Has thinking been outlawed in the United States of America? I apparently didn’t get the memo. I know thinking was actively discouraged and sometimes subject to persecution under the Bush administration but he and Cheney have been out of office for nearly 10 months now. I guess old habits die hard and most Americans have forgotten how to exercise the gray matter between their ears.

Come on, folks! This is a new day and age. We have brains, let’s use them for their intended purpose. In all of human history, I don’t believe there has been as much stupid amassed between two oceans as there has been between the Atlantic and the Pacific in the last decade. How soon before we reach critical mass and explode? Maybe there will be a mass implosion from the accumulated vacuum of 300 million or more empty heads.

Though the British have been enacting ludicrous laws longer than we have, I think we Americans have probably taken it to an art form.
For instance:
~ In Illinois, it is illegal to take a french poodle to the opera.
~ In Kansas, it is illegal to practice knife throwing at any man wearing a striped shirt.
~ In Kentucky, it’s illegal to marry the same man four times.
~ Maryland has a statute against mistreating oysters.
~ Mississippi bans killing squirrels with a gun in a courtroom.
~ It is against the law to pump your own gas in New Jersey.
~ North Carolina prohibits using elephants to plow cotton fields.
~ In Fargo, North Dakota, you can be jailed for wearing at hat while dancing or at a party where there is dancing.
~ Women are forbidden from wearing patent leather shoes in Cleveland, Ohio.
~ You can be arrested in Oklahoma for making ugly faces at a dog or for getting a fish drunk. (I think there’s a similar law regarding fish in Ohio.)
~ Pennsylvania does not allow you to fire a cannon at your wedding.
~ It is illegal in South Dakota to lie down and fall asleep in a cheese factory.
~ In Texas it is illegal for children to have unusual haircuts.
~ In Utah, birds have the right of way on all highways and it is against the law to fish from horseback. (Nothing about getting the fish drunk.)
~ A Vermont statute prohibits whistling underwater.
~ Apparently, they take their religion seriously in West Virginia because members of the clergy are not allowed to tell jokes or humorous stories from the pulpit.
~ Wisconsin does not allow butter substitutes in state prisons.

It was the Irish poet William Butler Yeats that said, “Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire.” He was absolutely right. Education isn’t about learning a lot of facts and figures to pass tests. That’s filling buckets and the buckets generally have holes in them. If you never use that information for anything, you soon forget it and the bucket empties.

The purpose of education is to light a fire, a burning desire to learn, for the sake of learning, because it interests you, or because it’s useful to you. Education should spark your curiosity, drive you to ask questions and seek answers. Unfortunately, real education is the antithesis of the public education system. Curiosity, asking questions, and seeking knowledge are disruptive and, for many educators, a detriment to good discipline. In our system, the perfect student is one who sits quietly at his desk, absorbs information, and successfully regurgitates it for the test. Students who follow their curiosity and ask questions are usually labeled troublemakers or diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder and doped up with Ritalin. Who knows how many potential Einsteins and Edisons have been silenced simply because they were not content to absorb and regurgitate?

What educators should be doing is providing their students with the basic tools they need for learning and at the same time, light that fire that makes them want to learn. My favorite teachers were those who put aside the textbooks, took the material a little further than was required, asked questions that required some thought on my part, drove me a little harder, and inspired me to learn because I wanted knowledge, not so I could pass a test.

Even when I was in school, those teachers were rare but I was fortunate enough to have studied under several. These teachers tended to be mavericks who didn’t always follow the rules established by the Board of Education or state bureaucracies. They chose to be teachers because they wanted to impart their knowledge and wisdom to another generation. They taught because they loved to teach. I am eternally grateful to have had teachers like Clifford Buck, Glenn Dawson, Lawrence Carter, and Jane Braden. I had many other good teachers and there were other excellent teachers I knew of by reputation, but those I mentioned are the ones whom I still fondly remember; the ones who made an indelible impression on me.

Do teachers like them still exist? I pray that they do because the are the only hope for our youth. We need teachers who push their students a little harder and inspire them to greater things than a standardized test score, teachers who have the courage to innovate and reach out to their students, and teachers who, themselves, continue to learn.

The answer to the education crisis isn’t to throw more money at the problem or to put more computers in the classroom. It is definitely not more administrators larger bureaucracies, or lower standards. The answer is more good teachers who are allowed to educate and inspire the pupils placed in their care. I’m sure most of them would be up to the task if we got the bureaucracy off their backs. Of course, this is a utopian dream. Once a bureaucracy has become entrenched, there is no uprooting it. So many of them have long ago outlived their usefulness and exist only to perpetuate themselves.

“I never let schooling interfere with my eduation.” — Mark Twain

Dickheads of the Week (for the week ending Jan 7th, 2006)

I found the dickheads who left their young children to fend for themselves while they partied in Las Vegas the most disturbing. Well, at least the dogs had adult supervision. Some people deserve to be neutered and not allowed to breed. As for Pat Robertson, I have a pretty good idea where his head is. He should be forced to attend children’s Bible study classes as a student and actually read his Bible, especially the “red” words (they’re the important ones).

Rice Admits U.S. Underestimated Hamas Strength (New York Times, Jan. 30, 2006)

“The secretary of state said the U.S. failed to understand the depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime leaders.”

I think Condoleezza hit the nail on the head when she said, “The U.S. failed to understand.” (The emphasis is mine.) That pretty much sums up U.S. foreign policy. It also aptly describes U.S. domestic policy.

Still clueless after all these months

Louisiana in Limbo (New York Times, Jan. 30, 2006)

“The Bush administration has rejected the most broadly supported plan for rebuilding New Orleans while offering nothing to take its place.”

The rebuilding should have started as soon as the water began to recede. The paperwork and the funding could have been sorted out later. I’d have to say it’s the worst case of “reconstruction” in the South since the end of the Civil War (with FEMA and their contractors as the carpetbaggers). You can bet the plans to rebuild Trent Lott’s house have been approved and are well under way.

But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

[You gotta sing that with a nasal twang.]

There I was, sitting on the Group W bench. That’s where they put you after committing your particular crime. A father-raper on the Group W bench, the biggest, meanest father-raper of them all, asked me, “What ya get?” “I didn’t get nuthin’. They just pulled me out of the water.” “What was ya arrested for?” “Fer being stupid.” And they all moved away. …

Sincerest apologies to Arlo Guthrie for that horrible parody.
—–
‘Gonzo’ journalist Hunter S. Thompson dies
Hunter S. Thompson, 65, Author, Commits Suicide
He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Colorado on 20 Feb 2005. He was best known for his 1972 book, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which I wholeheartedly recommend reading. I wonder if I still have my copy.

‘Simpsons’ Animates Gay Nuptials, and a Debate
By SHARON WAXMAN

Published: February 21, 2005

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20 – In the ongoing culture wars over whether gays should have the right to marry, an animated question reared its head on Sunday prime-time television: as goes “The Simpsons,” does the nation go, too?

In an episode titled “There’s Something About Marrying,” a longtime character on Fox’s 15-year hit – it was Marge Simpson’s sister Patty Bouvier, a closely held secret until the 8 p.m. broadcast – came out of the closet while Homer Simpson conducted dozens of same-sex weddings after small-town Springfield legalized the unions in a bid to increase tourism. As television’s longest-running situation comedy, “The Simpsons” is no stranger to hot-button social, religious and political issues, mocking wardrobe malfunctions, Hollywood liberals and born-again Christians, among other targets.

Marge Simpson, left, and her sister Patty Bouvier, right, with Patty’s girlfriend in last night’s “Simpsons.”

But when a show as mainstream and popular as this takes on one of the most divisive issues in American society, it is certain to attract attention. Bookmakers in the United States and England were taking bets as to which character would be revealed as homosexual, and whether there would be a kiss – a nod, perhaps, to the popular programming gimmick of having lesbian characters lock lips during sweeps periods like the current one.

But mostly, television experts, fans and advocates for gay marriage ruminated over the larger significance of the moment.

“The issue was mainstream to some degree, but now that they’ve deigned it worthy of the show it is interwoven into the fabric of popular culture,” said Ray Richmond, a television columnist for The Hollywood Reporter and co-editor of the anthology “The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family.”

He added, ” ‘The Simpsons’ bestows upon something a pop culture status it never had before, simply by virtue of being ripe for a joke.”

(BetUS.com posted odds on the kiss at 7 to 5, and laid odds on Patty as the favorite to come out of the closet.)

Not unexpectedly, culture warriors were swift to weigh in, both for and against the cartoon’s treatment of the issue.

“It’s saying to those who demonize homosexuality, or what they call the homosexual agenda, anything from ‘Lighten up’ to ‘Get out of town,’ ” said Marty Kaplan, associate dean of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and host of a media show on the talk radio network Air America. “It sounds as though they’re saying that what the religious right calls ‘the homosexualist agenda,’ as if it were creeping Satanism, is: these people are your neighbors in the Springfield that is America.”

Indeed, in some ways the Simpsons’ fictional hometown, Springfield, has become a surrogate for mainstream, small-town America, with Homer its bumbling working-class hero. The closest parallel may well be the endearing though intolerant Archie Bunker, who became a symbol of working-class America in the 1970′s show “All in the Family.”

L. Brent Bozell III, president of the Parents Television Council, criticized “The Simpsons” for addressing the issue of gay marriage, though he cautioned that he had not seen the episode. A parental advisory preceded the broadcast.

“At a time when the public mood is overwhelmingly against gay marriage, any show that promotes gay marriage is deliberately bucking the public mood,” he said.

“I’d rather them not do it at all,” he added. “You’ve got a show watched by millions of children. Do children need to have gay marriage thrust in their faces as an issue? Why can’t we just entertain them?”

The show’s writers could not be reached for comment, and Fox declined to comment.

Since debuting in 1989, “The Simpsons” has commonly skewered the most sensitive topics of social, religious, political and cultural debate. The culture, in turn, has returned the favor. “The Simpsons” has been featured in at least one university philosophy course, in which Homer was used as a tool to understand Aristotle, Kant and Nietzsche, and in a mathematical course to explore topics like calculus and Riemannian geometry.

The show, now in its 16th season, still garners strong ratings, while reruns of episodes from past years are broadcast continually on Fox. It has become a billion-dollar franchise for the network, spawning lucrative DVD packages, books and consumer merchandise.

Hey, I’d rather “American Idol” wasn’t aired. Do I need “talentless people attempting to sing” thrust in my face? But you know what? I don’t watch “American Idol.” Do you know why? Because I don’t need “talentless people attempting to sing” thrust in my face! My point? If you don’t like shows that bring up “issues,” don’t watch them! And please, stop trying to protect me from all of your imagined evils in the world. I do a good enough job of finding evil on my own.

I keep hearing about this so-called “homosexual agenda.” What the fuck is it? To tell the truth, I’m starting to get a lot more concerned about the “heterosexual agenda.”