In Reference to Your Post about William Bennett

Your post reminded me of some misgivings I had about Bennett many years ago, which his new adventure seems to validate.

He has a listing in the ‘Who’s Who’ section of Shuteye Nation 2000.

William Bannitt. If the Pope were a Harvurd-educated Republian° politician°, he would probably act a lot like former cabinet secretary William Bannitt, writing and tirelessly promoting thousands of books about how we could solve all the country’s problems by reading books written by William Bannitt. (See “Fixing Education,” Moon Books, Shuteye Town 1999.)

Here’s an excerpt from a Bannitt book on sale at Moon Books in Shuteye Town 1999.

FIXING EDUCATION

Chapter One

The decline of basic values in Amerian public education is no accident. It has been paced by a corresponding decline in the teaching of basic skills, history, and literature. Both trends serve the purpose of isolating children from the taproot of the Amerian moral and legal system in ways that make them powerless to defend themselves against an increasingly suffocating political correctness designed to replace enlightened democracy with a rigidly egalitarian, multicultural mobocracy.

When I was Secretary of Education, I found myself constantly engaged in confrontations with elementary and secondary school bureaucrats who were prepared at every turn to sacrifice attention to literacy problems in favor of endless proposals to foster ‘multicultural awareness,’ ‘gender sensitivity,’ and ‘racial tolerance.’ These bureaucrats were so intent on their aims that they would stoop to any ploy to change the subject. I have had elementary school principals claim they were “unable to understand the words” in my numerous New York Times essays on education. I have met with history teachers who evaded questions about deficiencies in Amerian and Modern European curricula by insisting that they themselves could not identify five important historical dates or list all 50 states of the Union. I have met with math teachers who professed an inability to do long division and English teachers who ostentatiously uttered serial atrocities of syntax, usage, and noun-verb agreement.

I am, of course, aware that there are some competency problems in the public school teacher corps, but I am not so naive as to suppose that an English teacher could have escaped learning grammar twice over in the Greek and Latin studies which used to be required in all the secondary schools I have ever known, from Choate (which I attended) all the way down the ladder to Hotchkiss (which my father’s gardener’s son attended.)

Therefore, I have no alternative but to conclude that such charades of ignorance are expressly designed to provide cover for the ongoing, systematic indoctrination of Amerian youngsters with a set of values that most citizens a generation ago would have denounced as insipid and traitorous. Today, the most successful physician or attorney will also try to change the subject by asseverating an ignorance of the dictionary definition of ‘insipid.’ I am not fooled. I knew dozens of pre-med and pre-law students at Harvard. Their views on the comparative merits of Aquinas and Savonarola might have disappointed on occasion, but they knew what ‘insipid’ meant.

How have we reached this point? How can Amerians continue to turn a blind eye to the compulsory perversion of values which is proceeding under their very noses? Here, the only answer which serves is that the program of propaganda which supports public education’s corrupt curricula is exceedingly clever, intricately organized, and ruthlessly cunning about hiding its agenda under a screen of apathy, ineptitude, and mediocrity. To put it more simply for those who will feign incomprehension, the fix is in. Hence the title of this book.

We cannot afford to let them succeed at this. The plan must be exposed and defeated. The consequences of failing to stop the hidden agenda are almost unthinkable. Try to imagine a graduating high school senior who cannot recite the preamble to the Constitution and its first ten amendments; who cannot write a cogent literary analysis of Shakespeare’s development as a writer from, say, Titus Andronicus to The Tempest; who cannot characterize the strengths and weaknesses of the ten most significant monarchs of England; who cannot explain the distinctions between Galilean and Newtonian discoveries about gravity; who cannot reel off the twelve-times-table at a moment’s notice; who cannot identify the principal organs and their functions in the viscera of a dissected frog; and who cannot name the cabinet-level departments of government and the most powerful chairmen of committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.

Just imagine it. Yes, I am indeed discussing the prospect of cultural immolation. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit. Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris Laviniamque venit. Multa ille terris iactatis et alto. Dux femina facta. Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.

[The standard trail-off ending of excerpts from Moon Books is my own Greeking, taken from the q first lines of Vergil’s Aeneid I’ve never forgotten since a tyrannical Latino teacher made us all memorize them well enough to reproduce them in the snap quiz we had at the start of every class. Had to get some use out of it in my life.]

Elsewhere in Shuteye Town, he is a panelist on the SBS Network’s ‘Charles God Show.’

P.S. Here’s the pdf file of my ‘Fixing Education’ entry as I repackaged it for the recovered text files of ST99. The oblique opening with a diversionary discussion of John Bunyan was a nod to the old New Yorker affectation of never starting an intellectual essay by mentioning what you’re really going to talk about.

Here’s the file. Hope you can open it…

The Dubious Legacy of John Bunyan

 

The Boom that will fall in December

The link:

Blogger Content Policy

Vivian Maier

 

A nanny lived and died. Then they found her stuff.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8HYHj-VU4sg&pp=ugUEEgJlbtIHCQkeDAGHKiGM7w%3D%3D

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zya5kG_9cFw&pp=ygUddml2aWFuIG1haWVyIGRvY3VtZW50YXJ5IGZ1bGw%3D

The full documentary of “Finding Vivian Maier” is available free on the Plex streaming service. The guy behind the documentary has to figure out what to with all the stuff.

Catching up

Back in June I went through a spell of being on overload and posted about it feeling guilty for not checking in. This post will feel like that one. I’m on overload again, juggling too many things at once, battling cumulative physical fatigue less successfully than usual. 

Thought I’d quick share the three principal reasons for being offline of late.

1. “They Keep Drawing Me Back In”

Same deal as back in June. Me and Michael…

I’ve been neglecting Facebook while I work on the legacy stuff, of which this is a part. (Do you realize there are over a hundred posts here now, just me writing to an imaginary you in a way that’s been helpful to me anyway?) Mostly I’ve been writing less text and posting more in FB “reel” format, which leaves more time for other priorities. 

But the world is not cooperating. Things are falling apart at an alarming rate, and I can’t believe how little people have noticed that this is a vast generalized phenomenon. Censorship continues apace at the kinder gentler Meta, which is quite unsubtle about refusing to show graphics of my Instapunk posts when I link them from Facebook. There are varying time delays on post notifications to my most faithful readers. For some I can guesstimate an approximate number of days it will take them to find something I’ve posted. The new freely AI apps are also openly censored, with constant refusals to accept posts for “inappropriate” content whenever the name Trump appears in a headline. Autocorrect is wildly out of control that’s not as visible to people who don’t write as much as I do. The weakness of AI alogorithms is nowhere more in display than in AutoCorrect, which always tries to anticipate proper names and reveals the rotten level of cultural education built into the ridiculously aggressive fill-ins of wrong names derived from pop music celebs instead of history. 

The streaming services on television are another area where I have more awareness than most, because I use teevee as a background static during sleep and writing. But just picking a show on this or thwt streamer is more time consuming and error-ridden than ever before. Response times are so slow on Amazon Prime that I’ve taken to calling it Amazon SubPrime, but they’re not an exception, just an extreme. Everything’s slower but the pop-ups that sabotage reading on iPhone and iPad via constant interruptions of ad notifications rigged to take you directly to the ad page if you don’t the tiny little close-‘x’ box dead on. Text is similarly interrupted everywhere by blocks of repeating ads (sometimes suspiciously editorial-seeming in their placement) related to your own recent searches for snack foods or clothing items at Google. 

The massive, mind-numbing deterioration of how everything works is even worse in the media clickbait strategies and the tone of all politicians everywhere. The gross stupidities and self-contradictions that nobody notices except when they’re shopping for a tu quoque example are insultingly repetitive, vacant of real content, and soaked in malice. 

We are falling apart The Deep State, DEI, and inept AI intrusions do battle with the evil Nazi Trump and his apocalyptic economic growth and national security agenda. 

Why I felt obligated to post not once but twice yesterday at Instapunk Returns. I just feel too guilty staying silent while the social network psychodrama puts a gun to the head of the entire nation.

Contradicting Nostradamus

The Rest of the Story on the Clancy Trial…?

Why did it have to be Snakes?

That’s a pretty breakneck posting rate for me at Instapunk Returns. But I get so infuriated that I have to do my documentation of absurdity routine.

 2. The Ongoing Hunt for Older Work

It uses disk space I don’t really have. And it takes time. Just one example of how it gets flagged as a hole and ensuing attempts to fill the hole. It took me decades to write much about my business career, but having done so on multiple occasions in recent years, I realized it’s the biggest hole in my writing life of all. I was just as prolific in my years at Datapro, NCR, General Motors, Whirlpool Corporation, and a bunch of freelance clients along the way as I’ve been elsewhere. Speeches, video scripts, marketing brochures, management education courses, factory floor training manuals, advertising copy, strategy documents, RFPs, and in one case a glossy corporate magazine averaging 50 pages every two months, half of every issue proposed and written by me. We won a national award from a major Public Relations trade organization for the Whirlpool Management Journal in its maiden year. Best Internal Communications Publication of the Year. The one takeaway I had from all the business writing was a bound copy of that first year’s issues. Which I am certain is still somewhere in my house. But I can’t find it. My best corporate client was Bruce Berger, Public Affairs VP of Whirlpool when I was consulting there, and he is now a Professor Emeritus in Management Theory at the University of Alabama. Intermittently I’ve tried to find a valid email address that doesn’t produce a canned response and finally succeeded a couple weeks ago. I congratulated him on his new book about the Vietnam War and also presumed to ask him for photocopies of two categories of material from his bound copy of the Journal he had had made for four of us who worked on it. He answered graciously and told me he’d sent me the only bound copy of a year of WMJ he had left, though it wasn’t the first year’s. When it arrived it was Year 3, but it appeared to have retained its seriousness and depth, including the “Pro vs Con” debate feature in every issue intended to make managers think outside the lines. Better than nothing…

About 300 pages, 8 1/2” by 11” format. 50 pages per issue.

Dave Whitwam’s the CEO I ghosted a piece for at the Harvard Business Review 

on about 36 hours notice, Christmas Eve. The Editor was effusive.

It goes in for several pages and concludes with Rebuttals on both sides. I used to write both sides.

Somebody kept trying, even after Bruce and I were gone…

Anyway. A distraction but a positive one. I sent Bruce a copy of my book about the WWI experiences of my Grandpa Miesse in the Rainbow Division. He thanked me and told me he was planning another war book, based on his great-great-great-Granddad’s experience in the Civil War. Cool.

3. Your Fault

You posted this:

She’s saying what only a woman is allowed to say. I got banned by 

American book publishers because I said as much 33 years ago.

I knew of her, years ago. She is (or was?) married to the InstaPundit, who turned on me savagely for responding to Obama’s call for an honest discussion about race. He called me a despicable racist and killed my burgeoning career as a conservative blogger. I got a fistful of death threats for a post he has more than exceeded in his own political incorrectness since. But I always knew she was smarter than the average bear.

I doubt if you’ve read this. It is expensive. But worth it because lavishly illustrated in color. My wife ceased being able to work her Kindle magic before I could get it  transferred to a less pricey format there.

Still one of the works I’m proudest of. I invented tongue-in-cheek sociology theories proposed b y recently divorced men about women. A double satire on feminism and social science. But getting the joke has never been in the feminist wheelhouse. 

The Andrews piece is a milder version of what I recently posted at Instapunk Returns on the same subject:

The Real Sword of Damocles Hanging Over Western Civilization

I believe it is one of the major causes of the civilizational collapse we are now threatened with. Still, I hadn’t included it on my list of frontline topics for the new website my colleague and I are planning. In fact, I’d never even dreamt up a mock cover of my book on feminism, and you’ll see it’s not on the priorities list. I didn’t necessarily want to cut my potential audience in half right out of the box this time.

But here’s what I did do. Thanks to the Helen Andrews post, I did finally design a book cover for Whwt would probably be the easiest Table of Contents to assemble of all the books on the list.

I’m trying to regain control of my pragmatic sense of Priorities. But here’s the cover. If you want to blackmail me with it, I won’t blame you. I made it. Like the rest of the bed I lie in at this stage of my life.

I’ll get back to the real world topics in a bit. When I’ve caught up on a little more sleep. 

But I’m not a misogynist. It’s just that I know what Axl Rose is singing about in rock music’s greatest white trash love song…

. 

Didn’t want you to think I wasn’t thinking of you…

Thought I’d show you something you wouldn’t find otherwise

That’s my reader (i.e., you) astride the Raptor.

Yesterday, I told you about the Raptor Ka and the fact the punk writers who survived even after they were supposedly exterminated on the night of the MOVE bombing in Philly. Just like I survived my loss of everything in the 1990s. Here’s a sampling from the first big thing I did after losing everything, something I never would have done if I hadn’t lost so much I was relegated to an obsolete IBM PC I hadn’t tried to work on in years. I discovered Microsoft Word had a drawing package. So I drew. Drew the country I was living in at the very end of the 20th Century, on the brink of the 9/11 wake-up call that didn’t quite take.

Pretty sure I could talk myself blue in the face before you’d go exploring in Shuteye Town 1999. So I’m force-feeding you a self-contained trip to one of about 20 stores in the Shuteye Mall and showing you what you might find there. This is one path through the screens I’m posting here. Other choices exist, but I chose one I’ve always thought representative of what I was doing in this infernal place. See what you think.

That’s less than 25 of 3,500+ screens in Shuteye Town. It’s a place you visit and construct your own narrative by asking choices screen by screen where to go and what to do next. Fiction where the reader is not a spectator but the protagonist.

One reason why I cling to my Thurberish ‘art’ and insist it’s also a key component of my works. Once I started ‘arting around, I never stopped.

I’m thinking some comic books, a few framed items, and maybe even coffee table books will have to be in the product set available at the new website… 

Don’t tell anyone I’m not dead

Just posted this for my colleague in efforts to return to active publishing:

Priorities List

Thought I’d keep you apprised…

Out of Time

Things pop up into my ken, and I let them lead me where they will.  Saw this poster on the FB page of a disenchanted Yalie (one of two) I look in on from time to time. Hadn’t thought of Kafka in a while. He was a co-star in of the Boomer Bible’s books of the VIPs, Frankie & Johnny, and I liked this quote as well as a lot of his writing. 

Looked him up at Wiki, (re)discovered he had died at the age of 40, a life cut short like other writers whose work I respect and admire to varying degrees. I decided to do a roundup of other writers who had died young, the outer boundary being Marcel Proust, with whom I share a birthday. 

What’s striking about the list is that  all of them wrote the kind of books that might be interpreted as “wounding” in some way, even if their stabbing was only of writing conventions in force at the time they lived. The most innocent of them was Ring Lardner, who wrote with insouciant good humor, often in colloquial dialects that probably offended the guardians of Standard English. (His writing voice was as oral as dialogue, meant to be heard by the reader, not just perused. Cool.)  I learned from him, as I did from every name here, how far you could go in using words to kindle imagination and thought in the minds of readers. I loved “You Know Me, Al,” “The Dream Life of Balso Snell,” and “The Metamorphosis” as much as I admired “Tender Is the Night,” “Le Bâteau Ivre”, “À La Recherche de Temps Perdu,” and the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, much of which I memorized even as a boy. I actually feared Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” of which I have read only excerpts quoted by others because I had been warned about the dangers his writing posed to alcoholics trying to stay sober. But I could read portions of “Under Milkwood” out loud with the best of the other wannabe actors who perform mostly alone in shower stalls. I read Camus’s “L’Étranger” only because my polymath French teacher at Mercersburg disdained it so when he told us it was on the list of required readings for the AP French exam, but we wouldn’t be wasting time on it in class. I thought it was better than his review of it, if not a candidate for favorite books.

Looking back on them now what I feel is a melancholy sense of how much they missed by dying halfway down the road. Like any Fitzgerald buff, I was reminded of his dictum that “there are no second acts in American life.” But this is more glib than true, and it certainly doesn’t predispose the answer of what these gents would have done if they hadn’t died young. Yes, some of them may have decided they’d already given their best and moved on. I knew that temptation from my own experiences with alcohol, something I clearly have in common with Fitzgerald, Thomas, Lowry, Rimbaud, and Poe, regardless of any similar demon in the lives of the rest of them. 

I did, in fact, have a deep existential crisis in my life at about the same point in my writing career as the prematurely dead ones listed above. But I did not die. I did go on to have a second act in my life, not famously but prolifically, with many rewarding experiences that have altered my perspectivr in enlightening ways. Why I feel a distance between me and all of them. When I look at their lives my eyes are more Gandalf’s than Aragorn’s, though Aragorn is still in there somewhere, stirring to consciousness as need be. I’m content to be the old one now, even if I resort to the prosthetics of AI to be convincing in the role…

In this face and hair and attire, I find my thoughts drifting toward the wedding guest, which I too have written about, and a sudden avalanche of other curiously familiar dramatic events. I have my reasons, as you will read later, but here’s how I used the Internet to find my way back to an old character who speaks only when spoken to…

The trigger in this YouTube pastiche of the Coleridge masterpiece was the live action drawing of the female and her golden locks. Why I had to dig up the key passages of a much longer work…

_________________________

In the current context, the verses above drove home to me the many close parallels to what I actually did experience as I mu life collapsed into a ruin so complete it seemed over. Tied to the mast is not a bad way to describe it. The sheriff had banged on my apartment door in Delaware. I had to be out of the place by morning or I would be arrested. I had nowhere to go. I had no cash. All I had was a phone number. She came with her blonde locks and her funeral-black Cadillac and wouldn’t let me quit on life. We made three roundtrips between Delaware and Greenwich NJ in a single night, each time with her car stuffed full of my last remaining possessions. After that is the magic number seven, because I did not realize she had indeed won a game of dice with the devil and she did not want to let me go. I was hers.

Seven yewrs I’ve described variously elsewhere, but I regained my creative spark and produced two of the major works I’ve ever done, as well as the launch of a third that would carry on even even after I finally made an escape of sorts into a fulfilling afterlife. The seven yewrs were full of lessons that came later than most middle aged men can expect to be schooled by them. I, too, finally saw the beauties of the water snakes “in tracks of shining light,” and the albatross fell from my neck.

One could say I’m reading my own narrative of perseverance into a highly unlikely stroke of luck that turned out favorably for everyone involved. One could say that if I didn’t have evidence of a phenomenon I’ve described here before — that big important things in my life happen out of order.

As it happens, I formed a mystical bond with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner many years before I experienced my personal version of it in my mid-forties. It was in the late 1970s that I conceived of a punk writer movement with the mission of saving a generation from illiterate nihilism. The allegorical sea from which the punks sprang was a story called “The Parade of Volumes,” written down from a waking dream. A great city is dying, trapped in the spell of a woman named Madame Sapinaire. The churches fell, one after another, and then everything else too, as a hungry lichen swallowed the ruins. Survivors fled underground into the tunnels and two brothers battled for dominance, one hard, one generous of heart. It was the hard one who survived to keep fighting.

As this story continued simmering in my mind, I surprised myself by writing the first punk story, by a band whose name came from a nursery rhyme I may have first heard in the crib. The Shuteye Train. The story, titled Shammadamma,  was part rock song, part oral prose written to break every rule of fiction writing. The authors announced themselves as the authors, declared their intention to murder their main character, who was a Sixties cliché full of drugs and political slogans, and self indulgence. Goaded by the authors he awakens sometime after Woodstock to the need to make money, have stuff, and “change things from inside the system.” He goes to law school, etc. The story’s climax occurs at his wedding, when the Shuteye Train crashes the reception, terrifies the wedding guests, hangs the protagonist on a cross, scarecrow-like, and guns him down. “Shammadamma, Shootabooma, Blammadamma…”

The punks of South Street arise around the mystical coming of the Shuteye Train, which rules as the iconic creative inspiration of the movement, reaching their full height in a story that is also my best poem, Epiphany Ship. Long physically invisible to the punks, Shuteye Train finally emerges from the computer under the leadership of “Doctor Dream,” whose entrance is recorded in the book Punk City, one page of which is shown below…

 

“It is an undead visitor…” Derived directly from The Ancient Mariner. Back then I had no hint that The Boomer Bible and its follow-ons would become the albatross that strung me up as a pariah in American publishing. I had no idea that my failure to become the next writing sensation would disillusion my wife or that a long quieted beast called alcohol would return to maroon me in a wide wide sea of indifference, loss, and doubt.

About those snakes. Doctor Dream is the “Son of the Raptor,” a metaphysical predator of empty souls in a mythological world based in the ghostly Egyptian entity called the “ka.” Here is what the Raptor Ka looks like…

I got my second act. But why would it be prefigured by something that took shape in my imagination 19 years before?