What the Hell Is Wrong?

Do you wonder?  I used to, but I don't anymore.  I know.  We are wrong.  The problem is that we think we are right.  Not only do we think we are right; we believe, against all the evidence piling up before us that we are right, as individuals, as communities, as a nation.  And, we have every reason, we think, to believe we are right.  Ten years of war and waste.  Ten??  Try fifty since Vietnam.  Four(?) years of darn near depression caused by a few thousand at most greedy and unprincipled bankers and the complicity of another few thousand  or so careless, stupid or greedy politicians and regulators.  A country full of politicians who cannot agree on the time of day, and children who from the age of reason onwards believe they know everything; children who cannot read, write or think because we have decided teaching them how to do those things isn't necessary. Children who are parents and parents who are children, to put not too fine a point on it.  Finally, public perversion promoted as virtue and codified in law.

The other day I  briefly took part in an online conversation about education these days, such as it is.  Some folks I know were discussing the changes in grade school curricula in some of the school districts in places near where they lived.  It seems that the districts decided it is no longer necessary for teachers to concern themselves with teaching cursive writing to children.  All of them have or will have computers and be more familiar with keyboards than pens and pencils.  I joined them and commented on my mother and aunt, the former who was able to write well and clearly, type 120 words a minute and using Pittmann could take dictation with the speeed and accuracy of a court reporter.  Her sister's hand was indistinguishable from the book illustrations of Palmer.

Both had only grade school educations but were more learned, better educated and more prepared for life as an adult than most college graduates today.

Yesterday I read something that caused me to blink, then shut my eyes and shook my head in disbelief.  I did not think such stupidity could be assembled in one place and kept together in that place for long enough to do harm.  You see I had a theory about stupidity; that it was incapable of binding itself into large masses  (being too stupid so to do) , of attraction and accretion if you will, like clumps of matter, bits of atoms and molecules, slowly building galaxies over time.  I was wrong.  It was when I began to look at children these days more or less as a disinterested, distanced observer that I began to revise my theory about stupidity; children are the products of education as one might say stars are what gravity builds and education has become stupid.

It was when I began to notice the increase in news reports of children forming mobs and attacking citizens in the street, beating them into hospitals and then disappearing that I started to doubt my theory; or the other reports of mobs of children invading subways and buses, stores and malls for robbery and mayhem sprees.  These are what our schools produce, the consequences of stupidity.  These are the result of our education system; ignorance and bestial behavior on a large scale, terror.

Stupidity has built something ugly in our children, stupidity realized in the form of educational practice and policy; a massive life sucking black hole of stupidity drawing us all into destruction, not building but tearing apart everything which comes near to it.   Nothing shines in the galaxies built by stupid educators.  All is distorted and the light is destroyed.  Well, not quite destroyed.  Each child is, rather like a mini black hole, rendered incapable of escaping its own well of stupidity and shedding its own spectrum on the rest of creation.

Do please take the time to read this article. It should make you laugh, cry and scream with anger and frustration. The frame of mind, the incomprehensible stupidity, of the people responsible for this bleak "comedy" the author describes is not limited to the University of California system, nor to colleges and universities.  It can be found repeated in high schools and grade school systems all over the country. 

If there is one paragraph in this thing which is bone chillingly frightening it is this:
"UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.” Training computer scientists to compete with the growing technical prowess of China and India, apparently, can wait. More pressing is guaranteeing that students graduate from UCSD having fully explored their “identity.” Why study Cervantes, Voltaire, or Goethe when you can contemplate yourself? “Diversity,” it turns out, is simply a code word for narcissism."

Our "diversity" will be our death.  "Snuff out" is the operative phrase here in regard to what this idiocy represents.  It is nothing less than the death of our civilization. The cancer of narcissism has infected us with us.


As Pogo said, and I love to repeat:  "We have met the enemy and it is us."  Truer words, etc...

You have read what I suggested  you read and you have shaken your head in disbelief.  While you are still dazed and reeling may I hit you again?  The referee you see hasn't sent me to a neutral corner.  Here, then, my knockout punch.  Governor Gerry "Moonbeam" Brown of California has just signed into law a bill which mandates all textbooks and other educational materials in California schools "cover the contributions of sexual minorities" in our history.  I will refrain from any Maureen Dowd styled snarkiness regarding what I might think are the peculiarly, or exclusively lesbian, bi-sexual, gay or trans-gendered or other sexual minorities' (shudder) contributions to our common weal.  But I wonder, if any there may have been, why it is necessary to identify the contributor of same by the use which he, she or it makes of its genitalia.  If there is a more stupid idea in the history of the species I am open to suggestions as to what it may be.  It borders on child pornography.  What questions might run through the mind of an otherwise innocent seven year old child (if any still exist) who hears that it was Poet A, who was a lesbian, who wrote this lovely series of poems.  Would a young hand be raised to ask what in the nature of lesbianism causes one to write such things?  Would they wonder whether or not one should become a lesbian if one wishes to write poems, or if one is a lesbian for desiring to write poems?  Would a teacher be required to mention such things?


Professor Anthony Esolen of Providence College has written about the abyss we seem so eager to hurl ourselves and our children into with much more eloquence and quite a bit more insight than I can possibly claim.  This morning I read another piece of his in Crisis magazine.  He identifies the problem as a failure of the culture to support any sort of moral development in our youngsters.  We have emptied homes of mothers and fathers, replacing them with social workers, drive by dads, teenaged Moms, liberated single mothers, over worked and over-wrought grand parents and 500 channels of TV.  And, we have emptied our schools of everything, it seems but diversity, tolerance and something that the schools in California call "equity".

As Professor Esolen says in his good and earnest essay: "The first thing to do is to cripple the family."  Anyone who has not seen that as being the result of most of what is happening in our schools, courts and legislative chambers for many years, and resulting in chaos and aimless pursuits all over the land has no eyes.

I know a young woman who is an unwed mother.  She works .  Her mother takes care of the child.  The child's father is "somewhere" and comes by to see his child "sometimes".  She would like: a tattoo.  She thinks: that the men in another city nearby are sexy.  She is not unusual at all.

Last week as I stood in line at the bank I heard a bit of conversation among a young lady and two young men.  It was difficult to tell which was which, except for the soprano tone of the lady.  Profanity punctuated the speech of all three,  tattoos coverd most of their exposed skin...of which there was a lot.  various bits of metal pierced other bits of skin.  They spoke about another young lady who had a child, and another young man who was the father of the child.  He had the child with him.  They said it was foolish of him to think he would get custody, or be allowed to keep the child since he was merely on furlough from prison.  Furthermore, he is father to five other children by three other women.  This is not unusual.

I know another young woman who is a college student.  She studies quite hard.  She loves her mother and father, her siblings and her faith.  She wants to graduate and attend a university where she will eventually get her Ph.D.  Part of her studies include learning Latin, by God!  She is not interested in meeting sexy men in a city nearby.  She IS unusual.

What the hell is going on?  And, why aren't you doing anything about it?

Something Simple, Something Cool

The sun has almost set on the hottest day of the year and I have opened the window in this small and stuffy room.  My upper lip is dripping, and my shirt is wet, but I'm a happy guy.  I done good at supper and also fortunately I put the A/C in the window this morning and our bedroom is a cool and dry 76.  Not a bird peeps outside, but one or two young children laugh and play in the neighbor's pool a street over.  It's a nice sound, and makes up for the lack of song bird evening serenades.

Back to supper, though.  Today was my turn preparing supper.  Last night I announced that I was going to make something simple, something cool.  I was going to make a tuna salad. Immediately Mariellen reminded me that I'd have to keep raisins and apples, which I have been adding lately, out of the salad.  That's because I'm not supposed to eat fruit with my main courses or my stomach will explode.  Rats!!!  And Kathy very quietly wondered if I would be using regular mayonnaise.  I knew that meant she'd prefer I use something else.

"Why don't you make something using the herbs in our garden, Dear?" said Mariellen smiling her most lovely wife smile at me.  I had my orders.  I didn't just fall off the truck.

So, before the temperature had reached the melting point of lead, I wandered out to the patch and snipped the tender tops off some green things: parsley, dill, tarragon and basil.  I got enough to satisfy me, and wandered back inside, washed the plants and put 'em in the fridge.  Then I grabbed three cans of tuna and opened them, squeezing the water into a little bowl for Benedict, Kathy's deaf white cat who lives downstairs and whom I need to like me.  He's a freak for water from the tuna can.  I'm waiting for the thank you note.

Next I took a lemon the size of Pluto out of the fridge and zested it, adding it to the tuna I had turned into a nice bowl and squished into little pieces, the juice, too went into the bowl with the tuna and zest.  Three stalks of celery and one onion both chopped into micron sized bits joined the growing mess.

I stood back and wondered what next.  I looked in the fridge and saw sour cream, Greek yogurt and real Hellman's calorie charged fat filled mayonnaise.  Guess what?  I came down half way between Kathy and me and mixed up some yogurt and mayo adding it to the bowl full of stuff.  Finally I chopped the weeds up and plopped them on top, mixed like I was making haroses for Passover and put it in the fridge until supper.

Kathy has cut up a little red onion and washed and spun some lettuce.  I had a couple of red tomatoes.  Mariellen fished two brand new cucumbers out of the patch.  There was a loaf of good solid bread, and soft butter.  So I assembled as they say on NPR, "plating up" the stuff in my best fancy casual style, and whistled them into the Dining Room.  Oohs and aahs told me I had done good...but I knew it all along.  The dishes were so clean after eating we just put them back in the cubbard.  (I really do know how to spell that word.)

Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.  The last thing I gave the mess of stuff was a blast of Dijon mustard.  I wondered about horseradish, and maybe I'll try that next.

"Did you write down your recipe, Dear?" she asked.  "Nope."  "Maybe you should in case we want to do this again."  Maybe.  Yeah, I've got your maybe.  Here it is:

Something Simple, Something Cool

3 can chunk white tuna in water
i/4 c. chopped fresh dill
1/4 c chopped fresh parsley
1t chopped fresh basil
1t chopped fresh tarragon
1 lge onion chopped
3 stalks celery chopped
1 lemon zested with juice added
1t Dijon mustard
1/4-1/2 c mayonnaise
1/4-1/2 c Greek yogurt.

Squeeze and drain liquid from Tuna, break into small pieces in large bowl.  Add all other ingredients.  Mix well.  Cover and let sit in fridge for at least an hour while flavors blend.  Serve on beds of lettuce or mixed greens with assorted raw vegetables and good bread.