town, leaving an empty factory and devastated lives in theirrnwake.rnAt least on the way out the road signs posted the speed limitrnin miles, not kilometers. A little victory, by the way, which suggestsrnmyriad possibilities. The grassroots revolt against thernmetric system, that monstrous spawn of the Big-Government-rnBig Business-Big Science alliance, was beautiful and inspiring,rneven better than our ancestors’ rejection of Esperanto. As HerbertrnSpencer, one of the great metric system haters of all time,rnput it during the English metric debate: “Ten thousand personsrnintend to make twenty million persons change their habits.”rnAnd that is precisely the logic of globalism.rnPoor Spencer’s side lost, several decades after his death, butrnbv then his people had been hopelessly corrupted by imperialismrnand boarding schools, the same poisons that degraded ourrnWASP ruling class into deracinated internationalists who withrnblithe spirits sent their social inferiors off to die in senseless warsrnon behalf of the United States of Abstraction. “It is not worthrnthe while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar,”rnas Henry Thoreau wrote, and we must remember this: that forrnevery Mickev Kantor or Jack Kemp there are 10,000 Americansrnwho stand with Thoreau. Among the unsung patriots of ourrnday, mv everyday heroes, are the ornery old men who speak ofrnquarts, not liters; the refractory kids who flunk tests on theirrnmetric conversion tables; and the track officials who still stagern100-yard dashes and mile runs.rnInternational competitiveness and national defense: the statedrnrationales for the metric system are the same given for seemingly-rnevery act of despoliation over the last half century. Almostrnevery healthy manifestation of American culturalrnlife—whether the regionalist art movement, the Iowa renaissance,rnthe agrarian-distributist alliance—was snuffed in thernworst of all decades, the 1940’s, when our rulers determinedrnthat henceforth, till the end of time, an attack on a single eat inrnZanzibar was tantamount to an attack on us, and our boys andrnour money would be sent away, far from home, to serve thernAcronym of the Day. We were all Zanzibarbarians now.rnIt is impossible to overstate the devastation visited upon myrncountry by the Cold War. All those 18-year-old bovs fromrnBatavia or I lolley or Lime Rock, New York, who were stolenrnfrom their families and their towns and died, scared and alone,rnin Korea and Vietnam. Who learned, as the light went out, thernsad truth that a Batavia boy had written in his diary a centuryrneadier, as he drifted away in a Virginia hospital bed, a casualtyrnof the Battle of the Wilderness: “Today- the doctor savs I n-iustrndie—all is over yvith me—ah, so young to die.”rnBetyveen the dead and the displaced, fed by the blood ofrnhundreds of thousands of nonyvhite people who had to die sornthat Strange Robert MeNamara could have nightmares in hisrnAspen chalet, the Cold War also gave us the National System ofrnInterstate and Defense Highways, which yvasted our money- andrndestroyed local patterns of life and commerce; such abominationsrnas statehood for Hawaii and Alaska, the National Endoyymentrnfor the Arts, and the Holy Meter; and the first majorrnfederal assault on education—the National Defense EducationrnAct.rnAs a boy I attended John Kennedy Elementary School,rnwhich was named, I am pleased to say, not for Angle Dickinson’srnparamour but rather for the turn-of-the-century superintendentrnof Batavia schools, a self-consciously Important Manrnwho wrote books on orthography and the “Batavia System” ofrninstruction.rnKennedy yyas sober and pompous; he merited, I am sure, everyrn”Kick Me” sticker that irre^erent yvits pinned to his back,rnbut still, he yvas ours, and a buckram symbol of an age in whichrnBatavians might still organize their own schools and draw uprntheir oyvn curriculum. He yvas a fanatic on the matter of teachingrnlocal history, for as he yvrotc in his history of the HollandrnLand Office: “Crandfather’s chair may be a very humble piecernof furniture, but it is prizx’d beyond all price because it is grandfather’srnchair.”rnDespite the noble efforts of many terrific teachers, grandfather’srnchair is not much more than kindling today, as textbooksrntell of the magnificence and victimhood of every group ofrngrandfathers but our oyvn. Our 13-year-olds can name the presidentrnof South Africa, but don’t knoyv the yvords to “FifteenrnMiles on the Erie Canal.” It’d be nice if they kneyv both, butrngiven that they live 15 miles from the Erie Canal and 8,000rnmiles or one TV screen—yvhich is even farther—from Pretoria,rnone bit of knoyvledge is essential to their citizenship and thernother is useless, rather like being able to list the films of RobbyrnBenson.rnThe New York State legislature mandated not long ago thatrnall schoolchildren in our state be enlightened by “holocaustrneducation.” The Nazi extermination of European Jewsrnwas a ghastly and diabolical episode, but since when is it morernimportant to our children than their own history? Now GovernorrnMario Pataki has signed a bill requiring all districts to teachrnthe Irish potato famine, and soon the school year yvill be yvallto-rnyvall genocide studies, September to June—with the Indians,rnthe only victims yvho have a legitimate claim upon ourrntime, getting the short end of the stick, as they always have.rnSo what we end up yvith is our children being taught the painrnand suffering of every people on earth yvhile they learn nothingrnof their oyvn history: our kids should be getting James FenimorernCooper and Red Jacket and Grover Cleveland—indeed, ifrnAlbany rededicated Martin Luther King Day as I larriet TubmanrnDay, in honor of our neighbor from Auburn, then I’d bernall for it—but none of this can happen if the history of foreignersrnconies to mean niore to a people than their oyvn history.rnOur children are as flies to the Worldwide Web, trapped inrnthe computers that state mandates and the lobbyists of therncomputer-industrial complex are hard-driving doyvn ourrnthroats. And why? So yve can educate our boys and girls to berninterchangeable parts in a vast in-ipersonal—antipersonal—machine.rnSo thev can die for Microsoft. And here I might add,rncontra Bob Dole’s ventriloquists, thank Cod for the teachers’rnunions. They stand and fight with us, with the defenders of localrncontrol, on issue after issue: opposed to school consolidation,rnopposed to year-round schooling, opposed to nationalrnteaching standards, and dead-set against the apple of everyrnRobo-Coi-i’s eye, school vouchers.rn”Ere long, thine every stream shall find a tongue, land of thernmany waters!” exulted the antebellum Neyy York poet CharlesrnFenno Hoffman. But globalism aeknoyyledges no streams, justrna single yvorid-encompassing ocean in yvhich all local flavor,rncolor, even sin, is droyvned.rnIn Batavia, we once had our very own legendary madam, arnlady named Edna, yvho for decades kept a famous brothel onrnJackson Street. Edna yvas the city’s most generous philanthropist:rnshe endoyved the orphanage that occupied the formerrnhome of our railroad baron Dean Richmond; she paid the medicalrnbills of many of our toyvn’s poor; she quietly distributedrnMARCH 1997/13rnrnrn