class system, not caste system

I don't know what Old Dog is trying to say about  knowledge being relative.  Generally (all things being equal) the more knowledge you have the more powerful you are, just like being taller or better looking gives you more power.  And I don't know what Old Dog has against grey areas.  Aren't they the most interesting?  Issues that are easily resolved into black and white are like bar arguments where some guy whips out his cell phone and five minutes later instead of having a swell old time of bragging and bullshitting and making jokes everybody is sitting there staring at whatever sport is on the tv.  Aren't interminable discussions the bread and butter of The Institute?  Well, I suppose it is a free country.

Maybe thirty years ago, G.L.O.W was a tv show featuring women wrestlers.  These weren't the brutal women wrestlers that were an offshoot of men's wrestling.  They were all hot babes in showy scanty costumes.  The tv show was just wrestling.  That was the show I watched. The new Glow show is a show about that show, or rather a fictionalized version of that show, or that's what I've read, I haven't seen it.


I think the word the dawgs are thinking of is class system rather than caste system.  The distinguishing factors of a caste system is that you are born into it and you die in it, and there is no event that can change it.  American slavery was a caste system where to be born black was to be a slave.  In other forms of slavery you got into it by an unfortunate situation (debt or losing a battle, or maybe being kidnapped) and you still could buy your way out, or you could rise to prominence in society,.

Currently in America the rich look down on the poor, the learned look down on the unlearned, the glitterati look down on the Joe and Jane Shmos.  It's hard but the poor can become rich, the unlearned can pick up an education, Jane Shmo can put on a glittery gown and learn to dance and become a glitterati.  There may be some resentment at first in these upper classes to the newly arrived, but it fades quickly because, well, this is America. It's not a caste system. 

I don't think the class system has anything to do with kids not learning stuff in school.  Beagles was once a schoolboy, does he remember ever not wanting to learn geometry because it didn't come from, say, his ROTC subculture? 

There is a matter where people grow up in am insular society that doesn't like outsiders so that when the outsiders try to teach them that we should love everybody this rubs them the wrong way.  Actually that is the topic I was trying to wend my way to through the path of the Oogs, about knowledge being power so it should be a force for good as far as enlightening, but that power element makes it sometimes oppressive,  That's what I was trying to work my way to.

Beagles grew up in Chicago but now he doesn't know what group dynamics are in big cities?  Well of course he left town at a young age, so how would he know how long his neighborhood pals stuck together?  In my case I have lost complete contact with my neighborhood buddies and my grade school classmates.  I know a few high school chums, Beagles among them, through fb but we don't interact socially.  All my really good buddies I met in Champaign.  Seems to me the peak age for making friends is like maybe twenty to thirty.  What is the experience of the dawgs?

One unique experience was growing up in the bungalow belt was it was a great equalizer, there were no rich and there were no poor.  It seems like Old Dog grew up in a similar neighborhood, but I will let him speak for himself.  My friend Ruby Dew grew up in a very small town where the rich and the poor and the middle all went to the same school, so there was a lot more elbow rubbing going on there, and the society she describes from those days seems a lot more classist than the one I grew up in.  I don't know what to make of that.