knowledge is power

Even though there was the usual lack of interest in the tale of Oog and Hoog and the guys inbetween, Boog, Doog, and Foog, I have, as Beagles is fond of saying, have not let that stop me before, and since I have nothing to add to Beagles tale of his encounter with Kosmos 1900 I shall proceed.

Remember Prometheus?  Kind of an interesting figure, a titan who interceded on behalf of man against the gods, bringing us, way before, Arthur Brown, Fire!  Wiki gives short shrift to titans, they seem to be the gods before the basic Greek gods of legend, possibly a bit more earthy which seems to go with being forebears.  It always seemed to me that Prometheus gets a little short shrift from popular lore, without him no tasty charco burgers, just a handful of flesh from a carcass,  But possibly that defying the gods thing makes people nervous.  Nobody wants to be laughing it up with the class clown when the long arm of Teach grabs him by the collar.

Possibly Oog had figured this out because he didn't pretend that he was defying the gods,. no he was working with them.  I'm thinking he went from clever guy to witch doctor to shaman to priest.  There was regular knowledge like rudimentary arithmetic and more exotic stuff like spells and potions.

On the one hand knowledge is a great thing, it helps you get through the day more easily,  On the other hand knowledge is power so it was taken up by the chief to control those not in power.  Interesting that division of power between the prince and the priest, you wonder why the priest didn't just grab all the power for himself.  Maybe the priest had to be kind of otherworldly to give credence to his knowledge, but nobody wanted some goofy guy leading them on a raid on the neighboring tribe.

Let's just jump ahead to America.  That universal education, where everybody has to school which is free is pretty much an American idea, in the old country only the rich went to school and they paid for it.  We had a wide open country and lots of resources, but one of things that made us top dogs was that we had great education, almost everybody could read and write and we had great schools.

But as a kid, I noticed a lot of stuff was just forced down my throat, chiefly that patriotic, wave the flag stuff, and obedience to authority in general.  My ilk was against all that crapola in the 60s but maybe we were tossing out the baby with the bathwater.  Just because info was sort of slanted did not mean info in general was a bad thing, just because learned men seemed to be toadies of the oppressive government doesn't mean that learning is a bad thing.

We used to be proud of education remember, nowadays teachers are marching because they need part time jobs to put food on the table, nobody wants to pay them.  Used to be we listened to the voice of learning, and if we didn't agree with it we had to assemble a logical reason to oppose it.  Anymore we can believe that Hillary is buggering moppets in the basement of a pizza parlor because somebody read it somewhere on the internet.

I meant for a lengthier discourse but got swept into the Handbasket to Hell superhighway.  Seems to happen all the time these days.