COMMONWEALTH IS A GOOD WORD

COMMONWEALTH IS A GOOD WORD

Commonwealth is a word that has been in use in the English language since the late fifteenth century. And it has been a good word: good being itself a social word, from the same root as gather and together. Massachusetts and Kentucky are commonwealths, not just states. As commonwealths, they are dedicated to the common good. The motto of the Commonwealth of Kentucky is “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.”

We have perverted the idea of wealth, however. Wealth these days is what every American is supposed to pursue for himself or herself--and to hell (or poverty) with everybody else. And thus we get Donald Trump.

Of course, Trump is a minor leaguer. His bragging about having $9,000,000,000 is silly, in the grand scale of American greed. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are each worth ten times that. They sit on fortunes of $90,000,000,000 each.

There are currently 45,000,000 Americans living in poverty. That's 15,000,000 households or families. Suppose Buffett and Gates gave each of those 15,000,000 families a thousand dollars. That would cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and they would still have $75,000,000,000 each, which would earn as much as the $15,000,000,000 that each of them gave away.

But neither Buffett nor Gates is going to live forever, so they can afford to give a lot more than 16.5% of their hoardings. Let's have them give away 90% of their hoardings--and they will each still have more than the bragging peanut-vendor Donald Trump.

Or let's give them three years. The first year Buffett and Gates can each give $3,000 per household to the Americans living in poverty. That will cost them $45,000,000,000 each--half their wealth. And those poor families will have an extra $6,000 each.

The second year, Buffett and Gates will have $45,000,000,000 each plus the $5,000,000,000 that their fortunes have earned for them--without their doing any work at all! So they can each give $2,000 per household to those living in poverty. That will cost each of them $30,000,000,000--and leave each of them with $20,000,000,000.

The third year they can each give $1,000 per household to those living in poverty. That will cost them $15,000,000,000 each--and still leave each of them with more money than Donald Trump has!

Of course, even this kind of giving won't eradicate American poverty. But if we use it as a model--for all American billionaires, and maybe even for millionaires, in threee years' time we could make the United States a commonwealth, and even a functioning society.

 And if we could do that, then maybe we could all turn in our guns!

HOW TO MAKE A HORSE RUN FAST?


When American Phaorah was just a colt, another horse bit half his tail off.  

Ever since American Phaorah has been afraid of other horses behind him:  It might happen again!  So he runs--and he runs fast, to keep them off his tail.

                                   

FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

FEED MY LAMBS, BUT ONLY IF THEY CAN PAY

Aurora, Colorado is an American city of 345,000. It has a 5% unemployment rate. It has a six-week free summer concert program annually. Its best hotels have rooms for $500.00 per night. And at Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District, Della Curry was fired from her job in the school's lunch room for giving a free school lunch to an elementary school child who didn't have money to buy lunch.

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with a city with a new “resort and convention hotel” and boasting of having a dozen colleges and universities, but which can't allow a city employee to give a hungry kid a school lunch?

Isn't there something ABSOLUTELY wrong with the school managers who fired
Della Curry at Dakota Valley Elementary School for giving a hungry kid a school lunch?

Couldn't the principal have paid for it? Or one of the seven vice-principals? Or even maybe a teacher?

Not to mention President O'Bama, who has billions of dollars a day to spent on bombs and drones and other weapons and surveillance devices.

Maybe President Obama should use some of his expensive surveillance devices to discover how ABSOLUTELY wrong this whole country is.

Maybe Warren Buffet could pay for a few school lunches. He could feed all the hungry kids in America, every day, and not spent even the interest he earns every day. And Bill Gates likewise.

Isn't wealth like theirs ABSOLUTELY wrong?

Instead of contributing to politicans and their election campaigns, Americans should give their money to feed poor children school lunches.

Why don't we just NOT ELECT anybody to office this year? As a nation, we would save enough money to bring everybody up out of poverty. And if we did away with high-tech weapons of mass destruction we could have mass assistance--and good instruction--for all of our school children, and for their parents as well.

If we actuaally need a president, let's have Donna Curry, formerly of Dakota Valley Elementary School in the Cherry Creek School District in Aurora, Colorado. She wants to feed the hungry. Let's let her lead us.

Or are we all too stupid--and too stupidly selfish and mean--to want to change? Are we as greedy as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates--or the person in Aurora, Colorado, who fired Donna Curry?

3 June 2015  

Academin Nuts

ACADEMIA NUTS

 

News from the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science

 at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought

 

            Saarbruecken, 2 June 2015.  Working in cooperation with Artificial Intelligence and Distraction scientists at MIT and Infectious Disease researchers at PSI, scientists in the Department of Nutritional and Intellectual Science at the Center for the Advancement of Peripheral Thought have discovered a potential cure for the most ravaging of academic diseases, Ismism.  In its various forms, Ismism incapacitates thousands of academics--mostly in the Humanities--every year.  Now there may be a cure for this debilitating and obfuscating disease.

            Severe acadismal academicism and exponentially infectious ismism among academismists lead to scholaritis, pseudoscholaritis, and acute pseudoscholarly ismism and ismitis. 

             Researchers wearing earplugs have developed a cure for these maladies by electroshock elimination of bollyglobs of fructifying ismgism and a simultaneous infusion of intravenous literature.

             Preliminary results indicate that this treatment results in more than 99.44% speechlessness among ismism-addicted academismists treated for more than thirty consecutive days.  Chief researcher Prof. Dr. Clarence Peach, though pleased by the general success of this regimen of treatment, says that the most seriously infected ismists may have to spend the rest of their lives in treatment. 

            Daisy-Belle Monitor at the World Air Pollution Control Center welcomed the news.  “Most academic speech can be classified as useless noise,” she said; “some of it is listed by the Bad Language Institute as grade one anti-communicational nonsense.” 

 

                                                                   -0-

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

SPEAKING OF TONGUES

            “Speaking in tongues” is an old trick.  The ancient Greeks must have done it, since they used the word:  a word for babbling with the tongue.   “Babble”  is either an onamatopoeic word like “blab” or “burble”—a nonsense sound—or it has as its source the Tower of Babel in the Western Bible.  Jesus’s apostles supposedly spoke in tongues when the Holy Ghost sat on their heads on Pentecost. In later Christian times, it has been associated with inspired talk, presumably in a language only God can understand, and is reverenced. 

            Religions often reverence things that can’t be understood:  like Athena being born out of Zeus’s forehead, or the virgin birth of Jesus, or the Christian idea of three persons in the one god.  Those are all imaginable, even if they are illogical or unnatural.  But speaking in tongues—babble—is well beyond that.  It doesn’t communicate anything, and nobody ever bothers to write it down.  Still, in some traditions it is reverenced.

            But speaking of  tongues, maybe we should think about the ways the animal world—not including humans, for the most part—speaks with tongues.

            Humans use their tongues to turn the noises that breathing and the voice box make into various different sounds, which become words and language.  And human have become clever enough to translate those mostly tongue-differentiated and tongue-controlled sounds into symbols, and sometimes to write them out.  Many children use their tongues—unconsciously—when they are learning to write, making lingual gestures which might be linguistic gestures

            Western languages share an “alphabet”—which, as a word, must be the most absurd bit of babble ever recorded.  It gets its name from the first two letters  for the ancient Greeks, alpha and beta.  There is no reason, of course, why they should be the first two letters.  “O”—or “OM”--has a long tradition of being considered the first sound, the original word of the God.  “I” is a straight line, a simple part of the circle:  it might have been a good place to start, especially as it is the me-word.  And all language comes from a self.  It isn’t a separate creation.

            The oldest of the Western languages, Sanskrit, from maybe five or six thousand years ago, has a very carefully logical ordering of sounds and the letters that represent them.  (In the West, with a nice blend of ignorance and arrogance,  we call the Sanskrit letters an “alphabet.”)  And the Korean language has a similar ordering of its sounds, thanks to King Sejong, a fifteenth century king, who learned the Sanskrit lettering system from Buddhist monks in China.

         But animals—or some of them, anyway—speak with their tongues, or with their wet noses.   Being kissed by a dog may be sloppy, but it’s reliable.  Dogs don’t do Judas kisses.  And though cats licking each other at bath time isn’t kissing, it is both friendly and seemingly pleasurable both for the licker and the licked.

            Humans say that snakes are not trustworthy:  they “speak with forked tongues.”  But snakes lie on their bellies, not with their tongues.  Snakes aren’t talkers at all.  Human tongues are the ones that lie—so why do we malign reptiles for having forked tongues?

            When humans say that someone speaks “with a crooked tongue,” they mean that the crooked-tongued person can’t be trusted.  Although there are untrustworthy animals of various kinds, we don’t identify them as being so by their having crooked tongues.  Even monkeys don’t use their tongues to play tricks.

            With the exception of humans, the animal world seems to have honest, trustworthy tongues.   Does our more elaborate intelligence enable us to misuse our tongues?   Sure.  It’s not just a matter of our giving false kisses.  Look at all the dishonest things we say!

            “I love you” frequently doesn’t mean what it says.  Indeed:  as saying go it’s about as trustworthy as     “I O U,”  among humans.   And the saying “Speak softly, but carry a big stick” doesn’t suggest that what we say is worth much, or to be trusted.  And “Telling lies,” we say, “is easier than telling  truths.”  Our language is so full of sayings that promote dishonesty that we should probably call tongue a dirty word.

             Speaking of tongues, perhaps what we should say is that maybe we would be better off if we didn't.

               

A FABLE FOR OUR TIMES

A FABLE FOR OUR TIMES

            A little boy was playing on the beach.  He decided to build himself a sand castle.  He would be its king, and its walls would defend him from invaders coming in from the sea.

            

            He started  scooping sand up around himself to build his castle’s  walls.  He built them well, packing them tightly so he could build them tall.

            

            As he built his walls he was also digging the moat around his castle.  But as the walls became higher and higher and the moat became deeper and deeper, he couldn’t reach any more sand to build with.  So he started scooping sand from the floor of his castle, and adding it to his walls.  Soon he was standing on his tiptoes, and stretching up as far as he could, adding more sand.

            When he had dug so far down that he couldn’t build his walls any higher, he declared his castle finished, and sat down in the hole he had dug, and looked up, admiringly, at his walls.

            And he sat there.

            Then some other kids walked by, and kicked it down, on top of him. 

            They weren’t bad kids, just kids.  And one of them wrote with his toes in the sand, “God Bless America.”

GOD BLESS AMERICA

GOD BLESS AMERICA!  GOD BLESS THE CIA!  GOD BLESS AMERICAN INTELLIGENCE!

Poor Americans go without food while the CIA funnels millions of dollars to middle eastern war lords.

There is no public transit for the poor (and Black) people in Detroit, but lots of money for diplomatic junkets.

We have no money for decent public schools, but billions of dollars for daily military training flights.

Obama can have a dinner party for fancy people, at a cost of several million dollars--which might have been spent on feeding starving American citizens one decent meal.

The United States of America is a strange thing.  In some ways it is like the United Cantons of Switzerland, in its catering to the filthy rich.  But Switzerland has neither an overwhelming national debt nor an absurdly expensive and infinitely dangerous military.

The United States thinks of itself as in some way like the European Union.  But the European Union is a society, and the United States is an anti-social competition.

I live now in Germany.  In the aftermath of the two world wars it had caused, and out of the ashes of its defeat, Germany built the European Union.  Not an empire, but a union.  And the union began as an economic union, and became a political and social union.  Not just a nation, and without any of the nonsense of "God Bless the European Union" or "the rockets' red glare," or now seventy-five years of constant war.

I was five years old when the United States entered World War II.  I am now eighty years old.  And the United States has been at war  for almost all my life!

Nations apply for membership in Europe.  It began with six states:  Western Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Italy.  Five economically stable states, and Italy.  Then it accepted Denmark, Britain, and Ireland:  a small but economically prosperous state; a large, proud (or vain) and economically weak nation; and a third-world state.  Then Greece, Portugal, and Spain:  all three states   which Europe would have to fund.  And now Poland, and the smaller Eastern European countries.  Maybe Russia will be next.  I hope so.

Europe doesn't have an army.  Or a navy.  Or an air force.

And the murder rate--not just in Germany, but in all of Europe--is almost zero!

Can there be a society in which everybody has a gun, and one half of the nation's wealth is hoarded by 10,000 rich people and the other half spent on what is called "national defense"?

I can't understand people--my friends, many of them--who "believe in" the United States--who accept, support,  identify with and emotionally or intellectually or morally defend the United States.

I don't ask for a perfect world--and given my moral, social, and intellectual limitations probably wouldn't be able to recognise a perfect world if I saw it.  But I know very well that this world we live in is not perfect, and that for all its self-glorification and self-praise and military might and murderous use of that military might, the United States is not in any way qualified to lead this world.  It is not qualified to lead anything more important than a bully's fight on a bad school's playground.