Beat the Press
To get a good country, get a good education.
The damned thing about a fascist takeover is, the steps you need to take to get rid of the fascists are made impossible by the fascists.
So people will have to improvise on these recommendations I am making. Maybe some local school boards will be able to implement them; maybe some people will have to do them at home as part of some subsidized home-schooling racket (sure to be popular in a Trump administration!) or else just as an evening parent-child activity like Bible reading or scrapbooking.
I propose two courses of study for young Americans.
Back in the old days — and I mean really old, before my time even — schools generally included civics among the subjects they taught. The image above is from a 1917 civics textbook on sale at Etsy, Community Civics by R.O. Hughes of Peabody High School, Pittsburgh. The TOC covers a lot of ground, in dozens of chapters from Branches of Government to Quality of Street Car Service to Disposal of Wastes and European Systems of Management, and so on. You can get an idea from this sample of the measured, thoughtful tone of the thing — which I’m sure has its own time-specific prejudices (I can imagine where that “Union and the States” section might get to) but you can also imagine a modern version that has fewer or at least milder prejudices.
There are modern civics books, I’m told, but I’m guessing they’re not as thorough as this one, which seems to follow the old pedagogical method: Cram the kids chapter by chapter, quiz them to make sure some of it stuck, and include some probing essay questions so at least a few of them will do some actual thinking.
The big idea was to show not only how one’s government and related systems worked but that it was meaningful to know how they worked. A lot of what we consider the old folks’ idealism (or naiveté) about government comes not from propaganda (though there is always going to be some of that in such education, hopefully not enough to totally turn the kids off), but from the effort and attention that went into teaching them about it.
The old-timers understood the basics. They had been shown the mechanism of the engine. They knew government was not just some black box into which you fed votes and got out tax breaks, but a series of interlocking systems in which they, as citizens, played a part.
Call it a hunch, but I think if our young people were given some such education, they wouldn’t vote like such fucking morons.
The other thing is newer: Media Literacy. We all have heard it preached for grown-ups, and there are some textbooks, but I think all kids should have classes in it the way they had — have, in my regime — civics classes.
I was thinking of doing one of my Received Opinion with Bolt Upright sketches today, but found the prospect too dispiriting. You guys know from those sketches and other commentary how badly I think our press has failed us in this election particularly, and how little they learn from their own failures — I mean look at this shit:
Amazing. Yet we fail our children by not teaching them to recognize this kind of dipshittery.
When I was a Sylvan Learning Center tutor I snuck in (it was not part of their rubric) simple news analysis as an exercise. I had the kids read a Daily News story and then tell me in a few words what it was about, to see if they could synthesize the information. (Which is hard for adults, too! I often have to refer several times to a story I have read to make sure I have all the facts straight.) If the story involved commentary — either by the writer or by sources — I checked them to see if they could tell that from the hard facts. “Fact and Opinion” were part of the rubric, but taught in silly made-up examples; I thought using a news story instead was not only a good reading assignment but also, like, you know, a life skill.
And it is. If more people had been taught this in school, I believe, when they read something in the papers about “concerns” about “crime” and you asked them if they knew the difference between that and a response to actual crime rates, they wouldn’t just gawk at you as if you’d asked them to give the value of pi to 13 decimal places.
This is not just good ol’-fashioned l’arnin’ for young’uns, but I think a way forward. It would make students more knowledgeable of the very important realities with which they will be confronted as adults — and much harder to bullshit.
Who’s with me?
Note that the civics textbook used as an example dates from 1917. For years one of my older sisters worked on a project analyzing textbooks and the decline in pedagogy over the 20th century, during which schoolbooks have been steadily dumbed down. Our corporate overlords really do want a populace of mindless drones — and they've made one. The latest and most shocking atrocity was the insistence on "whole language learning" to "teach" reading. Instead of the lessons in phonics we got, kids were given books and then somehow magically expected to teach themselves reading. It's been a dismal failure, and now the pendulum has swung back to phonics — only today's teachers were never taught phonics or how to teach it. Reading abilities in the U.S. are worse than they have ever been.
Political Party - a loosely knit organization that tries to control government by winning elections
I learned that definition in eighth grade civics. We had another class my senior year. And this was in a redneck farm town of 1500 people. The kind of place that kept all the black people living in one four block area of town that didn't have street lights or sewer and never got the snow plowed in the winter. It was a racist ass little redneck town but everybody still had to take two classes of civics.
I didn't grow up to be a stupid asshole, at least when it came to politics.
I look at the results of the election and I wonder if it's possible to run an effective democracy when it's saturated with bad social media. If you bombard people with bad information you can make a significant number of them believe whatever you want them to - oh shit...
There is a positive note in the fact that fascism just doesn't work. There would be 200-year-old fascist governments if worked at all.. I know, Volkswagens and all the trains ran on time. That was okay but within 10 years the countries got blown to shit. And it's probably nothing noble like the citizens wised up to the clarion call of freedom. It's rich people wising up to the fact that if you pay people a decent wage and they've got money and they can buy things and the economy is good. That's counterintuitive to Rich Fucks who rate having to pay overtime right up there with Prometheus getting his liver chewed out every night
Yikes!