Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is credited with the axiom that freedom of speech does not include yelling fire in a crowded theatre.  While this is somewhat out of context of the actual ruling that Holmes was making at the time, the concept serves me well here.  If I am in a crowded auditorium or arena of some sort and I falsely begin to yell fire, it is reasonable to assume that someone may panic.  One would suspect that it was my intent to create panic as no other logical motive exists.  Panic, psychologists affirm, is very contagious.  If the building is crowded and everyone rushes toward the exits at once injuries and even death are likely if not certain.  The premise here is simple.  I have misinformed those around me who have no time or ability to judge the veracity of my assertion.  In the absence of an alternative voice shouting that there is no fire and assuming no sane person would falsely call the alarm, everyone in the building would assume that there was indeed a fire.  It is therefore prudent for them to attempt to exit the building as quickly as possible given that a clear and present threat to their lives appears to exist.  The bottleneck created by a large number of individuals acting without guidance crushing the exits insures a tragic outcome.  Because my speech led to a tragedy that I should have easily foreseen, barring any mental abnormality, I am responsible for that tragedy and should shoulder the consequences.  If someone dies, I should be charged and found guilty of at least intentional manslaughter if not a higher count as my actions were not only reckless but frivolous.

People like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others of their ilk have been yelling fire at the top of their lungs.  They are not presenting alternative opinions and reasoned criticism but rather sensationalism in a hunt for ratings and top spot on the neo-con rubber chicken circuit.  The American people caught up in the fear mongering presented as journalism by these self-important gurus of Right-wing thought are reeling under a deluge of misinformation.  Hearing screams across the airwaves that Obama is going to murder their grandmothers and turn their children into socialist robots, fear takes over and few people make good decisions when they are afraid.  For the record, one more time, I have read Obama’s policies and watched his performance over the last several months and I can affirm categorically that he is not a socialist nor are any of his policies socialist.  On health care he is simply proposing what amounts to an extension of the existing medicaid program to provide for a voluntary opt in.  It will not solve the current problems in health care and will be more expensive than it should be because the major health insurance companies will still control the bulk of the market.  As for his speech to school children, asking young Americans to write an essay on how they might help their president and their country hardly seems indoctrination unless you follow the philosophies of Ayn Rand and believe that you should never do anything to help your community or your country.  How is it indoctrination if the children themselves will be giving their thoughts to the president on how to make a better America.  That sounds more like patriotism than indoctrination.  After all what is a country if it is not its people working towards common goals?  I thought that was the big complaint of the Republicans and Right Wing activists that the Democrats were not listening to the voice of the people.

Facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, mired in two foreign wars that they cannot understand and see no end to, the people of America are confused and frightened.  America no longer looks like the giant it did only a few years ago.  Americans now doubt the certainty of their childhood, that America is the most powerful and wealthy state in the world.  It’s economic dominance in tatters and its military failing abroad there is not much security left in the American psyche.  So what do these super-Americans do?  Why exploit the situation for personal gain of course.  After all that is the American way.  Lacking a coherent criticism of the Obama administration’s policies and fearing the popular surge that brought him into office in the last election, the far Right has reached into the past to resurrect the great Satan, the eternal boogie man of the Cold War, Socialism.  A word they know will fan the fear and paranoia already extant.  I see another remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in our future.

Now people are showing up at presidential appearances sporting assault weapons.  I wonder how these same shock jocks would have reacted had someone shown up at a Bush appearance with an AR15?  Oh wait I seem to remember security ejecting a couple of people from an event for simply wearing anti-Bush T-shirts.  In America you have the right to bear arms at a presidential event but not insults.  Never mind, we on the Left prefer to take people out with footwear,  not guns.  How long before some confused and misinformed American attempts to assassinate President Obama in a righteous rage brought on by the words of these depraved disseminators of dissociative behaviour?  Or an already disturbed individual seizes his opportunity to be a hero or just to become immortal like Lee Harvey Oswald?  The stage is set.  It may no longer be an if but a when.  Rhetoric is already turning to action and unless the flames are dowsed soon it is only a matter of time before at least an attempt is made on the president’s life.  Like the reckless person in the theatre yelling fire, Beck, Limbaugh and the rest of the provocateurs should then be held accountable for their actions.  They should be charged as conspirators and if the attempt is successful, assassins.  The full weight of the law should be brought to bear on them just as it would be on me if I yell fire when there is none and someone dies.  Their actions make them as guilty as if they pulled the trigger themselves.

British Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, included Savage (real name Michael Weiner.  Great, we Germans spend a half century trying to outlive the stereotype only to have this idiot come along.) in a list of people persona non grata in the United Kingdom.  For this Savage is threatening to sue.  He claims he has never incited violence on his talk show or in his writings.  Technically that may be true.  I have never actually heard Savage say ‘Go forth and smite down the democratic liberal wherever you find him, in expresso bar or at Gay Pride Parade.’  Does he need to say this to be inciting violence?  No.  But will shutting him up stop these attitudes? Also no.  This is hearts and mind time and censoring Savage will not change the mind of one bigot. 

Silencing his message from the public airways will only drive it underground and add to its mystique.  More, it gives the message credibility.  Why censor something unless you are afraid of it.  Believe me that will be his spin on the matter.  ‘They know I speak the truth, that is why they fear me.  They fear that I might tell you what they don’t want you to know.’  His message doesn’t need to be silenced it needs to be challenged.  Isn’t it interesting that these champions of freedom seldom allow themselves to be caught in a public debate with anyone able to expose them as the frauds and fools that they are.  Cowards naturally shrink from a fight.  When they are caught as happened when Bill O’Reilly interviewed Phil Donahue on Fox the shallowness of their position reveals itself.  When Bill began his talk-over terrorism of his guest, a style common to these types, the articulate Donahue rose to the occasion and left O’Reilly sputtering back on the ropes desperate to survive the round.  That is what is needed to counteract the menace of these self-righteous megalomaniacs. 

Those of us old enough to remember Alan Berg, a American Left Wing radio shock jock murdered outside his home by Right Wing extremists, know that challenging these sociopaths has its risks.  Glenn Beck fantasized on his radio show about killing Michael Moore saying he thought he would be able to do it himself rather than hire a hitman.  His words dripped an underlying desire to really do this not just fantasize.  Nothing worthwhile comes without risk.  If we don’t soon begin to challenge these miscreants we will condemn ourselves and our posterity.  Their view of the world is unsustainable; left unchecked apocalyptic war and environmental catastrophe are certain.  Challenging the pied-pipers of doom sounds worthwhile to me.  Donahue, Moore and others have proved it can be done.  You and I can do it too.   Don’t sit by complacently when a colleague or acquaintance parrots the latest vitriol from one of these idols of ignorance.  Fight back!  Most of us would feel uncomfortable sitting passively while someone made a pejorative remark about Blacks or women.  There is no reason why we should condone with silence similar comments and ideas about immigrants, the poor, or homosexuals or any group whose only offense is their existence.  Nor is it wise to leave unchecked ideas that will cripple our biosphere. 

Political correctness has allowed hatred to hide.  Censorship does just the same.  It makes the stupid the mysterious.  I don’t want these ideas and hatreds hidden.  I want them in the clear light of day where I can draw a good bead on them and shoot them down.  So don’t call for censorship.  Join me on the firing squad and execute ignorance with suppositories of wisdom.

A study of university professors in Ontario (Canada) reported students were immature, lazy and unprepared.  They also lacked the research skills that might yet save them from going blithely forth to their, and our, doom.  The so-called most informed generation had little knowledge and what they did possess was superficial at best and outright myth at worst.  For example, Canadian troops, in one form or another, have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2002.  Yet when I ask students at beginning of semester where Afghanistan is only 1 or 2  can answer correctly.  None of them have a clear understanding of how we got there and what we are trying to accomplish.  But if I ask whether they support their troops the majority answer in the affirmative.  How can you support your troops if you don’t know where they are or why they are there? 

Something not reported was that many of them are functionally illiterate.  A functional illiterate can read and write but with severe limitations.  They could perhaps read a menu (without the pictures found in fast food joints the purpose of which is a recognition of the extent of illiteracy); they could read the headlines of a newspaper but would struggle with the content.  If they get news at all it is from television and even then they are lucky to fully comprehend the story as their vocabularies are woefully inadequate. 

Are teachers to blame?  They are certainly the easiest target.  They stand on the front lines in the classroom day after day.  Surely they are aware that what passes for education today is a hollow shell.   The problem is that people outside the education system can’t see the forest of bureaucrats hacking away gleefully on the ability of the trees to teach.  Teachers have marginally more say as to what goes on in the education system than the school janitor.  Decisions are made by bean counters and other bureaucratic nitwits shuffling papers in some climate controlled paradise.  They wouldn’t know what end of a white board marker to use let alone how to fire up the data video projector.  They love flow charts but anything with real people involved like a classroom, forget it.  Those bipedal chatterboxes in the hallways are clients or products to them not kids with a life that demands preparation.  The business mentality that has invaded our schools has created good cogs but poor humans. 

This is not the first study to raise an alarm that something horrible is happening in our society.  It will likely not be the last.  What I have yet to come to grips with is why we allow this to continue.  Maybe the reaction by students in one of my classes to the survey sheds some light.  They laughed.  They had been insulted and they thought it was funny.  They had been called immature and they accepted it. 

In a separate study this generation of high school graduates was found to be closer to their grandparents than their parents in attitudes and outlook.  Fresh-faced youths interviewed for the news report merrily expressed their optimism for the future.  The current recession/depression concerned them not at all; nor did the two foreign wars that are going badly for western powers.  They seemed oblivious in their certainty that life would unfold as it should.  But is this optimism or naiveté?  When I was their age I too was optimistic.  I believed that we could create a better, more just, and more humane society.  I believed the future could bring an end to unnecessary suffering and ease the pain of the rest.  And of course I believed that I would find love and adventure.  Optimism in youth should be a given.  I still strive for that better society.  Change is slow but it is measurable.

However, I knew the dangers presented by an illegal and unjust war in Southeast Asia.  I realized the fragility of life under the umbrella of nuclear weapons.  I watched the machinations of government destroy people’s lives without conscience and knew only herculean efforts would bring about meaningful change.  I was optimistic not that things were great but that things could change; that most people were basically good and if we banded together there was little we could not accomplish.  The key was being in as well as of my world.  My father always complained that I was an idealist but it was an idealism grounded in reality.  I am not saying that young people today should rent their clothes and wail at the fates all the time.  I don’t now and I didn’t then.  Rest and recreation, which I admit was sometimes chemically induced when I was their age, has always been important to me.  I am definitely a Type B personality.  But denying the obvious is not escapism it is just dumb.

This generation thinks everything is basically wonderful and Bill Gates will fix everything else.  That truly is a telling reminder of the 1950s.  In the Leave It To Beaver era housewives wore pearls to vacuum and were ditsy redheads whose antics would attract disapproving but loving smiles from their husbands.  The 1950s was the clean cut illusion of what life in North America was supposed to be.  Ike was in the White House and he would fix any problems that might arise.  There was a sense that the world had been settled with the defeat of Naziism.  There was a comfort and certainty about society.  But it bore little resemblance to the reality.  Many teens of the era, particularly those of interest to ‘popular’ researchers, knew nothing of the world outside their immaculate suburbs.  Blacks were smiling Rochesters singing and dancing, happy in their simple life.  Mom was always home to make a hot meal and gush over the latest kitchen marvel.  These young people had not yet learned of the horrors of life in the ghettos of the North or shantytowns of the deep South.  They had no idea that after they kissed mom goodbye in the morning she would turn to a bottle or pill to get through her day, both gleefully prescribed by a male dominated medical profession who thought the little filly was just suffering from a bout of female hysterics.  While conscientious studies chronicled the dark side of society, there was an entire industry within social science to prop up the illusion and a flickering television to inject the social sedative. 

How did we end up with a generation that knows little and worships the fatuous?  Shouldn’t we have seen this coming and done something about it?  For the past 30 or so years successive political leaders in Canada and the United States have been trying to fix the education system.  But wait a minute.  When did it break?  There is the key to the problem.  An Ontario education minister in the 1990s said everything we need to know about the problems we see with our youth today.  He brought his senior bureaucrats into a meeting and told them to create a crisis in education because he was going to fix it.  I will not hold it against this particular man that he himself did not finish high school.  After all neither did I.  I completed only grade 9 while he went on through grade 11.  The difference between us is I never stopped learning.  He did.  I quit high school for social reasons; he quit because he believed education was unnecessary.  Like many on the Right, he believed the sole purpose of education was to inculcate vocational skills to suit the current job market.  But there is more.  I don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories but I do believe there can occur a confluence of interests.  As the franchise had been expanded in the 1960s and 1970s to include the previously disenfranchised groups, women and minorities but also the lower classes, life became more complicated for those who wielded the instruments of power in western society.  Democracy is a messy, chaotic, inefficient, and if you are a corporate capitalist inconvenient, method of governing a country.  More people in the mix just slows the process down further.  Knowledge is power and knowledge was increasing in groups who had been cheated by the status quo. 

You can’t just stop teaching in schools altogether so you need to make it appear as if everyone is getting an education

when they are not.  The solution arrived at was a return to the 3 Rs, Readin’, Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic.  I have always loved this little phrase about education because it is the mantra of morons.  At least people who can’t spell because only one of the words really begins with the letter R.  (For those educated in our current system the three words are actually Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.)  The fact that it usually comes from people on the political Right gives me added joy.  But what do you expect from a political movement that considers Ann Coulter a seminal thinker?  The 3 Rs is Right-wing code for let’s gut the content of education.  History, civics, geography, anything that expanded the human in our young people was brushed aside as a waste.  Critical thinking was replaced by rote learning.  No wonder students get bored at school.  How many times can you recite the times table or set formulas?  Add to this little mix forcing teachers to become boosters for the little cretins and voilà a generation that can be lied to and manipulated to support any atrocity, any blunder and George W. Bush for two terms.  Stupidity should be a choice not a given. 

Well the Right got what they wanted, a crisis.  And what might you ask about the children of the people who did this to education.  Don’t worry.  They are in private schools that still provide education.  Nice how everything works out for the best for those in charge.