Rodent Regatta

Letters to Rod Paige and Ted Kennedy

By Craig J. Cantoni

(For Internet publication)

Two open letters follow, one to Education Secretary Rod Paige and another to Senator Ted Kennedy.

Dear Secretary Paige:

Although it wasn’t your intent, your op-ed in the October 30 Wall Street Journal helps to explain why today’s graduates of government schools cannot think critically and logically.

The op-ed began with a recital of how much government school spending has increased under the Bush administration. To quote: ”President Bush has increased K-12 education spending by 40% since he took office. That’s more in two years than it increased during the eight previous years under President Clinton. In raw terms, this president has increased education spending by $11 billion.”

Then in the following nine paragraphs, you stated the truth about education spending—that there is little relationship between increased spending and academic achievement.

Your logic would read as follows as a syllogism: Wasting money is wrong; increased education spending is a waste of money; therefore Bush did the right thing by increasing education spending. Hurts the brain, doesn’t it?

Or try this: Republicans are the party of small government and low taxes; Bush increased government spending more than Clinton; therefore Bush is a true Republican. Ouch!

I will keep your op-ed in my files and take it out whenever I have misgivings about the financial sacrifice that my wife and I make to exercise our religious freedom and send our kid to parochial school.

Sincerely,
Craig J. Cantoni

Dear Senator Kennedy:

I am very sorry to hear that you are still fighting your demons, especially the ones about inheriting your wealth, connections and political office from your philandering, bootlegging daddy, who also pulled strings to get you into Harvard. It must be very difficult to know that you earned little of your status and power on your own. Your feelings of guilt and inadequacy probably explain why you recently came out against so-called legacy admissions to universities.

Incidentally, your dad and my grandfather had a lot in common. My grandfather worked as a coal miner when he immigrated to this country from Italy. Chances are, the coal that he mined was used by your dad to fuel the boilers in his mansion. And my grandfather was also into moonshine like your dad. During Prohibition, he made wine in the cellar for personal consumption.

Anyway, back to the legacy issue.

You want universities to begin reporting how many of their admissions are legacy admissions; that is, admissions that are made because a parent attended the same university or gave money to the university.

I went to my copy of the U.S. Constitution and could not find an enumerated power that authorizes the federal government to enact such a regulation. Nor could I find a basis for such a regulation in the Federalist Papers or any other writings of the Founders. Perhaps you were sleeping during history class at Harvard or looking up a classmate’s dress when the Constitution was covered.

Of course, your secret agenda—other than exorcising your demons—is to build a case for affirmative action for government-favored groups that vote Democratic, especially Hispanics and blacks. Since it is mostly whites who get preferential treatment from universities based on legacy and endowments, you think it logically follows that it is okay to give preferential treatment based on race. You and Education Secretary Rod Paige think alike: illogically.

Your Harvard intellect fails to grasp the difference between a race-neutral practice that has a racial effect and a race-based practice that has a racial effect.

A legacy admission is a race-neutral practice that does not violate the Constitution. Universities are colorblind when they grant legacy admissions. Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a race-based practice that violates the Constitution, irrespective of the intellectual somersaults of Sandra Day O’Connor. Universities are not colorblind when they give extra admission points to certain races.

Both practices have different effects on different groups, but their starting points are radically different.

Am I going too fast for you?

Take my son as an example. He is the first Cantoni since his great-grandparents immigrated here who will have the wherewithal to attend an Ivy League school. Unlike you, he is not lucky enough to have a parental legacy that will give him an edge over other applicants. That doesn’t bother me at all, primarily because I don’t want him to attend an Ivy League school and be indoctrinated in the kind of politically correct nonsense that you espouse. But even if it bothered me, I wouldn’t want the federal government to do anything about it. I’d simply write it off as your forebears having more money than mine.

Affirmative action is a different matter. It means that the son of a Mexican immigrant can jump the line over my son, the great-grandson of an Italian immigrant, solely on the basis of his ethnicity. Now that bothers me a lot, enough to want to grab my pitchfork and storm your family castle in Martha’s Vineyard.

If that sounds extreme to you, please keep in mind that you’re the extremist. You took an oath to uphold the Constitution, an oath that you ignore. The Consitution clearly prohibits the denial of rights based on race. It is completely silent about advantages that accrue from wealth.

Incidentally, you and your party also favor estate taxes. That means that you want the government to take a part of the nest egg that my mom and dad saved and invested all of their working-class lives. Reminder: You’re the champion of the working-class. Wink, wink.

Most members of your party favor the estate tax for egalitarian reasons, believing in equal outcomes and in the use of state power to achieve equal outcomes. Other members of your party—and, sadly, many Republicans—favor the estate tax because they believe in a meritocracy. They believe in people starting on a level playing field and earning what they get in life. But if these people had ever taken a course in critical thinking, they would understand that their beliefs logically lead to the state rearing children or killing parents. Why? Because one’s success in life depends on parental influences more than inherited money.

Take you as an example. Even if daddy Joe had not given you a dime, you would have still benefited from his connections and the Kennedy name. Or do you believe that you would have become a U.S. Senator on your own merits and did not have an enormous advantage over my father, who was raised in a two-flat on Dago Hill—sorry, but that’s what we call it—in St. Louis? If you think that, you should stay away from the liquor cabinet.

Sorry, but the legacy of connections and power that you inherited from your daddy is going to follow you to the grave, regardless of how much you pontificate about fairness on Capitol Hill. If you had had the courage of your convictions, you would have resigned your senate seat, changed your name to something with a vowel at the end of it, given all your money to charity, moved into a bungalow in the North End of Boston, and did honest work for living.

Sincerely,
Craig J. Cantoni

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Mr. Cantoni is an author, columnist and founder of Honest Americans Against Legal Theft (HAALT). He can be reached at ccan2@aol.com.