Walking on Thin Ice

wall graffiti - foto by smith

lord save me from academics.

i’m reading The Devil’s Book Of Culture - History, Mushrooms, And Caves In Southern Mexico by Benjamin Feinberg (2003 - a university of texas product).

chapter 3 begins with “In this chapter, we shall see how ‘history’ comes to be located in specific historical periods.” that’s bad writing, lazy thinking, nothing but academic double-talk.

if you can’t write without first explaining what you’re going to write, you have no business writing in the first place. it’s like voice-overs in movies - they’re signs of lack of thought, lack of talent, a bad confusing script, lack of artistic flow and control.

we’re back to that old saw: if you have talent, you do - if you have no talent, you become an academic.

i’m not running down teachers here - teachers have always been my heroes, they’re the ones that gave me hope when young, got me through this moral emptiness called society.

what worries me is these types of fuzzy thinkers and their barcode minds are teaching our young in universities. between the cheney-bush beast’s destruction of elementary education called “leave no child behind with a working brain” and this sort of stuff, we’re pretty much destroying clear independent thought in our young. of course, we may be doing them a favor - ignorance is bliss, and the world today is a vicious ugly greedy uncaring corporate place, so maybe the young are better off not thinking.

although there is a bright side to academics - reading their poetry is a great way to beat insomnia.

sometimes i feel i’m one of the few surviving minds in a world of intellectual zombies, stuck in a George Romero movie titled “Night of the Unliving Academics”.

braaaaaiiiiiinnnnnsssssss. i need brains.

“The only thing I ever get irritated about is elite intellectuals, the stuff they do I do find irritating.” - Noam Chomsky

reprise from my blog of august 29, 2007:

i’m reading The Intellectuals And The Masses - Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939 by John Carey (1992). h.g. wells and d.h. lawrence wanted to kill off all brown, black and yellow people because they were spoiling the beauty of the intellectuals’ view and were causing commonism to creep into the culture. ezra pound and t.s. eliot agreed with hitler’s fascist master race ideas. intellectuals back then felt common folk should not be educated, in fact should be killed because they were diluting the intellectuals’ world and creating garbage with their suburban existence. they also felt intellectuals should rule, and be given free food and money to live.

it’s sad to see what folk i once respected actually thought.

bette davis from The Letter (1940) on tv screen - foto by smith