Indeed, I think the written word is of great importance in a world increasingly dominated by images of one kind or another. In his strange little book “In the beginning was the command line,” Neal Stephenson distinguishes between “textual” and “sensory” interfaces/metaphors and shows how the latter can influence people’s belief systems without them really understanding what is happening. (Marshall McLuhan also had interesting, if overdrawn, ideas on this subject.) This is a topic I hope to write about in the future.

A big part of the leftist mythology is how highly intelligient and better educated they are than the hicks in the non-leftist community. Now, here is a leftist commentator alleging that the coming generation, schooled in an educational system dominated by leftism, political correctness, multi-cultural ideology, race and gender sensitivity, and teachers’ organizations that are little more than wholly owned subsidiarys of the liberal political party, are dumber than dirt.

What this complaint screams out to me is that this writer clearly believes that the up and coming generation has opted out of the leftist camp.

If they were 1960’s-style activists, and committed as a generation to the mythical counter-culture that caused such turmoil in the West, and spawned much of the current educational and cultural leadership, does anyone imagine Morford would find them to be dumb and uneducated?

What he has realized, either from contact or polls or other analysts or some combination of those sources and more, is that the massive attempt by the left to mold the youth of the country into acolytes in the anti-capitalist, anti-western, anti-technology, anti-traditional culture, anti-military ideological warrior army has failed on a scale every bit as massive as the campaign was to begin with.

Of course these kids are dumb, stupid, and uneducated. They have rejected many of the fundamental pillars of leftism. I wouldn’t be at all surprised that most of the rejection was fueled by the unrelenting attempts of the “educational community” to stuff it down their throats in every conceivable fashion they could devise from pre-school to grad school.

And, no doubt, there are those that have inculcated the amorphous half-thoughts and floating assumptions that underly most of leftist ideology. But the repeated polls and surveys I have read about for years tell the story of youngsters who dislike politics, want to have traditional careers, families, and lifestyles, and are much more patriotic and religious than the educational community that they have been enduring since childhood.

The next time you read about some big protest “event” that has more organizers and staff people than protesters, and there have been quite a few over the past several years, remember this caustic little essay condemning those very stupid youngsters for being too dumb to get out there on the barricades and do their duty to topple the evils of capitalism, consumerism, and technology.

It’s either that whining allegation, or admit that the youth of the country would rather be out there getting a good job, buying stuff, and trying out the latest computers and video games.

“They’re too dumb to know we’re still the “wave of the future” sounds more like panic than anything else.

Just about what you’d think — a sex toy for those who are into that sort of thing. To be fair, I believe Morford values the quality (whatever that may mean) as well as the quantity.

Seriously, Morford has written before of his belief that the war on terror (aside from being capitalism’s natural reaction to the Little Brown Other) is due to the fact that Bush et al were sexually inhibited, and therefore must act out their frustration on the world. No, really.

I wrote about previous Morford columns here, and here. The latter contains the special bonus phrase, “[Rumsfeld's] black eyes gleaming like the devil’s own golf balls.” That’s Morford’s, not mine. I wouldn’t touch that with a stick.

You will see this Morford has not improved with time.

Employers knife each other in the back trying to sign on the best and brightest employees.

Wow, it must be nice to be one of them.

My husband’s embrace of Darwinian literary criticism is understandable to me. We came to literature because we felt it helped us understand human nature: Pinker may be perceptive but Shakespeare and Faulkner have him beat. I think these theorists are likely to lead to a generation that is programmatic in their applications, but I don’t argue with him about this generation’s readings – they are generally solid and hearken back to the sense that literature is really about life and life is sometimes more understandable through literature. But, my husband always says he couldn’t go with post-modernism; he read the books but, well, he grew up on a farm. They just seemed silly. To him, life was quite real and continues to be so. These books were words unconnected to life as he knew it, meaning as he’d found it. We’ll see about the Darwinists, but I’m pretty sure he’s right about literature.

I’d argue that when words are more closely connected to human nature, to our experience, to what we know with our guts, then we trust the words more because they are anchored. People like Morford don’t really trust them, they may use them but they know that their words aren’t connected to experience. (As we all noted immediately – capitalists don’t want idiots working for them, school teachers aren’t John Birchers, his whole perspective seems strangely skewed – and that was before I’d heard about the butt plugs. For give my naivete, but what the hell are they?)

Speaking for myself, I don’t think it is working with words per se that presents the danger but rather the fact that people who work with words do not work with nature. We use words to manipulate and influence other humans beings. People who work with words succeed of fail in life based solely on their ability to somehow effect the minds of other human beings. This in turn fosters a subculture with behaviors, values and beliefs that focus on the manipulation of the behavior of humans as a the final solution to all problems. Worse, if the people who exert influence over their livelihood belong to the same subculture, then the wordsmith never receives any negative feedback at all. This allows them to create vast fantasy constructs, such as Marxism, which survive for generations.

People who work close to nature do not have such a luxury. Self-agrrandizing self-delusion kills. No matter how eloquent the poet, he cannot beg the sun for mercy. A farmer cannot verbally cajole the grain to grow. An engineer cannot woo steel from brittleness. A broker cannot sing to the market to alter the price of stock. Behaviors, physical actions, must rapidly conform to the dictates of nature or they fail.

Mark Morford’s delusional belief that capitalist seek an ignorant population rather goes to prove this point. Such a contention would produce derisive belly life’s among actual capitalist. For them, highly educated and highly skilled workers are money in the bank. Employers knife each other in the back trying to sign on the best and brightest employees. Private employers must spent billions every year investing in employee training and they burn much political capital trying to get the socialized education system to actually turn out skilled workers, Such a reality is readily apparent to anyone who has spent even the least amount of time in the private sector yet Morford can pen such an idiocy in a major publication of the articulate elite without provoking gales of laughter.

People who lose contact with nature eventually lose contact with reality itself. They become mired in a shared dreamworld.

What next? Rosie O’Donnell gives a physics lecture? Ted Rall teaches the importance of good drawing and good taste?

Of course, people with narrow abilities…tend to value and use them as proxies for both intelligence and morality.

As concise an explanation of Morfordism as I’ve ever seen.

When he makes this analogy to testing… “It’s like weighing a calf twice a day, but never feeding it”…he ignores that fact that a substantial number of the “farmers” have been feeding the calves on sawdust and ground glass. One reason for the testing is to identify these people and get them to either change their ways or pursue careers in fields other than “agriculture.”

If we had market competition in education, among the downstream consequences would be that the colleges of education would reform or die out on their own.

suggestion: best quick fix on our schools? eliminate ALL colleges of Education and get teachers to teach subjects, and hire them at decent salaries.

Americans have managed to live, one way of another, with the best and the worst that a free market oriented economic system can offer, that is bad and good television, junk food, pop music, video games, etc. and most of these things have been there in America for generations and their education system has always adapted to these new trends. American schools and universities are using internet, podcasts, etc. as educational tools. I greatly admire this ability to adapt to rapid changes in society.

But go to China, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, France, and many other nations, and you will find out that kids in these other countries are doing/reading/eating/listening to and watching exactly the same as USA kids: they want to play games, own ipods and listen to music and watch videos all the time, they want to eat junk food and the McDonalds, KFCs, Pizza Huts, are always full of people, same as in the U.S.A., and their movie theaters are always full of comedy movies, the same that American kids are exposed to. If foreigners do better in American universities, it’s not that Americans do worse; foreigners do better in Brazilian, Chinese and European universities I bet you, that’s human nature, a family makes a huge sacrifice to send their kid to study abroad and the kid understands the importance of that for his/her education.

But is the population in the rest of the world prepared to deal with these “by-products” of a free market society?

It is my perception that if you go to a McDonald’s in Europe it is not the same as if you go to one in the U.S.A., in the European McDonald´s the little girl or boy will seriously look at you and ask you “what do you want”, being nice and smiling to an stranger, a guy they’ve never seen in their lives is a difficult process for them, then go to a McDonald´s in the U.S.A and the girl or boy will have a big smile for you and be very nice to you through the whole transaction, it is not that they like to talk to strangers, it is the fact that American kids understand the importance of the customer in their society, and they manage to be good and demanding customers too. You could argue that McDonald´s provide training for these kids, they do, and it is the same in both continents, but European kids still have a hard time understanding the concept “customer”. So societies manage these trends differently.

But while American parents and educators have learned to deal with the effects of these trends in the education of their kids, it is the rest of the world I am worried about, China, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, India, countries that arrived to this modern times and age unprepared, without infrastructure, with huge social problems and conflicts, with millions of people under-educated that now have to deal with a brutal exposure to TV, junk food, pop music, video games, etc. Parents in these countries are more concerned about poverty, debt and economic crisis than the future education of their kids and don’t understand the effects of these trends on their kids.

These countries are the ones that are already leaders in Coca-cola consumption in the world. And junk food consumption is already growing enormously there and their educational system and teachers have to deal with an entire TV/junk food/pop music/video game addiction/ipod addiction/internet addiction/messenger-chat addiction and copy-and-paste generation that was barely beginning to learn to read when these free market “by-products” hit them.