Sunday, August 9, 2009
You Mean it's not Whiteface? You Sure?
Garbage In, Garbage Out...
Just as it was true for code monkeys creating the first GUIs, the concept that bad education leads to bad understanding rears its ugly head once more in Gene Healy's recent op-ed piece for the Washington Examiner. Only this time, the coming Revolution is a hydra of youth-core extremists pounding on tables and shouting down dissent in a desperate plea to get someone, anyone to listen.
We often forget that the young voters are, in fact, young; they are headstrong, stubborn, convinced of their righteousness, and unshakeable in their convictions. For today, at least. Tomorrow, the focus may be back on Gossip Girl, who knows. But using this mercurial demographic as a basis for both an election and a party position is extremely dangerous, rather akin to playing with fire in the southern California foothills--ideas that nobody cared about in the first place get passed along so fervently due to insta-media outlets like Twits and MyFace that the "old guard" of people over age 30 are simply taken aback by their ferocity.
Seeing this explosion of effort (which is all actually quite effortless, thanks to said above insta-media), the "fuddy duddies" rally around whatever makes them look the most popular, like the latest starlet with one side of her head shaved--in the pale light of morning, these elder statesmen look simply ridiculous for having followed the whims of children. But oh-hum, these children grow up, and become "activists," angry (and now bitter, thanks to adulthood) partisans who will smear anyone or anything across the information superhighway that gets in the way of "their" candidate. Shock and awe is not just a military campaign, it seems, anymore.
So in reality, what we are dealing with is not the fallout from the miseducation of the American youth, but the radicalization of the American Memory of Youth, that wistful remembrance of better days when all these stuffy concepts and theories about jobs, economic recovery, auto manufacturers and endless option-ARM loans could be boiled down into one single defining statement that few alive today actually spoke--We Shall Overcome. Overcome... what? That's generally never answered.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
An Education-Free World at Last...
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Poetry Night: Echoes from the Past...
Gain by degrees huge tracts of land,
Till Neptune, with one general sweep,
Turns all again to barren strand.
The multitude's capricious pranks
Are said to represent the seas,
Breaking the bankers and the banks,
Resume their own whene'er they please.
Money, the life-blood of the nation,
Corrupts and stagnates in the veins,
Unless a proper circulation
Its motion and its heat maintains.
Because 'tis lordly not to pay,
Quakers and aldermen in state,
Like peers, have levees every day
Of duns attending at their gate.
We want our money on the nail;
The banker's ruin'd if he pays:
They seem to act an ancient tale;
The birds are met to strip the jays.
"Riches," the wisest monarch sings,
"Make pinions for themselves to fly;"
They fly like bats on parchment wings,
And geese their silver plumes supply.
No money left for squandering heirs!
Bills turn the lenders into debtors:
The wish of Nero now is theirs,
"That they had never known their letters."
Conceive the works of midnight hags,
Tormenting fools behind their backs:
Thus bankers, o'er their bills and bags,
Sit squeezing images of wax.
Conceive the whole enchantment broke;
The witches left in open air,
With power no more than other folk,
Exposed with all their magic ware.
So powerful are a banker's bills,
Where creditors demand their due;
They break up counters, doors, and tills,
And leave the empty chests in view.
Thus when an earthquake lets in light
Upon the god of gold and hell,
Unable to endure the sight,
He hides within his darkest cell.
As when a conjurer takes a lease
From Satan for a term of years,
The tenant's in a dismal case,
Whene'er the bloody bond appears.
A baited banker thus desponds,
From his own hand foresees his fall,
They have his soul, who have his bonds;
'Tis like the writing on the wall.
How will the caitiff wretch be scared,
When first he finds himself awake
At the last trumpet, unprepared,
And all his grand account to make!
For in that universal call,
Few bankers will to heaven be mounters;
They'll cry, "Ye shops, upon us fall!
Conceal and cover us, ye counters!"
When other hands the scales shall hold,
And they, in men's and angels' sight
Produced with all their bills and gold,
"Weigh'd in the balance and found light!"
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.