HOME
Message Board
CURRENT COLUMNS
- Editor's Corner
- Blogfest 2005
- Commentary
- Commentary Too
- Down The Middle
- Faulking Around
- Global Warning
- This guy walks into a bar...
- Investing 101
- Faulking Opinions
- Off The Rail
- Words
ARCHIVES
LINKS
CONTACT US
 | |||
This guy walks into a bar and says... - Jan 29, 2006 - Printable Version
- "He has slipped the surly bonds of truth..."
by Ken Shade
If you pay attention to such things, you've noticed that I haven't written an article for The Faulking Truth since September. I have started several articles, and I intend to finish them. However, I haven't been able to. There is a reason for this. Simply put, the reason for this is that my MS has been kicking my butt.
It works like this: I want to go to sleep. I get in bed and get all comfy. I close my eyes and go through my usual ritual of selecting a typical and mundane task, then running through an alphabetical list of all the states and countries I have been to and counting how many of them I have performed that task in.
Here's an example: I have prepared food in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Barbados, Belgium, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico and the United States Virgin Islands.
Usually, long before I get to Vatican City, I have dropped off to sleep.
Now, if I pick the wrong action, like vomiting, I may have to start all over again with a new subject. (I have only flashed hash in Nevada and Oklahoma, so it doesn't take much time to make my mental list.)
Anyway, once I have occupied my mind long enough to allow myself to fall asleep, my MS starts messing with me. Frequently, I have leg spasms that wake me up several times a night. Usually, I have bladder spasms that send me to the bathroom as many as a dozen times. I get about three hours of decent sleep most nights, and this savages my ability to concentrate. I get sleepier by the day, but still can't sleep more than an hour at a time. My head is full of cobwebs 24/7.
I have learned to fake my way through conversations. I phase out on people, but I nod, smile and listen for some cue from the other person as to what the conversation was about before I began to orbit Mars. People can seldom tell that anything is wrong. When I try to do anything that requires focus, though, I am lost.
I have not selected my Medicare prescription drug plan because the words on the government forms I received start to swim around before my eyes moments after I start trying to read it.
I have not started taking Avonex injections, which I need very much, because I cannot figure out who I am supposed to get them from, even though I have a prescription.
I start important letters and emails to people I dearly love, and they sit in the "out box" for months on end because I can't get more than a few words down at any given sitting.
I get lost in my own neighborhood.
I am surrounded by Post-it notes that say things like "call Biogen," "pay credit cards," "send thank-you notes," "investigate 529 accounts," "fix Anthony's bike" and "call about hotel implosion." These notes have been up so long the glue has given out, and I've had to re-post them with Scotch tape. (I just accidentally typed "Scotch rape," but I caught it.)
I forget names, including, on one terrible occasion, my own.
I attempted to eat a granola bar without first removing the wrapper.
I read novels paragraph at a time.
I start articles for The Faulking Truth on subjects that require research and deep thought, but I do not finish them.
If I try to finish them enough times without success, I get depressed. That makes the whole problem worse.
If I do accomplish something, it takes me a few days to recover.
This is a frustrating state of affairs, but I tell you about it so I can tell you something else.
I have been becoming increasingly aggravated as today has progressed. The more upset I got, the more I wanted to vent my feelings in a new article. Finally, I got so worked up that I took a Vivarin and sat down here to write. I'm going to finish this if I have to spend the next week twitching in a puddle of my own urine. I'm going to finish this because I've been pissed off about today's irritating topic for twenty years.
Today is the anniversary of the Challenger explosion. When I wasn't reading (18 pages of a Mishima novel before I realized that I had no idea what I was reading about), washing clothes, preparing dinner for my kids, trying to post a Quote of the Day or attempting a nap, I was watching television. I usually watch The History Channel, CNN, C-Span, ESPN or FOX News. (FOX News is my video grotesque, a Bosch painting that speaks.) Most of these channels had at least one story, today, about the accident. Some had several.
This is what my day sounded like:
BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...Christa McAuliffe. BLAH, BLAH...Christa McAuliffe...BLAH, BLAH! BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...teacher in space...BLAH, BLAH. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...teacher in space...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...while her parents looked on in horror... BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...while her students watched in horror...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...Christa McAuliffe...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...teacher in space...BLAH, BLAH...teacher in space...teacher in space...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...Christa McAuliffe and six other astronauts...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...school teacher Christa McAuliffe...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...chosen out of thousands... BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...Reagan honored the seven...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...slipped the surly bonds of Earth...BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH, BLAH...Christa McAuliffe.
Even as I write this, with The History Channel on in the next room to help me stay awake, they're firing up a show called "Failure is Not an Option 2: Beyond the Moon." Guess who the person they showed during the intro was? If you said "Christa McAuliffe," give yourself a Moon Pie.
Spellchecker is trying to change "Christa" to "Christ," which seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the day.
Mind you, I have no problem with Christa McAuliffe. While it saddens me that she is the apparent Mick Jagger of mission 51-L, while the other six astronauts are relegated to eternal Bill Wyman status, I have nothing against her. I know it is not her fault that she has become almost deified. Besides, had I been a teacher at the time, I would have applied for the program, too, and I would have been plenty jazzed if I had been selected.
What I have a problem with is that everybody seems to have forgotten how she got there.
That's what I have had a problem with for twenty years, and it is the reason I have spent the last three hours and eighteen minutes writing this article to this point.
Early in the made-for-TV movie that was the Reagan campaign, he began trying to sell the public on the idea that there was an "education crisis." Of course, he wasn't the first politician to assert this, nor was he the last. People on the Right and the Left love to say this. It's like "We only use ten percent of our brains," "Full moons make people act nutty," or "Suicides peak at Christmas." It isn't true, but it's said so often that it has come to be taken as fact. If you say any of those things, or if you say "We are falling behind the rest of the world in education," people will not question you at all.
Allow me to digress for a moment from the mainstream of tonight's screed to point out one reason that the terrifying "education crisis" is a myth.
First of all, the people who rely most heavily on this notion are people who want to gain, or retain, a political office. The people who place second in being invested in an education crisis are single-issue fanatics selling snake oil to cure everything that ails us. The method most often used by both sets to make their point is comparing test scores. They set the scholastic test scores in mathematics and science next to each other and compare them as if they were arrived at in the same way. When they do this, and the USA comes out lower than other developed nations, they point to it and scream about how we are failing our children and our nation by allowing them to be surpassed in vital areas of learning.
What they don't mention, or are unaware of, is that they are comparing apples and oranges. Every single nation that places ahead of the United States in test scores differs from us in one, or both, of two important ways:
1) They take the approach of giving the kids what we would call a college education in high school. Then, after the murderous rigors of such a high school, students go to universities which are a day at the beach, compared to American universities. By the time college is over, their students are no more advanced than American ones. They just got slammed earlier than we did. Japan is a prime example of this.
2) Before comprehensive tests are ever given, these nations siphon off the bottom twenty percent of the student body and shuttle them off into trade schools. The academic bottom feeders never get a chance to bring the average down because they aren't in high school with the kids who can cut it. Imagine the biggest losers and the least academic twenty percent in your school having their test scores dropped from the overall average. The guys who spent four years in vo-tech would never take the test. The guys in vo-ag would never take the test. They guy whose proudest achievement in high school was the enormous bong he made in pottery class would not take the test. The glue sniffers, the lunch money thieves, the stoners, the paste eaters, the paint huffers, the emotionally disturbed, the thugs and the guys who sneak off to the bathrooms to drub their dings would never take the test. Imagine how good your school would look.
In my high school, if we had dropped the scores of everybody named "Wishon," we'd have looked like the M.I.T. of the southern plains.
Our biggest "mistakes" are trying to get everybody ready for college, and administering the scholastic test to people who would have been written off after eighth grade by other countries.
The digression is over. Let's get back to Reagan.
Ronald Reagan truly believed that we had an education crisis, and he believed he knew what would remedy it. One of the first acts of his new administration was to commission a panel of experts to study education in America, and issue recommendations about what should be done to improve the situation. Being Reagan, he assumed the expert panel would suggest more prayer in schools, paddling, less sex, less integration and a return to the Three "R's" (Ridin' Ropin' and 'Rasslin')
What he got instead was a report entitled "America at Risk." (Professional academics are big on the education crisis, too. It makes the money flow their way.)
The report recommended smaller classes, hiring more teachers, paying teachers more, expanding computer access, building more schools, magnet schools, etc. It recommended a lot of things that cost a lot of money.
Reagan, busy telling us that we can eliminate taxes, balance the budget and place an ICBM in every back yard would have none of this spending crap. So, he came up with an alternative; a television promo, really. He said we should choose a teacher to fly on the shuttle. He said that it would make everybody realize what "heroes" teachers are. He said it would raise the prestige of the teaching profession, thus attracting a better class of people to it. These new teachers, thoroughly infused with passion by watching one of their peers in a weightless environment, would do a better job of teaching our children.
I'm not making this up. Remember, this is a man who thought the answer to teen pregnancy was "morality patrols." Morality patrols were to be cars with speakers affixed to the top. Trained government employees were supposed to drive these cars around lovers' lanes, blaring Bible verses and telling the people in the foggy-windowed cars to go home and cut that sex stuff out.
And so, the "teacher in space" program was born. The lucky teacher selected would soar into legend and solve our education crisis all at the same time.
Well, it didn't work out that way, did it?
In the first few hours after the explosion, being an optimistic sort of guy, I thought I saw a possible silver lining in the devastating dark cloud of what had happened. I thought: "Well, maybe people will look at how all this came to be, and realize that Reagan is a fraud."
Then, I saw Reagan on TV. He was consoling the families. He was consoling the nation. He was doing a masterful job of reading what was put in front of him. He looked grim. He looked concerned. He looked like a man of steely resolve. (After all, that's what his script called for.) He was quoting "High Flight." He used the opportunity to step to center stage and play God, all the while making people forget that the Christa tragedy was his fault. Her death was no more tragic than that of the others on that flight, but you wouldn't have known that from what R.R. and the TV talking heads said. Her deification began that week, and Reagan reaped the benefits. It was as if I had persuaded a small child to go base jumping, then got to look presidential praising the kid's bravery when he splattered on the sidewalk. It was cynical beyond description.
I have been waiting twenty years to hear some talking head come out and say: "The teacher in space was Reagan's P.R. gesture, and it blew up in his face...literally!"
I haven't heard it. I haven't heard it because TV people admire the skilled use of their medium, and don't care much if it's being done by a mendacious opportunist. I haven't heard it because, like the war in Iraq, we were made to feel that asking questions about the program was tantamount to spitting on the graves of those who died that day.
It wouldn't still bother me so much if we didn't have a president [sic] who had taken Reagan's ruthless exploitation of tragedy to truly depraved depths. Wherever there is death, he leaps to the lectern to turn it to his political advantage, even when the deaths are his fault. He rants about how anybody who opposes the war is not respecting or supporting our soldiers, yet he has shown his respect and support by sending them to die in a war he lied to create; a war that seemingly has no clear objective. He doesn't care how many die because each death is another opportunity to claim that ending his insane policies would be relegating that soldier's sacrifice to the status of "meaningless." "Keep the war going, or these men will have died in vain." He flies to Iraq on Thanksgiving to be photographed holding an actual, plastic, movie prop turkey, then flies home, leaving the troops with their MRE's.
He claims that Iran's nuclear...excuse me...nuc-u-lar weapons program is cause for us to take action against them, when his threats against Iran are the very reason they jump-started their nuclear weapons program in the first place.
He terrified and enraged the entire Arab world by invading a country that did not attack us and using the word "crusade" to describe our mission. This made Hamas more appealing to Palestinian voters. Now, Bush claims we need to redouble our efforts, our crusade, because Hamas won the election.
Every tragedy is another location shoot for his reality show. He went to New Orleans, a city where his administration was an integral part of the overall breakdown of relief efforts, and set up generators so he could go on television and claim that the power was back on.
He appears before backdrops that say "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED," and "Helping America's Children," all the while giving lie to the slogans by what he actually does. Sometimes, he appears before backdrops that say things like "Supporting America's Workers" because he knows people don't pay much attention to the actual complexities of labor policy.
The Challenger tragedy reminds me of all this because it reminds me of the advent of the era wherein even the appearance of truth ceased to matter. Politicians have always lied, but at least they usually tried to be selective about when to lie. They felt such ruthless and prolific dishonesty would turn the public away. With Reagan, all those considerations fell by the wayside.
So far, the GOP is the only American political party to realize that Marshall McLuhan was right. Things no longer appear on television because they are important. They are important because they appear on television. Facts only become facts when they come out of that box, and if comes out of that box, it MUST be fact. Bush is an idiot, but his administration is cunning enough to know what they can now get away with.
Reagan handed them the ball, and they ran with it.
In the final analysis, those seven people, who wanted to advance the cause of science, in their terrible loss, wound up advancing a far less noble cause.
I have been working on this short piece for almost six hours. I've taken two Vivarin, had two bottles of vitamin water and taken off my clothes so I'd be cold enough to stay alert. The article is done, but I don't know how good it is. I can't concentrate well enough to go back and read it. I know it will probably be Wednesday before I am back to my usual low standard of "feeling good."
I also know this is probably futile, and not really good for my body, but I just had to get it out of my system.
Maybe, if enough of us do things like this, there are a few other things...people... we can get out of our collective system.
Voice your opinion on our message board (you don't have to sign up to post).