Some who know me or who have read Fool for a Lawyer know I have a very funny prostate exam story, but this is not it.

And I am being totally serious here.

I think it is safe to say in our culture it is taboo (for reasons related to purity,) to discuss inserting one’s own finger in one’s own anus, especially if you are a man, (for homophobic reasons, maybe,) and I suppose this is the reason why nobody ever discusses the fact that there is a very easy way for a man to check himself for one of the most common cancers, prostate cancer.

We hear so much about checking the beautiful and untabooed female breast, but, though a comparable number of men die from prostate cancer as women die from breast cancer  (27,000 v. 40,000,) it is a real challenge to even Google the info needed to perform a prostate self-exam.

Men, be aware: by the time we reach the age of 80, nearly all of us will have developed prostate cancer.  Still, physicians often neglect to offer a prostate exam, we are reluctant to agree even when they do offer, and it is quite embarrassing to ask for it yourself.  Right?

Now, not being a doctor, I should say this should not be in lieu of the exam you will have done by your doctor, but rather a way of making yourself more aware of your own health and to catch a problem more quickly than you would have without performing the self-check.

All the info I impart has been culled from internet sources I have judged reliable and my own experiences utilizing that info, and since I am talking about a harmless procedure (as long as you wash your hands well afterward,) I don’t think it’s wrong for a regular guy to dispense the info.

So, here we go…

First of all, we need to visualize what you are going to do.  Here’s the best picture I could find:

So, we are talking about getting a fingertip that is lubricated (liquid soap works well, and a rubber glove is unnecessary as you are entering a place that is anything but antiseptic) in there far enough to feel out this walnut-sized organ for hardness or lumps.  Its texture and firmness should be similar to that of the flesh on the pad of your thumb when you make a tight fist. If it’s as firm as your knuckle or you notice any lumps, you should tell your doctor.

If you have ever had a prostate exam before, you know that you can feel it when the prostate is touched.  It is a very peculiar feeling that can be quite uncomfortable, and I would say the feeling you have afterwards is even more uncomfortable.  So, you will need to go in carefully with a well-trimmed fingernail.

The position you want to take is up to you, but I would suggest from my own experience that you sit on the side of the tub, with your feet in the tub.  Lean forward into the tub (so you do not fall backwards,) and slide your butt out so that it is hovering well over the floor.  Now, bring your hand under your belly and between your legs, palm facing up, and insert your lubricated middle finger carefully all the way in to your anus.  Remember where you are going by remembering the picture (above,) and the prostate’s location with relationship to your penis.  You will find your prostate (and will feel the strange sensation when you touch it,) right straight-on where your middle finger naturally ends up.

Now, feel out the surface, all the way around (if you can reach that far,) and across all its interior surface area.  You are feeling for any hardness or inconsistency in texture. If any part of it feels harder or bumpy, let your doctor know.  Don’t be afraid to tell your doctor you examined yourself.

Now, give yourself a pat on the back (after you wash your hands.)

So, the Ground Zero Mosque debate is not a question of human rights, as some very well-meaning intellectuals would have us believe, which you would find them realizing quickly and effortlessly if the percentage of US Muslims who believe that suicide bombing is sometimes justified rose from its current level of 13 percent to, say, 60 percent.  My point is that the argument is over a subjective judgment of the degree of extremism.   (It is much higher, of course, in other countries, –and, among younger US Muslims, which may be interpreted as a generational radicalization, but hopefully it just represents the radicalism of youth.)

And it should be made clear that what is at stake here is not a basic human right, but a legal right granted by the Constitution.  Religion is not the natural state we are born into, like physical characteristics (such as race and sexuality,) but a construct (that many people see as especially irrational and intellectually primitive.)  History is full of horrifying examples of human constructs that were not curbed, gone wrong.

And don’t let any of these mainstream-media talking heads lead you to believe this is a free speech issue.  Religion represents the antithesis of free speech.  By definition, Religion is the restriction of speech–the delivery of an ultimate truth that is defined authoritatively.

…You may ask, why pick on Islam??  Cat Stevens is a Muslim, and he wrote “Peace Train!”

36% of young British Muslims believe a person should be killed who converts away from their religion. Obviously, a large portion of the world’s terrorists are Muslim-motivated.  Shariah law, under which little girls continue to be barbarically tortured, enslaved and murdered, is a Muslim concept.  If we were to go to war against terrorism and stoning people to death and people who cut off people’s noses and keep girls from getting to go to school or women from exposing their faces in public, it would be seen as a religious war.

I know, my ideas seem harsh, but if we can just put aside this intellectual taboo against offending religion, they can be seen to be clearly true.

However….

… If we are going to curb Islam, we must be careful not to discriminate.  We must appropriately curb every religion that is a serious threat to us.

I’ll start with the religion I was raised with, Catholicism.  Sometimes, to be a threat to society, it does not take even a significant percentage of a religion’s followers to be scumbuckets, as long as their misdeeds are particularly vile.  Such is the case with the Catholic clergy that have committed and covered-up child physical abuse and rape.  Depending on how poorly one views child rape, the atrocity of their crimes may be far beyond 9/11 and all other Islamically-inspired terror acts combined.  This religion as it has been functioning is a scourge and should be curbed in ways I advocated in an earlier post you can click to HERE.

Now, let’s take Christian Fundamentalism, and think back on all that Shock and Awe bloodthirsty baby-killing recently perpetrated by Bush and his Fundamentalist followers, acts which Bush honestly referred to as a “crusade” until the media shut him up (read more about the Christian inspiration HERE and my “Pre-Emptive War is Murder” post by clicking HERE.)  After the invasion of Iraq, any world citizen should look on Fundamentalist Christianity as a scourge comparable to Catholicism and Islam.

I could, of course, go on to detail Jewish support for Israeli cluster-bombing of children, Hindu foundations for enslavement and gender-based persecution, and  human rights outrages that arise from any religion.

Yes, to be instituted in a non-discriminatory manner, this new scrutiny of religion will take sacrifices from just about everyone (to be fair, us atheists, I guess, should make all the decisions,) but I must say I wholeheartedly agree with the Tea Partiers on this one–it is high time religion was held responsible for its evils.

I’ll start thinking it out.  (Let’s see: no mosque at Ground Zero, no Catholic church within 3 blocks of a school or day care, megachurch enrollment restricted to those not registered to vote,…  We can do this!)

Considering the low pay most citizens receive, it is nearly impossible to get along on just one parent’s income, so the school system is simply the only thing to do with your child while you’re at work.  And, anyway, everybody else does it.  What’s there to think about?

It is easy to see ourselves as helpless to our economic needs.  The dual-income lifestyle—if we are fortunate enough to have found a life partner, and if we are both fortunate enough to have found employment in this god-awful economy–is necessary to pay the auto loan, the mortgage, the bills, bills, bills, bills, bills.   But, it must be said that this is still a construct.

We frame in our minds what is acceptable for our lifestyle and what is not.  We build up psychological constructions of identity and feel bound to them.  I remember in my first marriage while my mother was alive I never for a moment considered divorce.  Soon after she died, magically, bizarrely, the idea was there, as if she needed to be out of the way for it to be possible as a construct.  The fact is there are plenty of families that get along on one low wage.  Maybe they don’t own much.  Maybe they live poor (click here to see my “Live Poor” blog.)  All I am saying is that in only very narrow, extreme circumstances should economics get in the way of what is best for a child’s development.

So, let’s look at it fresh.  Let us assume we are intelligent enough to be capable of raising a child to school age competently.  Assume we have nurtured the child well, and we find the child has been learning briskly at home.  The child knows how to read and count and how to use scissors.  The child can set the table, paint pictures, and obey the rules of simple board games.  It can be assumed that we have passed along to the child whatever skills we are especially competent at.

So, why send them to school?  Will they will learn more or learn it more efficiently than they will at home?  Will their being mixed into a class of 25 kids not actually be a hindrance to their further learning?

We haven’t always been as smart as we are now.  Used to be, when we would think what we should eat for dinner, we’d ask what might taste best, or what might give us the most energy or strength, or what might make us larger than other people.  This is why our forbears cooked up big fat sausages made from unmentionables, swizzled their breakfast foods in hot bacon grease, and kneaded together sugar and butter to make snacks.  Then, once Madison Avenue joined in, a generation was eating foods heavily-laden with flavoring and coloring chemical agents and preservatives.

During the natural foods revolution of the 1970’s, we got smarter.  We started asking ourselves what we should be eating considering our natural evolutionary progression.  We learned that rather than pompously ordering our bodies to do what we wanted, we should actually be learning from our bodies what we need to be eating.  Considering the vast majority of our evolution, which has us as leafy green foragers, we came to realize that what we had been doing was all wrong.

So, let’s look at education.

I’d say most people share a common idea about the purpose of schooling, but few have ever attempted to put it into words.  We want schools to provide children with what their minds need in order to develop skills and knowledge in the most efficient manner that still keeps the child emotionally healthy.  Looking back at what is organic as a guide, we might imagine a child watching an elder modeling how to do something (ie: picking fruit, gathering wood, speaking a language,) then practicing with the elder as a guide, and then, later, productively demonstrating the skill independently.  That productivity at the end is as essential to good pedagogy as is the modeling part, not for its own sake, (as, a child’s learning should not be restricted to knowledge they will necessarily use productively,) but it is essential in the role it plays in motivating the learning and making learning relevant.

I have found this very basic way of understanding education to be an insightful and sufficient angle of approach to really any issue regarding pedagogy.  It was not, though, even a significant component in the impetus of US education.  Rather, US education grew from a need to control the massive flow of immigrant outsiders, which US industries actively sought and, indeed, could not function without.  Children running wild in the streets had to be controlled for a productive society.  Workers had to be prepared with a basic literacy in following society’s order.  In Democracy, Education, and the Schools, Roger Soder informs:

Many years before the American republic was forged, the householders of the early towns taxed themselves for schools in which all the young would be taught “the laws of the land, and the principles of religion.” Since they did not need schools for their own children (they could afford tutors and the luxury of sending their children abroad, or eventually to private academies at home), this self-taxing would appear to be an act of considerable magnanimity.  However, it was as much more motivated by self-interest.  These comparatively prosperous settlers did not want the religion and the ideals of self-government they had brought with them to be endangered by the ignorance of growing members of newcomers lacking access to schooling.[1]

In the classroom, in a Puritanical effort to disown our natural proclivities (and those practiced by immigrants,) we selfishly and stupidly regimented a factory order, lining children up in rows, demanding they sit still, and forcing them to learn tedious routines of rote memorization, a particularly foolish practice in suspending all identity to allow for subjection to the motivating cause of the task or educator.  We were just plain wrong—falsely believing the brain learns by exercising like a muscle and that a servile identity is more capable than one which is self-motivated.

US education developed without any regard for, and, in fact, with antagonism to, the natural way the human brain learns.

Thanks to compulsory education laws, the end of the 19^th century brought a huge increase in the numbers of children in our schools, drawing children from the factories and farms, subtly changing their role in the home from what had once been more like that of a servant,[2] to a conception that engendered the family’s pride and affection.  A romantic awareness of childhood innocence began dawning in this period, and the increasingly popular newspaper industry began publicizing cases of child abuse and neglect, which may be seen as the dawning of a profit-driven pop culture exploration of the public’s emotions for tender areas that could be exploited to sell copy, and, feeding itself, driving the further blossoming of this sentiment in the people.  This was a whole new ethic–one that could not be gleaned in the millenniums of moral insight that had gone before, from the Ten Commandments to early 20^th Century US law: Thou Shalt Not Hurt Children.

In the comfort of the financial boom during and after World War I, we learned to love our kids.  For the first time in Western human development, we matured morally enough to begin to appreciate and protect the innocence of childhood.  We outlawed child labor and began making laws to protect abused children.

So, coming to the realization that large numbers of children could not be regimented like robots without the infliction of cruelty, US educators were driven in a more organic direction.  John Dewey told the world that attention had to be paid to a child’s individual impetus.  Children could not be taught at the educator’s convenience, accepting whatever information the teacher wanted to pour into them, but, to learn, children had needs that the educator had to actually put forth an effort to detect.  Dewey’s vision was for working groups of kids to be steered towards socially rewarding goals, each child learning their own natural role in the group and growing within the group by following their own interests.

This idea, being too radical a change, was neglected for a milder application of Progressivism, where the outcome could be more concretely judged as useful to a capitalist society–children would be trained for the work they were most suited to.  So, for the next fifty or so years, children were steered through vocational-ed programs, clerical skills or home-economics classes, or towards college-prep, depending on where educators saw their inclined talents were leading.  Tracking, where kids are tested and assigned to groups of similarly-scoring students may be seen as a modern, more egalitarian extension of this pedagogy (in its use of testing, rather than subjective judgments.)

Today, education is seen really as a way to prepare children to be successful in the US job market.  Children are encouraged to learn sophisticated academic skills, but most never master them.  Even if they succeed in learning the skills, most do not end up using these skills in their employment.  90% of US workers are employed in the service sector.  Computer skills are pushed in school, but, though it grows more quickly percentage-wise than other sectors, the high tech sector accounts for only a miniscule number of US jobs.  Cashier is the fastest growing job category with reference to total numbers of jobs.[3]

A 1984 Cleveland State study showed there is very little correlation between grade point average and income, job satisfaction, and effectiveness. [4]

No, contrary to popular belief, kids are NOT preparing for employment.  They are preparing for the SAT test, which leads to college, which helps lead to better employment than others.  Still, this is an aspirational purpose.  It is not something that turns a successful result in most students.  Only 37% of young adults even take the SAT.[5]

It is not for all children, then, that US education is popularly purposed, but a minority of winners.  (To stay on point here, I will resist the tempting detour discussion of the enduring characteristics of those winning classes and the entrenchment of certain racial minorities that the educational system, generation-after-generation, proves miserably impotent to overcome.)

(And I could detour further into a discussion of whether, in fact, the few students who graduate college and obtain high-paying jobs and lifestyles supported by loads of cash really are winners.  I suspect they are, but only in relation to the losers.  If they had been educated with well-considered values, I don’t think most people would find the lifestyle of, say, an investment banker or a corporate lawyer to be worthy of their energies.)

If you consider the kids entering the doors to the average US school, you will find a variety of needs.  You will find many children are in the midst of a developmental potential for one particular interest over another.  Many will need special attention to get them to make very sorely-needed progress.  Others will need that same attention to help them make advanced progress they are especially capable of.  Some will be resistant to learning.  Some will just need to get up and move around more than others.  And there will be some interested in obstructing the learning of others.

Working on the assumption that cramming all these students together in the same room is a proper first step, our schools have no choice but to teach to the middle of this group.  In fact, not one child may be in the middle, yet in most classrooms the middle student is the aim of the educator.  The average child attending school spends too much time waiting for others to catch up, or so much time compensating for their confusion, or so much time listening as other children are reprimanded, so much time completing assignments of skills they have already mastered or are not yet capable of enough to learn from failing at, or attending to that social world children create to entertain their abandoned minds—a world of gossip, pop culture, social rivalries, and clock-watching.

Tracking students into groups of similarly-performing students has not worked, in that poorly-performing students need better students among them to succeed, so, relegating a student onto a poor track is dooming their educational development.  It is true that highly-performing students do less well with poorly-performing students among them, but, in controlled studies, they aren’t brought down nearly as much as the poor students are brought up, so educators have been rejecting tracking lately.

There are other types of tracks we could choose to identify, though.  There are kids who have been poorly nurtured morally.  There are violent, angry, or cruel children–kids whose parents let them stay up to all hours of the night, so that, in class, the child is grumpy, dull-witted, and a real disciplinary problem.  There are kids whose parents curse nearly every other word they speak, kids whose parents never read to them.  There’s an SUV parked outside the junior high beside my little girl’s kindergarten every day, its speakers blasting the most disgusting rap lyrics while two boys no older than ten sit in the back seat doing their homework, their jerk of a mother polishing her nails, waiting in the front seat for her third child to exit school.

The children are innocents.  They deserve an education.  But there comes a point where society has degraded so far that there is no social connection between my family and that child’s family.  I am nothing like those parents.  And I can not reach them.  What that woman is doing with her rap music is screaming at me to stay away, brazenly proclaiming her difference from me.  I can’t reach her any more than I can reach the corporate lawyer who works around the clock and has his son nurtured by hours-upon-hours of obscenely violent video game time.  At the point the social connection between parents is broken, so is the responsibility of the parent of the highly-performing child to allow their child’s intelligence to serve to help break the fall of the poor student’s intellectual ability.

Sure, if we lived in a true community, where there was at least some social pressure to conform to certain basics, I’d feel a need to work together with my neighbors on education, but we need to be allied in some way more than merely zip code.

For a significant portion of the school day, the average child is not occupied meaningfully, and it would be expected that, once that portion grows beyond a certain level, parents would stop sending their children to school.  And wouldn’t academic failure be a valid indicator of when that portion of the day was too large?

A recent Marist poll informs us that 25% of US citizens are “not sure” which country the US gained its independence from.  And 40% of those aged 19-29 weren’t sure, compared to only 20% of older citizens, which may indicate there is a ramp downward in US stupidity taking place.

The schools were founded for purposes few of us would identify with.  They developed in a clumsy way, meant to shuttle masses of students as best as possible into the right industries.  They have become a mere pretense to goals most kids never grow to achieve, and the real activity taking place is still, a hundred years after Dewey’s prime, poorly addressed to the needs of the individual student.

The disparate and individualistic nature of modern society makes community impossible, so that mass groupings of children that may have been productive in previous generations are no longer capable of being organized in a nurturing way.  The groups are destructive to all involved—a cacophony of interests, unmoored to morality, intellect, or even basic common sense.

So here, I am going to try to reconceive the proper way to educate our children, keeping in mind the organic conception of the elder who models and oversees before the student demonstrates mastery.  I propose the following:

• Children need to be paired closely with an adult model.  Education must be crafted to their own individual needs and competencies.  As they advance further, they should be encouraged to work together in teams.
• In this disparate society, alas, children should be paired carefully with other children whose parents share a commitment to certain basic ideals, or who are, at the very least, making a sincere effort to conform to that commitment.
• Children need to master all skills and knowledge that can be demonstrated to be useful in the life they anticipate, from laundry to home repair, from cooking to a knowledge of human sexuality, from solving emotional problems to speaking with confidence.
• They need a significant grounding in all the traditional subjects, as there is no telling what they may be drawn to with the proper exposure.
• They should understand the way the world works, from an air conditioner to Congress, from history to the stock market to a basic understanding of quantum physics.  I don’t see why they should need to do equations in quantum physics, but they should know how to go in that direction if that’s where their interests lie.
• They should be highly skilled at finding out things they do not know from all sources, at explaining things clearly to others, and at seeking and receiving thorough explanations from others.
• Paying not merely lip-service to character development, I propose children should be trained to develop their own sophisticated rationale for morality.  (See my blog on the importance of morality in art.)  They should be challenged to the point that they are adept at arguing moral principles.  Further, they should be capable of judging and rejecting cultural persuasion, from peer pressure to false advertising.  They should be so involved with the genesis of their own identity that they can easily reject unworthy cultural icons and pastimes.
• Every day should involve them in some rigorous physical activity.
• They should be trained to have a basic competency in all forms of artistic expression.  They should be taught to turn to artistic expression as a healthy way of processing.
• Parenting!  Throughout their upbringing, every child should have regular instruction on what makes a good parent.
• Lastly, children should be very carefully instructed on social and civic responsibility.  They should learn to love and admire the best of their society and they should be raised to see all their fellow beings as worthy of their respect and fraternity.  They should be raised with a commitment to values that respect and support the greater social good.  To quote the motto of The Liverpool Institute High School for Boys, as Sir Paul McCartney did in his oratorio: “Non nobis solum sed toti mundo nati,” or “Not for ourselves but for the whole world we were born.”

In contrast to the ideals my rethink of education generates, schools are becoming vastly less varied in the subjects they offer.  Also, for a variety of reasons, culturally, we have active taboos against the teaching of many subjects, such as citizenship, morality, or even homemaking.

Class sizes make approaches that are sensitive to a student’s individual competencies or needs impossible.  Further austerity-inspired state cut-backs are currently increasing class sizes.

Public schools are incapable of making community bonds strong enough to engender the kind of responsiveness in the parents of problem students that would justify the commitment of advanced students.

The pedagogy practiced in a modern school does push teamwork and creative problem solving, but group-work observed at work in a real classroom is a testament to how sensitive good pedagogy can be.  Group-work has been shown to be more effective in the classroom than children working individually, but this conclusion was reached in controlled studies, where the group-work is performed carefully and with bountiful resources.  When improperly performed, classroom group-work may be much more ineffective than having children work on their own.  Sure, schools love it, because it is a way of justifying larger class sizes and a way to decrease disciplinary problems (as children who are working in groups can’t be blamed for calling out or disrupting the class, and they can spend much of the time talking without the teacher having to know they are off-task.)  Group-work can improve pedagogy in a way comparable to the results seen in studies, but, I would argue, only when being practiced carefully by the exceptional teacher, which rarely occurs.

As for physical activity, classrooms operate with most of the physical inertia they’ve always had, but children are becoming even more inert, being left at computer monitors more and more, occupied in free-time by handheld games and lunchroom video screens.  (Recess is actively being withdrawn with fears of liability for sunburn or complaints in regards to exposure to cold weather.)  Children are not meant to be sitting throughout the day.  Even adults should be standing or moving most of the time.  Click HERE to read more about this.

So, in my home, we have arrived at a decision that was not a challenge, rationally.  We have decided, for our children, to leave school-based education behind.  The simple steps to homeschooling legally are available through a straightforward Google search.  Thanks to the Internet, homeschooling communities abound, along with resources, regular meet-ups, and even group academic classes that parents sponsor for their areas of expertise.  My daughter has homeschool soccer every week.

I see leaving the entire notion of school-based education behind a supreme act of dedication to my child’s individuality.  It is a drastic act only to those who dread the burden of independent thought and action.  We must, though, take our own steps in life.  After all, what else is life about?

[2] “During the early years of the Republic, children were little more than chattels of their families—often referred to not by gender but as ‘it.’” US Dept Health, Education, and Welfare 200 Years of Children, 1976, p. 65.

[3] Tozer, Steven E., School and Society, 2008, p.346

[4] Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis American Educational Research Journal June 20, 1984 21: 311-321,

[5] http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/cbs-2009-national-TOTAL-GROUP.pdf

In the first act, a young woman is subjected to a series of humiliations, and she is then brutally raped. In the second act, she invites the rapist for dinner and verbally enlightens him on the horrendous reality of his act as she tricks him into eating his own child–a mature fetus she self-aborted. (I guess this is why the author made the character a pre-med student.)

The play is about as sophisticated as scrambled eggs. It is important to note its context, though, as it was released in 1983, when rape had not been yet fully digested as a social issue, when it’s popular presentation was limited to action movies (like that year’s Dirty Harry flick, “Sudden Impact,”) in which rapist crooks were always destroyed (and often tortured) in the final scene by the mansome tough guy. This was way back in the prehistoric days when the New York Times would actually assign the review of a play by a male playwright about the rape of a female to a male reviewer (as they did with this one.) Notably, this play premiered a couple of months before the New Bedford, Mass., barroom gang rape that would eventually inspire legislation nationwide to protect victims of rape.

The play is a novel but naive (not to mention outrageously and unnecessarily graphic) attempt to compare the victim’s strength favorably to the rapist’s–an attempt to regain from her what she lost. Its glaring failure, though, is that there is nothing enlightening to be gained from comparing a rape victim to a rapist. Though a rape victim clearly suffers “loss,” a rape is not a contest that the woman has lost. It is a putrid anomaly in society’s psychological stew, like any child molestation or murder. The perpetrator can offer the victim no avenue for understanding what has happened or how to go forth. Her problem does not reside in her social relation with the perpetrator–she has no relation to him, as he has committed an inhuman act, and should be, then, surely to her, no more human than a rabid dog. Sure, she might hate the guy and want to see him tortured, but that is not a revealing insight into the theme of rape. It is, rather, an impulsive emotional response to being victimized.

Some of the group’s members liked this play. One young woman, I’ll call her Kay, objected to my critique, telling me it helped dramatize the horror of rape–how the victim feels, what has been taken from her, and how it affects her. Still, the way Kay stammered over them, I got the feeling these polemic assets were not at the heart of Kay’s response. It seemed that she had a positive emotional reaction to the play that her comments didn’t explore—something that I was not interested in.

We look for different things from art.

Sometimes we turn to what I will call “assertion art,” which seems to speak like us and say the things we want to say. Assertion art can be positive, such as when Beyonce sang “At Last” at President Obama’s inaugural ball; and other times it might instead be negative, such as when a guy who was raised in an abusive home in a crummy and violent neighborhood seeks escape with a nasty flick like “Saw” at his local theater. These are emotions we already yearn to express. The art gives us an avenue. The enjoyment of the art is not enlightening, but reinforcing.

Check out this assertion tattoo artwork I recently noticed on a woman’s shoulder at my kindergartener’s graduation…

On its least sophisticated level, assertion art, though, can be more masturbatory. As in a Dirty Harry flick, the tension might be raised only for the thrill of the release, without any prior yearning involved. Maybe Kay has no particular need to express issues with rape, but just passively allows the play to get her to hate the rapist, and then she thrills in seeing him get his comeuppance. “Yeah!” she feels. Or, rather than her hatred for the rapist, her empathy for the fictional rape victim may be her greatest source of enjoyment; the same mournful thrill people get exercising their emotions by leaving a Teddy bear beside the lake where a disturbed stranger drove her car full of children all strapped into their seats.

Assertion art expresses the good and bad of ourselves whether it is real or fabricated for the thrill. It can make us stronger, but we don’t grow.

I have another invented term to try out here, a counterpart to assertion art. I will call it “scaffolding art.” Rather than reinforcing our stand, scaffolding art creates a space between the artist and us. This space is the difference between what we are aware of and what we are not aware of. A play might get us to think in a way we never did before. Kay may have felt the play bridged a space for her, allowing her to explore the feelings of a rape victim more fully than she ever had imagined.

It is important to note the relativity of awareness in understanding how awareness functions in scaffolding art. The awareness being scaffolded on the pages of the New Yorker, for instance, is entirely different than that in, say, Sports Illustrated or in that of Star Trekker, or UFO Monthly, for that matter. An expert reader of one of these magazines forced to read one of the others would be challenged to appreciate what the magazine succeeds in satisfying its usual readers with. The more esteemed reader, the New Yorker reader, could not be expected to be better at understanding the UFO magazine than could the Sports Illustrated reader. In this relation, the New Yorker has been stripped of esteem. The New Yorker, after all, does not display any objectively superior traits. It does not use an objectively better vocabulary, as one might very well call it worse because so many fewer people can appreciate it. Truly objectively, we’d have to call it novel, at best. Its writers specialize in communicating with a certain narrow group of people, people who have never read the original script to The Wrath of Khan. Your average Joe, picking up a New Yorker, will read the cartoons, maybe half a movie review, and maybe a few paragraphs of a short story before leaving it on the subway bench where he found it. And this is because the writing is not accessible to him—it does not overtly demonstrate some value worthy of the average Joe’s esteem.

Writing found in the New Yorker seeks to reach a sophistication that might be seen, from a Star Trekker’s point of view, worthy of the same humored disparagement with which a New Yorker reader might regard the quite sophisticated fold-out Romulus battle plans featured in Star Trekker’s December issue.

Scaffolding art bridges awareness, but its value can be relative. Your scaffolding art may be irrelevant to me. More perplexingly, though, nowadays, you may find your scaffolding art is irrelevant to you.

Consider the exponential expansion of artistic expression that occurred first with mass popular culture and now driven to a near–infinite expanse with the Internet. We have crossed into a world where knowledge can no longer reasonably be said to be mastered, even if we limit ourselves to an artistic category, like poetry, to use a particularly useful example. Where there was once thought to be a limited stream of published poetry that one might monitor, now there exists an endless sea.

Where once a poet could write with authority, secure in their educational grounding of what they were building on, today they just cannot. More and more, that grounding is shifting to include more ends of the universe that were never before considered. Where once a professor might mock a student for failing to catch a reference, today the same professor won’t dare for fear the student will draw out his own corner of the universe in riposte. I will see your Ovid, and raise you an Osho and a Chrystos.

No edge of artistic expression that is safe now will be safe come tomorrow. No artist will be an expert or even an authority. The nature of art, when the floodgates to human expression are truly open, is as endless as the ether.

In this view, scaffolding art, then, just like assertion art, is limited in value to a time or place, or perhaps a type of person or experience. The romantic notion of greatness, then, is just a romantic notion.

Unless.

Stepping out of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” another play my course featured, one might feel hyperaware of the shallowness of the human constructs practiced by Mamet’s characters. That awareness, it can be argued, has the ability to improve us. It involves a judgment between what is right and what is wrong, a moral judgment.

Morality is a tricky tool to handle. We do not all agree on what we call morality. Some people use the term loosely, including all sorts of superstitious nonsense in what they refer to as their morality. Just about everything to distinguish one from the majority has been seen as immoral at some point in history to some culture. Skin tone, religious preference, sexual preference, marital arrangements, eating with a particular hand, wearing or failing to wear particular garments, having a particular physical deformity, whispering, opposing authority, hairstyle, left-handedness….

My first wife’s mother once confided to me: “You know, they’re the kind of people who put mustard on their cheese sandwiches.”

Still—and this is the crux of what I have to say—I am quite certain that all people share a basic common morality. There is in the nursing mother’s loving, nurturing exchange with her baby, and in the father’s protective embrace of his child to his own chest, a passing of some distinct and very complicated lesson that is true in every far corner of the human universe, that every decently-nurtured person in every culture across our planet can assert. There is a universal. I’ll call it love.

When art asserts or scaffolds the loving ideal it becomes something with a universal grounding, and, unlike other expressions, that art’s value has the ability to claim true objective prowess. Since I was a child, this is what I have looked for in art, from my pre-school thrill with Adam West’s devoted valiance in the Batman shows to my teenaged swoon over Van Gogh’s tenderly loving portrayal of fields and skies and faces as they hung there on the wall of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to my young adulthood realization at Ralph Ellison’s “King of the Bingo Game,” standing there on stage, his thumb on the control, yearning for the love that he is due, but that is far beyond his grasp.

The universal ideal of love is the key to truly, objectively great artwork.

Here’s the link:

phati’tude Literary Magazine

Paul Krugman and the economic experts that win Nobel prizes and such are just plain wrong to utter any comparison to the Great Depression, a time when you could poke a Glad straw into an anthill in Titusville, Pennsylvania and come up with enough free oil to power the next three years of what was cranking off Henry Ford’s assembly line, back when vast stretches of the world were unexploited, when “explorer” was a job title.

They are glaringly wrong–either fools or charlatans vying for the attention of the Capitalistic establishment mainstream media, which has everything to gain from dragging this economic decline out and so much to lose from a total reorganization of the worldwide political structure (idealistically think: world government) as to make such a change literally unthinkable.

It is amazing how easily unthinkable things can become thinkable, though.  An excellent example:  There’s buddy of mine, a virulent right winger.  He believes social programs are the main reason for our economic decline.  He believes there should be no government, no taxes, no health care, etc….  The other day, trying to get under his skin, I said to him, “What about all this debt we’ve amassed?  What will we do if China tries to call us on it?”

Without missing a beat, he responded, “We’ll just nationalize all our industries,” flipping from libertarian to communist in a mere shrug.

Hilarious.

Soda pop isn’t healthy, and neither are snack foods.  I can’t drink coffee, as I drink it too much as it is during the day, and tea is just too boring for my palate.  And, to my taste, alcohol-free beers have the flavor of swill.

A little while back, I heard about a funky Russian/Chinese health drink that is fermented easily at home, called “kombucha” (the “ch” and “u” pronounced like the sounds in “choo-choo.”)  The guy who told me about it said it wasn’t sweet, so I immediately thought of it as an alternative to my nightly red wine ritual.

The long and short is I brewed it myself and found Kombucha to be a spot-on alternative to wine.  It tastes winey, but it has effervescence, like beer.  It is healthily packed with probiotic organisms (think “pub yogurt,”) that I swear I can taste.  And it contains only a minute amount of alcohol!  Proponents believe kombucha boosts the immune system, helps digestion, fights cancer, among other unsubstantiated, but possible, benefits.

I’ll tell you how I made it.   Kombucha is made simply by allowing microorganisms to grow in sweet black or green tea.  The microorganisms are most easily obtained by purchasing a cold bottle of kombucha from an upscale supermarket or any natural foods store.  Any kombucha can be used as a starter with which to brew more kombucha.

Though you can adjust these proportions to taste, these are the ones I used: 2 gallons of water, 1/3 cup of black or green tea leaves, 3 cups of sugar.

You use about 40 ounces of the water to boil and brew the hot tea, then strain the tea out and dissolve the sugar into the hot tea.

Once the sugar is dissolved, you get another container big enough for all the water and made of either glass or plastic (only use plastic with a 1 or 2 recycling code on the bottom.)  This container should have a fairly wide mouth.  I use a couple of those plastic pretzel jars you get at Costco and a big picnic jug with the spout at the bottom, which is ideal for draining the finished product.  You can brew the tea in a metal pot, but never use metal to hold the kombucha–it reacts poorly with the kombucha acids–and never use it with a ceramic container, as some ceramic has lead in the mix, and the kombucha acids can leach the lead into the drink.

Next, you fill the big jug with the remaining water–cold from the tap, and you pour the hot tea in, making a jug of lukewarm-to-cool sweet tea.  Now that it’s not hot (too much heat kills the microorganisms,) pour the bottle of kombucha in.

Place a paper towel over the mouth of the jug, and a rubber band around it to keep out fruit flies, but to allow oxygen in.  Place the jug in a warm place away from sunlight (the warmer it is, the quicker the organisms will grow, but direct sunlight can kill them,) and give it 7-10 days to brew.

Over this period, you will notice a big, ugly mushroom growing on the surface.  Kombucha-lovers call this the “mother,” as it can be moved from any batch to easily start a new one.

Your kombucha will be ready when it develops a brief initial vinegary bite to the taste.  If it’s too sweet at first bite, you haven’t let it sit long enough to let the organisms eat up the sugar; if the taste after the initial vinegar bite is too sweet, you need to use less sugar next time.

Once the taste is right, pour it out, leaving a small bit of kombucha and the mushroom behind as a starter for a new batch.

Cap your kombucha tightly (to keep in the effervescence,) and refrigerate it.  The cold and lack of oxygen stops the organisms from advancing any more, but keeps them alive, which is what gives kombucha its health benefits.  Some people seeking a buzz will cap it but not refrigerate it, which will cause alcohol to ferment, but this self-defeatingly causes the organisms to die from alcohol poisoning.

Keep all your implements clean, and don’t add other juices, fruit, etc… to this mix or you’ll get stuff that isn’t healthy growing in your mix.

Na zdorovyeh!  (Phonetical “Cheers!” in Russian.)

His supervisor claimed he was ordered by the line superintendant to discipline the train operator after the superintendant noticed the train operator was returning from runs several minutes late as a consequence of the cautious operation entering stations.

The train operator claims ever since the March killing of a passenger at the 77th street station, he has been doubting the safety of status quo train operation, which is to enter at full speed, regardless.

Subway trains can take nearly a full train length to come to a stop, depending on the grade of the track and the train’s speed.  Train operators are required by MTA rules to operate in a “safe” manner and are legally liable in certain  situations.

“If there are two yellow lines, what are they there for?” the train operator asked, referring to the lines that warn passengers away from the dangerous edge of the subway platform.  “If they’re there because it’s a safety problem, then, by rule I should enter with caution.”

Today, the train operator was working a make-work job on a platform, standing there in a vest, earning his 60K salary, plus benefits, plus training, etc…, of the public’s money, serving no apparent purpose, instead of operating his train, as he awaited the MTA’s Labor Relations Department to draw up formal charges.

The MTA is currently experiencing a fiscal crisis and is laying off workers.

The MTA is also currently experiencing a string of subway train collisions-with and killings-of high-profile passengers (attractive, young, or white victims,) in addition to the low-profile (minority, elderly, homeless,)  4-killings-a-month routinely caused by its subway trains.

Yesterday, a day after this disciplinary action, 2 attractive, young passengers were struck by a train operated by another train operator, which was entering a station at the routine speed required by the MTA.  One passenger was killed, the other is being treated for life-threatening injuries.

See my blog entries decrying the MTA’s lack of responsiveness to deadly safety issues and the recent New York Magazine article about how sick train operators are of being a party to these killings so that the MTA can get an extra ounce of performance out of the system.