Could you or I examine the way we were taught, have been, are . . . the way we have been taught to read, more exactly; yes, just the way literacy has been engaged–could we examine this apart from the way we have sold the way we have taught it? Literacy, reading and writing? I am not so sure that this is something we could do successfully, a sheer critique I do not think we are ready to engage, ready to hear, just how full of shit we are, this is not easy for many to take. We want certainty–but then, this is why every time anyone looks at any time, that time under scrutiny becomes either the best of times or the worst of times. We love the severity of the superlative degree; the severity is something we can confuse for certainty. It happens all the time to many people everywhere, every when. The following is an examination of our pedagogy, concerning reading and writing in their particulars–it was made by me, a me I was at a time when who I was went to college for a degree in literature, and it was published in my blog, what I write he writes, I wrote, he wrote, everyday on this website kept diligently, a literary review, as he says I say, on the About Us page . . . he is who he who is I is as he is as he was when he was writing for his blog how long ago now I can’t tell.
Reading at an advanced stage of literacy is not a requirement for political participation in America, but then bread and circuses is not new to the American state and governments have supported innumerable variations on representative government without the masses either literate or participating. The people are taught to read through many of the organs of the state, thereby insuring a level of advanced under eduction at an inflated value. Inflation permeates everything in our lives as soon as we tell ourselves we have to learn to live with economic inflation. Economics hits home too hard not to affect the things we do and the ideas we think day in and day out.
Public education as we have it in New York City is an example of this kind of inflation, but then an inflation that is contingent with the overproduction we have in education where all are special, any can be talented, and semi-literacy meets the demands of a society that produces little of what it consumes, underpays and enforces wage slavery around the world to feed its greed, its tape-worm driven gluttony. Is there any reason for anyone anywhere in any business or industry to get the annual bonuses that investment bankers on Wall Street get; is there any reason for the CEO of ABC to get 72 million a year? Readers need not apply. And people imagine your nuts when you tell them that Robespierre was right, that of all machine politics, the greatest in the cause of democracy was the guillotine.
Notice, though, that it is Public education. The public are always the people in service of the state. When functioning as a public, which the people must do sometimes, they are not functioning as the people. These are two distinct and categorically separate political entities. They are often mutually exclusive in their functions.
Yes, office cubicles resemble more the cells in a beehive than they do anything else; perfunctory level jobs for life for perfunctory performing drones, all of them increasingly more and more underpaid as top-level executives have become the new oligarchy in America. Our lifestyle is our hemlock, if any one of us should be brave enough to stand Socratically against our media sophists and the oligarchy of CEOs countrywide. But then we don’t read anymore, and our knowledge of classical antiquity has evaporated, so any allusion to the terrible forty of Athens or the death of Socrates passes as does a ghost.
Afterword, Afterwards
Much of what he writes is diatribe, polemic when it is not diatribe; diatribe often instead of the rants he sometimes goes off on in the blog. He does not discern differences among tirade, diatribe, polemic or rant in the pages of his website. He leaves that for his readers to discern. Sometimes they do in the comments they leave. Mostly, though, comments are minimal and often stupid or semi-literate when they are left. He is convinced that the internet is not a great democratizing tool, anymore than political pamphlets or broadsides were in a time of limited technological advances with respect for communication.
The Falling Leaf Review 