The Journal

 

Serving the Metropolitan Area

 

Since 1872

 

May 11th

 

SCHOOLS DAZED!

 

By Jack Parnell - retired Congressman and Independent Presidential candidate

 

Syndicated by Acme Features

 

  This ol' candidate for Guvnor of Texas as wound up runnin' for President some years back not the drunk, the used-to-be drunk motorcycle lady, the cripple or the oops man who failed upwards to become Secretary of something awhile or the crazy person Im talkin way way back figured Americans just might elect him if'n he raised standardized test scores, so teachers were commanded to turn li'l Texans into veritable data-spouting fonts... as might someday reap beacoup bucks on those quiz shows. Well, voters with an unearthly respect for charts and graphs duly crowned Dubya as George III, Pretender to the Lone Star Republic, then crowned him agin' (legitimately, this time, sort of) for the whole freakin nation.

Sometimes I get these bad dreams of about twenty years down the road when I'm a toothless old Kentucky codger driving amongst Texans... down a dirt road toward Crawford, of course, still unpaved... and along comes the flashing lights behind and state trooper, as asks: "Sir... you were doing twenty-seven in a twenty-five mile zone, so tell me, boy: What is the capital of Chechnya? I do a Perry uh, uhm he says no, sir, it's Groznia. Put your hands behind your head, get out of your vehicle slowly, or I'll be forced to ventilate you." Then, after he's writ me up for "spedding", I stop for ice cream to wash the dust out'n my throat and the thirty-somethin gender studies graduate behind the counter asks: "Chocolate or vanilla, but first and in order to be served... to make four trillion dollars, a stack of tightly packed hundred dollar bills would extend a) 2,700; b) 3,200 or c) 4,400 miles into space?" I realize I'm going to have to answer, and correctly, in order to wet my tonsils... not to mention not knowing what the dollar will be worth by then which is why I say it's a bad dream.

Seems to me some might want educated children, not human dictionaries, but what I think's really going on is that most downsized, disgruntled and imitation principling Americans... many as who've seen their jobs et up by the plague or shipped off to China... see the teachers and firemen, the garbagemen and those state cops, as still have respect from the public and union jobs, and get envious dog-in-the-manger envious! Those days of clapping and banging on pots and pans at sundown to thank the gumment workers, the hospital nurses and first responders those days are over. "One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity..." astronomer Carl Sagan said before shuffling off to his own private cosmos and that before the last election, "...that the media is reassuring people it's all right not to know anything - that, in a way, it's cool."

I guess I grew up in a deprived (maybe, even, depraved) populist household... the Senator wouldn't let me come to DeeCee full-time 'til I was old enough to enroll as a junior in that private high school in Georgetown. So I had to trudge up through the local system up on Millers Ridge, including two years at Dan Boone Consolidated Middle... with textbooks as taught two and two makes four, Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo (and got sent off to write angry letters to people who didnt care, just like Mister Trump), and that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves even though there were good people on both sides.

Missed out on that post-modern Common Core-age curricula as has replaced the violent and Eurocentric Iliad and Odyssey with tales of "Respect, the Frog" and "Dignity, the Turtle". Missed out on the critical race race to the flagpole of wokeness as taught black people were good and white people bad. (Texicans just shrugged.) I also missed out learning that "curriculum of caring" as holds one gets ahead in life by ordering hot coffee from the Klown for a morning's commute, spilling it in your lap and hiring some big-hair, big-teeth TV lawyer to sue the company.

David Slavitt, a foe of post-modern French pedagogues as Wacky Jacky Derrida and the Paul deMan Man, even voices the ultimate political incorrectum: "The whole point of a university education used to be to teach discrimination." Maybe, had we not demonized said verbiage (as held sway in the days when reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic were taught to the tune of a hickry stick), we'd be able to perceive the oaks of discipline from that scrub forest of Squeamishness and the politically correct, as leads, straightly or not, to the attorney's door.

The voucher and charter people have their agenda, too, but most are their own worst enemies. Too many scammers as, for example: Gap-financed Channel One (financed by The Gap and hostile takeover mavens Kohlberg-Kravitz-Roberts)... shoveling kids into classrooms to watch fake news on television with a teaspoon of lite, white literature, math and history and plenty of commercials. Too many crazies and worse wantin' to get their Mitts on America's children, force-feed 'em with propaganda and get paid for the doin'. Some'll fall back on faith and values, but now as Mister Trumps Supremes have let those self-proclaimed Christians belly up to the taxpayers' buffet, well also either double down on declaring America a Christian (or, if them AIPAC lobbyists do their jobs, alongside of Jared the K. and the Second Man), a Judeo-Christian-only nation or else throw the door wide open to the Buddhists, the nudists, the Scientologists, Appliantologists and Osama death-deniers, that Jew-hatin Mickey Mouse knockoff from Hamas and your friendly, local Satanist. (See more in this here Don Jones Index a year ago).

May work during a plague, but in elsewherenow no.

I wouldn't go banning or burning those Harry Potter books and DVDs, but I don't want my tax dollars paying to set up Hogwarts Academies in Raleigh or Denver, or even Duluth... that one magic word as pops vouchercrats like puffballs bein' "madrassas"!

So we pass our kids, like oat-bran muffins, through the system and out... and then into the colleges and univirulursuaries where "freshmen are herded into fifty thousand yearly, 500-seat lecture halls, with little chance of interacting with the sage on the stage," according to Murray Sperber, author of "Beer and Circus". The "circuses", as replace real education, are trivial elective seminars (like that on gambling, at the University of Wisconsin), collegiate sports and so-called "business curricula" where students learn to "make things happen by pushing paper around," complained financial writer Milton Moskowitz back in the day. Once they take over, we won't "...have any steel or coal or cars or food or houses or clothing. I guess the assumption is we'll just import those products." And pay for them?... with what? IOUs? Guns and poses? No matter, were Americans!

Old Miltie he aced that one.

Lets tip the old chapeau or MAGA cap to the late Alex Trebek by citing one of his bestKen Jennings, that old Jeopardy guy before becoming that new Jeopardy half-a-host (the, go figure! online gambler) who said that nearly ten percent of University of Miami students were unable to find Miami on a map.

No wonder, as another Don Jones lesson explained: people said, moren a decade back, America ranks in the lower quartiles of most indices as fit developed nations and the dead bottom, in some. And that was before the Man from Monkey Largo.

So, what, you ask, might Catfish elementary education look like? Well... elementary, for a start. Youngsters over the age of seven having, by that time, already been schooled on gun safety by their baby mamas boyfriends would walk to neighborhood schools, burnin' off them junk food calories and poppin caps on any dirty old man as tried to offer them rides or candy, instead of bein' bused to huge, dilapidated warehouses. Those in middle and highschools could ride bicycles and, once impris uh, enrolled learn at least a few useful skills like welding, planting corn, auto repair, computer coding and dealing with corporate and gumment disnerveoucracies. Those private enterprises as wanted to keep their Trumpastolistic tax cuts would be invited in for the mentoring and the such.

We can fix our schools... if the parents, teachers, bureaucrats, private sector and taxpayers all understand continuity (as opposed to freedom) doesnt fly for free not in these post Coronavirii stimulating days of national debts nearly doubling our GDP. Come to think of it... we cannot afford not to fix them. The alternative is unacceptable. Maybe George Will and Mike Barone would rather do without schools, as, like wearing masks to visit grandma during the pandemic, have become "emblematic of Soft (i.e. gay) America", but it's gonna take more than armies of steroid-swilling illiterates with hands full of assault weapons and pipe wrenches, spleens full of hate and heads full of social media swill and Marvel Comix cotton candy to combat the Soviet darkside hackers, the geeks of Beijing and Bangalore, let alone the hardasses still spilling out of ISIS and Iranian madrassas and Sergei Lavrov, if he ever stops lying about his promises to blow up the world.

"Fighting crime begins with the early years of the neglected child, when there is still a chance," retired Miami juvenile judge Seymour Gelber states in his memoir, "Hard Core Delinquents". "The longer we wait the harder it will get. There are no assurances of success, but there is guarantee of failure unquestioned failure if we try any other route."

 

CLICK the CATFISH to go to PAST and PRESENT EPISODES of "BLACK HELICOPTERS" and to OTHER JACK PARNELL COLUMNS

 

 

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             Infected:  32,604,495

                       Dead:  580,061

                         Dow:  34,548.53

 

Its National Nurses Day.  Grateful patients, public shower them with applause and prizes.

   CDC has good news on plague, nearly 150 million Americans have had at least one vaxx, and it will be lessening by July given the usual trinity of masks, vaxxes and social distancing.  Some doctors admit Covid, like the flu, will require yearly booster shots until 20 ?... but the Moderna vaxx seems to be effective against the Brazilian, Indian and newer strains.  President Joe says he supports easing patent protections to allow competitors to make generic versions, but vaxxes are dropping, owing to the hard-core of Trump faithful who believe it all a conspiracy.

   Ol 45 receives the bended knee from Caitlyn Jenner and tnewly re-educated Kevin McCarthy (R-Ca) prosecutes his war against Liz Cheney with vim and vigor as well as accusing Facebook of acting like Democrats.  The implied threat impels its Cancel Board to tell The Donald he can re-apply in six months.

   Facebook rival, Amazons Jeff Bezos, says hell auction off seats on his Blue Origen rocketship so that space tourists can fly up and return a few minutes later.  Space X starship successfully lands on its fifth try and will be ready for recycling, but a Chinese rocket fail will have it plunging to earth to strike somebody on Mothers Day.

   Heroic nurse and bus driver join nurses the former talking a school shooter (a @ year old female) into giving up her gun, the latter organizing an orderly evacuation of ki