Man! Dude! Session #317
(M)an: Dude! Nate Silver of the United States and his FiveThirtyEight
website are approaching the 2014 Midterm Elections here like Kiran Bedi extols
the present Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, and as Malala Yousafzai
continues to identify the assassinated ex-Prime Minster of Pakistan Benazir
Bhutto-Zardari as her hero and role model.
(D)ude: Man! Nate Silver, Kiran Bedi, and Malala Yousafzai
are like the Republican Party’s Growth
and Opportunity Project that the perpetually percolating Republican
National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus referred to as an, quote unquote, autopsy. No wonder Wisconsin
Representative Paul Ryan chose to rework President Obama’s campaign messages
from the past into book format right before the 2014 Midterm Elections! The
Republican Party is incapable of envisioning democratic principles because its
members choose to relinquish their own professional sovereignty to campaign
financiers they wait on hand and foot.
M: Dude! You’re referring to Paul Ryan’s latest attempt to erase
the markings left behind of the false pretenses on which he operates as Mitt
Romney’s concierge in that hackneyed offprint entitled The Way Forward: Renewing The American Idea!
D: Man! False pretenses? He’ll have to do a much better job then
at concealing the deliberate misrepresentation of the facts in order to move up
in socioeconomic status like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, whose
children’s education is guaranteed as long as Christie remains a dedicated
custodian to billionaire Sheldon G. Adelson.
M: Dude! Talking about education, my coworkers held a
weekend barbeque at a nearby city park and I realized where the problem of academic
standardization fell short.
D: Man! You figured out a reason why Texas insists upon
writing its own college and career-ready standards instead of adopting the
Common Core State Standards Initiative?
M: Dude! Yes. As I was speaking with the children, they
showed me their technologically advanced tablets and collection of books in
their backpacks filled with juice boxes and dietary refreshments. They seemed to
have it all. Except that their parents had deluded themselves into believing
the tablets and books could take the place of parental interaction and
encouragement. We live in a society, well at least in Republicans Rick Perry
and Gregg Abbott and George Prescott Bush’s Texas, where parents seriously
remain convinced that tablets and books can sustain their children alone. That
is a terrible misperception.
D: Man! When I oversee my nieces and nephews, I actually sit
down and instruct them playfully in fundamentals like phonics and counting
lunch monies. It’s really incredible how they become attached and actually
anticipate my next visit. I get the older children to listen to me read
classics like Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and Agatha Christie. They have
become so accustomed to the books’ formats that they insist upon hearing the
final chapter of whatever Agatha Christie mystery I’m performing at the moment
because they know that the sleuths, whether Hercule Poirot or Miss Jane Marple,
will dissect every detail as it actually happened in that last chapter.
M: Dude! That’s how I teach Sunday school. I read aloud one
of Aesop’s fables to figure out the level of comprehension of the classroom and
then proceed with reading my students passages from Pearl S. Buck’s 1971 nonfiction
masterwork The Story Bible and 1962
fiction classic Satan Never Sleeps.
D: Man! Yes! No! No?
M: Dude! Overall, children deserve to become an intellectual
summons for their guardians, especially with the presence of children’s
librarians and books at public libraries across the United States. I still
remember how surprised I was when I saw a poster of the rock star Sting
promoting that Reading is fundamental
from the eighties on the wall at the Fort Worth Public Library sometime in the
nineties. The poster was situated near the nonfiction sciences section and the
preteen magazines and comics and I interpreted the poster as a sign from above to
try my shot at being able to read and comprehend botany to zoology alongside
aeronautics and astrophysics.
D: Man! The literary prizewinners were my favorite. I still
remember finding out about Caldecott author-illustrators Marcia Brown and Chris
Van Allsburg and Uri Shulevitz. What surprised me most was how the celebrated
gold medalists in every category had received silver medals and tertiary honors
before and after their respective wins. The same with the Newberry authors as
well like Katherine Paterson and Russell Freedman and Betsy Byars. I still
cannot forget the lessons on forgiveness and loss that I learned from those
young adult novels and historical nonfiction. Betsy Byars’ The Pinballs still haunts me, the novel where one of the characters
is accidentally run over by his father’s car in their suburban driveway and
paralyzed as a result and then placed in foster care.
M: Dude! The Caldecott Books and the Newberry Books were
invitations to learn more about the lives of the authors that these awards
celebrated and honored as well as the writers who shared shelf space beside
them.
D: Man! Every adult must be able to read the literature
children are bringing home because these books are truly breathtaking in their magnitude.
M: Dude! And excellent icebreakers or conversation starters
to just about any concern or topic you may have even as an adult trying to
learn how to read and write yourself or process your own pain and suffering.
D: Man! Oppression takes many forms and this current media trend
to reduce intellectual rigor in American society through excising individuals
like David Letterman and Jay Leno from hosting late night talk shows and
installing nil-wit small fries as their replacements is only one such example
of lowering of public standards overall to accommodate the privileged plutocrats
and their subordinate lackey politicians who are constructing a subservient idiocracy
with their Republican Party and American Press Corps converts.
M: Dude! Small fries? I could use a Big Mac and Super Size
Fries in Moscow right about now!
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