After My Sabbatical: Tiny Tidbits About My Last Job

I have not actually been on a sabbatical, although I wish that I had and I wish that I could return to somewhere, anywhere back to reading and writing and otherwise not taking part being part of this period in the world's general history, the triumph and toppling of materialism and stupidity the emperor with no clothes the professional sports world the cult of celebrity the impossibility of publishing the tyranny of the politically correct and most of all the rise of Bernie. I just do not feel the bern the burn the whatever it is you who do do. My younger sister worked as an intern for Bernie back in the last century or should I say millennium and every time I see the Bern or Bernie I think of what she heard every day for the duration of her internship and that was Jennifah! Get me a tuna on rye!

I was, am a Warren lover, and I don't understand why an energetic intelligent woman with many plans, a woman who's fought successfully against The Man the bankers the corrupt the plutocracy and has a history of sensitivity for the disabled for children for special education is losing has lost to two elderly men one who's nearly doddering who sat and railed against Anita Hill back in the day, his day when he should have done better and the other who screams more than talks who has visions and no realistic plans who had a heart attack quite recently and whose followers are legion but include easily IMHO as the kids say the same sort of dense folks who back the naked emperor in chief just from the other side of the proverbial coin. And if they're not those followers, the bros or whatever they're called, I suspect they're following him because it's cool to like someone so uncool.

I will very much support the Bern the Burn if he is the person who runs against the Piece of Shit.

I've thought about things to write in this space, ways to communicate and what to tell you, dear Reader and I come up short. I bought a green bra and panties the other day, the most lovely color green. I flew to Atlanta to visit my mother and my father, had a wonderful time hanging with them, realizing that I am so incredibly blessed to have parents who are truly parents. We don't see eye to eye on politics (they're best left unsaid) and their views are such that I've felt near despair over the last four years, especially, but somehow it didn't feel that way this visit and I'm not going to wonder why.

Buried deep within this post is a tidbit. A tiny tidbit. On one of my last days at the ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls' school where I worked (see previous post), there was some talk in the teachers' lounge about Trump, and Mitt Romney had just voted "Yes" to impeach the PieceofShitPresidentoftheDisunitedStates and I never, never, never talked about my politics in this place because there's no good in talking politics when Israel is part of the equation but I said I just didn't understand how anyone could support That Man and someone else said, "He loves Israel," and so I stood up and said, "I can't be involved in any conversation that supports That Man," and I walked out and into the office and sat down to do a little grading while I steamed. The thing is, Reader, at this school I was prevented from teaching anything that had anything that was suggestive of romance. I mean things like longing gazes in a Willa Cather's Song of the Lark. I mean suicide in Marilyn Robinson's transcendent Housekeeping. I mean the word hell in an article from The New York Times. I mean Nathaniel Hawthorne's rich allegorical short story Rappaccini's Daughter because it mentions The Garden of Evil. When I referenced the great Spanish architect Gaudi in a poem we were studying by a contemporary deaf poet named Raymond Antrobus and asked the students if they'd ever been to Barcelona and they said yes and I asked whether they'd seen the amazing cathedral and one girl said, What's a cathedral? and because I'd been teaching there for a year and a half, I knew there was a distinct possibility that a seventeen year old girl might not even know what a cathedral was, I told her. Then I was told We are not allowed to go into cathedrals, and I said, Oh. And this was later confirmed by one of the Powers That Be and still I said Oh when what I was thinking was that we are all screwed here in this world. Back to the office where I sat sweating and biting my sharp, sharp tongue that so desperately wanted, was trying with all its half-century honed might to scream:

You protect your daughters from reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and Willa Cather but support the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief?

Reader, it's a good thing that I am no longer working at this school. I learned a lot there -- about intolerance, to tell you the truth, and about its masks. Given these girls' behavior in general -- which was, frankly, closer developmentally to those who've just entered adolescence than those leaving it for marriage and babies -- I can only surmise that their rituals, their blind belief system and oppressive rules and regulations regarding every single thing they wear, eat and do make them uniquely unable to live in the world, much less listen to their silly, old lefty progressive English teacher, Elizabeth Aquino.

Did I mention how stressful it was dealing with this school and these girls and the idea that there are legions of people out there preventing 17 and 18 year old females from reading Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own because it would just open the floodgates (one of the teachers actually said this to me) yet supporting a serial sexual assaulter and vile racist misogynist because he's been so good to Israel? Did I tell you about the Cup-o-Noodles girl last year? The sad thing is that I was so into my job last year.

Jennifah, get me a tuna on rye!



#VoteBlueNoMatterWho

Guns and Grizzly Bears and Jesus, Oh My!

Bear, looking into a Connecticut school classroom

GUNS and GRIZZLY BEARS!

Have ya'll been watching the shitshow on C-Span? Who knew we'd be living in these times, a kind of Monty Python meets Dante with an overlay of Caligula? For you readers outside of the Disunited States of America, congressional hearings of Drumpf's cabinet appointees are underway. So far we've heard all kinds of interesting stuff from the Band of Billionaires that Drumpf has elected to run his government. Yesterday, I heard Betsy Ross DeVos (not her real name, but I can't help it), Education Secretary-Elect, talk about the issue of guns in schools as best left to the states, her example being the great state of Wyoming where its population of three hundred children in public school warrants guns to defend from grizzly bears. The question about guns was asked by Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut, a state where an entire class of first graders was gunned down by a white disaffected young man whose mother was a legal gun enthusiast.

JESUS!

Speaking of, while it wasn't brought up at the hearing, Betsy Ross DeVos (not her real name but I can't help it) is also on the record as saying that schools need more Jesus. She and her ilk are on a mission, apparently, with their "school choice" and "voucher" programs. Evidently, these programs are part of a larger plan to bring greater Kingdom gain. I know that the buzzwords of school choice and vouchers simplify a complex problem that good minds have been working on for as long as our planet has been spinning round the sun (or perhaps only for the last 6,000 to 10,000 years that the earth has been around, according to creationists whom Betsy Ross DeVos has embraced), but forgive me if I don't trust in Jesus guiding billionaires to fix public education, especially Betsy Ross DeVos who appears to know very little about public education or even about what it means to need a public education.

Reader, do you know what IDEA is? No worries if you don't, because your proposed Education Secretary, Betsy Ross DeVos (not her real name but I can't help it) doesn't either. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) ensures that all children with disabilities are entitled to a free appropriate public education to meet their unique needs and prepare them for further education, employment and independent living. When questioned by Senator Tim Kaine about IDEA, she was either woefully uninformed or screwing around with us. Given the rictus on her face, I'm thinking both.

Between her ignorance or dismissal of education and disability law and Attorney General Elect Jim Sessions' statements about children with disabilities being the bane of the public school system -- well -- JESUS CHRIST! -- maybe those are words that she does know and understand?

Anyhoo.



I'd like Betsy Ross DeVos (not her real name but I can't help it) to know that the public school system, however flawed, afforded my daughter Sophie nearly two decades of inclusion in our community, stimulation, both academic and social, and an alternative to sitting at home or in a nursing institution, wasting away, like many people with disabilities did, even in my lifetime.

I'd like the woman to know that the only reason Sophie's education was ensured was federal law, and that, even so, individuals and school districts will break the law or work around the law which makes me believe that without the law, we cannot be assured that our children will be guaranteed a public education despite their disabilities. I do not believe that Jesus ensured my daughter's public education.

I'd like Betsy Ross DeVos (not her real name but I can't help it) to see this picture of Sophie that I took yesterday. It was her first day back at her public high school in over five weeks. She was so happy to be back. Honestly. She had a GREAT DAY.

So what can we do about this, outside of downing shots of frozen vodka and watching reruns of Monty Python skits or praying to Jesus to step in?

We can resist.

Here's a way:

Many Senators have already expressed doubts about DeVos’ fitness to run the education department. Let’s drive those doubts home. EVEN IF YOU'VE ALREADY CALLED ABOUT DEVOS, CALL AGAIN 

DC callers will be directed to Lamar Alexander, chair of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. Here are the numbers of all the HELP committee members -- a fairly star-studded group as senators go -- that you can also call. If you see one of your senator's names on this list, weigh in!

HELP Committee
Chair Lamar Alexander (R, TN)
202 224 4944

Ranking Member Patty Murray (D,WA)
202 224 2621

Mike Enzi (R, WY)
202 224 3424

Bernie Sanders (I, VT)
202 224-5141

Richard Burr (R, NC)
202 224-3154

Bob Casey (D, PA)
202 224-6324

Johnny Isakson (R, GA)
202 224-3643

Al Franken (D, MN)
202 224-5641

Rand Paul (R, KY)
202-224-4343.

Michael Bennet D, CO
202-224-5852

Susan Collins (R, ME)
(202) 224-2523

Sheldon Whitehouse (D, RI)
(202) 224-2921

Bill Cassidy (R, LA)
(202) 224-5824

Tammy Baldwin (D, WI)
(715) 832-8424

Todd Young (R, IN)
(202) 224-5623

Chris Murphy (D, CT)
(202) 224-4041

Orrin Hatch (R, UT)
(202) 224-5251

Elizabeth Warren (D, MA)
202-224-4543

Pat Roberts (R, KS)
(202) 224-4774

Tim Kaine (D, VA)
(202) 224-4024

Lisa Murkowski (R, AK)
(202) 224-6665

Maggie Hassan (D, NH)
(202) 224-3324

Tim Scott (R, SC)
(202) 224-6121

**For more Daily Action alerts, text the word "DAILY" to 228466 today!**

And if you would like to contact your Senator without signing up, you can just call (844) 241-1141 to be connected.

When Guilt Dances with Despair

I was moved yesterday when I read my friend Carolyn's short post Presuming Competence about what she's doing with her son Ben these days. I was moved, and I also felt familiar twinges of guilt. Many years ago, I took Sophie to see the acclaimed Soma in Austin, Texas, and while Sophie responded somewhat to her techniques, seizures and crisis got in the way, at first, of follow-up, and then I just

let

it



s
l
i
d
e.

Some people claim that there's no use for guilt, and as a former Catholic, I understand that in part, but I disagree, too. Guilt plays on the edges of Despair, prods me into changing something, interrupts the terrible partnership of Despair and its lover, Paralysis.

If all I ever do is read to him, discuss things with him, teach and give him a chance to offer feedback through choices written on paper, it  still opens his world much wider than it's ever been. It's too easy to leave him alone to stim with his objects of choice, like his shiny crinkle paper, and not engage with him. There's a time and place for those things, but they shouldn't be all of his life.

This morning, I spent more time than I usually do with Sophie, talking to her, playing with her and then climbing into bed with her and opening up a large-print version of Stuart Little. I began to read, and do you know that Sophie quit humming and stimming, kept her head back on the pillow and very quietly listened? We read two chapters that way, and when I began the third, she sat up and looked away. I took the cue, put the book down and got up. Next time, I think I will pose some simple yes/no questions and see what happens.

Guilt interrupted paralysis and despair and instead enabled the gorgeous prose of E.B. White to dance around the mystery that is Sophie's understanding.

Mind-Blown

Thanks to a homeschooling mentor of mine, I have been reading and re-reading this incredible article about children and education. The title is A Thousand Rivers: What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning.  As I gear up to do what may be a complete "school year" at home with Oliver, I feel periodically panicked and instinctively confident. My friend sent the article more than a week ago, but I opened it tonight, during a less than instinctively confident moment. I took a deep breath as I read, not so much because it confirms what I feel, instinctively, but because it's written so beautifully and is particularly persuasive. It makes sense. It deals with the madness. As my friends send their children off to four-year colleges, after a frantic year of freaking out about the process, as my own son gets ready for another grueling year in a typical Catholic high school (that he very much wants to stay in, despite my own reservations,) as Sophie is so very much "left behind" in her local public high school, I am relieved to be following my instincts -- and, most importantly, Oliver's, for another year.

Here's an excerpt from the article:

We have radically altered our own evolved species behavior by segregating children artificially in same-age peer groups instead of mixed-age communities, by compelling them to be indoors and sedentary for most of the day, by asking them to learn from text-based artificial materials instead of contextualized real-world activities, by dictating arbitrary timetables for learning rather than following the unfolding of a child’s developmental readiness. Common sense should tell us that all of this will have complex and unpredictable results. In fact, it does. While some children seem able to function in this completely artificial environment, really significant numbers of them cannot. Around the world, every day, millions and millions and millions of normal bright healthy children are labelled as failures in ways that damage them for life. And increasingly, those who cannot adapt to the artificial environment of school are diagnosed as brain-disordered and drugged. 

Here's a clip from a documentary which is having screenings all over the world:

Schooling The World: The White Man's Last Burden trailer HD from lost people films on Vimeo.

Rolling around with Tolstoy

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious of truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues , which they have proudly taught to others and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

Tolstoy

I love that quote -- have been rolling it round and round in my mouth (I wish I spoke Russian!) as I go about my day. It pertains to the growing debacle in Iraq, and it pertains to the federal re-scheduling of medical marijuana and it pertains to our recent discussion of special education and private/public schools. It pertains to my earlier lament about Sophie's summer school location and this article I read today about the biggest house in Los Angeles being built, a whopping 85,000 square feet, valued at $150 million dollars.

Roll it around, baby, roll it around.

And P.S. One of my seesters reminded me that it also pertains to the NRA and 2nd Amendmenters and their inane arguments against gun control.

Masticating

Colleges are eschewing their very purpose — to educate people — so they can attempt to become finishing schools for yuppies or discount degree mills.

Matthew Saccaro 

 

As I continue to whack weeds and forge a new path for Oliver, I am constantly mulling over the state of education, too, for Henry -- will he stay motivated and interested (hopefully), will he be able to go to the college of his choice (probably not), will we be able to afford it (definitely not)? I'm at once suckered in and repelled by the planning that most of my friends have to do with their kids as they move closer toward high school graduation, and when I read this article today, I felt the substantiation (is that a word) of my gut feelings which are really just swirling about, not fully formed. But like the proverbial cow chewing her cud, I'll be thinking about all of this for a while.

Reader, what do you think?

Moo.

Changing Education Paradigms

Nearly 11,000,000 people have viewed this video, but I was not one of them. Thank you, Francesca, for giving me the link!

A riff on education, privilege, my son Oliver and revolution

OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM IS ROOTED IN THE INDUSTRIAL AGE. IT VALUES PUNCTUALITY, ATTENDANCE, AND SILENCE ABOVE ALL ELSE.

from How a Radical New Teaching Method

Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses by Joshua Davis

So I've written a lot about my twelve year old son's struggles with school, with learning, with dyslexia, with learning disabilities, including auditory and visual processing. None of that writing has been particularly substantial and only barely touches on the depth and breadth of the problem, of the level of hatred that he expresses for school, of the tears, the tantrums, the sturm und drang. I've also written extensively about Oliver's uncanny ability to perceive the world and the people around him, about his curiosity, his intelligence, his sense of humor and his hilarity. I know in my heart that he will be fine -- in the long run -- but just how arduous that run is remains a question, and not just how arduous but whether the arduousness is even warranted.

Right now, I believe on a deep, gut level that it shouldn't be this hard.

Today I spent a good part of the morning researching home-schooling and also looked into a number of alternative schools. Quite serendipitously, a dear friend of mine sent me the article from which I quoted above -- click here, and you can read the whole thing. 

I'm shaking things up, for real.

The other day, I got an alumni magazine from the private school that I attended in Atlanta, Georgia for middle through high school. While I value the education I received back then and know, particularly in English and writing, that it helped me to become the writer I am today, I was appalled by a letter included with the magazine that asked alumni help in the current capital campaign to raise $88 million by 2015. I believe they are close to $75 million and need only close that gap of $13 million in three more years. 

ADVISORY: Language from here on out could be offensive to some.

Here's my response: What the fuck?

I can hardly go into what all of this means to me -- the enormous and ever-growing disparity between the extremely wealthy and those who have less and then even nothing. What is my alma mater buying with this sort of endowment? Are these children better educated and more prepared to succeed when they're finished? What is the measure of success? Where does it end? 

Again, what the fuck?

I might be starting a mini-revolution here at chez Crazy where the disabled and the abled live side by side, where the Catholic school boy rubs elbows with the revolutionary and where the primary caregivers live forever. Stay tuned or tune in with your own riffs.

Brain Surgery

Medieval Brain Surgery

I imagine that got your attention on a Thursday morning, and I hope the presentation/performance that I'll be doing this afternoon in Tarzana will get some as well. I have the distinct privilege of reading an essay I wrote some years ago to a group of nurses and medical personnel with other mothers in a sort of mini Expressing Motherhood show. Brain Surgery is one of the chapters in my Book That Isn't Yet a Book, and it describes my experience discussing her possible candidacy for brain surgery when she was a baby and just diagnosed with epilepsy. Despite the near twenty years that have passed since that discussion, my feelings about brain surgery are much the same, and while I am, admittedly, distinctly irrational about cutting out a part of someone's brain, believing it to be something that we will perhaps one day look upon as barbaric (as we do lobotomies, let's say, or bloodletting), I understand that the techniques are becoming more and more sophisticated and outcomes more positive. That being said, I'm grateful not to have to make that decision for Sophie and can, instead, stay squirming in philosophical enquiry about it.

Here's the first part of the essay -- given its length, I'll post the rest later this afternoon.

I traveled across the country to Los Angeles to see Dr. S , a pediatric neurologist known as “the best of the best,” and when he examined Sophie she was still not a year old. He expressed his dismay at the relatively poor outlook for infantile spasms, a rare form of epilepsy that Sophie had recently been diagnosed with in New York City.  He recommended that we have a pre-surgical work-up. (Later, much later, when I had met many parents of children like Sophie, we would joke about this doctor and call him “Dr. Knife”). He wrote in his notes, which I still have in Sophie’s medical records file, that Sophie was “a bright baby of just under one year.” I loved the “bright” part, pulled the paper out often when I had gone back to New York. That one word sustained me, sometimes, when I thought I would go wild with uncertainty.

But after that visit with the esteemed neurologist of the west coast, when I put Sophie into her car seat in the white rental car that I would drive to the airport to catch our flight back to New York, we were on the road for less than ten minutes when she began to have what seemed like hundreds of very small jerking seizures. I was driving on unfamiliar roads, on the famous Los Angeles freeway, but I was driving with one eye looking in the rear-view mirror, my lips counting, “one, two, three, four….it’s alright Sophie, relax, twenty, come on Sophie, relax, fifty…” and so on until her tiny arms which were methodically straightening, then stiffening, then bending forward and her head bobbing and her mouth twitching, then grimacing, finally stopped and she collapsed forward, her head hanging over the five-point harness of the car seat. She had more seizures in that car ride than I had ever seen up to that point. With no explanation, and there never was one, I attributed the episode to her “bright” appraisal of the esteemed doctor and her listening in as we talked about her condition, her prospects, her brain and the possibility of surgery.  In other words, she knew at some level what was up and given the sensitivity of her brain, could only respond to such stress with seizures.

            Back in New York City I made an appointment with our neurologist to discuss the recent visit to Los Angeles. The day of the appointment, I didn’t have Sophie with me because of the seriousness of the matters being discussed. I had made a resolution after the incident in Los Angeles that I would try my hardest not to talk about her condition in front of her. A “cutting edge epileptologist” who looked to be about 35, Dr. N wore his blond hair with a distinct, vulnerable part down the side, crisply pressed khaki pants, a white button-down shirt with a bow-tie and shoes that I can only describe as Buster-Brown-like.

            “Mrs. Aquino, please come in,” the doctor stood at his door and beckoned to me. I was sitting in one of those curved metal chairs with stainless legs and flipping through an old Scientific American magazine. I put the magazine down and stood up abruptly, nervously and walked down the hall to his office.

            He had already seated himself behind an enormous desk covered with papers, stacks of journals and magazines and what appeared to be a child-sized replica of the human brain. The cauliflower folds looked tough and protective of the smooth pink surface beneath. The brain sat on a huge book, one of those diagnostic tomes that doctors flip through in the privacy of their offices, when they can’t be seen looking for information not easily recalled.

            “Sit down,” he said, motioning me to one of two armchairs angled toward one another and the imposing desk in front of them. I was alone, though, as Michael was at work, and I awkwardly pulled one chair out and then sat in the other.

            “So, what can I do for you today?” Dr. N. is an obviously intelligent man but sweet as well. He is thoughtful instead of arrogant, appears earnest and concerned. His face is placid, his eyes warm but they blink like a cartoon child’s. He is gracious, almost humble, and he asks questions in a manner that gives you the sense that you are making the decisions, not he. When I relayed to him the information that I had recently received from the acclaimed Dr. S in Los Angeles, Dr. N leaned forward and put his hands together, fingertip-to-fingertip, like a little tent. He leaned his chin on the top of the finger tent, blinked several times and listened intently. It seemed like what he heard was going into his head and then down through his fingers into that tent on his desk. Neurologists have so much power, you see, what with their delving into the human brain. After a year of dealing with them, I was painfully aware of that power and sensitive to inferences. I wanted to get in that tent.

            Dr. N is a good listener and rarely interrupts, so when I was finished, he let go of the finger tent pose and let out a long, “Hmmmmmm.”

            It was my turn to lean forward, which I did, restraining myself from placing my own hands on the desk in front of me. I willed them into my lap, to be still. I clenched my knees.

            “Well, let’s talk a little bit about brain surgery,” Dr. N began.

How to Prepare for Two IEPs in One Week

First, stop at a really bad fast food outlet and have enough restraint to only order a vanilla ice-cream cone and a small Diet Coke.

Oliver's IEP went very well -- he has moderate visual and auditory learning disabilities, and his school is extraordinary. I really didn't even need the ice-cream cone.

Sophie's IEP is next week, and I'll need to armor myself. This is how I'll feel, probably, when it begins:

photo via Matador Abroad

Or maybe like this:

Of course, if I have the right attitude, I should look like this:

photo by Alain Delorme

Stay tuned.

Losing community

Bridge Studio: Jason Schmidt
via NY Times

Another good neighbor friend called me today to break the news that he's moving his family to Irvine. Their only child, a boy exactly Oliver's age, is one of several boys in our neighborhood whose families are either moving up and out into much bigger houses and fancier 'hoods or the opposite: simpler lives in smaller areas. This boy and the other boy live across the street and around the corner, and for the ten years we've lived in this house, our neighborhood has resembled Maybery of Andy Griffith more than a couple of residential streets in an enormous city.

I cried in the car in the parking lot of Trader Joe's when he told me. I cried because it means my boys won't have easy access to neighbors' houses -- the banging of doors as they come in and out -- the tribes on the trampolines and the wars in the front yards. Sure, new people will move in, but relationships take years, and most of these homes are small, starter ones -- I'd anticipate young couples with babies and toddlers moving in, not tweens and teen-agers. The trouble with living in this city -- for us -- is that we are not particularly upwardly mobile and most of the people around us are. People don't blink an eye at spending millions of dollars on homes and hundreds of thousands on private schools. They have the means to sequester themselves behind boxwood walls with pools and media rooms, and settle on sending their children to schools that are in distant neighborhoods. I'd venture to say that they don't live in neighborhoods but in beautiful houses on beautiful streets.

If they don't have the means, they have the sense to move out and beyond to where their lives could be simpler, easier on the foot, the planet and the pocket. I wish they wouldn't, but I understand their choices.

I'm wondering about all of this, feeling sad and not a little trapped. Even if I could afford it, I don't want a bigger house or a fancier neighborhood. I love my house and I love my neighborhood. I don't want my children to go to exclusive private schools in far-away neighborhoods and be surrounded by those who only know huge privilege.

 But I don't want to be left behind, either.

(I loved the photo above from this wonderful article.)

Engaging Students with Learning Disabilities

You must watch this if you're interested in education, in inclusion, in children with learning disabilities, etc. and then share it, please!

Watch Engaging Students With Learning Disabilities Early On on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

Curmudgeon

Frontier schoolhouse

I do love a curmudgeon, especially one who writes well.

Here's an excerpt from an especially incisive essay in The New York Review of Books by Charles Simic.

Widespread ignorance bordering on idiocy is our new national goal. It’s no use pretending otherwise and telling us, as Thomas Friedman did in the Times a few days ago, that educated people are the nation’s most valuable resources. Sure, they are, but do we still want them? It doesn’t look to me as if we do. The ideal citizen of a politically corrupt state, such as the one we now have, is a gullible dolt unable to tell truth from bullshit.

...

If this lack of knowledge is the result of the years of dumbing down of high school curriculum and of families that don’t talk to their children about the past, there’s another more pernicious kind of ignorance we confront today. It is the product of years of ideological and political polarization and the deliberate effort by the most fanatical and intolerant parties in that conflict to manufacture more ignorance by lying about many aspects of our history and even our recent past. I recall being stunned some years back when I read that a majority of Americans told pollsters that Saddam Hussein was behind September 11 terrorist attacks. It struck me as a propaganda feat unsurpassed by the worst authoritarian regimes of the past—many of which had to resort to labor camps and firing squads to force their people to believe some untruth, without comparable success. 


You can read the rest of  The Age of Ignorance here.


I'm not sure what to do with it all, though, other than shake my head and feel a certain smug satisfaction draped over growing dread that I'm in total agreement.