aryan authors. The nazis explained we are not Jews, we shouldn't read books written by Jews. Dennis noted the response by Gwendolyn Fuller, a veteran African-American English teacher in San Francisco.

As reported in the S.F. Examiner:

She said that she would "quit teaching" if she couldn't focus on the classics such as "The Great Gatsby," "Lord of the Flies" and "The Catcher In The Rye."

"I'm outraged by this proposal," said Fuller, a Lowell English teacher for 28 years. "You focus on the classics, and then you weave in books of color. It's not the other way around."

Dennis took phone calls from people who called themselves Liberal who were outraged about this. They considered it pure racism and harmful to the students. Some of them said they were members of the ACLU, loved the sixties and were frightened by this policy. He also took some phone calls from some African Americans who said that Dennis can't understand why this is good because he's not black. One black caller told Dennis that Blacks don't have as many classics to contribute because they were oppressed for so long they weren't given the opportunity to write them. He also said it will empower young blacks to read black authors. Dennis said that he didn't relate to this at all. The last thing Dennis said he thinks of when he reads a book is that it was so great, or all of the sudden he feels empowered, because he learned that it was written by a Jew. Dennis said that either a book is a great work of art or it's not.

Dennis said that since this form of racism is coming from the left, the predominant media will not give it much attention.

At 2:00 Dennis had in studio, actor-producer-director-writer Robert Duvall. A few weeks ago Dennis told his KABC listeners how he was so affected by Mr. Duvall's latest movie, The Apostle. Dennis was overwhelmed by the impact the film had on him. Mr. Duvall said that he would be happy to come in studio today to discuss this film and his career.

Dennis told Mr. Duvall that in sixteen years of radio he has not once devoted an entire hour to one actor. But Dennis decided to do it with Mr. Duvall because he so admires his work. Dennis urged his listeners to see The Apostle.

Mr. Duvall said that he wrote the screenplay fourteen years ago. He did it to provide the audience with a fundamentalist Christian preacher with respect as a full human being and buck the trend of Hollywood to offer only a caricature. Mr. Duvall also said that he researched the project to give it authenticity by attending many churches across America. Watching a 95 year old black preacher in West VA affected him the most.

Mr. Duvall said that Hollywood didn't want to make this movie, now nominated for an Academy award. It took him a while to get this project off the ground.

Dennis said that the movie so affected him that although he loves much of Mr. Duvall's past movies, he will forever see him in the role in The Apostle, similar to the way when he thinks of Charlton Heston, he thinks of him as Moses in the movie, The Ten Commandments.

Dennis noted that Mr. Duvall is different politically from most in Hollywood. Mr. Duvall said that he tends to be a little right of center but really sees himself in the middle. He doesn't like extremes on either side. He said that he wished there was a position called "radical middle." Dennis told him that he calls himself a "passionate moderate." Mr. Duvall responded "that's good!"

Dennis wanted to know what the Christian response was to The Apostle. He heard it has been received well. Mr. Duvall said he has had a wonderful response. He noted how the Long Island Pentecostal Preachers loved the picture and also ministers James Robinson and Pat Robertson thought it was a terrific film. Dennis said that these were powerful responses because in the film Mr. Duvall's character is no angel and there is a scene of him arguing with Jesus. Dennis also said that he heard that a national conservative Christian group gave the film an award. Mr. Duvall said that he did receive the award and that the movie is being accepted well in both religious and secular circles.

Dennis asked Mr. Duvall if certain roles affect him. For example, Dennis said that the actor, Ray Fiennes, who played the commandant in Steven Speilberg's Shindler's List, said that he had to monitor himself because he realized that playing the role was making him a meaner person in real life. It so affected him. Dennis wanted to know if Mr. Duvall's portrayal of Stalin and Eichman in previous films affected him the same way. Mr. Duvall said that it didn't because to him it was like children play acting. He learned his lines, acted, and at night went home. He left the characters behind. He did say, however, that he believes that playing the preacher in The Apostle did make him a better human being. He believes this happened because the project was so long in the making. Mr. Duvall said " I've become a better human, being in it. I do believe it."

LUKE's summary:

Dennis Prager sounded funny today. He returned from a snowy vacation in Wyoming with a sore throat. He attempted to ski.

Dennis castigated a proposed policy by the San Francisco School Board that would apportion English books according to the racial makeup of the school.

A caller told Dennis that George Will, in the latest Limbaugh Letter, said he was optimistic about America, and that many of our problems were cyclical. DP felt encouraged by that news.

DP says that because this racism comes from the left, the major media will not report on it.

Prager says that if you can't relate to the tragedies of others, you are racist. If you can't cry over black slavery or Romeo and Juliet, then you are a racist. [What if you never cry, period?]

Doug Hill writes: " Excuse me, but was that KLOS disk jockey Jim Ladd who was on DP's show at 1:45 pm today? I didn't catch the caller's name, but it sounded like him. They were talking about the move in San Francisco to limit the white male authors taught in school to at most 30% (of the books read). Both the caller (who identified himself as a liberal democrat) and DP were against that. They agreed that you can learn from those of other races, not just your own. DP talked about how he was influenced by the (classical) music of Germans, while the caller talked about how he was influenced by the (rock-&-roll) music of Black Americans."

Prager based his commentaries upon two articles in the San Francisco Examiner, available at their web site: www.examiner.com

Mixed review for reading list change

By Julian Guthrie

OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

A proposal to overhaul required reading lists for students in San Francisco so that up to seven of every 10 books be by authors of color has drawn criticism and applause -- and a call by one school official to require an equal number of books by gay and lesbian authors.

A day after The Examiner reported that San Francisco school board members Keith Jackson and Steve Phillips are pushing an initiative that would make the "too white" high school English curriculum more multicultural, educators and students appear deeply divided over the measure's merits.

At The City's flagship Lowell High School, veteran English teacher Gwendolyn Fuller -- an African American -- said she would "quit teaching" if she couldn't focus on the classics such as "The Great Gatsby," "Lord of the Flies" and "The Catcher in the Rye."

"I'm outraged by this proposal," said Fuller, a Lowell English teacher for 28 years. "You focus on the classics, and then you weave in books of color. It's not the other way around."

But Mission High School teacher Dela Arriaga, a Mexican American, said, "The school district should be applauded for trying to expand the canon. Students today need to be exposed to books that are contemporary and go beyond the typical white male experience."

The proposal, quietly introduced at a March 5 school board meeting, appears headed for approval and could take effect in high schools as early as next fall.

With only four votes necessary for passage, board members Phillips, Jackson and Dan Kelly and board President Carlota Del Portillo support the measure. It will go before the Board of Education for a final vote March 24.

Board member Juanita Owens said Tuesday she favored the measure, but she has one caveat: that gay and lesbian authors be added to the list, along with black, Latino and Asian authors.

By Rob Morse

EXAMINER COLUMNIST

WHEN I WAS a kid in New England, and racist members of the Boston School Committee resisted integration with every tool of stupidity at their command, I developed a theory that school boards exist to promote ignorance.

A quarter of a century later, now that I'm in supposedly enlightened San Francisco, I find the theory still holds. San Francisco school board members have invented racial quotas in literature. They're complete idiots, and they're in charge of your children.

School officials in San Francisco think the English curriculum is "too white," and want to set up a quota system so kids would be required to read 70 percent "authors of color."

One example, before we get to the usual dead white male suspects like Chaucer, Shakespeare and Mark Twain:

I took a look at the list of proposed recommended readings drawn up by the Unified School Districts. It's a good list of readings, but right after each author's name is the offensive category "ethnicity/culture/country."

It sounds like something in Serbia. Indeed, the purpose of the category is to ethnically cleanse kids' readings.

The first book on the ninth-grade list was the great "All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque. The school authorities hadn't even read the book. Under Remarque's "ethnicity/culture/country," they had written "France."

He was German, school district dummkopf. Remarque was a draftee in the German army in the First World War, and his 1929 book was about the misery and terror of war for everyone, regardless of "ethnicity/culture/country," not just Germans.

French, German, who cares? We're talking white European American. And under the proposed literary quota system, a kid only gets to read three out of 10 books by whites.

Then the kid has to read seven books by "authors of color," five of which would have to be by African American authors.

It seems like Asian American authors are getting short shrift in this city of more than 30 percent Asian Americans and 16 percent African Americans -- that is, if you believe in the idiotic notion that literature should be assigned on the basis of population.

"We want every ethnic group to be represented, but I really want to help African American students," said school board member Keith Jackson, a co-author of the literary quota proposal. He's African American himself.

This goes beyond ignorance. This is a recipe for race war, at least in the weirdly politicized world of English teaching, where words like "ethnicity" and "the canon" are bandied about even by ignoramuses on school boards.

Political correctness has completely flipped and become racism. If the school board wants authors' skin color to reflect the ethnic make-up of San Francisco -- a lame-brained idea to begin with -- there's something really wrong with that math.

They haven't gotten to math yet. What color is math?

I called my father the retired physics professor, and he said, "Most of math was derived from the Greeks and the Arabs, and we use Arabic numerals. Of course, there's no way math is distinguished by color."

This is not a trivial digression into other academic fields, because as my dad the physicist pointed out, Nazi scientists rejected the Theory of Relativity as "Jewish science" because Albert Einstein came up with it.

The word "ethnicity" should be expunged from kids' reading lists. They get caught up in enough superficial b.s., gang warfare and educational quackery without having to judge authors by the color of their skin.

It's embarrassing to tell people the latest idiocy in San Francisco. I called my former historical linguistics professor at Stanford and told her that school board member Dan Kelly had described Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" as economically biased because it "characterizes people based on their class."

I always thought that one of the work's great strengths was that the tales are told by folks from all strata of 14th-century English society -- a knight, a monk, a miller, a clerk and so on.

"If looking at people on the basis of their diversity and social class is bad," said my former professor, "they might as well eliminate Shakespeare."

I told her that eliminating Shakespeare as a required reading was part of the plan, too.

We come right back to the demonstrable fact that school boards promote ignorance. When I taught elementary school in New Haven, Conn., I was lucky enough to teach in a church-run school with no school board.

White and black kids read books about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Black and white kids read "The Phantom Toll Booth" and "The Wind in the Willows."

What is the "ethnicity/culture/country" of Mr. Toad, anyway?

I even read the kids chapters of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" while they were having lunch. I was uncomfortable with part of the name of Mark Twain's great African American character, Jim, so I left it out.

One day my best student, Seth, came up and said, "Mr. Morse, you've been leaving a word out."

Yes, it was uncomfortable, and, yes, I had to do some fancy historical-linguistic explaining. Yes, the kids could deal with it.

Yes, kids are smarter than school board members.

In his third hour, Dennis Prager interviewed actor Robert DuVall, one of his favorites, about Robert's magnificent new film THE APOSTLE. Robert wrote the script fifteen years ago when he won his Oscar for Tender Mercies, another Prager favorite.

It took that many years until Robert found that he would have to make and direct THE APOSTLE himself. He did and Prager calls it magnificent.

DP says that when he saw the previews for the film, he thought it would be another Hollywood hatchet job.

DP praised the full picture the movie gives of a fundamentalist Christian preacher.

DuVall says he has been infatuated with preachers since the 1950s. "I respect these people…even if I don't always agree… I feel [that with this film] I have made a contribution. TV has people celebrating the spectacle rather than the substance."

DuVall went to churches all over America, including six in one Sunday in Harlem. He is a Protestant who believes in one God and in Jesus Christ, but he does not agree with all the views of his character in THE APOSTLE. He says his beliefs are a private matter.

Dennis says that DuVall will forever be etched in his mind as the preacher in THE APOSTLE.

DP says that the scene with the Bible and the bulldozer was one of the most powerful human transformation scenes. "These guys do 180 degree turns… It does happen. That scene is based on a true story."

Robert seemed self-effacing at times and Prager had to prompt him to explain the film as a mission, and to feel vindicated by THE APOSTLE's success.

DuValle says that most of the folks in NY he interacted with were less perceptive about THE APOSTLE than the other folks he interacted with across North America.

Robert says the movie achieved crossover success (with secular and religious communities).

Prager and Robert agreed that the movie humanized people who are frequently caricatured.

Robert says that acting is like playing house for big salaries, you perform and then you go home. Prager wondered about Ray Fiennes comment about playing the Nazi commandant in Schindler's List made him a meaner person. Everything you do affects you. Your actions affect your heart more than your heart affects your actions.

After much prompting, DuVall said THE APOSTLE made him a finer person.

DuVall says you have to have lots of hobbies to stay sane, and stay off dope.

Dennis said that he made three films, one starring Larry. And DP says there was dramatic improvement by Larry in his acting.

[Did Dennis make three films? I thought he helped produce three videos, which were about 20 minutes each. DP did not make them. He couldn't make a film to save his life. Would he know what part of the camera to look in? But then again, DP was laughing as he spoke… And DP makes films in the same sense that I do…]

Dennis will be on KABC TV at 6:25 AM Thursday morning. I hope he doesn't drink wine tonight until he can't tell the difference between Hamaan and Mordacai, as a good Jew is supposed to.

The last caller was an ordained minister who said THE APOSTLE gave him permission to return to the ministry even though he wasn't perfect, and to just do the best he could, where he could. Bloom where you are planted.