Thursday, March 16, 2006

Dim bulbs

As a nation the U.S. is a land of mostly dim bulbs. Foreigners that I meet are always amazed that I know something about their country or region of the world. They tell me how few Americans they have met seem to know much of anything at all. Even the supposedly "uneducated" Mexicans, that I work with, know quite a lot about their culture and history. Every one of them can name all seven U.S. states stolen by the American military in 1848 and they also possess rich lively vocabularies. Their work ethic and determined purposeful toil is not only propelling their country along with the funds being sent home but is doing the same for ours as well. Imagine life today without illegal Mexicans. I dare you. They don't call it the "Re-occupation" for nothing. But I digress....

The slow insidious takeover of every local school system in the country by the federal gov-mint has finally succeeded in what it set out to do: raise a nation of dependent sucklings that are cluelessly in need of Big Brother to soothe the bumps and pat their rumps then blow them up in wars. The culture of dependence and acquisitive entitlement is instilled from an early age. Actual education is sparse at best. The pierced idiot you see every day gabbling away on his cell phone is the product of such a system. Parents have surrendered their young to Moloch and he has trained them to be the obedient and ignorant serfs necessary for his ambitions of command and control. Never mind that this eventually rots away his power by debilitating the population's ability to engage in productive endeavors and thus sustain the tyranny. A good parasite never kills its host.

Anyway, this is not going to be a sad blog post of woe but instead the celebration of the dawning global era, on this continent, which will make the State run model of education as a prison obsolete. It is already obsolete, as is the liberal arts college degree, but it won't be long now before we can feel the real pain of its dire irrelevance. The rest of the world is about to take over, and that makes me very glad.

My new Apple computer was manufactured in China and the tech support woman, who was extremely helpful, was in Bangalore, India. The electronic revolution now puts workers around the globe in direct competition with one another. The flattening of the landscape for high tech and service work is now exposing America's severe educational vulnerability.

At the low end Mexicans are rapidly taking over the industrial and manual labor jobs, while at the higher end more educated foreign workers are taking the accounting, drafting, engineering, computer tech and customer service jobs. These new foreign workers are multi-lingual and way more highly educated coming out of their country's eighth-grade than most of our dumbed down college graduates could ever hope to be. Have any of you hung out on an American college campus lately? It ain't a pretty sight. "Like whaddya mean dude, like....huh?"

I just want to say BRING IT ON! I much prefer dealing with East Indians, Mexicans, Chinese, Euros and Apaches. The more contact I have with these people the better. They have not been tainted by the false and fraudulently corrupt tenants of the Ritalin dispensing American education system. They are still more informed by the world they inhabit and use the handed down traditions of their culture, which stress family and clan loyalty, informed judgment and the love of learning as a life process instead of a forced indoctrination.

We are about to be bit in the ass. HARD! GOOD FOR US!


May I help you?

5 comments:

beamis said...

I only disagree with your statement that "Society will forever reform into smaller groups, and these will fight." I don't think fighting is a natural instinct among humans. I really don't believe that most people are itching for a fight with other groups. Maybe we'd all like to check out their womenfolk, but that's about it. Free trade networks and localized control are the hallmarks of normal human conditions.

It wasn't until mass religons and governments started interpreting our intended destiny for us that the trouble for humanity really begins in earnest. Local customs quickly gave way to a "wider good" which was proscribed by conquering leaders in the name of their God. As Hitler would later say, "we're giving these backward people a history!"

All the great wars of the past started out with decisions made by large scale central government control. Think Alexander, Solomon, the Chinese emperors, Caesar, Cromwell, Napolean, Stalin, Mao, Hitler and Bush Jong Il.

I suspect that most of us just want to be treated with respect and dignity by our neighbors and trading partners as we go about the generally pleasant commerce of human life. This shit ain't complicated.

Central government power of the kind experienced over the last three hundred years is finally coming to an end as we have known it. The electronic revolution in information is making it hard for them to stay in control and the improvised effectiveness of 4th generation warfare (low tech guerilla insurgent tactics) on standing conventional armies will soon have it crumbling, like it is right now. The free and open exchange of goods, ideas and recipes will be enhanced as we dance on the graveyard of the military-industrial complex.

Bring it on!

Audie said...

"the tech support woman ... was in Bangalore, India."
"... America's severe educational vulnerability...."
"... foreign workers are ... way more highly educated coming out of their country's eighth-grade than most of our dumbed down college graduates could ever hope to be."

The tech support industry is thriving in Asia not because they're generally smarter than Americans (I doubt it) but because they're willing to work longer hours, in shittier conditions, for a fraction of the cost. I realize this is something you would cheer, but to attribute the phenomenon to their being smarter or better educated isn't accurate.

What has been perhaps the biggest boost to the education levels of many non-Western populations? Exporting a good chunk of their young people to Western universities -- experience and knowledge that is then taken back to the home country (Asia, especially), and disseminated.

You seem to cheer both the world's current state of technological progress (largely made possible by Western, publically supported research and education), and home schooled, local, small scale "traditional" learning. However, "handed-down cultural traditions" and "family and clan loyalty" do not an Apple computer make. The Chinese people who assembled your computer were not working in a little family-run business in a hut in some village, gluing memory chips into motherboards just like great grandpappy-san did generations ago. No, those workers were doing the tedious handiwork of a design that came out of a guy's Western-educated brain in California.

I don't really disagree with your opening statement that the U.S. is a land of mostly dim bulbs. (After all, look who we voted for president, twice.) But, at least from what I've seen, this observation is more clearly evident on a trip to Wal-Mart or by a survey of televangelist congregations -- our 'culture'? -- than by a trip to a college campus. I spent a decade of my life on college campuses, and nowhere have I felt the energy of fresh and competing ideas more strongly -- something I certainly never felt in the indoctrination and reverance for "tradition," the mandated church attendance and the small-minded bigotry of my family and small-town "culture." I, for one, am forever grateful that I had the opportunity to escape the latter, and I'm not convinced we'd be better off if "clan loyalty" and provincialism, instead, were our only option.

beamis said...

Good responses ya'll. Thank you both for your thoughtful replies. I will ruminate upon your words.

Ain't it great we all hail from the rarified air of the Zion Interp Tribe?

Audie said...

Indeed.

Thanks fer providin' the forum, and the stimulatin' and provocatin' thoughts (and pitchers) that reg'larly appear here.

It's rarely the spirit of your posts I disagree with, but merely the Cheney-esque shotgun nature of your firings, which end up wounding (what are to me) such innocent creatures as public school teachers and the like.

As Viktor Frankl once said, though, "What gives off light must endure burning," and I think of that phrase often when I read or hear the thoughts of people who push and push the boundary ropes around and publically test their own thought and that of others -- cuz so many of the rest of us just wait for them to challenge the boundaries so we can REact and push back.

Regardless of who ends up being 'right,' the exercise is still invaluable, and few seem willing to undertake the task of putting the process in motion -- because of our lower threshold for the painfulness of that burning. But I appreciate that you are one of those light-giving people, beamis.

I feel I should affirm this, since I am often one of the ones to push back on your frontier-testing.

Love ya.

beamis said...

Thanks ya muchly. I also realize you has teachin' in your blood, 'cause I done learned from ya in the past as a mentor.