A Commentary By Debra J. Saunders, Rasmussen Reports, 6/20/10

When activists (who are not necessarily students) were able to delay construction of a UC Berkeley sports center by living in trees for 21 months, there was no review of what went wrong.

When protesters with torches vandalized UC Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s home, there was no review. But when UC police arrested 46 people demonstrating against higher-education cuts by occupying Wheeler Hall on Nov. 20, there were complaints that police overreacted. And so — with authorities, not anarchists in the sights — a review was born.

Last week, UC Berkeley released the 128-page report. In academic fashion, it notes two forces that converted “an animated but essentially non-violent protest into a raw power struggle between demonstrators and police” — without overtly taking sides.

There were officers, who in a “series of over-reactions by insufficiently supervised police” at moments overreacted, intensifying fears among students. Then there were demonstrators, mostly “young, sincere, and emotionally mobile” students, but also “a smaller group” that “set out to instigate confrontations with police” and provoke them “into high-visibility over-reactions that could be used to inflame the crowd and escalate its aggressiveness.”

The review served a useful purpose in that it details the need for campus police to prepare for the worst and, when it occurs, to communicate with demonstrators and other law enforcement personnel who come to their aid.

There are also some heroes in the review, like Dean of Students Jonathan Poullard, who took the initiative to advise Wheeler Hall occupiers via megaphone that if they wanted to leave peacefully, they should sit down before the police came in. “As it turned out,” the report notes, “all the occupiers followed this wise advice.”

Two aspects of the report stand out for me.

First, there’s this dubious theory on the use of riot gear by officers from UC and other departments called to aid the scene: “If the police had not worn riot gear, there never would have been a need for it.”

While the review purports not to take a side on this theory, the review board continues, “We wonder whether it was wise to have some of the mutual aid squads try to move through the crowd in rigid, formal, militaristic formation.”

I object.

For nearly two years, UC delivered energy bars and water to trespassing tree sitters lest activists get hungry or thirsty and fall from a tree. Do not tell me that the university is supposed to take every precaution coddling activists breaking the law, then risk the safety of men and women dispatched to ensure the peace in dangerous hot spots.

Which leads to the other issue — that student protest is practically a major at Berkeley. UC police arrested a professor for cutting the crime scene tape outside Wheeler Hall. Some students told the review board that they ended up at the Nov. 20 protest simply because they wanted to be part of “the Berkeley experience.”

Unfortunately, this means, the review notes, “many students reportedly do not understand that disobedience of campus rules (even quite ‘civil’ disobedience) can affect their academic standing, that it can jeopardize their ability to continue their education here, permanently mar their record, perhaps even prevent them from receiving a degree whose other requirements have been satisfied.

“Moreover, the rules as written are not enforced consistently.”

Not enforced consistently? Hey, it’s news to learn that the rules are enforced at all. University spokesman Dan Mogulof told me that the Center for Student Conduct adjudicates these cases, but the majority of Nov. 20 “cases are still unresolved.”

Please observe: The academic year is over.

What is the penalty for occupying a building? Associated Students President Noah Stern told me, “It is not clear what the penalties are for a violation.” He added that due-process options slow down the system.

Student advocate Kelly Fabian explained in an e-mail that punishment for student violations could range from a “warning with community service to suspensions of varying lengths.” Alas, that doesn’t tell students much. If there is punishment, it is veiled.

I want to make this clear: I support all students’ rights to protest and exercise their First Amendment rights. But students and activists do not have the right to take over an institution that is supposed to be dedicated not to protest, but to higher learning.

If students want to engage in civil disobedience that trespasses on the university’s vital education function, they should be ready to pay a penalty — like cleaning bathrooms for an afternoon. They’re adults. They should know this. Yet the occupiers of Wheeler Hall included a general amnesty for civil disobedience as one of their “demands.” They must think they have a right to dodge consequences.

Mogulof noted that the school wants to “communicate early and often with students about the time, place and manner rules that govern protest demonstrations and expression, to explain the consequences of violating those rules.”

He’s right, but there is a rub: If there are no consequences or no consequences within a meaningful timeframe, there’s not much to explain, is there?

http://capoliticalnews.com/blog_post/show/5453

Even the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) has now objected to the Democrat Party, suing the Democrats and its leadership for “stealing” their party platform and relabeling it as “progressive”.
According to political hotwire and many other sources, CPUSA claims that the entire so-called “new” Democratic agenda is, in fact, the product of a decades-long, painstaking campaign by CPUSA theorists, agitators, and underground subversive cells – which makes it the intellectual property of the Communist Party USA, protected by American copyright laws. “They stole our entire platform, rebranded it ‘progressive’, and claimed it as their own,” declared a CPUSA spokesperson at a press conference in San Francisco. “And we communists say, not so fast! Not in this country anyway, where we still have property rights and the rule of law, thank God! Actually, let me rephrase that…”, which was a comment to undermine God as both the Democrats and Communists have done. The Communist Party representative further explained that government ownership of the auto and financial industries, redistribution of wealth, and free rationed health care have always been among the glorious CPUSA objectives: “We held on to these goals through all the difficult years of factional infighting, purges, denunciations, and heroic espionage on behalf of the Soviet intelligence services.”

According to the article, CPUSA lawyers presented documents to the press showing that the Democratic platform of 2010, almost line-for-line, reiterates the CPUSA platform of 1963. In other words, the Democrats of today are the Communists of yesterday. I recently laid this all out in a commentary called the “Democrat-Communist Manifesto. The socialist takeover of our government is starting to show its vulnerability to reality. We elected Barack Obama as president without looking into his past. The socialist in control of the executive and legislative branches of government have grabbed more government control on the people. Now their push is for control of the courts as Obama appoints judges that carry out his Communist agenda. He has nominated Elena Kagen to become the next lifetime appointment to the United States Supreme Court, even though she has never served one day as a judge. She is a lesbian, who, as Dean of Harvard Law School, forced military recruiters off campus due to her distaste of the “Don’t ask. Don’t tell” policy of the military. She also once wrote, “Americans are more likely to speak of a golden past than of a golden future, of capitalism’s glories than of socialism’s greatness.” While the socialist and communist in America try to re-label what they are really doing, they work unified to the same goal – removing capitalism and God and replacing it with control by the government.

Frank Aquila
Manteca
President of the
South San Joaquin Republicans
mantecarepublicans@yahoo.com

http://www.mantecabulletin.com/news/article/14388/

State Senator Leland Yee, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, wants to bar California from adopting any new material from curriculum changes in Texas, which he and other critics view as right-wing revisionism. Though much publicized, the charge fails to stand up, but some textbooks do need correction. Those would be California textbooks, and this is not a new problem.

“They’re all horrors, and there is no reason for them.” State Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig said that in 1988 about California’s watered-down texts. Honig, a liberal San Francisco Democrat, duly invited scholar Diane Ravitch to revise California’s history curriculum, which had been tasked to instill pride in accredited victim groups.

“Telling publishers that their books must instill pride only guarantees a phony version of feel-good history,” Ravitch wrote. “Publishers, as a result, bend over backward to be positive, whether writing about the genocidal reign of Mao Tse-tung (presumably to avoid offending his admirers) or the unequal treatment of women in Islamic societies (to avoid offending Muslims).”

Texts should be accurate, Ravitch wrote, “but to impose contemporary political requirements on how the events are portrayed only ensures that the history we teach our students is inaccurate and dishonest.” In California, it certainly has been that.

The textbook An Age of Voyages: 1350-1600 showed Sikh founder Guru Nanak wearing a crown instead of a turban, and a beard that was trimmed instead of long, as alert Sikhs pointed out. At the time, the California Department of Education had no mechanism for ensuring that textbooks were “factually accurate.” Little wonder that errors became commonplace.

“Studies have found hundreds of errors in California textbooks,” says the website of the Textbook Trust, a watchdog group. The mistakes include geography, such as the notion that California’s southern border is the Rio Grande. It isn’t, and that river ventures nowhere near the Golden State, whose textbooks also fail to get math right.

A second-grade math text used in 79 schools in California’s capital city of Sacramento contends that five times three equals five. The book, fully approved by the state, is part of a series published by MacMillan/McGraw-Hill and used through the sixth grade. In the nearby Folsom Cordova district teachers have students hunting for errors as part of a learning exercise. The eager fourth-grade students documented 90 errors in the math series, for which the district paid $1.9 million.

So the kids shape up as smarter than the publisher’s fact-checkers and anyone in what the Sacramento Bee calls the “labyrinthian process” of approving the books for the classroom. So do the teachers who are correcting the errors with red pen. Many other state-approved California textbooks could be marked up.

Meanwhile, the “Texas Curriculum Massacre,” (Newsweek ) that so disturbed Sen. Yee and other liberals, is overblown. As David Upton, assistant professor of politics at the University of Dallas, noted, this may not be the best curriculum, but “no one has pointed to a particular significant error of fact.” And contrary to accusations, Upton writes, “the curriculum is replete with specific references to Jefferson, religious freedom, the civil rights movement, and the achievements and struggles of women and minorities.”

These will never be enough to assuage critics on the left, argues Amity Shlaes, of the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. “Whatever lines it inserts about church, state, hip-hop or the Alamo,” writes Shlaes, “the board will not restore true balance. It will merely manage to make the curriculum a little less skewed to the left.” In a more general way, she adds, “the left also hijacked American culture” so the Texas social studies issue makes sense as a “small check on a larger problem.”

Yet another problem lurks in the background, the government education system itself, an unreformable collective farm of ignorance and mediocrity. This system encourages mass purchase of textbooks, with large states like Texas and California setting the pace. The books may be politically correct, and instill pride in Maoists and Muslims, but that is not the same as accurate. That is why Guru Nanak gets a crown instead of a turban, the Rio Grande gets misplaced, and five times three equals five. Call it the stupidity inherent in the system.

Hiding it away on back pages, newspapers across the country tried to keep the nation from the latest bad news about education, news that should have been on front pages everywhere. Both local newpapers, such as The Lawrence Journal-World, and national newspapers, such as U.S.A. Today, barely mentioned the results of  recent national reading tests by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Based on the testing of 270,000 students, the results showed that only one third of students in the three grades tested, fourth, eighth and 12th, were up to profiency standards in reading. Among high school seniors, 36% were proficient, down from 40% in 1998. One third of the students in fourth, eighth and 12th grades can not show even a basic understanding of civics at their grade level. Three out of four fourth graders could not name which part of government passes laws. Half of all 12th graders asked to pick an ally in World War II picked Italy, Germany, or Japan.

“I spent 30 years in the Philadelphia public schools teaching high school. When I began in 1965 the school was integrated and the students in my French class read Victor Hugo and Molière. When I escaped in 1995 there wasn’t a shred of knowledge, decency or honesty left in anyone’s heart, soul or brain, be it administrator, teacher or student. As you well know, 1968 was the cut-off point, like B.C. and A.D. (Before Counter-Culture and After Devastation). You went to bed one night with one set of values in place and you woke up in a strange new world. It was exactly like “The Invasion of the Body Snatcher.” Human beings had mutated over night into apostles of socialized education—the concept that education was a right, free from any attendant responsiblities. This meant caving in to every demand, no matter how outrageous, emanating from the most infantile and hate-filled kids one could possibly imagine. By 1972 the school was entirely Black and firmly entrenched in an irreversible policy of passing the greatest number even if they had no skills. This was presumably some sort of reparation for the past cruelties to Blacks and some sort of redemption for “ racist America who was waging a racist war in Vietnam.” In the classroom, we all began fighting for our survival in the same way—by pandering to the kids, appeasing them and diluting difficult subject matter on their behalf. The behavior in the classroom was out of control. Many teachers knew this was wrong but they put their heads in the sand and never came up for air. Many left the system—there was a mass exodus out of teaching back in the seventies. Sometimes a voice would be raised but the iron curtain of political correctness stifled all attempts to establish honest discourse among “professionals.” It was no longer a profession but a type of dull ritual devoid of meaning. My school was typical of the many once excellent city schools that fell into depravity over the 30 year period.”

“For forty years, leading educators and intellectuals have been saying and writing and teaching that the United States was no better and might even be worse than its enemies, that Western civilization was a mask under which one crime after another has been visited upon the poorer nations of the world, and that good and evil themselves are a matter of perspective, if not mere opinion. Some of the noblest ideas ever framed by the mind of man, including democracy, patriotism, honor, and freedom, have been systematically drained of meaning.”

Recently an acquaintance dropped this site link in an email with a note that it is a progressive group near a military base which got my attention. The Progressive Student Alliance (Pensacola) is active in the area but the fact that the location is encased in brackets means they are either spread out state-wide or across state lines.  This group may be very active in this area which is mostly military (Naval Air Station Pensacola) and a potential pool of members just waiting to be baited. Perhaps my take on these groups is somewhat hard but consider the fact that young minds are just as easily influenced whether they’re civilian or military. Sometimes being away from home is enough to encourage unhealthy alliances with people who appear to be mentors of a good cause but are hard core communists.

A look at this site quickly shows its purpose as the group is not exactly secretive about it; they just present their group not what they’re about but that was hidden in the site links they posted. I loved the pictures of the Israeli Anarchists Against the wall party goers (any guesses on what they’re about?) who look like the bathtub time machine malfunctioned and made them into a cross between 60’s hippie subversives (pardon the redundancy) and Tuareg tribesmen (no offense to the tribesmen).  Frankly if I were to see one of my junior personnel in the company of these people off base I would have to take some notice as the site does not give a physical address. However some of the links the site offers range from progressive supplies (hippie gear) to schools which were even more interesting. One link to a forum discussion is named School of the Americas but required member registration (may have to join soon) to view. Their videos (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8xTOadn1n0&feature=player_embedded#) are about social justice which can be misrepresented with catchy beats and a good picture collage; a very powerful recruitment tool indeed.

If this group does not seem to be a looming threat to the academic influence in these areas look at some of their supporters.  Links to Z-Magazine and South End Press websites will lead you to some of the most radical masters of leftist revolution such as Lydia Sargent and Michael Albert who were best buds with the late uber-evil historian Howard Zinn. Given the kind of radicals mentoring this group base commanders may want to monitor further and prepare for the potential influences of their brand of  ’education’ in relation to operational readiness of personnel.

Anyone who has studied the history of science knows that scientists are not immune to the non-rational dynamics of the herd.

A December 18 Washington Post poll, released on the final day of the ill-fated Copenhagen climate summit, reported “four in ten Americans now saying that they place little or no trust in what scientists have to say about the environment.” Nor is the poll an outlier. Several recent polls have found “climate change” skepticism rising faster than sea levels on Planet Algore (not to be confused with Planet Earth, where sea levels remain relatively stable).

Many of the doubt-inducing climate scientists and their media acolytes attribute this rising skepticism to the stupidity of Americans, philistines unable to appreciate that there is “a scientific consensus on climate change.” One of the benefits of the recent Climategate scandal, which revealed leading climate scientists manipulating data, methods, and peer review to exaggerate the evidence of significant global warming, may be to permanently deflate the rhetorical value of the phrase “scientific consensus.”

More:

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/march/when-to-doubt-a-scientific-consensus/

Make Mine Freedom (1948)

For years Nebraska has been one of the top teams in college football. So it is no surprise when Nebraska Assistant Coach Ron Brown was recruited by Stanford Univ. in California to be interviewed for the head coach position. He didn’t get very far. He was not discriminated against because he is black. Not at liberal Stanford. Brown’s problem at Stanford is that he is a Christian, apparently with rather firm beliefs on matters such as homosexuality and abortion. Said Alan Glenn, Assistant Athletic Director at Stanford, “Brown’s religion was definitely something that had to be considered. We have a very diverse community with a diverse alumni. Anything that would stand out that much is something that has to be looked at.”

Stanford prides itself in being in the vanguard of institutions which value “diversity” and “inclusion” .In fact it helped crystallize the movement to emphasize these ideas when on Jan. 15 , 1987, everyone, in a massive protest , started chanting “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Culture has got to go”, thereby launching the movement known as “multiculturalism.”

The Western canon, the generally accepted list of the greatest books of the West were now attacked as having been written by biased “dead white males” These books are generally based on universalism, the belief that there are universal truths that are potentially available to everybody. What Stanford now embraced was particularism, which says that what one may know is determined by the circumstances of one’s birth. Race, gender, and class became more important than ideas.

From this beginning there flowed out throughout the universities of America a whole new plague of totalitarian horrors, like “diversity”, “sensitivity training”, “political correctness”, “speech codes”, “dormitory re-education,” “deconstructionism”, and “gender feminism,” all under the general umbrella of “multiculturalism.”

That was 15 years ago. Lets take a look at a how it has all has turned out. Offhand, it looks like Stanford better hire every Christian it can find.

The brief comments that begin each section below are from “The Diversity Myth”, an almost definitive critique of multiculturalism by David Sacks and Peter Thiel, two former graduate students at Stanford University. (Independent Institute, $24.95) The book is especially recommended to students who wish to protect themselves from brainwashing by multiculturalists. Included are some other quotes, notably by Robert Bork, former Supreme Court nominee, along with comments by Mr. Magruder in parentheses, prefaced by LM.

(Sections of this article are reprinted with permission from the book , “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance on Campus, by David Sacks and Peter Thiel. Copyright 1998. The Independent Institute , 100 Swan Way , Oakland , CA. 94621-1428;info@independent.org; )

Trustees, congressional representatives, alumni, and the general public have begun to perceive that the great multicultural experiment has brought the very opposite of higher learning. It has brought speech restrictions, a new kind of intolerance known as “political correctness” a hysterically anti-Western curriculum, the increasing politicization of student life, and campus polarization along racial and ethnic lines.

“It is impossible to imagine that academic inquiry flourishes where thought police abound. Indeed, the intellectual apparatus of the 60’s radicals now dominating the universities is built for intellectual oppression, not for inquiry” -Robert Bork

“Of the 55 top-ranked universities in the nation, not a single one requires a course in American history, and only 3 require a course in Western Civilization”-The American Council of Trustees and Alumni

Underneath a glossy veneer of open-ended and utopian rhetoric, multiculturalism depends upon very specific values to operate, and at Stanford the values that inform this process happen to be the radical values of the 60’s. Most of the multicultural faculty and administrators were student activists in the late l960’s.

( LM- Professors who were campus radicals in the 60’s love to begin the semester by bragging to students how idealistic they were in their betrayal of the 40 million people of Southeast Asia. The truth is, although they cloaked themselves in an aura of great moral purpose, the war protestors gave aid and comfort to the enemy, marched under the flag of the Viet Cong, allowed Hanoi to dictate their agenda, and turned their backs on the American soldier when they returned. Now they run the universities, teaching students how to betray the West, and to cover up their earlier betrayal they write history books riddled with lies about the Vietnam War and their role in it.).)

When a stray look can lead to a charge of sexual harassment or an ill-timed joke to a charge of a racial slur, careers and lives are needlessly destroyed. Hapless innocents get thrown out of housing, lose their jobs because of “insensitivity.” or spend years fighting frivolous lawsuits. The multiculturalist hunt for nonexistent “oppressors” who can be held responsible for all of America’s ills leads to the vilification of innocents .

“Said Brown University “sensitivity” consultant Donald Kae, “If you are feeling comfortable or normal then you are probably oppressing someone, whether that person is a woman, or a gay or whatever. We probably won’t rid our society of racism until everyone strives to be abnormal.” (LM- What horse—- !).

The speech code never had to be enforced because it had not really been needed, at least not for the stated reason of combating an epidemic of fighting words and similar abuse. In March 1995, the Santa Clara County Superior Court agreed with the students and found Stanford’s speech code unconstitutional. Because of the ruling, Stanford students can now speak as freely as the residents of neighboring Palo Alto.

(LM- Judge returns basic American freedoms to student victims of multiculturalist tyranny. What a hoot ! Free Students Now from Multiculturalist Oppression! Turn on to Truth! Tune out the lies! Drop Out of Multiculturalism !)

In a widely discussed editorial in “The Stanford Daily,” columnist Andrea Park described the ritual clitorectomies performed in some African cultures but stopped short of condemning the barbaric practice. As a feminist Park wished to condemn the custom; but after much “soul-searching”, Park wrote that she realized she could not judge other cultures by her own standards. “Is it relevant that I, an outsider, may find the practice cruel ? As hard as it is for me to admit, the answer is no. To treat the issue as a matter for feminist outrage would be to assume that one society, namely mine, has a privileged position from which to judge the practices of another.”

(LM- How does one live with such hypocrisy ? This is a perfect example of the moral coma brought about by the cultural relativism embraced by multiculturalists.)

“Radical feminism is the most destructive and fanatical movement to come down to us from the 60’s, it certainly deserves its own place in the halls of intellectual barbarism…women’s studies programs and courses are abysmal swamps of irrational dogma and hatred.” Bork

It is worth noting that all of these efforts have not had a positive impact on the level of AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, or abortions at Stanford, relative to American society at large. More than 100 Stanford women still have unwanted pregnancies each year, of which about 90 percent end in abortion. The resulting abortion rate at Stanford is about twice the national average. And as for AIDS, the rate of death at Stanford is perhaps four to five times that of the relatively “uneducated” society at large .One university residence now even has coed group showers.

(LM- What an inspiring example for American society multiculturalism is setting!)

“It is remarkable how vigorously the modern intellectual defends the descent of popular culture not merely into vulgarity but into obscenity… multiculturalism is barbarism, and it is bringing us to a barbarous epoch.”-Bork

In recent years race relations on campuses have taken a turn for the worse. King’s dream is rarely mentioned and the races remain divided There are even separate commencement ceremonies for Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and African Americans. It is not inconceivable that a minority student, if so inclined, could spend all four years at Stanford without ever eating, living, speaking, or graduating with someone from a different race.

“Multiculturalists have turned Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream into a nightmare. He asked that his children “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” But multiculturalists say, “Judge me by the color of my skin for therein lies my identity and my place in the world.” -Bork

“The result of multiculturalism can only be the fragmentation , resegregation, and tribalization of American life.”- the noted liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

The Western religious tradition seeks to redeem all of humanity, not just select subgroups. The multiculturalists, by contrast, are interested in the rehabilitation only of those of a particular race, gender, class, or sexual preference who happen to share their ideological commitments. Religious Studies 8 , “Religions in America”, devotes whole lectures to Shamanism, the Peyote Cult, and the Kodiak sect, but not one to the Catholic Church.

(LM- Multiculturalism is a massive assault on the Judeo-Christian values of the West at the very time that discoveries in physics and molecular biology are lending new support to natural theology and theism. Leftist academic thugs, however, continue to carry on the spirit of the 60’s by beating up dissenting guest speakers to keep students ignorant of the issues)

“The American university has become a culture of forbidden questions.” Leon Botstein – President of Bard College.

Despite its well-earned reputation as a school with perhaps the most competitive admissions process in the country, classwork at Stanford in many ways no longer demands the intellectual equivalent of sweat. Of all letter grades granted to students, about half are A’s, 39 % are B’s, only 10% are C’s and about 1% are D’s.

(LM- Pay-offs for buying into the multiculturalist agenda. As a college professor on three campuses over l5 years I’d say the true average grade of American students is a C minus. The juxtaposition of inflated grades with declining S.A.T. scores clearly exposes how educators, steeped in the values of the 60’s, are lying to both students and parents.)

“All have won and all must have prizes.” The Dodo Bird in “Alice in Wonderland”.

Western civilization and classical liberal arts education truly are dead, killed off in the same multicultural epidemic that expunged “dead white males” from the reading lists. To be certain, the buildings are well maintained, the lawns are well watered, the football team plays for cheering throngs of fans, the faculty and the staff are well paid, and the students attend classes and receive diplomas. The institution can keep going for a while on autopilot. But the heart of the university’s humanities program – involving the quest for universal truth – has decayed into dust.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
Everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Did we think it only rhetoric when Yeats asked us; “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” In multiculturalism we approach the logical outcome of the campus values of the 60’s- fascism.

Art after Art goes out, and all is Night
See skulking Truth to her old Cavern fled
Mountains of Casuistry heap’d o’er her head!
Philosophy, that lean’d on Heav’n before
Shrinks to her second cause, and is no more
Lo! Thy dread Empire, Chaos ! is restored
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries all. “Duncaid” -Alexander Pope