438: School

Late yesterday, I walked into the living room at our East Little Rock condo and found a character I call “Ronald Charles, the National Merit Scholar,” sprawled on the couch studying the view of Little Rock’s skyline. Of course, it was C.W., and I usually enjoy him in this shape.

Today he seemed a bit down.

“What’s up?” I said.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, using the most common response a teenager uses when something is truly bugging him.

“Share,” I said.

“Can I have a beer?”

“It’s ‘may I have a beer’ and, no, you’re too young.”

“I’m 647 years old in your time,” he said.

“Then choose another form. What’s bugging you?”

“The schools,” he said. “Those things called ‘charter schools.’ I visited one yesterday.”

“How did you do that?”

He looked at me as if I had just asked how he managed to tie his shoes this morning.

I changed tactics. “What did you find out?”

“It was weird,” he said.

“How so?”

“For one thing, the entire first hour of class was devoted to what they called ‘dialogue training’ and it was most odd.”

“How so?”

The kids were divided into groups and were being made to memorize and deliver standard bits of dialogue.”

“Like what?”

“One group was being made to stand as the teacher walked up and say, ‘Good morning. Welcome to ‘Betsy DeVoss High School.’ Each student had to practice it until the teacher was satisfied.”

“Anything else?”

“Another group was doing the same thing, only with a different dialogue.”

“Which was?”

“How are you folks doing today?”

“I see. Any others?”

“Some were practicing giving directions, like ‘yes sir, or ma’am, it’s right down on Aisle Five’ over and over.”

“I see. Then they held classes?”

“Not until they assembled in the auditorium and did a few school cheers. This included a final arm salute to someone named Saint Sam.”

“And then?”

“They went to their classes, but they weren’t classes like any I’ve ever seen.”

“Oh really?”

“No. I snitched a schedule that one student left lying on a bench.” He produced a sheet of wrinkled paper, smoothed it and said. “Listen to these.” He took a breath and read, “Proving Science Wrong 108.”

“What?”

“You heard me. I stood outside the door and heard the teacher say, ‘It is a well-known historical fact that Charles Darwin accepted Christ as his personal savior on his deathbed and recanted his entire body of work. Now that’s false science for you.’ She then told them the assignment for the next day was to read the chapter called ‘Paul’s Travels as the Basis of Modern Geographic Systems.’”

“That’s not true about Darwin. I can’t believe you actually heard that.”

My Falloonian Elders don't
understand your concept
of flexible truth. - C. W.

“I don’t think ‘true’ was a measurement of accuracy in that class,” he said. “There’s more. You should have listened in on the one called ‘Flexible Mathematics: The Limitations of Numbers 107.’”

“You’re not serious.”

“Seems one no longer needs to learn things that the machines will do for you anyway.”

“You’re making me nauseated.”

“It gets worse.”

“How?”

He read from the list. “Obsolete Teachings 101: History.”

“No.”

He ignored me and continued. “Obsolete Teachings 102: Public Administration.”

I waited. He read, “Obsolete Teachings 103: Moral Imperatives in Modern America.”

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

He said, “No, it gets better. Standing outside the class on business administration, I heard a lecture called, ‘The Use of Tag-Team Matches in Conflict Resolution.’ It was the most interesting of call.”

“I can imagine. What did you do next?”

“I stood outside the Religion 104 class and heard a lecture called, ‘The Beatitudes as False Doctrine.’ It required the students to rise on cue and give a salute to that Saint Sam person.”

“I think I’ve heard enough.”

“Wait,” he said, “I haven’t even told you about the classes they were holding in the Athletic Wing. Well,” he said, “they called them classes anyway.”

“I think,” I said, “that you can have that beer now if I can join you.” 

See also:

Delta Dreaming

All Hat No Cattle

Enjoy these at all? If so, order Big Dope's Book at Wattensaw Press, Amazon, or other book sellers. It will make him so happy. Also, click on an ad. It earns him a little and costs the advertiser, sort of a win-win.

436. Prophecy

It was abnormally quiet in the house. I had come in from working outdoors and my wife was away for the day. I thought I’d better check on C.W. Did I mention that it was abnormally quiet? That’s when it’s a good idea to check on C.W.

But, uncharacteristically, I found him in my favorite easy chair reading a book. At least I assumed it was he, the shape was that of a middle-aged man of scholarly demeanor. He had a long, hawkish, face beset by wrinkles and accentuated by a thin mustache. His eyes flashed beneath a crop of dark, unruly hair.

He looked vaguely familiar but I let it pass. “What’s up? I said.

“The Elders are pissed,” he said, closing the book.

“Oh?” It was then that I notice what book he was reading. It was Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“And why are they pissed this time?”

“Don’t you think they have a right to be?” He said gruffly.

“I don’t know.”

“Listen,” he said. I noticed scads of yellow stickers protruding from the book. He turned to them, one after another, and read.

“War is peace.”

“Freedom is slavery.”

“Ignorance is strength.”

He closed the book. “Sound familiar? Maybe a little like last night’s newscast?”

Before I could answer, he turned to another marker and read, “One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.” He looked up at me and smiled, then said, “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“Be still and learn,” he said. He didn’t say it in a friendly way. I’d never seen him like this before. He quickly turned to another page and read. “And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'”

I just stood there, thinking of our Secretary of Education. “Are you,” he said, “proud of your country now? How do you like being a fulfillment of prophecy? Not the mythical kind where you read a prediction and then go make it happen, but when it happens on its own and you say, ‘So and So saw that coming?’”

As I pondered this, he continued, pointing at another section. He read, “Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” He stopped. “Say, for example, you have a twice-divorced adulterer being worshiped as a religious icon by a third of your population. He flashed a half-smile for the first time. If you think the Elders are pissed, you ought to talk to the Galilean. See?”

Trying to make sense of it all, I tried to answer. I could only say, “Yes.”

Do I have to draw you a picture? - C.W.

He snapped. “Is any of this really beginning to make sense? Does any of it sound familiar at all?”

“Yes,” I said. “I first read the book in high school and then several more times since.”

“Idiot,” he snapped. “I’m talking about 2018, not some journey into your past.”

This was the strangest C.W. I had encountered ever. “What is with you?” I said.

“Don’t you watch the news?” he said. “The Elders certainly do.”

“And why are they so upset?”

“You have no idea?”

“Maybe a slight idea. Could it be …?”

“Shut up,” he said. “Listen.” He turned to another marker and looked at me, his dark eyes piercing the farthest corner of my mind. “Listen,” he said, “and learn. Then you may know why the Elders are pissed.

This time he read gravely, “We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m beginning to see you point. America today is starting to sound exactly—and I’ll admit it’s scary as hell—like the state described in Orwell’s book.” I paused, “But what has the Elders so upset?”

“Orwell!” he screamed. “Orwell … what has the Elders so pissed about Orwell, his prophecies, and modern America?”

“Yes,” I said, “yes … what?”

“Only,” he said, “that they sent me here in 1947 to warn you.”

424: Science

Oh my, I hadn’t seen anyone smoke a pipe in years. Didn’t know they still made them. But there was C.W. puffing away on one, sitting at a patio table. His shape was a lot like the late playwright Arthur Millar. He had books and papers scattered in front of him.

He motioned for me to join him and I did.

He waved a hand across the pile of material before him like he was giving it his blessing. “I think,” he said, “that I’ve about figured it out.”

“How to look anachronistic?”

He ignored me. “Why your species is so unwilling to move into the future,” he said.

“Elucidate.” I could tell he was in one of his serious moments, and I enjoy those.

“Do you ever think about the monumental and complex problems facing your planet?” he said.

“All the time.”

“Ever thing of what it will take to solve those problems?”

“Probably things that we haven’t thought of yet.”

“Precisely,” he said.

That made me feel good. He rarely acknowledges that I know anything.

“Continue, please,” I said.

“Ever wonder,” he said, continuing in a questioning mode, “why one of the world’s richest families, emanating by the way,” he said, “from your own state, has joined hands with major religious institutions and a dominant political party in a plan to abrogate your current system of educating your children? Ever say, to yourself, what do they have to gain by denouncing reason, science, and the ability to address problems in a cognitive way?”

“You are right. It doesn’t make sense.”

He smiled, nodded, and picked up a large book from the table. “Ever read this?” he asked. It was a worn copy of The Golden Bough, by Sir James George Frazer, a Scottish social anthropologist, influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion. He is often considered one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology.

I nodded and smiled myself. “Yes, but it was a long time ago in a different lifetime.” A flood of memories washed over me. “I credit Frazer with freeing me from the shackles of mythology forged on me as a child.” I was sort of screwing with him by resorting to flowery language.

He ignored me. “Then you know how he recorded humankind’s cognitive process, beginning first with magic as a method of controlling the environment.”

“I seem to remember.”

“Then,” he continued, as it gradually dawned on your species that dances and incantations weren’t really able to change things, and that people didn’t suffer because you made a doll-like image of them suffer.”

“Go on.”

“So,” he said, “the thinkers of that time decided that external forces must guide their world. They chose religion, assuming there are personal agents, superior to man, controlling nature.  It has been said that this is a far more complex notion than that of magic, and requires a much higher degree of intelligence.”

“This is getting a bit deep,” I said.

“We’re almost there,” he said. “Hang with me.”

What else could I do?

“We are now at the point in the evolution of your people at which they thought that reliance on a divine source might be the best technology to be used in controlling the environment.”

“And some still do,” I said.

“Oddly enough,” he said. “This troubles the Falloonian Elders to no end.”

“I can see. What happened next?”

“In simple terms?”

“In simple terms, please.”

“In simple terms, religious contemplation led to complex thinking, and complex thinking led to science.”

“Science?”

“Science,” he said. “And as science emerged, your species hardened in its belief that the world had to be controlled, and, to a thoughtless few, that control had to be carried out on their terms, and for their ends.”

“And?”

 

Oddly, someone once suggested that
alchemy led to the scientific method. - C.W.

“Well hell,” he said, “can’t you see?”

“See what?”

“How science got their way.”

“I think maybe I do.”

“Let me help move you along,” he said. “I haven’t got all day.” He puffed on his pipe until he started the smoke flowing in bullous clouds. It was aromatic and not unpleasant. “Humankind can conceive all sorts of weird ideas and proposals. The problem, then, is that science can test those ideas and proposals.”

“And?”

“And how do you exert control over people with ideas that science can prove wrong?” He puffed again. “Let me give you an example. Let’s say you want to make people satisfied with their state of poverty. So, you tell them you’re going to cut their source of revenue and that will increase their income.”

“That sounds a bit familiar.”

“Doesn’t it though? Now, the problem is, as you well know, a second-year college student majoring in mathematics—some call that science—can prove that proposition false in a few moments. How do you maintain your control? You can’t kill all the college students.”

“No,” I said, “but how do you exert control over people with ideas that science can prove wrong?”

“Simple,” he said. He blew a huge cloud of smoke my way and I inhaled a bit of it. “You kill science.”

“But how?”

“First,” he said, “you kill all the teachers.”

I rose and walked away, staggering just a bit.

See also:

Delta Dreaming

All Hat No Cattle

Enjoy these at all? If so, order Big Dope's Book at Wattensaw Press, Amazon, or other book sellers. It will make him so happy. Also, click on an ad. It earns him a little and costs the advertiser, sort of a win-win.