RUSH: This is Anastasia in Wappingers Falls, New York. Nice to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. How are you?
RUSH: Fine. Thank you.
CALLER: I just called to say that I went to Cardinal Spellman High School. I was in Sonia Sotomayor’s 1972 graduating class. And when Senator Leahy said that, I got so angry —
RUSH: Wait a second. I need to set this up. Did you know her?
CALLER: Yes, I knew her. We were acquaintances, but we weren’t friends.
RUSH: All right.
CALLER: It was a class of 500.
RUSH: What happened at the hearings today is that Pat Leahy, the chairman of the judiciary committee, said that poor old Sonia, poor old Sonia, she had to work so hard, her parents had to work so hard, she didn’t have access to the classics. She went to Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx. Here’s somebody who went to school with her. Talk.
CALLER: Yeah. So Cardinal Spellman High School, to set it up, was a school that took above-average kids from New York City to go there, and the tuition at the time wasn’t very expensive. I grew up in Washington Heights in a fifth floor walkup, so my parents could afford to send me there. Actually, for two of the four years I worked part time so I could pay my tuition to go to this school because of certain circumstances that happened, but a lot of the kids–
RUSH: It sounds like you’re qualified to be on the Supreme Court. You’ve had a hard life, a fifth floor walkup. Do you have empathy for people?
CALLER: I have empathy. (laughing)
RUSH: You’re qualified for the court!
CALLER: Yeah, I guess so. My kids would say so, anyway. My kids would, but Cardinal Spellman was a wonderful school and she had the same curriculum as I did and other kids that went there and we had Shakespeare and Bronte and all the classics and she had to take everything that everybody else did. She was number one in the class, she was the smartest one there, and her academic achievements were wonderful, but the school was filled with Sonia Sotomayors, and myself, and that’s what made it such a great school, too, is that —
RUSH: All right, you are telling me that you had to take Shakespeare?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: That you had to read Emily Bronte?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Maybe those are not the classics. Maybe the classics are Marx and Hegel. Did you read Karl Marx at Cardinal Spellman —
CALLER: No, we didn’t. It was a —
RUSH: Well, that’s it! That’s the answer. The right classics. She wasn’t exposed to Marx. She wasn’t exposed to Hegel. That didn’t happen ’til she got to Princeton.
CALLER: No. Wasn’t in Cardinal Spellman, that’s for sure. She was very well steeped in the classics coming from Cardinal Spellman, which is a wonderful school to this day.
RUSH: I’ve got the current curriculum for Cardinal Spellman. Steve Gilbert at Sweetness-Light.com just sent, I’m printing it out now. Hang on — don’t go away out there, Anastasia.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: Let’s see. Just waiting for this lightning fast printer to spit it out. Here it is. All right. Here is the summer reading for September 2009 class of 2010. So if you’re going to summer school at Cardinal Spellman High School, where you and Sonia Sotomayor graduated —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — same class, 1972.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Tests will be given on all reading assignments during the first week of classes.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Government and Economics, A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr. Required reading. Political Science, 1984 by Orwell. AP American History, Lies My Teachers Told Me, Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James Loewen. AP Politics and Government, Hardball by Chris Matthews. And The Nine by Jeff Toobin. Let’s see. You gotta read The Color Purple, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and Heart of Darkness. Required reading Cardinal Spellman this year. Now, here are requirements for graduation for all Cardinal Spellman High School students, and I guess this is current. Four years of religion, four years of English, four years social study, four years phys ‘ed, three years math, three years science, two years foreign language, one year of art-music, and a half year of health. Let’s see, for New York state regents diploma, two years of foreign language — well, I don’t specifically see the classics on this list here —
CALLER: No, but I was in 1972 —
RUSH: I know. I know. I was looking to see if they were still there and I don’t —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: The specifics are not mentioned, but would you call Orwell a classic?
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: Okay, Orwell is a classic. Is Chris Matthews a classic?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Jeff Toobin a classic?
CALLER: No.
RUSH: Let’s see. Color Purple, new classic. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, a classic?
CALLER: I guess so.
RUSH: No. No, no, no, no, no. That’s where you learn about Hillary, though.
CALLER: Right. But in 1972 it was a little bit different, and you were given more classics. Even my daughter who is 16 in the high school up here doesn’t have any classics. She’s in AP English.
RUSH: Everything was different in 1972.
CALLER: That’s true.
RUSH: But in high school, I graduated in ’69, and I remember, we had an English lit teacher, classics, she worked for a guy or she studied under a guy who made a whole bunch of films that they showed in class. I forget his name, he’s a big guy out in California, big education guy, and her doctoral thesis was on the 250 minor characters of Shakespeare. And this woman was our teacher. I’m 17 and 18 and we were reading Beowulf. I hated it. But we had to read this stuff. The idea that a New York high school was not teaching that stuff, and a little high school in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, had on its curriculum is just a little hard to believe. But we have the answer now, Anastasia has confirmed they didn’t teach Marx and Hegel.