And, come to think of it, I don’t believe any of my children have ever been assigned to read a poem that rhymed. (Although they have seen Hamilton.)
Furthermore . . . as long as I’m fuming let’s not close my chimney flue . . . today’s students know all about climate change but spend too much time indoors staring at screens to know anything about weather.
Thus today’s students are graduating from school too stupid to come in out of the rain. But so did we. So did everyone. That’s the way it’s always been. We don’t get much of our education in school.
This leaves me in charge of the education my kids get outside school . . . I’m lying. My wife is in charge of that. And my kids can be damn thankful for it. But I try to do my little bit.
I give them two rules: mind your own business and keep your hands to yourself. I call these “The Bill and Hillary Clinton Rules.” Mind your own business, Hillary. And, Bill, keep your hands to yourself.
Then I invoke the Fairness Precept. This began with my eldest daughter, a child much given to exclamations of “That’s not fair!” One day, when she was about eight or nine and had worked herself into a huge snit about the unfairness of something or other, I lost my patience and snapped at her.
“Not fair?” I said. “You’re cute. That’s not fair. Your parents are pretty well off. That’s not fair. You were born in America. THAT’S not fair. Honey, you’d better get down on your knees and pray to God that things don’t start getting fair for you!”
Finally I teach them about hypocrisy. I teach by example. My mentor on the subject was my old friend (and colleague at the late, lamented Weekly Standard where our conservatism was merely of the half-baked kind rather than being on fire and burning everything to a cinder as is the fashion with conservatism these days) Andy Ferguson.
Andy’s children are older than mine. When his were in junior high and mine were still little, I asked Andy what he was going to say when he was asked—as he inevitably would be—“Dad, did you take drugs?”
Andy, a fellow survivor of the Better Living Through Chemistry era, replied, “I’ll say I never took any drugs, ever.”
“Andy,” I said, “what about that photo of you on the mantle from the 1970s, with your hair down to your butt and a guitar?”
“I’ll say I was playing in a band that performed a folk mass at church.”
“But Andy,” I said, “you’ve published books where you’ve written about being stoned out of your gourd.”
“Reading is part of a good education,” Andy said, “but when it comes to reading there’s one thing you can count on with your kids. They will never read anything written by their fathers.”
Which presumably includes what I’m writing here. Therefore I have told my children that I never took drugs, never had sex until I was married to their mom, and that when I was a kid I made my bed every morning before I left for school.
If the kids believe that, they’ll believe anything. They might even believe in getting a good education.
My Own Lousy Education
And How It May Be of Aid to the Nation
The dictionary definition of education is “The process of training and developing the knowledge, mind, character, etc., especially by formal schooling.” I am unprocessed.
I can’t exactly say I’m not educated. I have a college degree. But it’s in the liberal arts. What knowledge I possess is not trained and developed. Neither is my mind, my character, or—as best I can tell—my etc.
In other words, I don’t know how to do anything. I can’t build a building. I can’t design a rocket. I can’t do math: I can’t do arithmetic beyond the first part of the multiplication tables and I don’t know how much a whole mess of 9’s are. I can’t cure your ills or drill your teeth or represent you in a court of law when you sue me for medical malpractice. I can’t invest or speculate. (That is, I can’t do so successfully.) I can’t turn $1 into $1.01 even with the one-year Treasury rate at 1.54 percent. I can’t fix a flat on your car. (Wait, I can fix it, if you’ll let me roll your car forward a foot or two. Your tire is flat on only one side. I learned that when I took “Physics for Poets.”)
I never studied a subject that has been applicable to my adult life except Abnormal Psych, and let’s not go into details about that.
I was an English major because I was paging through the course catalogue and I saw “English” and I thought, “Hey, I speak that!”
I chose my courses in college according to what time of day the class met, adhering to the rule, “You can’t drink in learning before you drink lunch.”
And I graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. I am ignorant—but I’m good at it.
And that’s the enormous advantage of a liberal arts education. You can’t spend four (or five or six) years of college picking only courses that you can bluff your way through without learning to . . .
It may say “B.A.” on my diploma but what I’ve got a degree in is “B.S.” I can talk the shingles off a barn roof.
Or, as the case actually turned out, I can talk them back on. That is, yes, I’d be smarter if I had a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. If I had studied trigonometry I would have realized that cutting down a fifty-foot pine tree that was twenty feet from my barn might result in certain sine, cosine, tangent, and crushed barn roof results. No, I don’t know a hypotenuse from a possum belly.
But . . . you should have heard me with the insurance adjuster. Euclid, Archimedes, and Pythagoras put together weren’t a patch on me. (Even less so since they’d be talking to the insurance adjuster in ancient Greek.) By the time I got done the insurance company had not only paid for a new barn roof, it paid for a new barn to go under it and a new chain saw and a new pine tree and six cows to replace the cows that would have been killed when the barn roof collapsed if I’d had any cows.
I’m ignorant—but I’m good at it.
And the world should be thankful for all the liberal arts graduates who are just as good as I am at B.S. Think of all the things that we owe to B.S. Think of all the things that would be impossible without B.S.
Art
Literature
Rap music
Dating
Marriage
Having a talk with your son about the birds and bees
Advertising
Marketing
Sales
Tech company IPOs
And don’t start making this list because it expands at a speed faster than Star Trek’s USS Enterprise at warp 9, which is 729 times the speed of light, which is B.S. I pulled off a website on the Internet, which wouldn’t have any websites if it weren’t for B.S.
* * *
Let us examine just two examples. First, politics.
I’ll draw a box.
Look into the box. That’s politics without B.S.
How would we be governed? Who could be elected? Imagine a candidate giving a B.S.-free stump speech: “No, I can’t fix public education. The problem isn’t funding or teachers’ unions or vouchers or lack of computer equipment in the classroom. The problem is your damn kids.”
Our executive, legislative, and judicial branches would cease to function. Our political institutions would be “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds [full of B.S.] sang.”
The America that the world knows would disappear. ISIS would pop back to life and hold sway from Baghdad to Berlin. What the Islamic State didn’t pillage the Islamic Republic of Iran would plunder. Vladimir Putin would leave off mere meddling and install himself, midst bathroom fixtures of gold, in New York’s hastily renamed Putin Tower. Xi Jinping would be general secretary of the Communist Party of China, chief executive of Hong Kong, president of Taiwan, and mayor of Cupertino, California.
But perhaps politics isn’t the best example. There’s too much of it that would be good riddance. Let�
�s take the example of all the hard subjects I so assiduously avoided in college, the dreaded STEMs—where one was tested with real questions and was expected to give real answers.
I’d argue that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are also dependant on B.S.
Not that there’s any B.S. in these fields. (Well, there is—but there shouldn’t be.) Rather, the problem is who funds science, technology, engineering, and mathematics?
Usually, it’s fools. Like me. We who are full of B.S. are the people who rise to be corporate chief executives, presidents of universities, and high plenipotentiaries holding the public purse strings.
Poor Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, has to go before a congressional budget committee and say, “We need $10 billion for the James Webb Space Telescope so that we can peer deep into the universe and investigate across the fields of astronomy and cosmology to observe some of the most distant events and objects in the universe, such as the formation of the first galaxies.”
Congressman: “Why? Are there voters out there?”
Jim: “Um . . .”
And this is where Jim needs B.S. He needs somebody like me to rush to his side.
Jim: “Perhaps I should let my staff member Junior Space Cadet O’Rourke explain the further benefits of the James Webb Space Telescope.”
Congressman: “Let the witness be sworn in.”
Me: “The Honorable Representative will be pleased to know that, besides its telescopic properties, the James Webb Space Telescope also employs an eight-foot array of mirrors which, if the situation requires, can be reversed to collect solar rays and focus them in an intense beam directed at Fox News causing the network to pop like a kernel of Orville Redenbacher’s in a twelve hundred watt microwave.”
Congressman: “Ten billion dollars? Okay.”
What We Can Learn from the Sixties Drug Culture
Maybe the answer to America’s current state of angry perplexity is “Everybody must get stoned.” It’s certainly an idea that’s trending. But I was around the last time we tried that. And perhaps this is an historical period that we should reexamine.
“If you can remember the sixties you weren’t there” is a quote variously attributed to Grace Slick, Dennis Hopper, Robin Williams, and a bunch of other people because . . . nobody from back then can remember anything.
I’m a veteran of the 1960s “drug culture.” At least I suppose so. I was there, a nineteen-year-old college kid during the Summer of Love. And I wasn’t some student senate, frat boy, ROTC, squaresville college kid. I was fully onboard the Magical Mystery Tour. It’s just that I don’t recall much about it. Where were we going in the “bong bus”? What did we do when we got there? Who else was along for the ride? And why, when I try to think of their names, do they all seem to have been called “Groovy” and “Sunshine”? Oh my gosh, I hope I wasn’t driving.
Fifty-three years later everything is a purple haze—so to speak. Today there’s another “drug culture” in progress. And in an attempt to learn from the past, we should be thinking about this new drug culture. Although maybe not the way I was, half a century ago, when I was thinking, “Wow! This is great f***ing s**t!” (Notice that my thoughts were so fuzzy I was thinking in asterisks.)
Recreational marijuana is now legal in ten states, the District of Columbia, and the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands (talk about “far out”). Two countries—Canada and Uruguay (the Canada of Latin America)—have fully legalized the consumption and sale of marijuana. Two other countries (with absolutely nothing else in common)—South Africa and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia—have declared all personal possession legal. Marijuana is legally tolerated in licensed cafés in the Netherlands. At least thirty-two other nations, as diverse as Croatia and Jamaica and Luxembourg and Ukraine, have decriminalized the drug.
Medical marijuana is legal in forty-eight countries and in thirty-three U.S. states and all U.S. overseas territories. We know how it goes with medical marijuana. I have a great bumper sticker idea, yours free for the taking.
MEDICAL MARIJUANA MAKES ME SICK!
Health care provider: “What are your symptoms?”
Patient: “I’m not getting high.”
Marijuana has become . . . well, maybe not exactly “respectable” but no more worthy of rebuke than walking down Bourbon Street with a Hurricane in a Solo cup. (Although if you’ve got a doobie in your other hand you can still get ticketed in New Orleans, $40 for a first offense. But to put the social odium in perspective, it’s a $50 fine if you smoke a Marlboro in a Bourbon Street bar.)
Marijuana is an accepted fact. And it’s almost a fact that other mind-altering drugs will be accepted. (I love that phrase “mind-altering drugs.” As if there were no changes in brain function after you drink six cups of coffee before doing your taxes or after you drink four martinis before putting the nut dish on your head, mounting the back of the sofa, and reciting “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to the cocktail party. But I digress. Which I find I’m doing a lot while writing about the drug culture. It may have something to do with the drugs. I’ll have to go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.)
In 2014 Scientific American ran an editorial, “End the Ban on Psychoactive Drug Research.”
In 2017 the National Institutes of Health publication Neuropsychopharmacology (take a big toke and say that without exhaling) presented a peer-reviewed paper, “Modern Clinical Research on LSD,” supportive of the position taken in the Scientific American editorial. The paper noted, “Clinical research on LSD came to a halt in the early 1970s because of political pressure,” said, “The first modern research findings from studies of LSD . . . have only very recently been published,” and concluded, in its abstract, “These data should contribute to further investigations of the therapeutic potential of LSD in psychiatry.”
In 2018 the Journal of Palliative Medicine published an article, “Taking Psychedelics Seriously,” saying, “Recent published studies have demonstrated the safety and efficacy of psilocybin [’shrooms], MDMA [ecstasy], and ketamine [rave drug favorite Special K] when administered in a medically supervised and monitored approach.”
Of course “palliative medicine” is the treatment of terminally ill patients so no jokes, please, about people “dying to get a hold of these drugs.” But the path to legalization does seem to go through the doctor’s office before it gets to The Doors of Perception, as Aldous Huxley called his serious, thoughtful, scholarly book about getting stoned.
Which is the point of drugs. Not that we sixties “heads” weren’t “like, really into” serious, thoughtful, scholarly excuses for drug taking.
Back in 1902 William James, philosopher, physician, and “the father of American psychology,” wrote in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
Our normal waking consciousness . . . is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different . . . No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these forms of consciousness quite disregarded.
This was James’s excuse for getting stoned on nitrous oxide. None of us heads had sat down and read The Varieties of Religious Experience. But we all knew about the laughing gas.
More contemporaneous to the 1960s, psychology PhD and former Harvard professor Timothy Leary was on the college lecture circuit advocating that we blow our minds: “These wondrous plants and drugs could free man’s consciousness and bring a new conception of man, his psychology and philosophy.”
I went to hear Leary speak when he came to my school and . . . I refer the reader back to the second paragraph of this chapter.
I got the Leary quote from an anthology of 1960s Esquire articles that was sitting on my bookshelf. In 1968 Leary wrote a piece for the magazine that starts out as an account of a 1960 psychedelic drug experiment supposedly for cli
nical research purposes supposedly conducted under controlled circumstances and ends with two naked beatnik poets—Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky—wandering around Leary’s house while his teenage daughter is trying to do her homework.
Leary also spoke at my friend Dave Barry’s school. Dave has a better recollection of the experience, which he recounts in his book Dave Barry Turns 50.
Naturally, being college students, we did not rush out and take a powerful, potentially harmful drug that we knew virtually nothing about just because some guy told us to. No sir. First we asked some hard questions, such as: “Where can we get some?” Then we rushed out and took it.
We participants in the sixties drug culture did want to open “the doors of perception.” There is indeed a lot about life, the world, and the universe that we don’t perceive in our ordinary day-to-day consciousness. And we could have perceived a lot more of it if we’d taken courses in biology, geology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy instead of getting wasted and spacing out on the slideshow in Art Appreciation 101. (“Darkness at Noon”—easy A. The doddering professor had been giving the same multiple-choice exam for forty-five years.)
We were searching for “cosmic truths.” Although we weren’t searching very hard, judging by the cosmic truths we found.
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
We were seeking “cosmic unity.” One of the times when I took LSD I had just become one with the entire universe when the landlord knocked on the door of my off-campus apartment. The rent on the entire universe was two month overdue.
And we were looking for personal insights. For all I know I had some. But I don’t believe they were any more profound than the lyrics in the previously cited Beatles song “I Am the Walrus.” Which, many years of drug-free adult experience indicates, I am not. (Although I am tending more toward the 4,400-pound weight of a mature male Odobenus rosmarus than I was when I was nineteen, plus whiskers and, thanks to a partial plate and orthopedic shoes, tusks and flippers.)
A Cry from the Far Middle Page 11
