"Massey-Harris 101"

This book is not a hipper-than-thou book like "Letter to a Christian Nation" - not exactly - although it can be said that this writer wrote for two University of Wisconsin student newspapers. He went to Woodstock (Illinois) and has been to Harvard (Illinois). He once held a very high position in Washington (Illinois, in a tree as a tree surgeon). This book is not designed to impress the left-wing nerds who now dominate "Education," but, first impressions aside, it is a scholarly work that has dug up some eye-opening facts about the roots of our culture of Americanism. The author is a semi-retired Yooper who writes a weekly column for www.RenewAmerica.us. "Qualifications?" While many pundits seem to think that "history" began with the Summer of Love, 1967, this author overheard more history in first grade in a one-roomed school in the 1940s than most people today hear in a lifetime. His main point is that "An attack on your ROOTS is an attack on YOU."

 

Any old tree surgeon could tell you that, and one of the other main points of this book is that the "Youth Revolution" of the 1960s was a copy-cat image of the Nihilism movement in Russia in the 1860s (and "Generation XYZ" knows even less about the American Revolution than the Russian one). Books now take a back seat to the boob tube. Some people actually try to avoid the news like the plague, but as Francis Bacon once predicted.

 

 

This book is so "plain," so different, and so "definitive" that the author's long-range goal is to restore some balance to Big Education, or - whichever happens first - to get the ruler of Red China to swim across the Bering Strait with the Olympic torch between his teeth.

Curtis Dahlgren is semi-retired in the frozen tundra of Michigan's U.P., and his career has had some rough similarities to one of his favorite writers, Ferrar Fenton. In the intro to The Fenton Bible, Fenton said:

"I was in ’53 a young student in a course of education for an entirely literary career, but with a wider basis of study than is usual. . . . In commerce my life has been passed. . . . Indeed, I hold my commercial experience to have been my most important field of education, divinely prepared to fit me to be a competent translator of the Bible, for it taught me what men are and upon what motives they act, and by what influences they are controlled. Had I, on the other hand, lived the life of a Collegiate Professor, shut up in the narrow walls of a library, I consider that I should have had my knowledge of mankind so confined to glancing through a 'peep-hole' as to make me totally unfit for [my life's work]."

Curtis is listed as a University of Wisconsin-Madison "alumnus" (loosely speaking, along with a few other drop-outs including John Muir, Charles Lindbergh, Frank Lloyd Wright and Dick Cheney).