Smearing a Justice - The Poison of Progressive Bad Ideas is the Breakfast of Champions

Bad and chemicals and Bad Ideas are the Yin and Yang of madness -from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I had an exchange with a young Progressive teacher recently.  This person is smart, but, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut poisoned with 'bad ideas."  We were discussing youth boxing programs.  I stated that The Leo Boxing and Celtic Boxing programs did more for poor inner city young men, than activists, race hustling political priests and tweedy academics.  In our exchange Gandhi came up and I noted that lawyer Gandhi was not averse to actually showing up early and helping others to set-up chairs, as far cry from media hungry street agitators and activist.  This teacher responded that Gandhi was " better man than our late Supreme Court Justice, Scalia, who sat in his chair and took this county back 100 years. Gandi did not harm anyone working with a chair...but Scalia's politically/religious motivations continue to help the wealthy and hurt the poor. He was pro birth and anti life"

The young teacher applied the talking points (bad ideas) right out of Talking Points Memo - a script warehouse for group thought

This is nothing new, shocking, or something required to be ignored by the media. They will and do.

The trouble comes when people accept and never challenge bad ideas.

Justice Scalia was a towering intellect and probably the greatest Supreme Court Justice, since Oliver Wendell Holmes - the Great Dissenter.

However, immediately upon his death the folks at Bad Idea Central began to smear Justice Scalia and it continues.

Bad Ideas are the coin of our realm, I am sad to say.

In his hilarious and humane novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut's protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, is mentally ill.  In Vonnegut's way of thinking,  human beings are just 'large rubbery test tubes' and we are filled with either 'good chemicals, or bad chenicals' - Sometimes 'bad chemicals' sit deep in our bodies like fused explosives that will only go off, when triggered by 'bad ideas.'

Vonnegut, who was raised as an atheist by German American Free Thinkers seriously doubted free will.  He disliked religion entirely.

Free Will was something that Vonnegut thought was a dodge, created by organized religions. Rather, we were products of some cosmic crap-shoot and endowed, by No One, with either good chemicals, or bad chemicals and introduced to good ideas, or bad ideas.

Vonnegut seemed a very good, kind and wildly thoughtful man.

Today, I think he might  agree with me that our American condition is quite mad - nuts, milky in filberty, off the chump, crazier than rodents in that old timey out-house.

I do not necessarily believe that our God-given human make-up is a crap-shoot.  Neither did the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia believed that human beings are free agents and the Law was provided to protect, check, or correct the choices we make as individuals and citizens.

Bad ideas abound, because bad ideas are agreed upon and forced down the throats of Americans.  The bad ideas are rooted in group thought.

This morning, I read the latest "Kick the Corpse of Scalia" in  The Washington Post, 

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 11 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.
After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.

The piece goes on to 'suggest' -in an investigative report - but no where reports a nefarious plot in involving Justice Scalia with some crypto-Masonic Catholic Odessa File billionaires.

A Secret Society? They must not be trying too hard.  Hillary's e-mails and Obama's college records stay hidden in plain sight to the American media 'investigative reporters."

I want Glenn Greenwald to fire up The Guardian and all of his satellite hipster-doofus websites to get to the bottom of Justice Scalia's possible membership in the Ancient and Honorable Order of Turtles!*

I read this piece of "investigative journalism" and thought about Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions(BoC). Wheaties is not the BoC, but the martini's served to Dwayne Hoover by a wise-cracking waitress, which adds to his Cosmos-given 'bad chemicals.'  Wheaties had Bruce Jenner on its boxes at the time it was published in 1973 - how about that?

Justice Scalia will never appear on a box of Wheaties and, unless bad ideas get called out for what they truly happen to be, more young, earnest teachers will help the Talking Points Memos - Our National Warehouse of Bad Ideas - murder memory, shared truth and our country.

Speaking of Bad Ideas: Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Breakfast of Champion, anyone?

* I am a member - inducted 1972 by Buzzy Lawson, Ma Fleming's Saloon at Swedes in Delavan, WI.

Ty Warner - You Can't Fake Being a Good Guy

On Friday June 10, 2015, after many months of deliberation in an America that has been programed to boil furiously over whenever a successful person is deemed to be more equal than . . .anyone, the United States Seventh District Court of Appeals ruled that Ty Warner's punishment and sentence was just.

That was a shock to me.  Given our spiritus mundi (can I still say that?),  I expected the reverse, because I have gotten to know Ty Warner a little bit and that little bit leads me to believe that he is a good guy and this is no time for good guys - to paraphrase Cormac McCarthy. Creeps prosper, but good guys seem to take it in the neck.  The Sharptons, The Trumps, The Clintons, The Ayers and the self-made creeps like Dan Savage,Bill Cosby and Rachel Dolezal flourish in the age of Harrison Bergeron.

Every news outlet reporting on this fact strains mightily to get a hissy-slap at the billionaire anyway and that is only to be expected. You see, Ty Warner built his empire. Ty Warner is a man whom the legal cozeners, the academic milquetoasts and media purse puppies want punished, because he built his success.  Can't have that getting around. We are living in a time predicted by writer Kurt Vonnegut decades ago.  In his story Harrison Bergeron everyone must be equal -whatever.        

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal
before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter
than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was
stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the
211th, 212th, and 213 th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing
vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. 

The Handicapper General is coming, unless good guys ( gender neutral, mind) take stock.

Ty Warner has spent a great deal of time here at Leo High School, as part of his probation to be sure, but having a wonderful time of it. I am an old timey English teacher who learned his trade by watching and emulating my betters.  How I engaged my students was how I was assessed, by Father Bob Erickson, Father Jim Fanale, Father Ken Yarno, Nick Novich, Jim Frogge, Dave Raiche, Sister Hellen Kavanaugh and Rich Zinnani.  They told me and taught me that teaching kids required much more than book learnin' - did I like being with people who wanted to learn something; not just people to talk at.  My great mentors taught me that I could not fake it. " Hickey, you can't pretend to be a good guy,"

You is, or you ain't. Only a good guy can be an effective teacher and the State don't issue Type-301 Good Guy Certification.

Ty Warner would have made a superb class-room teacher.

He is patient, witty, prepared, engaged and engaging with willful, occasionally obstreperous and easily bored young men who might not ever become billionaires.  They might not. Ty Warner offers them an up-close and personal opportunity to learn from a man who is a billionaire.

All of Ty Warner's billions of dollars can not make him a good guy, nor can he leave that in his Will.

He earned that sobriquet, just as he did his fortune, on his own.  Ty Warner treats people, who can do absolutely nothing for him, like they are the most important and interesting people on earth.  You can not fake that.

I am very happy that at least one good guy survived our Harrison Bergeron culture and society. Thanks be to God.

Now, Who Wants to be Putin Pabst in His Icebox?

“Pabst Blue Ribbon is the quintessential American brand — it represents individualism, egalitarianism, and freedom of expression — all the things that make this country great,” - The Russian owner of Pabst, Евгений Kashper. or Yevgeniy Kashper AKA Eugene Kashper

Kashper’s parents, Jewish refugees from Communist Russia, brought him to the US in 1976 when he was just 6 years old, according to a source close to the entrepreneur.
Kashper went on to study at Columbia University. It was only after graduating from college in 1992 that Kashper set out to build a beer empire in the Eastern bloc.
Now, Kashper is “very concerned about being viewed as Russian” in light of the “recent political climate,” according to the source.

I drank the Mountie as a young scapegrace.  I was a delightful young chap and as merry-hearted as Sigmund Romberg opereretta.



Yes sirree, that's how I see the young scamp whose very entrance to a roomful of boon-chums and toothsome trollops would make the rafters roar with wholesome good fellowship and rollicking song. Often after a a few cheeksful of Drewrys, I'd coax one nd sundry to join me for a jaunt around the Ward in my alligator powered chariot -Mon Bijou! Ubi sunt!

Now to the case at hand.  The issue mind and not the score and four container of cans.

The Mountie was and remains Drewrys Beer.  A malted grain beverage for discerning pintsmen with modest purses. Now, Pabst was a great American beer brewed and distributed by a generous German immigrant family that donated a large estate in Oconomowoc, WI for use of a Catholic novitiate of the Augustinian Order. The family is out of the brewing business and continues charitable work.

Pabst is the beer of choice for the hip and aged.  I have watched old gents and soul patched knit hat cowboys blow the foam from a sudsy growler of Pabst in unison and sweet cross-generational tribute to common tastes.

One of the most energetic patriots I know, Dan Kelley of the north side, attorney, philanthropist, wit and swordsman, quaffs his Pabst with gusto.

However, ownership can breed contempt ( e.g. Trump, Willis, The Cell) for the values of the common man and the chicks he digs.

I'd apply the jewelers eye to the sight of a hefty purchase of Pabst,Red White and Blue, or Lone Star beer these days.  A Ruskie owns them.

No sir, to paraphrase Eliot Rosewater, "I tell you, boys," he went on, "if those Russian landing barges come barging in some day, and there isn't any way to stop 'em, all the phony bastards who get all the good jobs in this country by kissing ass will be down to meet the conquerers with vodka and caviar, offering to do any kind of work the Russians have in mind. And you know who'll take to the woods with hunting knives and Springfields, who'll go on fighting for a hundred years, by God? Drewrys beer drinkers.

Read This Story to a Liberal & Twice to a Progressive - Verrrryyyy Sloooowwwwwly! Harrison Bergeron

I taught this wonderful short story to my students at Bishop McNamara High Schoolin Kankakee, Il in the early 1980's. They got a huge kick out of it - "No way that can Happen!!" Boys and girls, it can and pretty much did happen here!

I also taught Sinclair Lewis.

HARRISON BERGERON
by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren't quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron's fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn't think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn't think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh" said George.

"That dance-it was nice," said Hazel.

"Yup," said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren't really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn't be handicapped. But he didn't get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

"Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer," said George.

"I'd think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds," said Hazel a little envious. "All the things they think up."

"Um," said George.

"Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?" said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. "If I was Diana Moon Glampers," said Hazel, "I'd have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion."

"I could think, if it was just chimes," said George.

"Well-maybe make 'em real loud," said Hazel. "I think I'd make a good Handicapper General."

"Good as anybody else," said George.

"Who knows better then I do what normal is?" said Hazel.

"Right," said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

"Boy!" said Hazel, "that was a doozy, wasn't it?"

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

"All of a sudden you look so tired," said Hazel. "Why don't you stretch out on the sofa, so's you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch." She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George's neck. "Go on and rest the bag for a little while," she said. "I don't care if you're not equal to me for a while."

George weighed the bag with his hands. "I don't mind it," he said. "I don't notice it any more. It's just a part of me."

"You been so tired lately-kind of wore out," said Hazel. "If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few."

"Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out," said George. "I don't call that a bargain."

"If you could just take a few out when you came home from work," said Hazel. "I mean-you don't compete with anybody around here. You just set around."

"If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it-and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"

"I'd hate it," said Hazel.

"There you are," said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"

If Hazel hadn't been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn't have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

"Reckon it'd fall all apart," said Hazel.

"What would?" said George blankly.

"Society," said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn't that what you just said?

"Who knows?" said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn't clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, "Ladies and Gentlemen."

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

"That's all right-" Hazel said of the announcer, "he tried. That's the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard."

"Ladies and Gentlemen," said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. "Excuse me-" she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

"Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen," she said in a grackle squawk, "has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous."

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison's appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

"If you see this boy," said the ballerina, "do not - I repeat, do not - try to reason with him."

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have - for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. "My God-" said George, "that must be Harrison!"

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

"I am the Emperor!" cried Harrison. "Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!" He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

"Even as I stand here" he bellowed, "crippled, hobbled, sickened - I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!"

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison's scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

"I shall now select my Empress!" he said, looking down on the cowering people. "Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!"

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

"Now-" said Harrison, taking her hand, "shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!" he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. "Play your best," he told them, "and I'll make you barons and dukes and earls."

The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons' television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. "You been crying" he said to Hazel.

"Yup," she said.

"What about?" he said.

"I forget," she said. "Something real sad on television."

"What was it?" he said.

"It's all kind of mixed up in my mind," said Hazel.

"Forget sad things," said George.

"I always do," said Hazel.

"That's my girl," said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

"Gee - I could tell that one was a doozy," said Hazel.

"You can say that again," said George.

"Gee-" said Hazel, "I could tell that one was a doozy."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Harrison Bergeron" is copyrighted by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 1961.