We have entered an era where the everyman wants one of his own as president; a man he can have over for dinner and play lawn darts with. Heck, maybe even win a round or two. You can see this in the rolled up shirtsleeves photo op whistle stops our candidates now make: Bill Clinton eating at McDonalds, Al Gore wearing ironed flannel, George Bush hiring a couple of guys from near the Home Depot to help him cut down a tree on his farm, and John Kerry – well, John Kerry is an elitist prick, but he does it in blue collars shirts. This desperate plea to the NASCAR set makes me violently ill, though it is telling that Richard Petty, a man who has made his career racing in circles and whose last name is “petty” has endorsed George Bush. I do not want the everyman as my leader. I want the smartest motherfucker we can find. Our president can deploy nuclear weapons. He commands the largest economy, the most formidable and advanced military in the world, and his words and actions influence global thought. What we have now is someone who – no offense to radio - cannot read without moving his lips, a man who cannot link together simple ideas to support an argument, and whose idea of education through No Child Left behind is to mandate a goal, underfund it, and then punish schools for not achieving those goals.
Have our standards really sunk so low? Have we truly lowered our national quality of excellence so that the guy who figures out how to remove gunk from bumper stickers could qualify for the Nobel Prize? My God, somebody call the MacArthur Foundation and let them know I’ve got some bonobos in the zoo who are prime candidates for their genius grant.
We send our children to school with the expectation that they will be taught by people who are educated. We hope that they will excel in their studies, we place the utmost priority on their public education so they will qualify for a higher one. And as we hemorrhage jobs in this horrific economy we are told that the solution lies in education. So why on earth are people so enamored with politicians who distance themselves from their own educations and who are desperate to show that even though they went to some fancy-schmancy Ivy league college when it comes to global diplomacy and foreign policy they, hyuh hyuh, trust their gut reaction? I HAVE HAD ENOUGH!
I am still paying off the student loans that helped me go to college. I learned how to reason, how to listen to those with wisdom, how admitting my lack of understanding of something could be an opportunity towards further learning, and how to open myself to further knowledge. These have become my rules of conduct for life. The only shame I have of my education is that I didn’t do better or achieve more. When I have been asked to lead I have been grateful and honored, and have tried to bring as much of my knowledge to my decisions and actions. And when I have been wrong I had tried to suppress my ego to admit fault, because there is less shame in admitting fault when it’s yours than covering up mistakes by redirecting blame. “First rule of leadership, EVERYTHING is your fault”. That’s Hopper, from a Bug’s Life. A movie this administration ought to watch.
But the everyman doesn’t want to lead, he wants to be led. The worker of the world is tired, he’s not earning enough to make ends meet so he has to work more. Productivity may be at record highs but that’s because those of us lucky to be working are working far more than 40 hours a week. The secret of telecommuting is that people are encouraged to blur the lines of work and home and are willing to work all the time. Feeding people at lunch isn’t generous, it’s a way to get them to work through lunch. We’re a nation of people who are so busy we don’t have time to think about which direction the train is going, we’re just lucky to have a seat. What we don’t realize is that through our neglect the conductors and engineers of the train have all been mentally downsized and are plowing us forward on primitive track. Once, bridges over chasms were built by engineers and educated men. Now, we approach a great span high above a river. It’s been designed by someone who has chosen to throw out everything he may have learned in school, and was built by the average man. It will never support our crushing weight.
Some pundit said that Bush speaks in sentences, not paragraphs. Tavis Smiley added that Kerry speaks in paragraphs, not sentences. Damn it, it’s time to work back to the five paragraph essay! The middle east cannot be reduced to good versus evil! Opening sentence – the region’s instability is the result of a century of western economic interests colliding with eastern religious ideology. Supporting paragraph, the history of English colonialism and the power vacuum filled by tribalism. Supporting paragraph, the dependency of global economies on fossil fuels which end up supporting religious regimes. Supporting paragraph, the destabilization of the only secular regime in the area has resulted in an entire region being overrun by religious zealots. Concluding paragraph, the neo-conservatives have used the chaos in the region to justify using the American military to take over global economies by force and erode domestic civil rights under the guise of an Orwellian war without end! You want a single sentence to remember? How about the less you know the more you lose!