MORALITY FOR THEE BUT NOT FOR ME
"Heroes have deeply influenced my personal life. They have helped me define ideas like honor, duty, truth, honesty, compassion,
self-discipline, and sacrifice. These are the ideas that are the bedrock of our society. Unfortunately, they are also ideas that we
don't hear very much about these days."
These stirring words are from
A Book of Heroes: Great Men and
Women in American History by George
Roche. It was published in 1998, yet another
of many recent tracts penned by conservatives making
explicit or implicit attacks against a President they loathed to the core of their
beings. Until recently Roche was president
of ultraconservative Hillsdale College in
rural Michigan and a conservative icon,
bravely upholding academic standards and
freedom in the face of the evil, P.C. liberals.
Roche became president of the school in 1971
and built it into a leading conservative
institution, and did it without accepting a
cent of government aid since he vigorously
opposed all forms of affirmative action.
Then, all of a sudden, Roche and the board of
regents at Hillsdale announced his
mutually agreed-upon retirement on November
10 of this year. What happened? He was on
a roll, becoming ever more in demand as
a conservative speaker and writer and seemed
just a step or two away from national reknown
even amongst the liberal heathens. Things
didn't start but they certainly exploded when
his son's wife committed suicide on October
17. Just hours before her death, in the
presence of Roche, she'd told his son of their
19-year-old affair.
That's right, Dad had been slipping his son's
wife more than tidbits of sage conservative advice for nearly
two decades, something sonny had been suspecting since pop had divorced mom just
a year before after 40 years of marriage.
The college was going to spin the suicide as
just an unfortunate, inexplicable incident, but
sonny raised quite a stink and didn't leave them that option. And sonny's every bit as
conservative as dad. He's not some outside
liberal troublemaker - he's simply furious
about the abhorrent and hypocritical actions
of the man he probably admired more than anyone
else. Apparently quite a few folks in the
conservative cadre are shocked and reeling over
this, as they damned well should be. Yet another one of their leaders committing adultery after all the time and effort they've
spent shrilly denouncing Clinton for that
"unforgivable" crime against their supposedly
precious family values.
Fooling around with his son's wife wasn't
Roche's only hypocrisy. For someone who so
regularly denounced political correctness he
had no problem imposing his own authoritarian,
P.C. regime.
In 1991 four former Hillsdale professors, all
members of the conservative National Association of Scholars,
wrote, "For years the Hillsdale administration has neglected its academic program to pay for 'outreach' activities designed to promote Dr. Roche, maintained a curriculum that requires no appreciable knowledge of Western culture, and used every possible means, including dismissals
and threats of lawsuits, to silence dissent of any kind among faculty and students."
When a student wanted to publish an independent
newspaper Roche - whose school's motto is
"Independence for Excellence Since 1844" -
banned the distribution of the paper on campus
and expelled the student. One of the editorials in the banned paper had stated, "Hillsdale is a cult of personality and not of principle. Roche is the divine monarch."
One wonders just what Roche, Hyde, Gingrich
and the rest of that lot are actually thinking
when they make their self-righteous
proclamations about the moral failings of
"society", i.e. their ideological enemies and
their socioeconomic inferiors.
Do they really think that their ostensbile
lessers are stupid enough to listen to their
pious proclamations and ignore their
ignominious actions?
posted by Steven Baum
12/11/1999 03:21:51 PM |
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