Why Send It To Washington When You Can Send It To Baghdad?

[cbertsch]

An article on the sort of speech George W. Bush is likely to give for his State of the Union address this evening provides the following insight:

President Bush is certain to focus on the economy on Monday night, reiterating his faith in Americans’ enterprise and work ethic, arguing for a short-term shot in the arm and repeating his call for low taxes as a permanent way of life. Mr. Bush believes deeply in Americans’ “keeping more of their hard-earned money, rather than sending it to Washington,” as his spokeswoman, Dano Perino, put it the other day.

Will there ever come a day when this Administration acknowledges the gap between rhetoric and reality? It would seem not. Then again, after doing everything in their power to sustain and strengthen a demographic either unwilling or unable to make that distinction, the powers behind our President may have lost the capacity to recognize that there are still people out there who lack that lack of insight.

Comments

[babyiwasshot.livejournal.com]

Hell, I mean--examining things DIVORCED from marxist/theoretical discourse--education has to PRECEDE even the disease prevention that dudes like buffet/gates are attempting to palliate.

WHen people KNOW how AIDS "works," they can avoid it; when people KNOW how malaria is propagated (And how to avoid it) they act accordingly.

KNOWLEDGE precedes all of this stuff.


Look at America, even; most people (on both sides of the spectrum) assert that America is failing. Why? Mismanagement of EDUCATIONAL policy/budget. The education system in this country is fucked; consequently, our public schools pump out dumbasses who, were it not for the grievous amount of wealth their parents/families accumulated in the past, when people WERE smarter, would be damn near USELESS.

This is why I'm so hard on my peers; they're fucking idiots with degrees/diplomas†. The standards by which one attains those merits have been lowered so exorbitantly that kids can become ostensibly "qualified" to do shit like, say, manage companies, but they don't really KNOW/UNDERSTAND how to do it well, and then you end up with FAILURES like enron. Nobody who TRULY understands good management would've permitted the shit that went on in Enron to transpire. Only unethical/uneducate dipshits would've agreed to the shit they did at that company.

†What makes me different? I'm an autodidact. Really, when I think about it, everything OF VALUE that I know I taught myself (or, rather, I taught/convinced myself to VALUE enough to listen to teachers when they taught it).

"I taught/convinced myself to VALUE enough to listen to teachers when they taught it"

THIS is the ROOT problem; my generation doesn't VALUE education; before one can be taught anything, he/she must first TEACH HIS/HER-SELF that to acquiesce to being taught is valuable



‡Which may seem hypocritical given my recalcitrance relative to the tutelage of my college instructors, but all my classes aren't really "teaching" me stuff I don't already know ('cause i taught myself), thus making finding a real MOTIVE toward getting a bachelor's (which, I'd assert, I already HAVE, sans the MERIT/DOCUMENTATION) difficult for me; I blew off assigned readings in one of my classes this week, for example, to read SHelley on my own, for FUN. I'm learning; only I'm learning what I want to learn, at the PACE at which I want to learn it. I'm not stupid, but lazy. Sadly, a diploma (evidently) reflects BOTH one's intelligence AND his/her work ethics (which is bullshit, in my opinion).

Another thing is that some of my instructors can't even CONCEIVE of how I taught myself this shit, as if a knowledge of Foucault or German Idealism HAS to obtained from a classroom.