The other day I heard a small snippet of an old Steve Allen-Jayne Meadows's "Meeting Of The Minds Show". For the 90 percent of you who have never heard of the show it was usually aired on a late weekend night, in a time slot where huckster Ron Propeil would be hawking a "set it and forget it" oven. Meeting of The Minds featured Allen and Meadows playing historical characters, usually sitting around a table and discussing various events in their lives that showed up in the history books.
My first viewing of the show, back in the 70's, produced a mixed reaction. My own college education in early bloom, I though it noble that these two entertainers were trying to bring a small measure of knowledge to viewers of Gilligan's Island and Three's Company. And, honestly, I detected just a little arrogance in the Allen-Meadows effort....catering to a yen to show off their own intelligence to the masses. (Allen was a Mensa genius).
However, last week's sampling of the Meeting of the Minds dialogue proved that Allen and Meadows dared not go too far in educating the public. For example, when Ben Franklin appeared in this 20th century setting, Jane and Allen simply re-raked Franklin's most commonly known facts....his electric experiments with a kite, his Poor Richard's almanac, with its wise quotes, and Franklin's admirable effort to bring the Continental Congress together long enough to declare our independence.
Those were all good things for an educated public to know. And Allen-Meadows should be applauded for their effort. But my reaction to their efforts this week, after my own four decades of scholarship, was that their efforts were superficial, barely scratching the surface as to who Franklin was. Do we have to know more? Well, yeah we do. We have to have far more pillars of knowledge about Franklin if he is to stand up against...oh, say a liberal challenge of his historic worth. We have to convince people that, though failing human, one of our founders served nobly. And the only way you do that is to know his frailties. After all, it does no good to leave old Ben stuck there on the page of history. We have to walk about his world a little to understand he and his times.
Let's look at old Ben's failings. Ben was a womanizer of the first order. He treated his wife shabbily. He was disenfranchised from his own son. And during his time in Paris, trying to coax France into aiding our revolution with troops and money, Franklin spent 90 percent of his time bonking old French ladies....to his diplomatic partner, John Adam's, disgust. Eventually Ben's bonking the French ladies won us a French allied effort that led to our independence.
Why do we need to know Franklin's sins? Again, so we can give him a bit of slack. So that we understand he was flesh and bone just like us.....making his contributions to this country ever more meaningful, despite his sins!
And, boys and girls, that's what education is. The more you learn the more you realize just how much you do not know. An education keeps a person from being an ignorant ass whose brain can never be penetrated...who can never surrender his own ignorant notions for a few splinters of truth!
The most tragic misinformation campaign of late has been much of America's willingness to tear down statues of Robert E. Lee. Good lord! If America only understood the nobility of the man! If anyone took the time to study the man...and learned how he was heartbroken to see his native Virginia secede. Or if America only knew how even Union troops admired that grisly old general! One gets to know Bobby Lee and one feels a bit ashamed that they will never be as admirable a human being.
So thanks Steve Allen and Jane Meadows. Thanks for giving me fodder for thought in these winter of my years, when I have attained sufficient education to understand just how much I don't know. That is the only level of education that is worth a damn!
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