Ode to the 125 bus: A hastily written, rambling sort of manifesto, State of the Union thingy.
"That's why I swim against the stream: 'cuz the shit only flows downhill."
- The Unloved.
Salvete auctores amoris,
I'll be changing jobs in less than two weeks, and his shift in position will require some readjustments in my life. For example, I now have to get my hands on a car (I guess that I should probably learn how to drive as well). This, of course, means that I'll be saying a sad farewell to the 125 bus.
The word "bus" does the 125 a great injustice as it has been so much more than a mere means of transportation to me. It's been my library, as I like to read on my way to work and it's been my bedroom, as I like to sleep on my way home. But, most of all, the 125 has been my classroom. My fellow passengers have opened up my mind to a world of knowledge that I would've once considered unimaginable. Did you know that the plural of "shrimp" is "shrimps"? Neither did I until last Friday when I heard another passenger loudly exclaim "I'm gonna get me some shrimps this weekend!" Unfettered by the draconian rules that have hamstrung many a grammarian, the vast majority of the proletarian scholars who frequent the Algonquin-Round-Table-on-Wheels that is the 125 have embarked on a bold, new conjugation of the verb to be: "I be", "S/he, it be", "We be" and, of course, "Which Doobie you be?
And it's not just the linguistic arts in which my fellow public transportation inmates have excelled. They also seem privy to a universe of films that not even the most ardent of "art house" fans has ever even heard of. Until last Wednesday, I was looking forward to seeing A Cock and Bull Story, but not anymore. Why waste my money taking a chance on what might be a very funny movie, when I can plop down my seven bucks on a sure thing: Big Momma's House II. According to a group of women seated behind me, Big Momma's House II is the apex of mankind's attempt at capturing humor on celluloid (or, as they critiqued it, "That be the funniest shit ever made!"). Admittedly, I failed to catch Big Mamma's House I when it opened six years ago (no doubt on a double-bill with Quills), but I loved The Madness of King George III and I never saw parts I or II of that trilogy.
Sweet Jesus who can't get his stigmata treated because his HMO says it's a "pre-existing condition", if ignorance is bliss, then America is the happiest whorehouse/candy store/free fireworks stand combo on Earth. People sure are naturally pretty fuckin' stupid, aren't they?
No! No one is naturally stupid! People are only stupid when they're encouraged to be stupid, and incentive to be stupid flows downhill from the restricted country club at the top of the mountain.
I don't mean to come off sounding like a professor of Menstrual Persecution at the Berkley School of Indigenous Oppression, and I am by no means implying that a group of wealthy white males are currently sitting in a Halliburton boardroom floating strategies about the most effective way to make you dumber. But you have to admit that the people at the top benefit greatly if the people at the bottom are too ignorant to question the status quo. People who believe that they're poor because God made them poor or because "that's just the way things have always been" are not just the ruling class' greatest asset, but also bear a great deal of responsibility for their current situation.
Speaking of the way things have always been, I've spend way too much of my free time trying to pinpoint the exact moment in history when the working class began to consider knowledge to be a bad thing. On the one hand, Jude Fawley, the working class protagonist of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure which takes place during the 1880's (the movie version features a nekkid Kate Winslet and that creepy soldier guy from 28 days Later. You know, the guy who keeps saying "The cure for infection is here"), is roundly ridiculed by his peers for his attempts to learn Greek and Latin. On the other hand, Jude was attempting to improve his mind and there were a few people (OK, drunken barroom patrons) who were impressed by his knowledge. If Jude Fawley were alive today and riding the 125 bus, he'd be content to know who was playing in the Super Bowl, what time his favorite s!
itcom was on, and very little else. And that would be OK, because there are plenty of decent people out there don't beat their wives, don't set stray cat's on fire, and who also just happen not to give a bucket of Crispy Kentucky Fried Shit© about the year in which Emperor Julian ascended to the throne (361 CE). Unfortunately, there are plenty more people out there who are not only proud of the fact that they don't know in what year Emperor Julian ascended to the throne, but are suspicious to the point of hostility of anyone who does.
As best as I can calculate (using an abacus, sun spots, and the intestines of a Madagascar ground pig, and a
really smart Asian kid), the backlash against intellectuals in the United States began in November 2, 1920 with the election of Warren G. Harding (that day also marked Harding's 55th birthday): a man who will doubt be remembered as the second worst President in US history. The Robber Barons were tired of educated radicals stirring up the works and many in the lower class were angry with the smarty-pants scientists and engineers who, in their minds, had brought the airplane, the machine gun, and mustard gas to the battlefields of the First World War; so an unspoken agreement was struck wherein a likeable moron would be place in the nations highest elected office. This was the first shot in the war against "those know-it-all eggheads": today known as "The Liberal Elite."
Meanwhile, back on the 125 bus, someone is spouting off at the top of their lungs about the proper treatment of detainees held in US custody.
"What we oughta do with those Iraqis who attacked us on 9/11 is sick some pit bulls on 'em. Then they'd tell us where that Ben Laden guy is hiding."
There I was, happily sleeping the return trip away when this idiot, two seats away, wakes me up with his thoroughly retarded interpretation of the Geneva Conventions. Someone is gonna pay for this.
"Second that emotion!" I chime in, "If we're 100% sure that one of them towel-head Iraqis scumbags knows something, then we should torture the living shit outta 'em."
A chorus of agreement greets my comment.
"Of course," I begin hesitantly, "If we're only, oh, let's say 30% certain that one of them Iraqis knows something, I guess we should still probably torture the living shit outta 'em."
"Well…maybe not thirty…"
"And we may get a guy or two who won't crack under torture, so we may have to torture his wife or maybe his kids in front of him to get him to speak up."
"Look, I dunno if…"
"But there's no denying that torture works. Sure, there are some intellectual types who'll tell you that, if you torture someone, the person being tortured is only gonna tell you what they think you wanna hear: you know, in order to stop the torture. But what about those folks back in Salem? They sure as Hell didn't waste anytime turning in other witches once the ol' thumbscrews were put to 'em. Shit - is your name Luther? Can I call you Luther? Thanks. Shit Luther, some of them folks back in Salem even turned in their own demonic relatives. You don't see any witches walkin' the streets today, do you? Maybe at Halloween, but with the help of God and the determination of Pat Robertson, that 'holiday' won't be around much longer. All hail the burning in my loins!!!"
"I guess…"
"True, Roger Brokaw, an Army Criminal Investigator who was assigned to Abu Ghraib as an interrogator, testified that the best technique he found for extracting information wasn't beating prisoners, or sicking dogs on 'em, or stripping them naked and making them pile on top of each other, or even forcing them to 'spank the Mullah' while Nation Guard members from West Virginia snap photos. The best approach he found was to 'engage them in conversation about their family….Many times they start crying, and then they start talking.' But how fuck are we average Americans supposed to know about that? What the furry fisting fuck are we supposed to do? READ?"
The rest of the ride is joyfully silent.
Technically, I'm a very bad person. It's not the fault of people on the 125 that they think it's OK to shove a hose up a detainee's ass and turn on the water until the poor bastard sings like the cast of Cats on meth; it's just another example of the stupidity ball rolling downhill across the cultural landscape. Can you guess the names of the brainless pig fuckers whose fault it is? C'mon, guess!
Here's a clue:
On February 7th, 2002, professional asshole George Bush issued a Presidential Directive suspending US observance of the Geneva Conventions. This was followed on August 1st by the not-famous-enough "torture memo" cooked up between Bush and Attorney General-to-be and trained two-legged talking turd, and popular recurring character Roberto Gonzalez. On October 5th of 2005, Bush announced that he would veto any military-spending bill that included a ban on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment": AKA "Kicking little brown prisoners in the balls."
Last week, in a trail that received little to no coverage in by the US media, a soldier was convicted of negligent homicide and dereliction of duty for causing the death of an Iraqi major general by stuffing said Iraqi major general head-first into a sleeping bag, binding him with electrical cord, sitting his chest and regularly covering his mouth. The soldier's defense was, basically, a September 10th, 2003, memo issued by the Army's top commander in Iraq which authorized the use of painful stress positions, exploiting prisoners' fears and terrorizing them with attack dogs.
In other words, no one a rung or two up the ladder of command had ever told him that what he was doing was wrong.
_._
Further reading:
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Reading don't fix no Chevys
Idiot America
The Latin word of the day is:
auctor - oris - author