criticizing the state

I wonder how long that slide rule club lasted. I can’t think of anything besides multiplying and dividing, well maybe square and cube and so on, roots and powers, but those are just specialized cases of multiplication and division, and again I wonder what girls, who I generally expect to have more sense, were doing in it.

Well there was one thing I was thinking of. When I was in college there was all this talk about activities, like you had to be involved in all sorts of activities to impress employers when you went out looking for a job. And I think nowadays high school kids are encouraged to take up all sorts of activities in order to get into a good college.

But I don’t think, even in the college-crazed honor classes at Gage, there was that emphasis on activities getting you into a college. I think the only thing that counted were those tests you took in your senior year, and maybe they didn’t even make that much of a difference. When I got into U of I, they took anybody from the state who applied. The year after that they became more discriminating, but I don’t think admitting me had anything to do with that.

Trouble with authority figures, sounds like something you would see in a JD’s jacket when he went into reform school. Well I have to say I did sort of admire those guys, not for the things they did that got them into reform school, but for their attitude, “What’s it to ya, Copper?”

I suppose you’re right about the teachers running the school because if not them who, and I certainly came around to that way of thinking when I became a substitute teacher. Do you remember the movie, Cool Hand Luke, where Paul Newman is the hero who takes on the mean prison warden? After a hard day of subbing I came home and watched it and I thought that Paul Newman was just some kind of smart aleck, and the prison warden should have been the hero.

Well all I wanted to do, all I’ve ever wanted to do, was goof around all day, and the teachers wanted some work out of me, write papers, learn enough to do well on tests, so the struggle between me wanting to goof off and them wanting me to learn something, was fair enough. But then they also wanted me to think in a certain way, that whole school spirit, patriotism, positive mental attitude stuff, that was what chiefly got my goat.

And to some extent yours too, as in that locker incident. I remember hearing this guy talking on the radio after the collapse of communism, and he worked in a factory in Russia, and there was some kind of problem, let’s just say it was crumby lockers. He thought it would be a good idea to do something about it, it would improve the plant and therefore its productivity, and therefore, the state.  All good commie workers should be working to improve the state no?

So he went to his immediate commissar, and there he ran into a problem. If he claimed the lockers weren’t up to snuff, then clearly the guy in charge of the lockers was unworthy, and if he was unworthy then the guy who appointed him must be unworthy, and the guy who appointed him, and so on all the way up to the worker’s paradise. To criticize the lockers was to criticize the state, and that was clearly not what a good worker would do, so shut the fuck up, he was advised. He realized then that since nobody could criticize anything, nothing could ever be changed, and nothing could ever get any better, but now he knew better than to tell anybody that.

I’m not sure if memory of it is correct, but I think it was once I was in the Engager office, did they have an office? Anyway some room, and I was play threatening somebody with a letter opener, like it was a sword, and Ms Kew came in. You know teachers never had much of a sense of humor.