© Benjamin Robert Taylor, 1996
(All rights reserved.)
This work began as a random series of essays that I wrote as examples for students I was tutoring in the English Writing Center at Miami Dade Community College in nineteen ninety-four. Students would come in with an assignment on one topic or another and brainstorming with them would often inspire me to try my own hand at the same topic. As the number of students I tutored grew, my subject matter, too, soon grew as diverse as modern Amerikan society itself has become. The reader will find gang warfare and armies of med techs, teen suicide and mandatory genetic engineering, austailopithicine sports gambling and techno-spinoffs from the space race all within a few pages of one another.
Although there was no purpose in those initial endeavors other than to teach by example and to hone my own skills as a writer, I soon became aware of a common thread that seemed to bind various works together. That common thread was not civil disillusionment, but the realization that misuse and misunderstanding of some of the English language's most common terms nearly permeates Amerikan society. Almost all of the problems found in our modern society can be either alleviated to some degree or solved outright by prioritizing the education of the masses. This booklet is both the outcome and the culmination of those exercises.
Although the title of this work is parody of and homage to Henry David, as is the first chapter, the gist of the work deals with the future, not the past. That is not to say that it is a work of fiction, although if some readers may prefer to place it into that category, that's o.k. While the frequent mention of legendary heroes, some real, some mythological, may link this work to the past, I hope that the inclusion of, references to and quotes from visionaries like Max Planck, Professor Hawking and the late Bucky Fuller (whom I had the privilege of meeting in nineteen seventy seven) will serve as a sort of intellectual springboard to the future.
If any of the many issues I have endeavored to deal with set one's mind in motion, then I will have achieved my goal in publishing this series of essays. I don't hope for anything so grand as to have even a single reader agree with everything (or anything) proposed in these writings; I only hope to inspire independent and inventive thought processes in a greater number of people to than is common today. The greater a reader's propensity for creative cognizance, the higher the likelihood!
There may seem to be a disproportionate number of statements throughout this text that point out the wickedness of the Republican party. I do not mean for these statements to be an endorsement of the Democratic party, for I believe them to be no less wicked. Sadly for America, though, the Republicans have held the country's reins for five of the last seven administrations. The two party system was designed to prevent any single group from staying in power long enough to force their own will upon the People. When any party, altruistic or evil, Democratic, Republican or other, is able to reign for more than two consecutive terms, the purpose of the two party system is circumvented.
I have no doubt that better solutions than those I have proposed for society's maladies will come to many of my readers' minds. I propose this work only as a catalyst for further brainwork and encourage everyone who reads this Essay on Civil Disillusionment to read every other work mentioned herein and to take upon themselves the task of writing yet more. Learn, then teach.
bobgod - January 22, 1996
Conspiracy Theory
I'm about to launch into a tirade the likes of which you may not have read since the heyday of the underground press of the nineteen sixties. I was a teenager durring the anti-war movement. I did not go to Cannada. I stayed in Shreveport, Louisiana and
spray-painted peace signs on police cars, planted pot in public right of ways and passed out a little paper called New Left Notes. In those days we leftists demanded that the vote be given to eighteen year olds, that Uncle Sugar gaurantee certain civil rights and that all U.S. trops be withdrawn from Southeast Assia; or else, we insisted, the revolution would be swift and bloody. The White House had no doubt that the threats of an entire generation were sincere and the changes we demanded were won. More time has passed since that time than the length of time I had lived up until then. Although there was no armed revolution and despite the winning of the vote for teens, civil rights and an end to the sacrifice of the amerikan poor to the gods of oil, rubber and sugar, the status quo remained largely unchanged.
I blast every government agency and department that comes into my tiny mind throughout the following pages. I accuse them of specific as well as general wrongdoing and I demand that they be held accountable for not only their actions, but for the results of their actions! My political leaning is to the far left, although I am a conservative. My religious beliefs can best be described as either anthrpomorphic pantheism or simple animism. I believe in preserving what is left of our freedom under the amerikan Constitution and in restoring what has been taken from us by our lawmakers. While I would prefer to see democratic process and education of the masses used as the tools that acheive this end, I suspect that if our public education system continues its well documented decline, such widespread governmental abuses of authority as the past three decades have brought may provoke the masses into casting their votes with bullets, not ballots.
By catagorizing one misuse of power after another I may appear to be one of those weirdohs who see conspiracies behind every politician. I am not. I do not. For one thing, I do not give any politician credit for either the intelligence to conceive such grand notions or for comunicative and persuasive powers great enough to convince others to go along with them. The evils I see within our system of government are inherent to the system and can only be eliminated by changing the system itself, not merely replacing a few politicians. Our first few presidents were farmers and teachers, not lawers. Russia has recently had ten candidates for president in a free election while we continue to have only two, or at best three - all of whom have worked within the same system for most of their lives. It is a sad day when we need to follow such an example of democracy as modern, post-Soviet Russia has now begun to set for us.
Certain portions of this essay have been previously published in the Ozark Gazette. All articles are presented here solely for entertainment. E-mail me for permission to reprint & distribute any or all items following this statement. Standard publishing industry royalties
apply. - bg
Introduction & Foreword
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