Upon A Certain Day In May

In which Y'r Int'r'g'l'ct'c Ethn'gr'ph'r interprets the recurrence of the mostly hollow genuflections toward the never-resolved events of that day and that week; time will tell, it seems that week was a pivotal one in the counter-cultural movement. I should note that about a dozen students were injured that morning at UNM, most with bayonets; no Guardsmen reported any injuries. Besides, Haymarket is just sooooo Gilded Age. nest paw?

Last Friday was the anniversary of that bloody day in 1970 when the Ohio National guard opened fire on a gathering of protesting students at a small, obsure state school in Ohio called Kent State University, killing four and wounding a half-dozen more, with random fire from more than 100 yards from the demonstrations. The Guardsmen were NEVER under ANY direct, imminent threat of danger to justify opening fire. No one got close enough. No one was ever punished or even held accountable for the murders at Kent State that day.

(On Friday, May 8, 1970, just four days after the bloody events at Kent State University, and with the campuses of America often literally aflame with turmoil for which they were ill-prepared understand, much less quell, the New Mexico National Guard retook the UNM Campus from the hippies.)

In Albuquerque, at UNM, the warm, spring weather, the impending end of school, and the deadly events of the previous week had stoked temperatures to a feverish fervor.  UNM already was an 'activist' campus: students had occupied both the President's office and the Student Union Building. Really "Occpied 'em." Took 'em the fuck over. Moved in. Lived and slept (etc., as you may imagine at leisure) in 'em.
Meanwhile, all spring long the he local, pro-war/anti-hippie, daily rag which had been fulminating against the campus radicals. They raised the stakes, demanding the city or the State 'restore order' on campus. A big demonstration against the war, and in solidarity with the dead kids at Kent State was announced for Friday, the Eighth.

That day, coincidentally of course, the Governor and the Lt. Gov. were BOTH out of State, and the NEXT in the chain of command, a little, power-mad, martinette who ran the State Police--5'5" or so with a complex about it--called out the National Guard.

About 11 am, the Guardsmen, from Socorro, not Albuquerque, dismounted their trucks, fixed their bayonets and began to advanced down the broad, bricked causeway from Central Avenue toward the Union in line abreast.

VVAW members were deloyed aas marshals, maintaining distance, but we got pushed back into the front line of the crowd. Then there was there was a flurry of activity, and suddenly a kid near me was writhing on the ground, blood spurting feet in the air. He'd got bayonetted in the upper leg, and his femoral artery had been cut.

 Another VVAW guy and I got a tourniquet on the kid's leg, and then made a chair with our arms to carry him to the Aid tent (there were ALWAYS aid tents, in those times). He was going into shock.

As we got out of the crush of the demonstration, we encountered a few ranks of Albuquerque's best burghers arrayed  behind a fence watching the hippies get their asses kicked, and cheering. They cursed us and spat on us. The kid had to be hospitalized, but suffered no lasting physical injury.

I cannot answer for the psychiological consequences, but my esteem for the "average American" never recovered.

But note, hippies: Every year, on this date, the Oligarchs haul out the images from that event to remind us that, yes, they will kill ya, if you piss 'em off enough, even if you're white.
Nack to Hippy Central, Winstone...

Flat Tax, Flat Wrong

Hola, Hippies of the world! Arise! We have nothing to lose but our love-beads...No, seriously: My name is John Konopak, a citizen-journalist in Albuquerque, NM, and I'm climbing the SoapBox to rant about TAXES!

There are all kinds of simple minds out there, and the STOOPIT is very strong among them. One of the most obdurately stupid cults in the religion of simple solutions are the "flat taxers." "The tax code is corrupt, and too complex, and favors the wrong people, and we should just charge everybody the same tax-rate, on everything, and cancel all exemptions, and deductions and just cut the crap. (THAT such 'flat taxer' folks often have jutting, prognathous jaws and ridged eye-brows? That's just a coincidence, I'm sure). Here's my reply to one such, today, on another thread, on which I declared that a flat tax is inevitably unjust, unfair, and inequitable. I said:

Try something novel, sir: THINK. It's an important word. It has more than 100 cognates; more than the Inuits have for "snow."  

Compare--a thinking activity--the condition of a worker taking home the Median income--around $50k/YR--with someone in the Top10%: $500k/yr.

Take 15 or 17 or 20 pewrcent of each and see what's LEFT? Clearly, the same tax has radically DIFFERENT effects on the amount of income the individuals have on which to live after their taxes are paid, nest paw? 

 Now take it DOWN a notch, where the impact is even MORE severe: Compare the lived, actual effects of a 15% tax on someone making $25K/yr--$3750-- with the person making $250K/yr, or $37500. I'm pretty sher you can figger it out the inequities for yourself.

Now, yer ol' pal, Dr. Woody has been accused of being all about critical, and being all nothing--or at least a lot lot less--about suggestions to fix things. I'll admit, I don't think things, as they are arranged now, are susceptible to BEING "fixed." But if they were, and a new system were to be imagined, I think I could live with something that looked like this. Along with the so-called "RobinHood" tax on all transactions of financial instruments and derivatives, you would:

Exclude the first $30k of anyone's income from income taxes of any kind, including States' taxes Then institute a sliding, progressive rate, based on the gross value of all received income, regardless of the source:

I.e.--5% from $30-$50001. 

9% FOR $50001-75000;

13% FOR $75001-100000.

17% FROM $100001-150000;

20% FROM $1500001-200000,

25% from 200001-300000,

30% from 300001-500000;

40% from $500001-One MILLION

ETC; maxing out at (post WW II levels): 90% over, say $5 Million

The levels would adjust with inflationary/deflationary pressures.

So, hippies! Now you can never again claim I offer no ideas to supplant those I criticize. If yoiu have objections,. raise 'em and I'll try to answer 'em, either here or at the beach.

As The Cookie Crumbles: Take a Memo...Please

One day in the summer of 1971, upon emerging from a drunken night of frantic prayer-bingeing and slef-flagellant masturbation with Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon stared in horror from his bunker beneath the WhiteHouse and beheld (INSERT DC DEMO SHOT) several hundred thousand angry, fearful, worried, threatened young people from all over the country who were thronging to the National Mall to protest the Vietnam War. He was horrified. It was, in his mind--in the "official" mind--nothing less than MUTINY! It is difficult now to recall just how threatening that was. (END DC DEMO SHOT). 

Against this backdrop, allow me to introduce you to Associate SCROTRUS Justice Lewis Powell (standing, second from the left--but on Raygun's right) 

(INSERT POWEL SHOT).

Raise your hand if you've heard of Lewis Powell!

Extra points if you've also heard of the Powell Memorandum.

 Lewis Powell was a successful tobacco lawyer--defending tobacco companies--in Richmond, and a staunch Republican "CorpoRatist free marketeer." Nixon tried several times to put him on the Court. Nixon finally succeeded in '71. Powell, then sitting on the boards of 11 major corporations,   acceded, but before his official nomination he wrote a very detailed and instructive memorandum to his friend Eugene Sydnor, Jr., the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The memorandum was dated August 23, 1971, two months prior to Powell's nomination by President Nixon to the U.S. Supreme Court. Jack Anderson got a copy, and tried to raise a stink, questining Powell's potential impartiality , ut somehow it never managed to surfaced during his confirmation hearings. Wonder how that happened, doncha hippies?
(END POWELL SHOT)
Eventually, it was revealed, but not until  well AFTER he'd been confirmed. Known now as "the Powell Memorandum," it's contents spell out, in careful points, with impeccable logic, and legal footnotes, the way that the Corporat Right would assume control of the means and modes of production of intellectual and cultural capital in the USofA, solely for the aggrandizement of the CorpoRat image and ethos. There's a link to the complete document on my Anosognosia blog.

The Plan outlined in the Memo became the template for the successful corpoRat coup d'etat initiated by Raygun and finished by The Chimpeeror and Cheney, and now being highly burnished by the current incumbent, the Tallest Midget. It was: over time, and gradually, to insert ideologically pure, pro-CorpoRat/conservaturds into the highest echelons of ALL the USer cultural and educational centers: media, schools, universities, museums, libraries, whence they could--those 'unseen wire-pullers that Edward Bernays talked about in the 1920s--direct the climate more favorably towards the "free marketeers."
(BEGIN HIPPIE MARCCHSHOT)

Powell, like so many of his age and class--notoriously his ideological soulmate in the WhiteHouse; and also and equally notoriously Allen Bloom, at Columbia, among others--was extremely distressed with the rebellious, youth/"counter-culture" and fearful of the anti-corpoRat implications it held for social justice and the fair distribution of social goods, and he--they were ALL--was fiercely agin it. They were, in the argot of the time, "freaked right the fuck OUT!" The memorandum is the product of his fears.
(END HIPPIE MARCH FOTO)
Powell, an acknowledged hawk on corporate privilege,was the 'spiritual" god-father of the whole, oligarchic coup that came to fruition under Reagan. He cast a decisive vote and wrote the majority opinion in a landmark corporate-personhood case called --First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti--a 1978 decision that actually invented a First Amendment "right" for corporations to actively influence ballot questions.

At the time, he was extolled as a "moderate" on social issues. But he voted to uphold anti-sodomy laws in Georgia,  and he voted to uphold the death penalty--in the face of documentation which demonstrated that – other than as punishment for the most violent of crimes – people who killed whites were significantly more likely to receive the death penalty as punishment for their crimes than people who killed blacks. Indeed, he seldom met a death penalty statute he didn't like. And he sided with Bakke against the University of California, in the case that effectively began to reverse anti-discrimination and restorative initiatives for minority students in public universities, too. Maybe "moderate" meant something else in those days, I dunno...

Probably, though, the template provided by his memo to tht USCoC is his greatest, and most lasting social influence. This gave impetus and direction to the right-wing, think-tank phenomenon. He more or less invented the "Heritage Foundation," and the rest just followed wherever they could find a compliant, sympathetic, generous billionaire.

 As noted, he thereby did most of the legal "spade work" for what became the Reagan/Bidness silent coup of 82-84.

Which, as events have shown, has succeeded wildly.(INSERT HANGING SHOT)

An interesting side-bar, and surely it is a mere accident and coincidence, but there was a previous "Lewis Powell" from Virginia who gained a certain notoriety, in an earlier time. He was hanged as a conspirator in the assassination of Abe Lincoln. (END HANGING SHOT)

 We can talk about such things, and butterfly wings, when I see you at the beach, hippies...

Avuncular Advice

I invite you to regard this image. Evocative lighting, the plaintive voice, the guilty admission? This is just such a blinding oversimplification that it just pisses me the fuck off. (Hence the PITH helmet is today's haberdasherial choice.)

To me, the ol' semiologer, what the image just simply REEKS of is the CorpoRat-ignoring/forgiving, victim-blaming and superficial reduction of an incredibly complex phenomenon --the total almost 100-year-long program of the wholesale brainwashing of an entire populace for the purpose of taking over the direction and manipulation of their individual and collective live--and then dumping it ALL on 'the people." Nothing less!

The reactionary, reflexively defensive, hysterically fearful, deeply disturbed public mood we are experiencing is the consequence of an experiment in human emotional manipulation the likes of which had never even IMAGINED on this scale ever before in history. The German Reich gave it a try, but it didn't last long enough to have trans-generational effects. China, too, has now outlived MOST of the people who recall the time before Mao, and so will soon no longer have living witnesses to the past.

The USer effort was begun under the auspices of Woodrow Wilson who, AFTER 1916), used the new mass-media technologies to woo and threaten and cajole and bribe and bully the people INTO the war he had been re-elected IN 1916 for keeping the Country out of. Wilson more and more has come to be regarded as the prototype of "neo-liberalism." The program was directed and abetted in full consciousness by the best "Liberals" of the time--the same class that Lenin called the "vanguard intellectuals": Walter Lippmann, Ivy Lee, and of course, Freud's favorite nephew, Vienna-born and educated, Edward Bernays.

It was Bernays who, a little later would pen these immortal ords about the pewople's 'true rulers':

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. ...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
― Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda (1928)

As to the contents of the guilty dad's sorrowful admission, a (and not only the only) more accurate reply would be:

Child, That's a good question, and the answer isn't as simple as some would insist. Just sit down and let me tell you a story. Once upon a time, many years ago before you were born, while your mom and I were still kids, most of the people still had steady, regulat, permanent jobs, with pensions when they retired. And the 'people' still got raises when they improved productivity. No, really.

Then around 1980, the Bosses decided unilaterally to violate the de facto bargain of the previous 50 or so years, which was to share profits from improved productivity with workers. Under the presidency of a second-rate screen-actor and spokesmodel and conservaturd sock-puppet named Reagan, and with the full cooperation and collusion of Govt. regulators, the Congress, the Fed, and the CorpoRat boardrooms, the decision was made to direct wage increases away from workers' pay-checks, and into profits where they could be split up among the Bosses, who they felt deserved them more..

Now, there was a glitch in this system, but the clever buggers soon figgered it out. The problem was that it was and still is a "consumer"-driven" economy. "Consumers" had to have money with which to consume. But without pay raises, where would the money come from? The Bosses still had to keep demand up, had to move those refrigerators, those color teevees...

And here's where they proved their true predatory genius: They took the profits they'd reaped from NOT giving wage increases, and turned them into LOANS to the people from whom the money was originally stolen ("legally," anyway), so the proles could "buy" the tchotchkes upon which the most powerful economy in the whole fucking world depended...Remember the Chimperor telling Murkins to "Go SHOPPING to erase and/or mute their fears after 9/11? He was serious. He meant it.

So, my child, in order to keep up with the CorpoRat-fueled consumptive bingeing it ceaselessly promotes and requires to maintain the family's status, as well to support the "consumer economy," I took a second job, and yer momma went to work, too. We had the house to keep up, and four cars--ours and that of your brother and you--aren't cheap, you know? Insurance for you and him is over $5000/year. And vacations. Remember DisneyWorld when you were ten?? And personal electronics? They're not cheap. Two or three hundred a month for the phones and wi-fy.

So, with one thing and another, I kinda lost track of "politics." I mean, we voted, but there wasn't time to notice what was actually happening.

So I'm sorry that I let it get away. But if you wanna help, quicher bitchin, an' go get a fucking job and start carrying your weight around here. Money doesn't fucking grow on fucking trees, you know?

Freedom ain't free, child..."

As The Cookie Crumbles: 1962~~The End of the "Old" Normal?

Hey, hey, hippies! It's time for celebration! This year is the 50th Anniversary of 1962?

You say? What's so special about 1962?

Well, that depends. Mebbe not much, comparatively (Well, except for the Cuban Missile Crisis; Oh, and I got my drivers' license...which we'll come back to...) Mario Savio would matriculate at Berkeley that year, but the first strong whiff of the counter-cultural revolution on campuses was still a couple of years off. In '63, JFK was assassinated, in '64, the VietNam invasion began in earnest, and things seemed to trend toward more chaos from then on. In '62, we had Cronkite, and Huntley & Brinkley calmly assuring us all was well. It sure seemed "normal" at the time.

THAT'S THE POINT. Looking back these 50 years, it seems to me that '62 might well have been the LAST year which it would NOT be ironic to praise for its apparent aura "normalcy." In the foto, you see probably the most popular car of the year, a Chevy Impala, shorn of the wing-like fins of the previous three model years, looking downright demure, for all its chrome. The '62 Cadillac still had inobtrusive fins, but it was alone in the marketplace...The style was almost apologetic, after the late 50s...

Sixty-two was a bad year for flying, for some reason. I started as a REALLY bad year for flying: January, the "FLYING Wallendas" fell in a show in NYC, killing two of them; in March, there was a really bad airplane disaster in NYC when a 707 crashed on take-off, killing all 163 aboard; in May, a bomb on-board brought down a flight over Missouri, killing all 45 people aboard; another 707 disaster in Paris killed 130 of 132 people when the plane, carrying cultural ambassadors from Atlanta, overshoots the runway; then on the island of Guadeloupe, later in the same month, another Air France jet (the third 707 in as many months, and almost as many weeks) smashes into a mountainside, in bad weather, killing all 113. That marked the last airline crash of the year, luckily.
(End Jet crash image here)

(Start Marilyn Image here:


For casualties of a more personal nature, Marilyn Monroe died. So too did Ernie Kovacs, the legendary televisionary and comedian; and the gangster, Lucky Luciano checked out; the violinist, Fritz Kreisler; ground-breaking sociologist C. Wright Mills; Adolph Eichmann was executed in Israel; authjor William Faulkner and Herman Hesse, the novelist (Siddartha, Steppenwolf); e.e. cummings, the poet, and Eleanor Roosevelt; philosopher Georges Battaille; and the atomic physicist Neils Bohr...

INSERT IMAGE WILT CHAMBERLAIN HERE:


There were winners: John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature; Linus Pauling won the Peace Prize. The Yankees beat the San Grancisco Giants in the World Series. It was pre-Super Bowl. The Dallas Texans beat the Houston Oilers in the AFL; the Packers edged the Giants in the NFL. On March 2 , in Hershey, Pennsylvania, Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors scored 100 points against the New York Knicks, breaking several National Basketball Association records. Sonny Liston knocked out Floyd Patterson, setting up his epochal battle with the young Cassius Clay. Roger Ward won at Indy, and Graham Hill, in a Ferrarri, won the Formula One championship. Rod Laver won the Tennis grand slam.
(End WILT Image Here)

Begin Beattles Image Here:


But is, as I said at the beginning, also a year full of portent, too...Elsewhere on the cultural landscape, The Beatles were looming: In January, the first recording featuring the "lads" appeared: "My Bonnie," credited to "Tony Sheridan and the Beat Brothers" (recorded June 61 in Hamburg), was released by Polydor in the U.K. Later in the year, the band fired Georgie Best as drummer and brought in Ringo Starr. They'd release their first LP as "The Beatles" in March, '63.
(END BEATLES IMAGE HERE)
Begin James Meredith Image here)

In February, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, though he was several months behind the first Russian to do so. Both K-Mart and Wal-Mart opened their first stores: K-Mart in Garden City, MI; Wal-Mart's in Rogers, AR....James Meredith enrolled as the First Black Student ever at the University of Mississippi....Algeria concluded its ferocious fight for liberation from France...A shooting war broke out between China and India....Helen Gurley Brown published "Sex and the Single Girl"...Best Picture was "Lawrence of Arabia. The Number One Billboard hit song of the year was "Sherry" by the Four Seasons.
(End Meredith Image; Start (mute) A-bomb vid)



The most memorable and portentous evens of 1962 began in October, and seemed for a brief time to threaten the immediate extermination if not of humanity, then of major cities on several continents, in an atomic holocaust. US intelligence flights over Cuba photographed Russian missile installations in Cuba. Kennedy and Kruschev at loggerheads. But the Russkis "blinked." And MAD set in...In a sense, that was the actual HIGH point in the US/Soviet tensions of the whole era, and things reached a tenuous balance, on the very eve of world destruction. The last above-ground nuclear test was triggered in Nevada.
(End A-bomb vid)

One more thing about 1962: on November 3, 1962, the term "personal computer" appeared in print for the first time, in the NYTimes..

Oh, yeah! On this exact date, in 1962, about a gazillion miles ago, I got my driver's license and started "dating" and--tho I didn't get laid--I got to third base for the first time, too, in the front seat of the family car, a '58 Plymouth station wagon (with a two-speed, push-button automatic), at the drive-in in Espanola...with whom? You Know: A gentleman doesn't tell, hippies...

Anyway: It's the 50th anniversary of my 16th Birthday...Bring cake!...Hope I see you at the beach---

As the Cookie Crumbles: OWS Apologetics

Back in the '30s, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote:
"We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we cannot have both."

As Ike's MIC speech, and a couple by FDR (especially the "Second Bill of Rights" speech, among others), Brandeis was not WARNING against some possible outcome. He was, instead, reciting an eulogy, actually explaining how it had come to pass that the wealthy had usurped the democracy and turned it into their own plaything. Cuz the choice had already been made, and it was to save the plutocracy, and to hypostatize wealth.

I was reminded of Brandeis' apt and apposite observation while perusing the F-book, where I happened upon the image at the top of this column. I wanna answer it point by point, since it seems to wanna present an apologia for the Occupation against claims aboput their agenda...I have seldom read a more naive pile of Horsecrap! Bullshit! Codswallop! Horsehockey! Malarkey! or Piffle! Balderdash! this year! I wanna dispatch 'em one at a time.

First, it declares: "We're not against the rich; we're against using wealth to gain unfair advantage."

Codswallop! Of course we're opposed to great wealth, per se! The only reason or purpose of excessive wealth is to use it to corner political power. Why ELSE would you want it? And, besides: to the rich, anyway, being wealthy is not an "unfair" advantage. It's one they believe they've "earned." This is inevitable, as long as there is no limit on the amount of wealth one may amass, and no effective way to embarrass them.

Next, they say: "We're not against corporations; we're against corporations governing us."

But in ANY political economy in which CorpoRats own and operate the equipment, naturally they're going to run things. SO of COURSE we oppose rampant Corporatism: Corporations, shriven of any responsibility to anything but their bottom lines" will inevitably use their power to usurp the power of more democratic institutions, because corporations are inherently anti-democratic. They are AUTOCRATIC.

The claim is made: "We are not against banks; we are against fraudulent banking practices."

Of COURSE we're hostile to banks, per se... As CorpoRat entities, their only actual, legal responsibilities are to their STOCKHOLDERS. They MUST show a profit, by LAW. So they'll turn every possible trick, slickery, and fraud just short of extortion to pry an extra dinar from their depositors. Banks practice frauds the way dogs scratch fleas: reflexively. The only banks which MIGHT be immune are depositor-owned institutions, like credit unions.

Then we see: "We are not against investment markets; we are against fraud in those markets."

But investment markets are ALWAYS fraudulent. No "industry" which depends on "securitizing" and selling collections of what are basically markers for bets for and against average citizens paying their mortgages for its solvency, or on imaginary things like commodity "futures" can escape fraud. It's all a dream.

It says: "We're not against capitalism; we're against corruption in capitalism."

That's absurd on the face of it. Capitalism, itself, like all the institutions it spawns, is INHERENTLY and INTRINSICALLY corrupt. It depends on that which cannot be: endless growth (or the promise 0f it). It's ONLY natural end-state is monopoly, with "competition" used only for the purpose of driving OUT COMPETITORs, after which the State is employed to preserve the monopolists..

And democracy inside such an array of corruption institutions is impossible, because the "representatives" will ALWAYS, ALREADY be available to be bought, on one pretext or another.

There is NOTHING in the economic "order" of the USfoA which is designed, built, intended or structured to actually ADVANCE the interests of the average person. Nothing; though there are parts of it which, through accident or inadvertence, do not directly fuck us up. And it's past time to forego the illusiuon that there is.

WWH Soap Box: Education Is Made, Not Acquired

In which Y'r F'th'f''l R'p't'r ex-plains the differences between "education" as a commodity and "education" as an act.

Hola, Fellow Hippies of the planetary sphere. My name's John Konopak, (aka "Dr. Woody" and other things in other places at other times, too); I am a citizen journalist living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today I'm clambering up the Symbolic Soap-box on a matter of importance regarding RE-developing--rehabilitating, even--a practical definition of (that is to say, how we may better understand of "education."

What got me thinking about this again was: The other week, a group of students in Detroit, as I recall, went out on a demonstration protesting, in the language of the press reports of the event, that they weren't "getting" a good education.

The probably objective truth of, and my sympathy for, their sentiment was obscured by the trope by which their complaint was framed, by both the aggrieved kids and the press. The whole process we call 'education' took a wrong turn when it became something one "gets"--unless it's the way one "gets" a joke--and I don't think it is.

This is an example of the importance of what George Lakoff refers to "framing" an issue. I detest the idea, now the dominant "frame" around the subject, that anyone--any student or child--"gets" an education.

That's not how it works. You don't "get" an education . You don't just pick "education" up from school like acquiring a loaf of bread, a half-rack of beer, and a pack of condoms at the stop-n-shop. Becoming educated means becoming fluent in the understanding, interpretation, and even the creation, sometimes, of knowledge in some sphere of human endeavor.

I used to hear the similar complaints when I taught undergraduates. What those students had not learned was that, unlike "schools" they were used to, the University is a place where knowledge is "made." They use other words for it, like "discovery," and "invention," and "proof," but it's all about making new "knowledge."

People working in colleges and universities aren't there primarily to teach. That's a relatively recent development: 100-150 years or so. They're there to make and test new knowledge.

One goes to "college" or University to learn how to make new knowledge in whatever discipline to which you attach yourself. They don't call them "disciplines" for the fun of it, y'know? The rules vary, but there are ALWAYS overarching principles which one must learn and master, even if it is only to deconstruct them, later. The underlying principle of a "college education" is that a trained mind is of use no matter the task it's set.

So you/we go to University (college) to train y/our minds in 'handling' with the materials of thought, those things of which "knowledge" is made: words, and discourses, and formulae, and theories, and taxonomies, and other texts. Frank Smith, an eclectic education scholar in the 80s/90s wrote a book in which he listed all of the nearly 100 English words that are cognates of "to think," one way or another: Ponder, cogitate, ruminate, cerebrate, evaluate, consider, judge, contemplate...I could go on and on...

In "higher education," the point is to get your hands dirty in that sloppuy, messy, ideational goop, like wood-chips from a plane, sparks from a torch. Ya get 'em ON ya, get 'em All OVER ya! In yer hair and under yer nails, and in yer clothes, and mainly in yer head... You handle the material.

And in the company of masters, by watching them, you then begin to learn to make your own tools with which to manipulate your material, to shape it and form it and use it in new ways.

And THAT is an Education. And you didn't "get" it like a tube of mascara or a new pair of jeans. It wasn't passed to you over a counter. You built it. Made it. It bears YOUR stamp. They're YOUR tools. You made them and you can use them.

To what ends anyone eventually applies those tools is pretty much luck, but if you did "your education" right, you'll be ready for a lot of different challenges, a veritable, and infinitely tempting plethora of possible paths and pursuits.

Just look at me, the very picture of success, down here at the beach, hippies.

Paz!