Blog Chez Jacq'

I've admired Fred Reed for years [Semper Fi, Bud] with few exceptions. This is one his best. Might be his best ever.

Fred Throws Sombrero in Ring

The Only Thing We Have to Be Afred of is Fred Hisself

September 24, 2008

I see that I shall have to come out of retirement and become President. It is the only hope for the country and the world. That I am willing to undergo the humiliation of the office is a measure of the depth of my sense of duty. Though perhaps I will do it under an assumed name.

First things first. I will need a stirring bumper sticker, this being the key to high office. What? I’m considering “Fred! Piss Poor but Look at the Rest.” Or “A Fred in Every Pot,” or perhaps “Better Fred than Dead”? Or “Tippecanoe and Frederick Too.” The possibilities are endless. In any event, election is a mere detail. Given the competition, the country will flock to my standard. Or wish it had.

Next I’ll need some promises. How about :When in office, I will do the following wholesome things:

Education. Put a bounty on members of the teachers unions. The season will start with a week for bow hunters and black powder and then be open to all. No bag limit. Think stuffed heads over the mantle. “Ah, yes, Miss Grundy. I knew her well.”

That accomplished, I will require a score of 1200 on the old SATs, before the dumbing-down, for teaching positions. I will then raise salaries until such people take the job. The schools today are in the hands of people too dim to know what schooling is, and resentful of people who have it or might want it. They remind me of vegetarian butchers: The whole concept doesn't work.

Then I will have everyone in the Department of Education strangled (possible electoral slogan: “Strangulation in the Common Interest”). Local governments will run their schools as they damned well please. Ha. Ha ha!

The military: I will support a constitutional amendment requiring that Congress declare all wars. (I know, but it doesn’t work.) This would have spared us Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and perhaps Afghanistan. The first urge of Congress is reelection, and the second, the avoidance of responsibility. They will never spawn a war they have to admit to.

Further (an old favorite of mine), I will require that the mothers of the graduating class at Harvard be strapped to the glacis plates of any tanks sent to foreign wars. Joan Baez will be my Chairman of the JCS. She’s a decent woman, sane, and has a nice voice. I bet the incumbent can’t sing at all.

Under my guidance, the military will assume a new mission of defending the United States rather than being a presidential hobby. I know: This is radical, but radical times require radical solutions.

I will put the defense contractors under Apple Computer. They will then beaver away making groovy if unnecessary gadgets to sell to bored teenagers. This will at least do no harm, and perhaps allow the US to compete with Japan in consumer electronics. Though I doubt it.

Energy. I will issue a cyanide pill to all Americans. When vines begin growing through the fan belts of the SUVs, because there is no gas, they will pop the pill. This will reduce the consumption of energy, and for that matter drop the population to a reasonable level—say, twenty people.

Suicide really is the only practical solution. Democracies have the foresight of retarded rabbits and never notice the inescapable, such as that the world’s demand for oil grows and the supply doesn’t. Anyone who points this out is called a commie, anti-market, un-American, a green, and accused of links to the Sierra Club.

Pills on the way.

Social policy. I will end affirmative action, zap. It does nothing but inspire division and resentment. Well, it also prevents its beneficiaries from doing anything to better themselves, since they don’t have to. Like all federal do-goodery, it is a magnet for grifters, crooked lobbies, charlatans, shysters, and bus-station rabble. If you need affirmative action, you aren’t good enough; if you if you are good enough, you don’t need it; and if you take it anyway, you are a freeloader.

Foreign policy. I will end the embargo of Cuba. It’s stupid, gives the US a terrible rep in Latin America, accomplishes nothing of use, and makes life hard for eleven million perfectly good Cubans. If the professional pseudo-Cubans in Miami object, I’ll have the frauds freeze-dried and air-dropped on some starving country in Africa. (Possible slogan: “Every cloud has a protein lining.”) Cannibalism gets a bum rap.

I will tell the Israelis to get back inside the 1967 borders, be a Jewish state, and shut up—especially the latter—or they will never see another American dollar or F16. I will then give the Palestinians exorbitant aid to build a country unless they attack Israel again, at which point I’ll spray anthrax on the whole place. This probably won’t work, but it has a better chance than anything else.

I pledge to end the lamebrain policy of looking for a war with Russia. The US has now put NATO, an anti-Russian military alliance, in the Baltics, on the Russian border; in Poland, on the Russian border, and is trying to bring Georgia, on the Russian border, into NATO. The US and NATO have large combat forces in Afghanistan, on the Russian border, and want to colonize it. Not smart. Think Canada, Mexico, and Cuba in the Warsaw Pact.

There are three levels of military stupidity: stupid, really and truly stupid, and war with Russia. Right now we’re going for the brass ring.

I will bring the GIs home from Korea. If South Korea wants to defend itself, it easily can. If it doesn’t, I don’t care.

Further, (I’m really getting into this) I will bring the GIs home from Europe. There’s nobody there we need to fight. As for Bosnia and suchlike geographic trash, last time I looked they were in Europe. Europe can worry about them. The US is not Europe’s mother.

Purple-haired dyke feminists: These venomous lynxes have done enough harm that I shall have to be firm. All public doorways will have a spectrophotometer to detect purpleness at hair level. When this happens, a laser will light up and, ssssssssPOP! her head will explode. The entire membership of NOW will be sent to Bangladesh to work in a jute factory. Since most of them look like fire plugs with leprosy, on their return they will be required to wear burqas.

The economy. I am against compulsory redistribution of wealth. This usually means taking money from those who earn it, and giving it to the federal government. If federal employees want to eat, they can plant corn. Or eat their cyanide pills. I will encourage the latter as simpler.

Finally, patriotism will become a capital offense. It serves chiefly as a mechanism allowing rogues and pathological short men to send our puzzled teenagers to kill someone else’s. Iraq can kill its own damn teenagers if it likes. I understand the urge, having had teenagers, but it isn’t my job.

How can I lose? The Age of Fred dawns.

Directly from Fred.

Labels: economics, education, military, politics, taxes

Fred Reed does seem to be obsessive in his need to write. Here is his latest effort, in English:

November 16, 2007

I am going to revitalize the American mayonnaise industry. Yes. Such is the patriotism rampant in this column. We will fill the nation’s swimming pools with the purest domestic variety, and then drown the entire staff of the public school system in it. I personally will tie cinderblocks to them.

My love of country is great: I will use no Chinese mayonnaise.

And then I’ll bring back the one-room school house. Many will denounce me in the public prints as retrograde. Well, when you have driven your car into a swamp full of underfed alligators, retrograde is what you want to be.

Why the one-room school house? Because it rewards initiative and brains and individualism and other things America no longer stands for and in fact can’t stand.

Think about it. In a school of one room, students can advance as they will. If a child of eight can read as well as the fifteen-year-olds, he can read with them. If he is able to do algebra when he is ten, why, he can do so. If he can’t, he can stay with kids at his own level. If the teacher can’t, put her in a tumbrel and take her to the mayonnaise. Is this not a splendid idea?

No. Today, advancement in the public schools depends on race, creed, color, sex, and national origin, on time served, docility, pernicious pseudopsychology, tolerance of pointless make-work, on preference for form over substance. Learning anything is irrelevant. Indeed it is discouraged, as it might increase the self-esteem of the smart. What counts is absorbing group-think like a napkin in a beer spill. The important things are doing witless homework and pasting pictures in stupid projects. This is pure hell for the very bright, and tends strongly to favor girls, who are more likely to do things they know to be stupid.

Next I am going to devastate the schools by giving the students hope. I will set up a comprehensive test, lasting perhaps a week, of everything that a graduate of a high school should learn. And I will tell the students that when they can pass that test, they can pick up their diplomas at the door. Gone, outa there. No more listening, agonized, to mouth-breathing IQ-85 preliterate marginal humans burbling ed-school Marxibabble.

Can you conceive of the academic frenzy that hope of escape would inspire, at least in the bright? A fair few kids in the fifth grade read at a twelfth grade level. (And plenty of affirmative-action teachers, documentably and obviously, don’t.) Lots could advance by broad jumps in all subjects if allowed to. Why not let them, and let them test out when they can? Isn’t the purpose of school to get them to learn?

Of course not. Schools exist to keep children off the streets and off the job market, to serve as day care, to provide submissive drones for the office market, and to instill appropriate values, meaning those that make for political passivity and high consumption. Americans exist to buy things.

Now, again, I understand that any notion of rewarding competence runs against the national character. I am aware of the almost lascivious fascination with the dull, slow, inferior, substandard, puzzled, coarse, shiftless, lame, and useless. We have affirmative action to ensure the perpetuation of these ideals. However, as a titillating venture into intellectual pornography, let’s consider how the schools look to the bright. Yes, yes, I know: the bright are elitist, and contribute nothing to civilization except all of it, and must be crushed. But…consider the bright anyway. Think of it as abnormal psychology, or peeking at dirty pictures.

Ponder Bobby Lou, who carts around an IQ of 145 or 160. Understand that he is innocent of this mistake. He didn’t mean anything by it. No intention of offending motivated him. Think of it as a genetic accident. But there he is: a freak, cursed by nature.

Every day, for all of his young life, he goes to school and does what seem to him appallingly stupid things. They probably seem appallingly stupid to the other kids too, but they are worse for him. He listens to teachers with IQs so far below his that he couldn’t reach them with a rope and a bucket. Globble-gurble. Blah blah blah. Wabble wabble. He squirms. He twitches. He thinks, “Why can’t I read my physiology text that I found at Reiter’s Scientific, or take Peggy Sue into the woods to cop a feel? God, I’ve seen bugs more intelligent than this woman, and more interesting. I’ve seen mothballs more….”

Now, being average is not reprehensible, any more than being unable to bench press Oprah Winfrey. However, there is something to be said for matching capacity to opportunity. If you want to teach Bobby Lou, you get someone bright, and let Bobby advance as he chooses. If you want to elevate Oprah, you get a fork lift.

But undeserved suffering is nonetheless inflicted on Bobby Lou. He rebels, or snores loudly, and the teachers think something is wrong with him. His grades are poor because he doesn’t want to paste pretty pictures in notebooks full of foolishness. In high school he takes to petty delinquency and to drink, becomes morose, and maybe lapses into terrorism. If he does, it is justified. (Come to think of it, I would issue him a hand grenade at matriculation to encourage the teachers not to bore him. Ha.)

In a one-room school, he could move at his own rate, and then test out of the whole fetid business.

Better yet would be separate tests of different subjects. When a kid demonstrates that he can read at the twelfth grade level, no teacher should ever again be allowed to so much as mention reading to him, unless it be to ask him to coach her. If the kid passes what is now the tenth-grade Algebra II, or chemistry or physics, that should be it. He should then have a choice of taking advanced courses, taught by a vertebrate, or going behind the school to smoke and drink beer.

I figure we can generalize the approach. We could have tests of what a student is expected to learn at a run-of-the-mill university (nothing), and at a middling or a first-rate university. (Surely someone remembers what they taught.\?) Really bright students could test out of the degradation in its entirety. The effect would be to unemploy a lot of professors, but we could just stuff them into the mayonnaise along with the rest.

I know what you are thinking. What if we run out of mayonnaise? Improvise. Ketchup. Salad dressing.

Labels: education, politics, satire, western culture