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Preston Tucker with a plan. Hold that Tiger! |
Preston Tucker was dead wrong when he said that the crummiest thing a person can be is a Lawyer (or a Politcian) Why? Because becoming a lawyer is, in my circular Rush, Hannity, and Coulter ABSOLUTE opinion, the most wonderful calling there is.
The educational experience you will undergo in Law School will transform the way you think.It will transform YOU as YOU.
It will improve your reasoning abilities. You will learn how to "Think Like a Lawyer" and be able to solve problems logically, for the rest of your life, whether they be legal problems, or any other type of problem.
As a Lawyer, You will be in a position to help others, and to serve your community. To buy a home and have two cars and be able to take the wifey and kids all down to Baskin Robbins for a warm gooey fudge banana split sunday with two scoops buried under a mountain of whipped cream with a cherry on top and that feels so good in your bulging tum-tum, after seeing the flickey show at the local cinema on a Saturday night.
Your family and friends will all be proud of you and your newfound status as a leader and asset to the rest of society. (Gasp!)
So I say becoming a lawyer is A-OK!
And don't worry about whether or not you can afford Law School, cause Unkie Sammy has gobs and gobs of gelatinous money to loan you, and you can even squish it around in your hands for a while like silly putty before handing it over to the Dean.
And a Law Degree, from ANY Law School is a rum thing, and will enable you to give the old "What Ho!" as I say, to any problem.
When all the other thinkers around you have thunkdid all their thinkey thoughts, you will cleave the brine of their delimma with your sharp legally minded, clipper ship prow, and blazing, logical intellect with lazer vision-like reason.
But let me try to illustrate:
It's like when the Yankees are playing at Home, and have the bases loaded with two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and are down by a score of three to zip.
Casey Stengel, the manager, is trying to decide who he should put in to pinch hit. He knows that the relief pitcher for the Red Sox, a knuckeballer, is hard to figure out, and so he has to choose between Mantle or Jeter.
Mantle, Casey thinks, will blast a tape measure home run if, that is, Mantle can get a hold of one of those tricky knuckeballer pitches, and then game will be over and everyone can go home. Jeter, on the other hand, has a higher batting average and a low career strike out history and is therefore the one to most likely get on base.
So what does Stengle do?
He calls up his lawyer, meaning You, and asks for advice on the situation.
Well, that was forty years ago, and Stengel and his Lawyer are still on the phone, because the Lawyer wants to save his "butt" as this year's Emory University School of Law commencement speaker Professor Sara K Stadler cited, and so he never did give any clear or direct advice to Stengel.
And Stengel's lawyer also got rich because every hour of that forty year phone conversation was a billable hour.
Poor Stengel, he was like a ship at sea that never reaches a Port.
And to this day, if one cares to make a trip over to the house that Ruth built, one will see a field full of very old and bent over men, with long white beards and tattered uniforms all waiting for Stengel's final decision.
In the stands are fifty thousand rotting corpses.
Would you like to know more?
JD Painter
The Gun the kids are fighting over might as well be Mickey Mouse,
because we learn to like the things a Society tells us to like.
Do youse guys see what I 'm getting at?
Alan Bloom was right.
He was right.
And of course this again:
* No offense Knut. Maybe I have your blog, with the insect pictures kicking around in my subconscious when I whipped up this Post Re: the whole Starship Troopers tag line bit.
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*Below is an excert that I have pasted from Wikipedia, (yelow highlights mine) but I hope people read it and sort of get the drift. To me it explains how a Lady Gaga gets born, and, to loosely quote Professor Bloom: "other polluted sources (Student Loan Debt) that issue in a muddy cultural stream where only monsters can swim" and I somehow feel there is a nexus between Bloom's book and the cultural 1 Trillion dollars in Student Loan Debt. You know, the Crisis in America today (AKA Mick Jagger the Bully) that no one is talking about.
But what do I know? I'm just a stupid Philistine construction industry Bozo. An overeducated working Joe. A Sam Weller House Painter, and a pseudo intellectual hack of a Jeeves.
I try to play a Banjo, and I don't go all that deep. Besides, Bloom said his book was only for the top Ivy kids to read. But still........
Closing of the American Mind
| "Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion." - Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind |
Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led"[3] that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent" [16] it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.[17]
Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes analytic philosophy as a movement, "Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the "great books" of Western thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. "Closing of the American Mind" draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in theEnlightenment thought of John Locke—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by '60s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.
Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.
In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the Frankfurt School, he examined the philosophical effects of popular music on the lives of students, placing pop music, or as it is generically branded by record companies "rock music", in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it for the first time with genuine philosophical interest, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, its place in our late-capitalist bourgeois economy, and its pretensions to liberationand freedom. Some critics, including the popular musician Frank Zappa, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society."[18] Bloom, informed by Socrates, Aristotle,Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star Mick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic-sterility of pop-music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.[19]Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist or psychiatrist—contemporary culture's leading umpires.
[edit]Critical reception
The book was met with much critical acclaim. The success of the work attracted a wide spectrum of critics. Martha Nussbaum, a liberal political philosopher and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.[20] Jaffa pointed out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students.[21] According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement.[21]
In a passage from her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."[20] The outraged "assault" on the book was continued by negative and impassioned reviews by Benjamin Barber inHarper's; by the scholar of ancient philosophy and Nietzsche Alexander Nehamas in the London Review of Books; and by David Rieff in The Times Literary Supplement.[22] David Rieff called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."[3] One reviewer, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff writing in the scholarly journal Academe, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", using as the narrator a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"[22] Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, a historian from York University, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the American Historical Review with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".[23]
Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Norman Podhoretz noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."[24]
In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publisher's Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."
Camille Paglia, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".[25] MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky dismissed the book as "mind-bogglingly stupid" for its canonistic approach to education.[26] On the other hand, an early New York Times review by Roger Kimball called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."[27]
In an article on Bloom for The New Republic in 2000, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote that "reading [Bloom]... one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens."[28] More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment from Jim Sleeper in the New York Times.[29]
Keith Botsford would later summarize:
| “ | "Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed to) rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. He loved people who were first-rate with real love... Many profited. Others, mainly dwellers in the bas fonds of 'social studies', or those who seek to politicise culture, resented and envied.[6] ______________________________________ Anyway, that's enough for this post. I'll just leave you with this little clip. I'll be filling out the previous two posts as well. To me, the fast talking guy with the cheezy blazer might as well be trying to sell a Law Degree, or Law in general, as a career. Well, maybe one more thing: The next time you see a huge pack of white "Harley Biker Guys" go pst this summer, think about what Professor Allan Bloom said about the Weimar Republic., and think about this video clip below. Quite frankly, I find the whole resurgence of, or maybe it is the creation of a variation of, call it a "Harly culture "or "Genre" to be a little frightening. Why? Because I feel a sort of latent hostility about the whole thing, or an undercurrent of hostility....or something. Shit!.....I don't know. but I sense something going on. I once interviewed a survivor of the Sachsenhausen death camp when in College. The man who survived was Jewish, and he told me in the interview, in so many words, that every time he sees a "Harley Guy" with the whole drag or get up on--you know, the leather and chains and boots etc, he is reminded of the men the SS hired to be the brutal prison guards. He referred to them as reminding him of: "The boys that did not do well in school". True story, and I still have a copy of the interview right here. In fact, I should post it. But I'd have to see if he is still alive and get permission, or get permission from his family. He used to work with my father years ago. He had worked in advertising I think. Billboards and things like that. So anyway, I'm just saying the society is getting pretty damn coarse, and, Like Allan Bloom, I blame the teachers for selfishly not teaching the humanities, while collecting handsome government student loan handouts all the while, and doing nothing to prevent the ruination of the lives of their students who are hopelessly drowning in debt for life now. I especially blame the Top University teachers, who all ought to have known better and are therefore in a sense Negligent, as it is defined, in having : "Breached a duty of care" to the larger society. The top Universitys tell all the other teachers what to do, and yet they don't have a clue about what it is like to live and work with all the white Queequege tattooed barbarians that are stuck in the 60's and 70's and play the same classic rock on the radio allllllllllll day long forever and ever and ever. When does one finally get sick of Mick Jagger type music? After hearing Gimme Shelter for the millionth time? The millionth and first? When do the hu ha hoos come to an end? Will it take a huge social upheaval to make the tape break off the reel, which will then spin madly around and around and with no music playing, until it finally stops? I'm gonna let this post sit for a week, and I'll be back in some of my past posts and working on them, Back in the stacks all week, so to speak. In the end, social upheaval can be resolved in a War, or, possibly, in Court. So why not bring a class action lawsuit against a Willie Stark-Like Dept. of Education, and all the top Universities? For Graft in the former, and Negligence in the latter? And in the end, I hate to have to admit it, but the diverse, as well as Legal, Mind will be the one to have to tell all the Ivy League Humanities Scholars their business, and set them right. I recommend that a Judge beat them all over the head with Professor Allan Bloom's book. I mean, if you have ever read a lot of Literary scholarship, it is written only for a select group that can understand all the references. A lot of it would never pass as a Legal Brief, and would get a grade of C. It doesn't have a glossary, or bother to explain all the concepts that are bandied about. As Professor Sara Stadler correctly stated in her commencement address to the 20011 class at Emory University School of Law, lawyers examine all the pieces, and then the pieces of the pieces. Literary scholars oftentimes don't bother to explain the pieces, and that is the difference between the legal mind and the scholarly mind. And the people that write all that literary scholarship all don't give a flyin, because we are the philistines, after all, but they have no problem collecting the Student Loan cold cabbage that the philistines had to borrow, and that they they never will be able to pay back. And what about all the BS Anthroplogy stuff you see on the discovery channel that are all just a bunch of shaggy dog , or better yet, shaggy mammouth tales? Student Loan money paid for that too kiddo! And what do all these highbrows do in their spare time? They indulge in dripping bathos on a Ken Burns documentary about Baseball. (It is only a fucking game!) Oh well, now I'm starting to sound like an Ann Coulter book again, and gotta stop. I guess with all this blogging, and in light of recent events such as the looming class action lawsuit against the schools mentioned in the upper right, my perspective is coming full cycle. This country would not be here were it not for Lawyers. What we need is another Oliver Wendall Holmes, or a Learned Hand, or a Justice Brandeis, or a combination of people such as that, that can hopefully straighten the whole mess out. Frankly, in that sense, I'm glad President Obama and the first Lady are Lawyers. Anyway, RE: The Weimar Republic again here. Shocking I know, but remember the Harley Guys as you watch this. And substitute the roar of a Tiger tank for the sound of Headers. And some of those Harley guys do wear similar helmets. And look at the heavy metal type skulls they are wearing, and the version of the cross, like Ozzy Osbourne wears. Just......look...... Just one or two pics. Now that you have seen the film clip praising the Waffen SS, and the depictions in it, look here, at this Ozzy Osbourne t-Shirt. He is an American Pop Icon. I mean........look.........just look...........  And look here. Remember what the survivor of the Sachsenhausen death camp said? See the death's head on the hats of SS men in uniform in the film clip above? And please, don't harden your heart, and listen to what I am trying to say. Look.....just look........  And here. And please again, don't harden your heart on me. Remember what the Sachsenhausen Death Camp survivor said, and look at this guy from a Lady Gaga video (Lady Gaga is an American Icon that even Maria Shriver speaks highly of) and remember the SS death's head. Don't get angry with me and turn away. Where were the Humanities teachers as people such as this were growing up? Look....just look. I want to cry sometimes when I see stuff like this, and I say to myself: "Ah Bartleby! Ah! Humanity. Melville understood the nature of Wall Street and finance, and the way it destroys the Human soul as Allan Bloom, to me anyway, seemed to imply, way back then. Lady Gaga, like Mick Jagger, quietly serves her financial backers, and like Marylin Chambers did too I suppose.  I have a skull model. Two in fact because I messed up putting in the teeth on the first because I had too many beers. But I bought it as a model during the time I had all my sinus troubles and surgery. I wanted to study the human head, and the sinus cavities, its structure, and where the olfactory nerves are located. My wife joked about that with the nurse when I had my surgery, and the nurse thought that was really funny. I suppose, with respect to art and in the way a skull can be depicted in art, and how it represents mortality I guess, is the key. The context, in other words, as in: "Alas poor Urich, vs the SS creed: Loyalty is my Honor? How are Ozzy, Lady gaga, and the Harley guys using the skull image? Like Shakespeare? As a momento mori? (spelling) or more in the spirit of the SS? All I have to go on is the statement by the Sachsenhausen Death Camp survivor, and as Allan Bloom said, Rock Music, Lady Gaga, and I would suppose the Harley Davidson culture, have no high intellectual sources. Did Nazi Germany?  __________________________________________________________ To the World: Meet John Doe. Me. I am Just Another underemployed Jerk and Loser from the current day, Indentured, Educated Class of America. I am a castaway from a corrupt and greedy, interest earning American system of Higher Education that has pillaged and plundered the once trusting, but now bitter and hostile, lifetime indebted American student. I am a bastard child. A by-blow from an American educational system that has failed the American Dream. An Educational system that has left its students in ruin. An educational system that is nothing less than criminal. An Educational System that is an effront to Humanity itself, and has to be sued or brought up on charges..or something. In 21st Century America, a School is not a School anymore. Higher Education, at its highest levels, has fallen in line with it's master: a dictating and barbaric Wall Street, and it is now bought and sold as a commodity. Higher Education is now, as William Carlos Williams might have said: a pure and crazy product of American capitalism, that exists in this day in a very greedy and crude baby boomer demonstrative, and selfish, and narcissistic, hippie monster manner that would have made even Alexis De Tocqueville weep. To the World, and from a simple, but observant domestic servant: All American scholarship, and especially the Legal scholarship, from the last 30 years plus, if not the last half century, should be viewed in this light. I hope my new friends in Australia, and hopefully in China, to whom America is very deeply financially indebted by now, and who also seem to have adopted me, and are interested in my blog and story, stay tuned as I try to describe the decline of a society and a nation. Here, as I walk along the beaches, I think of a sun burning out. Slowly at first, and then faster, and faster, and ever faster. And I hope my new friends, do not confuse Allan Bloom with Harold Bloom (the other Bloom, with an "H" Yeah..... he's another and different guy altogether. Anyway, all the top American Intellectuals nowadays seem to serve the banks, and are therefore freaks, and the biggest hypocrites of all, and should be first and foremost viewed in that light, since they never lifted a finger to stop this whole mess that they had to have been well aware of as it was in the offing. So I view them as modern day monks or Priests selling intellectual indulgences. Dangling a carrot, in other words, in front of the faces of indebted kids yearning for knowledge and a better life. If any disagree, let me know. But for now: To my fans from overseas: You had better print all this out before the powers that be shut me down. What the Fuck do I know anyway? I'm just a fucking indebted servant, and some people or entities stand to make lots of money off of my debt over the next 20 years. So I'm Fucked! I'm so fucked. May God Bless and help America in this very troubled time, because the school teachers sure don't give a flyin Fuck about the John Doe Philistines. And I'm one one of them for sure. Fuck it all! I'll edit it all later maybe. Like I say, I write directly into the blog, and make changes later. ________________________________ Added 6/6/11 @ 7:39 EST To me, the blank masks might as well be tattoos, and to me, the moment @ 4:25 represents a crucial moment when all US Scholarship finally decided to break down, and fell in line with the banking industry, even if it meant enslaving the students. (As Alexis De Tocqueville might have predicted) The tattooed USA populace, with souls reared on US Pop culture, is barbaric, and full of doubt now, and has been so for quite some time. And the top University Professors laugh at it all, and are sending out resumes overseas (At least that is my guess)
Dear God, where were the teachers? Where were the US humanities teachers? I walk in a world I do not recognize. Education has failed America. Education does not matter at all in this world. And, just for fun, and because life is a mystery after all: 6/6/11 @ 9:13 Really, really friggin depressed and feeling hopeless, ands in blow my brains out over my debt. Fuck! Going to bed. I am such a Pariah. I am deep and deeply indebted and worthless and immobilized by te society. i do ot fit in anywhere. I need to make amends for my whole past life and atone to everyone I can get hold of. I am so sorry to God. I seem to turn everythign I touchinto somethign bad. too tired to write anymore. I am so so sorry to everyone that I have wronged. I am deep and deep and deep in debt, and I have sinned. I amso sorry to everyone I have done harm to and wish to atone before checking out at some point. 6/7/11 @ 7:19AM Whoa? Did I write that last night? Well, I feel much better this morning, and all that from last night was the beer talking again. I slept well with all sorts of dreams (which I won't discuss) and seem to have worked something out somehow. An issue I feel better about, and I think I can now finally lay off the tall boys. Besides, I have to get myself back in shape. I also awoke thinking about something from the Robert Penn Warren Book audio book I am listening to in my truck back and forth to work; A passage that must be his poetry or that is quoting some philosopher that says: If life is motion towards knowledge, and if God is all knowledge, then God is non motion, and therefore not life, but dead. So JD painterguy was lying in bed and staring at the ceiling at 5AM and thought: If John Lennon said: "All you need is Love" and if God is Love, and, as I have established, God is already Dead, then John Lennon was really saying: "All you need is Death" Mad logic right? But I haven't finished RPW's novel yet, so maybe RPW takes those concepts another step or two. It really is a great, poetic prose style book and is very pertinent to today's political scene in the US. Again, the novel is: "All The King's Men" by Robert Penn Warren, and I highly recommend the audio book read by professional actor Michael Emerson. Youse can get it on Amazon, or tell your local Library to order it maybe. Then see the movie later. |
