"...it's not the training to be mean but the training to be kind that is used to keep us leashed best." ~ Black Dog Red

"In case you haven't recognized the trend: it proceeds action, dissent, speech." ~ davidly, on how wars get done

"...What sort of meager, unerotic existence must a man live to find himself moved to such ecstatic heights by the mundane sniping of a congressional budget fight. The fate of human existence does not hang in the balance. The gods are not arrayed on either side. Poseiden, earth-shaker, has regrettably set his sights on the poor fishermen of northern Japan and not on Washington, D.C. where his ire might do some good--I can think of no better spot for a little wetland reclamation project, if you know what I mean. The fight is neither revolution nor apocalypse; it is hardly even a fight. A lot of apparatchiks are moving a lot of phony numbers with more zeros than a century of soccer scores around, weaving a brittle chrysalis around a gross worm that, some time hence, will emerge, untransformed, still a worm." ~ IOZ

Aug 31, 2011

Spielzeug Self

Shorter former corporate attorney:  make sure your kids play in a purposeful, directed way that will build them up into high IQ future CEOs and project managers and who are both successful and compassionate, as well as focused on achieving goals set by superiors and kind to strangers, because there's nothing in those fucking double binds that could possibly shatter a fragile ego shaped and formed and stretched to the rack of the tyranny of success.

12 comments:

Rhys Ap Thomas said...

You actually read that article? You are a braver man than I Jack!

I come across that sort of shit and end up running and screaming like a little girl just to get away.

Jack Crow said...

I did read it. This is not to my credit. Seems the author honestly believes that children can be taught to be mindfully aware and executive egos primed for success, at the same time.

Anatole David said...

The worst of St. Benedict and de Sade drilled, for greater glory, into the skulls of children.

Jack Crow said...

Now that's a truth, Anatole.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

I tend to avoid the Huffington Post.

And here's the amusing reason: until I got the winetop, I using an old refurbished Dell stack running Windows M.E.

Nothing would kill that thing quicker than clicking on the HuffPo. It generally would require a cold reboot.
~

Pharrell said...

You're absolutely right, Jack.

And on a related note, there really is nothing worse than this new obsession on the part of all these parents with turning their kids into hyper-achieving meritocrats who are learning 3 languages at age 5, calculus at age 7, and tennis at 6 months old. ugh.

look, there's nothing wrong languages. and tennis is fun, and so on. but that kind of meritocratization of the kids is a reflection of the belief that all human life has been devalued unless it can serve the needs of global technocracy.

maybe it's become true, and now all of American life has now become a tournament and only the most slack-shouldered, vitamin-d-deficient, hoody-wearing nebbishes among us will be able in the future to get healthcare and a middle-class income in the white-collar world. but fuck that -- the goal then is to rebel against those conditions...

Pharrell said...

and, I realize there were some things in that rambling that were inconsistent (how can they be vitamin-D deficient if they're playing tennis? etc.), but....

zencomix said...

I stopped reading after "Presented by Flintstones... Find out which specially formulated multivitamin is right for your kid."

Jack Crow said...

Thunder,

It's to my shame. But, at least I don't read the Times or the Post.

Pharrell,

That's an apt turn of phrase: "perhaps all life [is a] tournament."

I've no problem with an honest agonism, myself, but it's only sporting atop a baseline hedonism.

Jack Crow said...

Heh, Zen. If you don't tailor their minerals to their activity, your kids are screwed...

Pharrell said...

Jack,

I agree completely. Honest agonism, real sport is bracing.

The kind I object to, as you say, is the kind that our country has produced, that says, "play for your healthcare! Only the top players will enter the middle class."

And moreover "white-collar sports," where the goal is that the least athletic, the one who has been sitting in his chair the longest, wins.

Richard said...

Jack, yes, you can link to my post about Bill Keller