Heroes, Reading, and the Good Ol' Days
Here’s what heroes and the good old days have in common: they both never were what they used to be. I have been hearing and reading lately a lot about this mythical hero from out of the past: the reader. How he used to read all the classics and could converse about such and such and what have you, and how his (or her) disappearance is the cause of all that ails us. The kissing cousin of this hero is the notion that the educational system of that mythical time (unlike today) churned out these readers and that’s why life was just so grand back then. All I can say is back when I lost my short lived gig with the Goodman band I wished to hell I had lost it for smoking what these folks are smoking instead of that low grade gage we were doing at the time.
I knew a lot of good folks who quit school at the age of 16 (my very own self comes to mind) not because we were geniuses and had managed to get all that good learning under our belts, but because it would not have done us a damn bit a good to continue school compared with getting on with life. That was the value we had put on education back in those good old days. Sure, assuming we all had the bucks and connections, we could have all gone off to college and what have you, and all it would have meant is that an awful lot of folks with a college education would have been doing what we ended up doing.
Do you want to know who read all those classics back then: useless rich folks who never intended to do a lick of work in their lives anyway and hung around the campus so they didn’t have to come face to face with the embarrassment of their uselessness. And jazz musicians were the ones with the lousy reputations! Go figure that one.
So how are we attempting to cure this curse that has befallen our unsuspecting young and making them morons who will in all likelihood grow up to be Republicans or something worse? We are going to test the be-Jesus out of them and in the process solidify their moron status. My advice to the boy is to go out and do something with his life, and if in the process you need to read something to get it done, you will figure that out too. First get in the habit of doing, and reading will become part of that doing if need be, and if not then there will have been nothing lost.
So if nothing really has changed, what is all the commotion about? It’s simple. There are a lot of things that need doing in this world that those with money don’t want to pay an honest price for its getting done. Here’s the thing to keep in mind. If every damn last one of the youth in this country graduated top of their Harvard class (think that Lake Wobegone where everybody is above average), all that would mean is that an awful lot of Harvard graduates would be working at WalMart without health insurance.
Now, just how much of an education do you over tested morons need to figure out what the real problem is here? Don't all raise your hand at once!
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