Tell Me More, Tell me Sweet Little Lies

I don't know love. Oh, I know it better than you do, in the direction of the abstract, of God's love, or even of the sort which requires paid counselors to rectify. I even have a nifty little proof of how love is out there, a part of reality with or without us to feel it, a step more real than the sort attributed to God. Abstracted like a subatomic particle is abstracted. But the love I don't know is the kind that you have to learn, and it was never on offer where I got my learnin'. For you neither, I'll bet.

Here's a strange exercise: Go out to dinner with Dad, and then when he says that he doesn't remember anything, start to tell all the things you remember, in some sort of random order, or based, perhaps, on some assessment of their level of emotional impact. To him.

Some things will actually stir a memory. Sometimes, that will even trigger him remembering a few things on his own. Most of the time, it's just you remembering things, which is a pleasant enough exercise. It passes the time at dinner.

But the thing is that there is always something which will trigger interest when there is some presumption of involvement of Dad's "I". Some pride that there was a him actually involved in whatever it was I was telling him about. Or maybe he just appreciated that I appreciated it. But it doesn't seem that I could tell an outright lie and keep his interest. Although he frequently expresses disbelief at what I do tell. "Really, I did that? Tell me more . . ."

There are a few things I'd like to ask my daughter some day when the right moment comes along. Nothing about drugs and sex and alcohol, but I would like to know if she's ever cheated on a school assignment. I hear that all criminals feel justified, and so, you know, in this very dangerous exercise, I'd like to know if I feel as though I fell short, if I would like to assign blame to her Mom, or if I am angry with my child. I'd just like to know is all.

It's not the answer which weighs on me, ever so lightly. It's the question mark; the sense that there will never quite be an occasion to ask this question, to open up that channel for a level of trust which could transcend all questioning. Perhaps it will be denied me. I know it's a dangerous arena. It's not my love at risk. It's more about my character, and how much I devoted to her. I'm 99.99% sure that she never has. In fact I know of plenty of ways in which she demonstrated that she'd rather undermine herself than to do those cheap things her classmates did to grub a grade.

Alright. I don't want to know. I already do know. What am I talking about??

I have split my parents now, taking on that initiative because neither of them has the ability to do it for themself. Over time, it became blazingly apparent that there was no happiness in one another; Dad a kind of addict of Mom's mere presence, having long since forgotten that there is a life of its own inside the female of the species. He never was taught that way. Or he's just afraid, as he always says; afraid of "girls," afraid of dancing.

And Mom his slave through so many physical manifestations of introverted rage, near death each time, and still she has no idea what, actually, would make her happy. She has no instinct at all about what to do to please herself. Dad's memory is mostly gone, and so when springtime presented the opportunity to spirit him off to their summer home without Mom, I took it. But as I've learned it's not his memory that's gone. It's control, in perfect analog to his physical body which is remarkably strong and fit for its age, but not really all that strong.

I am regarded as some kind of hero within the small orbit of my family, having taken upon myself something no one else knew how to accomplish. And, in truth, I do resent it. I feel that my life has been robbed from me, as I tell both parents little lies, act out things I don't quite feel, determined to see this chess match through to where Dad believes that Mom is also in his past, a forgotten melange of Mom, grandma, some shadow person.

But that's not about to happen. It really isn't his memory that's gone, it's the story of his life, which he wrote before he would forget it, but which had already written itself as a long list of obligations capped by self-indulgence. I think that Dad was afraid to dream. I think he's always been terrified to step outside of his competency, formidable as it is, and every single move has gone according to plan, during a time in the history of mankind when such a thing was actually possible.

Now, the man is attenuated. The plan complete. What would you expect to be left at the remains of a completed life.

There is absolutely no question mark in my mind that neither of my parents ever cheated - not once - in school, and certainly not with each other. This has not seemed any sort of triumph - more a shortcoming in the passion department. Their rage is always staged. There is never any actual danger that it could escalate to physical harm. But it does the trick to keep each person from himself. It delineates the boundaries beyond which is something unknown, messy unpredictable.

I am become that sort of Catholic child I thought I never would or could become. The one who throws over some distant life to return back home to care for infirm parents. Those parents, or generally it is Mom, linger then for years and years and friends drop away since that particular sort of passion is exclusive of a life for oneself.

I have never ever cheated on a school assignment. I don't have it in me. And, well, I don't have it in me to know what it is that I really want with and of my life. And the lies I tell, therefore, are nowise geared toward advancing my own agenda. Other than to liberate myself from this strange purgatory on one of Earth's almost certainly most perfect pieces of real estate. This is the it life. Charming waterfront living, tastefully arranged.

I feel vaguely as though I should have a life, and it can't be here. I can't even last the summer, nevermind the years and years of lingering always in store for dutiful children. I don't feel as though I care either that little or that much. Perhaps I simply don't feel, enslaved all these years to some idea for myself. Some bottled aspirations, as my parents led the way toward what seems almost normal now. Like drinking corn sweetenered carbonated water, it's considered acceptable now to spend an entire life in devotion to the kids' success. That's what having enough means now: the sheer excess to be able to give your kids the message that if they don't get into the Ivy of their choice, they might as well die.

We saw an unusual bird today, and the other day there was some new not unattractive growth on the beach. Some invasive species, rendering useless the classic field guides strewn about this house. I once thought I had to learn the names of these things. I never did. Lots of Dad's memories are about the Boy Scouts. That's where I would have learned to identify plants and birds and constellations. Later on, I learned lots of Chinese characters. Then I stopped and they linger on in my being as unused competencies, shades of knowledge.

We eat often at a Chinese restaurant, one started by an artist, a calligrapher, a poet who drew his recipes from the classics. They know me there. I taught his daughter. I recognized the character in one of his "drawings." It was "filial piety" as normally translated. Respect for ones ancestors. It was somehow, vaguely mis-written. Or maybe it was an archaic form. It was tipped a bit, drunken. There's another full moon tonight. I snapped a picture of it, and got a flying saucer. I posted it to Facebook. I have no idea why. I thought it was funny.

Dad's struggle to find words is extreme. I struggle to find words, but his struggle leaves him comically bereft much of the time. He pantomimes with vague approximations, vocally, grasping for the most common terms. Things familiar. I'm not sure this is what's meant by "memory loss" to most people. In some cases, he has an apparent thing in mind, but can't get at the words for it. It reminds me of myself speaking some foreign tongue. It's frustrating, but only because you can't dig up the word to make a connection. You want a dictionary.

But a dictionary wouldn't help Dad. The mechanics would elude him. Right now he's watching something on PBS about something about war. War captivates him, just like memories of boy scouts seem the most present. But the war stuff has to be real. History. He can't watch caricatures. Dramatic enactments of WWII go well. Just now he remembered how his father was all set to ship off during WWI, but luckily was absolved by the War's end. He seemed to have a perfectly clear memory of this.

Lacking words for the organisms around us must be similar to what gets called "memory loss." We become abstracted from the natural environment which is also part of us, but it was the words themselves which abstracted us in the first place. Without them, we would be embedded, connected.

So there is nothing separate from losing grasp in general to memory loss. I guess there are some people who keep a good memory well after their body is decrepit. But what good would that be? Is a sharp mind in a blasted body more free than a blasted mind in a sharp body?

This sense of "I" that we celebrate so much is nothing other from abstraction, separation, identity, that thing which makes us unnatural. There is nothing about my Dad which is not perfectly recognizable as him. There is nothing lacking, though much has been attenuated. And he's no longer in control, even of his wife, who has finally learned to assert herself. At least on the phone. At least across an international boundary.

I won't be able to do this much longer. My mind is subsumed beneath the white noise of Dad. I can't think. I'm losing my mind in a different way. My words are not available to me because there is no peace. I think we mirror each others' frustration. Perhaps another TV uipstairs would do the trick?

Oh, I can read there on my Kindle, which allows me to purchase new books without leaving my seat, pulling in the tower from the hill across the lake in the good ol' U. S. of A. Remember when a book was something to have and to hold, and folks would have been embarrassed to sell you just the words and prevent you then from giving them away to the next person.

My struggle is with irritation, with bodily functions and smells and old bad habits which were only lightly veneered by some civilizing influence. It's hard to like Dad now. He smells and won't wash and makes embarrassing and loud comments in restaurants of the sort he used to know enough to keep to himself. And this new being can't be blamed on new deficits. Rather, something got removed which kept the disagreeable stuff in check. But it was always there.

Then what is left, when everything else gets removed? When the house and chotchkes gathered up across so many years of perpetually contested truce are disposed of and all the memories must be told from someone else's mouth, or pen, or also-fading memory. Constructed memory which will always be cartoon-like smoothed, toward abstracted perfect shapes, for better or for worse.

Is all that's left just simply this compulsion to care, to act out love, to treat the shell as though it were the real thing, and not what should get left behind. I'll keep you posted. I'm learning love, but I'm not there yet. I sitll have plenty of work to do, to arrange for disposals, for professional care, for preservations when necessary. I still have truths to tell so that there will be calm and peace and something like co-existence, on the same campus, of two individuals who can't help one another anymore.

One, my father, always competent and always preparing ahead, shedding things, before he can't handle them anymore. He is stubborn like a bull if asked to relinquish authority, autonomy, charge, unless invited to do so by someone who will help him as a peer. The other, my mother, always resentful of control taken away, and for whom help is something compelled, with belittlement if necessary, with money doled out or withheld.

So I must stand in. For love. In all the wrong places. And then one day, perhaps, I will experience it, as a felt experience, as something real beyond control. As something not dependent on so many things piled up across the years. Perhaps.

Loser!

My sweet daughter used to make an L on her forehead at me a lot. Powerful expressions always originate with the very young, and of course it took me a while to "get" what this expression meant.

It has taken me my entire life until, perhaps, about now to decide that no matter how often I earned the nickname HardLuck, I am precisely not a Loser.

Lately, I whine about what the Health Insurance Industry does to me - they have systematically rejected every single claim, except for the incidentals, for my recent hospitalization. The total bill is enough to wreck me, and having paid my premiums doesn't begin to cover my obligations up against the set of rules they have for me to break unwittingly.

But the good news is that they are showing their hand. Demographically, they should consider me on their side in the Big Fight. They should bend over backwards to convince me that we really do have a fair and honest and worth-preserving system of health care. I'm one of the lucky ones who's recently enough unemployed actually to have health insurance, and still luckier to continue to be able to pay their premiums.

But just like Dick Cheney, they can't help themselves. By their actions they seem to believe somehow that I will be grateful each time they make an exception to their arcane rules that somehow I haven't precisely followed. Most of the time, I'm not the one failing to follow the rules anyhow; it might be the doctor using the "wrong" code, or the hospital passing the deadline for pre-certification, or me getting sick while crossing insurance boundaries. But I'm the one at the end of the line. I'm the one with the fewest resources to fight.

So, the power remains entirely with them to make exceptions, and I should be grateful? Actually, I think I've been granted a glimpse into the hellish orgy which is behind the way profits get made around these parts.

Back in highschool, everyone was shown highway atrocities, enough to make you quite actually sick, for the purpose of discouraging drunk driving. And we continue to be told of what a large percentage of highway accidents are caused by alcohol. For that matter, we continue to be terrorized by stories about drunken airline pilots.

But the message is never conveyed that if you put that many autonomous death machines on high-speed roadways, a certain amount of mayhem is simply inevitable. And it will look just as gruesome.

I prefer to focus on how few fatalities there are, given the nutso system that we have to multiply the consequences of any one of us going off, or making the wrong deer in headlights move, or just being despondent because of some sort of extreme cognitive dissonance.

Leaping ahead here; the terrorists are not the problem. The problem is that we live in a world where we grant the nutjob or the drunk so much power. Every time we think it must have been some Islamic radical, it turns out to have been some neighbor (in the case of Buffalo and Tim McVeigh) or some local nutjob flying his private plane into a building (in the case of Austin) in imitation of the big guys.

And when it really is some Islamic radical, we come up with bizarre conspiracy theories about how it must have been the Big Guy. Which just diverts attention from the fact that the Big Guy was always ready to take full advantage of whatever happened whenever it happened. They tell us all the time that some sort of terrorist incident is inevitable. Is that so that we can prepare for it (how would you prepare???) or so that "they" can?

We are being prepared by a slow but steady erosion of our civil liberties and degrees of freedom, but not the ones that count, like being able to drive cars or fly planes. It's the ones we shrug about which are being whittled away. The ones which, each by themselves, don't mean much, but will add up, down the road, to something which looks very much like Too Big to Change.

Google's gmail wasn't really working very well yesterday. I don't know if this will be documented, or allowed to languish as something that lots of people might have noticed but assumed was something "on my end." We're all vaguely aware of how vulnerable our information systems are. Cybersecurity is generally recognized to be as critical as infrastructure security of any sort. Google gets attacked by overzealous Chinese patriotic students, but that might be a difference without a distinction from being attacked outright by the forces of the Chinese government.

Just as it really doesn't matter who is the pilot of a mobile bomb and what deranged him. The system is simply set such that this stuff has become an inevitability. We like to assign blame, but maybe it's the system that has gone rotten.

Or maybe "the system" is working really really well, but there are some terribly minority winners for whom what they've already won is never enough. Maybe our fear is fully functional for them. If we think the system is busted, wrecked, headed for disaster, then we will remain fully powerless to do anything about it, and the ones who have the power can just keep getting more.

I do think it's about that simple.

The good news is that we will learn to get along because we must. The bad news hardly needs reciting, it's on the news every day, whether it's a Harvard genius toting a gun, or the figment of someone's imagination toting a gun in the UB Library. We're really scared of one another.

But no-one seems to notice how well we do, in fact, get along.

I'm a weirdo on my street, just because, I guess, I'm the only renter. Plus, I'm shy by disposition and don't really know the rules for interaction in the local soap opera. I guess I'm part of it - I wonder what role they have scripted out for me? I could make up some fascinating tales, based on the part that makes it out in public. They'd be at least as believable as the truth, whatever that is. I have no idea what my role is or should be. Honest.

I did not get that job, by the way, where I would be taking on a very public role helping to diffuse the tectonic forces now at the intersection of China and the U.S. This was not a mistake on the part of the search committee, nor does it make me a loser. I was well qualified for the position, and made it to the podium for sure, in a very crowded field. But there was only one position on offer, and I didn't get it.

In a minor sense, I am a known quantity in Buffalo. I am not one of the players. More of a bit part at the fringes who somehow has been in prominent positions at certain moments, but never in a real spotlight. That has been fine for me, but I have also allowed myself to consider myself a loser, even though each time that I have 'failed to succeed' the entire arrangement was a kind of setup. I was a patsy for someone else's failure to set a winnable context.

I guess that makes me some kind of fool, stepping in where more sensible people always have something better to do, or know how to say no. (there's absolutely no way I would have been able to say "no" if I were offered this job. I'm just as scared as you are about being out of work)

Whether heading a school for gifted kids during a stagflationary recession in a shrinking city at a time when "gifted" was a widely derided claim. Whether guiding a high level commission to China without the proper high level alignment back at the home school. Whether struggling to keep up with expectations in a field where those in power all, to a person, announce their utter incompetency (that's what IT work means in case you didn't know what you were doing to those guys who fix your machines).

But it doesn't make me a loser. The losers are the ones who are not allowed to live on my street, and who are therefore concentrated in places I would consider it a risk to my life to live. I wonder how the people who do live there consider it. Isn't it a risk to their lives as well?

Very smart and very well-grounded (sic) people trade advice back and forth, at a very high level - like 30,000 feet in the air high - about what should be done to "rightsize" Buffalo's infrastructure. Which parts should be let go, which bulldozed, which mothballed, since it seems perfectly obvious that there simply isn't enough population of sufficient income to preserve it all.

I don't think I want to live at those 30,000 foot heights. There's no air to breath up there. Well grounded in some esoteric field of experts is not the same as having feet actually on the ground.

I'm guessing that there are lots and lots of people in Sprawlsville who would love to live closer to the action if they weren't so encouraged to fall prey to the notion that everyone in the city is bound and determined get you and yours.

There's a big shopping mall just outside the outer ring of Buffalo called the Galleria. When it was built, it was one of the larger such places in the nation, built to take advantage of the cross-border shopping trends from Canada (depending on the ascendancy of Canadian or American hockey, say).

It's been in the news nationally for not allowing buses from the city to terminate there, leading to the loss of one poor woman's life crossing the quite literally impossible-to-cross highway to get to her low-level job inside the mall.

The first thing you see when you enter the mall are signs announcing that "children" under 18 are not allowed unaccompanied. The assumption is that this too is because of the unruly kids from the city (as if they could get there in the first place).

I happen to know first hand, because I was there, that this rule is because of a very exclusive and expensive private boarding school for dyslexic boys where I used to work. This mall was their Friday night release. During the week, the prescription to empower these boys, who were demonstrably smart (and necessarily rich, which is  neither here nor there) but who had trouble reading; the prescription was to provide order to their lives. And constant phonic drilling.

This was not exactly a military school, but it did set out to internalize order that the students were lacking, in a way often reminiscent of military schools. For the right sort of student, it really really worked. It was liberating.

But if you set these kids loose in the mall on a Friday, with teachers who have been on duty (you had to live on campus to teach there) virtually 24/7, you do have a bit of a problem waiting to happen.

It was these kids who were the reason for the rule at the mall.

As FDR once convinced us, it truly is fear and fear alone which is our adversary.

And if I, a winner in every sense of the game *except* perhaps my own internal impressions, cannot overcome fear, who can?

So, I'll continue to work on it. I'll keep you posted. I still think that the tectonic tensions between China and the US are critically important for us all to worry about, collectively. But of course, they are worries at the level of asteroids possibly coming in from the far reaches of the cosmos if you're on the ground dealing with health and safety emergencies.

The way to bring those issues down to earth, I am fully convinced, is to make it clear on a local level what it might mean to throw out the search for scientific stratosphere-level certainties (religious, technological, blueprinted - it hardly matters, because they're all the very same thing) in favor of a kind of contextualized flowing usage trued against centuries of drilling and practice and recitation. We could use the balance.

The funny thing is that in the so called ghettos, they're already way way ahead of us in the Eastern martial arts training. There may actually be less ground to travel there toward making sense of China, than there ever could be at the University which still only affords a tiny handful of professors and courses.

Well, it's a thought. My strength in my professional life has always and only been my patience. I seem to lend a bit of calm in the face of dire circumstances. It's why I like to sail in the wild weather. It's the kind of fool that I am. It defines my success in the field of IT, overpopulated by over-reacts who love the adrenalin pumping emergencies. I will remain calm, ever looking for ways on the ground to connect with the 30,000 foot perpetual emergency that the smart people in power pay attention to, exhorting us to do the right thing.

The Fish Lives on (and I expect a new salary offer any minute)

I know you were wondering about the fish. It's great to be wrong for a little while longer. It's a minor thing, but it's such a downer when you have to use that little net they urge you to buy along with your "starter kit." And flushing down the toilet somehow just ain't right.

Meanwhile, no action at work, since I guess the various implications if not shock waves have to be plotted out. So, I'm in my familiar limbo. Public face and private knowlege.

Last time, I was heading a closing school but still had to carry on with public enthusiasm and fundraising and hiring and even recruiting. Because part of the board wouldn't give up while the other part with the deep pockets were working out the school's orderly dissolution. I was on the responsible side, but it cost me my appendix and several times nearly my life for a huge variety of reasons. For sure, the scars run much deeper than the one on my abdomen. I just ain't been right since then.

The appendix part is actually pretty funny, in a grim sort of way. I was living across the border from Buffalo in my parents' Canadian summer house, having just left home myself again. Leaving home was about the second time in my adult life that I full out cried. The first time was when my daughter whom I was now abandoning was born two months prematurely.  There is always laughter and pain at border crossings, I'm sure. Especially when they're forced.

I'd come home from a pep meeting with the alumni portion of the board. As I recall, there was some threat to the meeting, that I'd better not scuttle their efforts, and even more still carry on as chief cheerleader in charge. I know I did truly want, with all my heart, for the school to succeed, and had even developed a pretty elaborate business plan to make it possible. 

I worked very hard to fund that plan, but treachery must have been the name of the spot I occupied. I know that I acted earnestly and in good faith with all aspects of proper governance and reporting. But I was living on some variation of adrenalin, and holding in all feeling. And the lead funder of the plan pulled out the bottom card. I'd failed the confidence game, at least in part I feel, because I was familiar with the foundation director. Knowing me, I wouldn't quite trust me either.

That night I developed a pain in my gut, which grew in crescendo volume until I thought my body had become a siren in its pain and could get no higher but somehow still did. In retrospect, it was idiotic to draw a bath, but I needed some exit from the pain. Finally, very late at night or maybe early the next morning, sopping wet in final panic from the tub, I made my way crablike out to my little bouncy pickup truck. 

I had to endure what seemed a full half hour's grilling at the border crossing, since by all appearances I was putting on an act and must be up to something no good. The dramatics were intense for sure, and I still don't begrudge the fellow at Customs his disbelief. I would often run in to another had-been headmaster colleague who'd taken a Customs job for relief at that border crossing, and could easily see myself there too. I was grateful when he finally suspended his disbelief, and let me through, to speed in desperation through the slushy streets so thankfully barren.

And  after being parked in the hallway of that hospital for what seemed interminable hours, amid ambiguous signs of what was going on in my guts due likely to confessions of liquor, they opened me up, and I hear my appendix burst like a rotten tomato in the doctor's hand post harvest. (he was more skilled than the one who delivered my daughter, and who left her Mom chopped up).

It was Christmas Eve, and the papers were full of the anchorage boathouse where I'd kept my non-yacht, being sent up in flames by the mentally disturbed son of the abused chief boatwright. That man was smart! But not much educated. I'd befriended him as best I could across that clubby class divide, just simply because my boat was crude, ugly, and not very properly preppy looking. I had no proper sense of color with the paint either. 

He always regarded me with the same fundamental suspicion he did all the prigs at the club's myriad helms. Many of them with portraits along the admiralty wall, back eons almost to the days when this manly yacht club got its start as camping destination for canoe-craze outings across the lake before the Peace Bridge ever got built.

The ceremonial and maybe original canoe went up in the flames, as I recall. The boatyard chief had just been fired himself, and there must have been some sense of outraged justice to the torching. I remember watching this craggy and mostly toothless man build my own boat's cradle, most by eye, from huge timbers now rotten and gone, but then perfectly matched and tuned to the task at hand. He thrilled to do it. I marvelled at the result.

His pricing reflected the budget he kept for his operation, and so far as I could tell never his own profit above what meager salary they paid. But I'm sure he ran afoul the admiralty, who'd somehow transmogrified from whisky bonfires on the beach to prigs who'd lost their sense of humor.  I shouldn't say, since I never knew any, and soon withdrew from the club in a kind of shame.

Though, and here's a strange true fact, my Dad and I did grace the cover of the Buffalo News Magazine one time for paddling down the river in our canoe. So, I guess there is return. (We were nowhere near the Falls, though they are always in your mind when paddling down that river). I head for the Falls again now, for sure.

This story is so hackneyed old, I can't even remember if I've ever written it or only told it umpteen times. And then there was that evening in the dim Demerol darkened light of my hospital room when I signed my final separation, and completed another border crossing to divide my life.

So now, still obsessing, I look forward only to these two three hours with you each morning. Or working out my book. It's what gets me out of bed, interrupted by my coffee induced morning regularity annoyingly, but there are worse ways to be stirred out of bed.  Shortly, I will have to start the increasingly grindy work day, and I'll  miss you until my return later on.

Meanwhile, the thought I'd meant to work out was this:  that I remain convinced of two twinned facts: (how many colons does it take to evacuate a thought?) The first: that offshoring of manufacturing is NOT primarily a race to the bottom for wages. Of course, there are many features of these decisions, including cheap shipping, cheap real-estate, inviting tax arrangements, lax environmental regulation, all along with cheap wages. Each of these alone is enough to constrain the hand of any decider, whose responsibility is to the bottom line, and to his stockholders.

Skirting the irony of the stock market crashing for just a moment longer, the fact I truly know is that the system which is global capitalism also wants docile labor, which gets defined by proximate fear of starvation.  That's always been a bottom line of the capitalist system, and it's bosses and beneficiaries have always been able to rationalize it away. Even while the university types struggle to connect the dots which allow the system to be blamed for creating the very misery its jobs, ostensibly, set out to resolve.

Parenthetically, I think connecting those dots convincingly might be as likely as cold fusion or winning an argument with my work colleague. He cheats in ways I cannot detect, nor master, and finally wins by wearing me out from the effort only to pay attention. I apologize that I do the same to you, dear and gentle reader.

The second fact I know full well is that our education system - the system now - is designed primarily to sort and categorize - as efficiently and perhaps as permanently as possible - its charges into those same alphas and betas which IQ testing was originally, and very militarily, deployed for.

The IQ test is the point of contention, always, both in the school I ran for "gifted" children, and in the community of educators more generally, since clearly "all children are gifted" (though not in the same ways, he whispered).  But it's more the gentle machinery of control and feedback which it seems impossible to grow beyond.  By suppressing the score, you don't make the score go away, and every child automatically and all the time knows it anyhow. It's what children do.

Now I've studied this stuff a little bit, but I don't want to claim any academic anything here, since I'm out to make an actual difference, which never felt very easy from inside those academy walls. That disconnect is quite matured, most clearly in the field of education, where what gets read and studied in the field has (or used to) almost no carryover to what gets read and studied in the ivory tower. The audiences and inspirational speakers just don't cross each other.

I'm pretty sure that I hate to my very guts that young D.C. Asian superintendent, but I might be wrong. I do know that the more purely competitive education of the Asian masses, where they don't worry so much about student/teacher ratios, does us better by some measures. And this young superintendent might be kicking ass in just the right way, though I doubt it. I have yet to hear an educator, outside the academy, who doesn't want better of the same. It's the metaphor that's wrong, I think.

We still take the lead for incubation of entrepreneurial talent. Bill Clinton's famous top fifty percent. I'm pretty sure I incubated some my very self. Some might even have gone on to use the Chinese I started them on. I haven't kept up.

But to the extent that the economy becomes frantic that we need a better educated workforce, my little jaded brain cries out, "yeah yeah."  Let's get accountability for those outcomes. Let's measure our students performances better. Let's computerize the classroom. Let's better instrumentalize the entire process. Isn't it computers we want to make of minds?

NOT.

Computers will never think, hello! And brainy kids don't often make any creative genius cut. Schools used to be cheap because they had no administration. And kids controlled each other, maybe, so the teacher didn't have to.  Our schools now lag in their structure from the industrial age, now so fully outsourced (drive sometime along the dreary Monongahela in a thunder storm at night, having done it a first few short decades ago when the superstructures were all lit up!!)

This is what gets heatedly debated in the academy, where the facts are all full known. Even as they must prepare practitioners. (another funny factoid: I ran into my former student teaching supervision supervisor tuning in to The Corporation, the other day.  Along with the business manager of yet another private school, who'd long retired from his post, and left from the film before I could say hello. There must be something in the air).

There are no good metaphors for school. It should be messy, involve lots of travel, foreign languages, and preserve good boundaries between teacher and student. School, for liberation, should be a root metaphor itself, not likened to anything else, nor trued by any comparisons.

That's what's become impossible anymore. But two things are in our favor now. The first is that there is broad general recognition that investments in education might make the best long term stimulus.  Except for those robot Republicans who don't have any other recording to play when you pull their strings, most people think that the government should do more and better than just to feed the gaping black hole maw of the financial economy (that pairing of terms just cracks me up!)

I don't necessarily want the ivy-logoed technocrats to stop doing that, mind you, because I'm not nearly smart enough to understand what they do and why. I only know that whatever glimmering Demerol (no, I don't do drugs. It's just a metaphor) hope for retirement I might have been nursing has now fully evaporated away. (I hear that health and retirement benefits were incentives from a time when wages were controlled for the commonweal - what a concept.  That standardization should stimulate creativity. Regulation by any other name, a different colleague brilliantly points out)

But for sure, we don't want all those college age kids clogging up the employment markets, especially as devalued and uneducated and interchangeable hands.  Such creatures are commodity exports from most of the world already, despite our border fences.

Just as we don't want too many unemployed declaring bankruptcy when their appendixes burst, I think the ultimate fact of socialized medicine (let's call it "standardized" for fun) and free public higher education stares us in the face.  Let's get on with it.  It's not just real-estate values that have collapsed. It's the whole shooting match.

But meanwhile, we should clear a space again for that school I ran into the ground, because it was far too messy, and like me, too far ahead of its time (my Chinese evaporates too). It cost near nothing to operate, though income versus outgo never could be matched. I guess the same might be said of any institution which had so little administration. (ho ho ho, let's say of any institution which asked so much of the guy who also rang the bell, as they say in China about heads of small schools). On both scores.

Kids need to be put alongside other kids who stir them is all. Among teachers who inspire and respect them as fully human (beleive me, that last is not so common in schools). Reading writing and rithmatic need almost never be taught, since kids pick up these things on their own if they aren't disabled from it by schooling.  

You have to work really hard to prevent a child from learning to read, expect perhaps at a school for the dyslexic, but that's another story for another time (I can't afford to laugh that hard right now).  You have to present arithmetic in the most abstract disabling recipe style confusing fashion to prevent kids from learning what a bunch of manipulative tiles can help them figure out almost on their own. You have to almost invent computers to prevent children from doing things with pen and paper.

We're damn good at what we do, sadly.

I went to school alongside kids who were a lot more like that boatyard man than they were like me. They knew lots of stuff I'll never learn nor understand. Can't we liberate them as well from dreary sessions at the back of classrooms hot roddishly talking about their AK-47s, likely to impress the student teacher's supervisor, while the actual supervising teacher was about to be led off for sexual abuse, result of a clever sting run by some pissed off cagey girls?  True story, that one.

I don't see why kids can't mix and match and still compete at their own level. There are many different fields of competition.

But we'll get the world and the economy we want. I'm still very excited by the ways in which we can smart our various grids in an information economy. But I really really don't want to live in anything even slightly resembling the dreary housing which its architects do build. I am no inhabitant of any warren, nor does my thinking even vaguely resemble something computable.

And I got my education not just in kindergarten, but by running one.  That Yale dipoloma's just for show (for Mom).

Oh, damn, drink up please, it's time.