The Amerikan Empire VII: Bad Education through Dirty Social Control

After twelve years of living overseas in Europe, vagabonding and traveling around the world, I decided to return to the Amerikan school system. I wanted to get the top degree as a historian, a PhD. Yet, I always hated the Amerikan system of ‘education.’ Like most people in the country, most of my Amerikan schooling experiences were quite negative.

I had thought that studying for a PhD, or a useless doctorate degree, would signify a totally different experience. I would be able to read what I wanted, and study various themes and topics that interested me. I could write passionately about what truly fascinated me related to historical stuff. I could then become a professor too.

I finally did receive my longed for PhD six years later – but I was terribly wrong. I was good at history, but common sense kicked me in the butt. The rot of the education system had even infected the deadbeat world of Amerikan university graduate school.

From daycare-head start, nursery ‘schools’ to the doctoral program schools in Amerikan universities, bad education reigns through dirty social control. The main culprit represents the mandatory and compulsory state ‘public’ school. The Amerikan forced and coerced schooling system exists solely for training obedient, institutionalized slaves. The elites wanted, and have continued to want, mental cowards that follow orders throughout their bad employment careers. The Amerikan school system currently runs like a minimum security jail system confined within the bureaucratic iron cage.

I’ll never forget my first few weeks on the Amerikan university campus after being out of the ‘school system’ for over ten years. The university charged and extorted students for almost everything that they needed on campus. There were counseling fees, student bookstore fees, student union fess, building fees, computer resource fees, etcetera, and even teaching grad students had to pay for tuition.

In the Amerikan Empire, the state, inclusive of federal, state and city governments, normally tax the citizens incessantly. However, the Amerikan university had perfected this art of taxation, charges and fines, which possessed even greater reach than the state – since tuition costs rose by the rate of inflation times twenty each year.

The university also had a long list of fees and sanctions that required continual outlays of payments, such as parking fees, for both cars and bicycles, late registration fines, drinking alcohol on campus fines, skateboarding fines, and the poor undergrads that lived in the dorms had it worse. Their lives were exactly like prisoners in minimum security jails. They had to inform the security staff when both leaving and arriving in the buildings. Any minor room infraction could land them serious fines, ending up homeless – or even arrested by the campus donut brigade.

I was really shocked when I saw one peculiar ‘innovation.’ The university had a full-fledged and legal, autonomous police force, with its very own detective and jail, cops openly carried semi-automatic guns, high-powered shotguns, and the unit had an armored vehicle with drug sniffing dogs. These cops were often young and hard-core. They regularly rode and walked around the campus looking to harass and bust both unwary students and strangers that ventured on the campus spaces.

While the cops kept the campus on lockdown, surveillance cameras were prevalent everywhere. It wasn’t as bad as a casino or a prison, but it came close. The vigilance cameras were in the hallways, library bookcase areas, and they even faced the front doors of restrooms.

A terrible ambience of fear and distrust pervaded the entire university campus community. The university bosses or administrators managed the whole operation from the top down. The Regents or Trustees possessed the legal management of the university, so they appointed the president. The president next appointed his or her own assistants, and in turn, they appointed the provosts, vice provosts and the other campus directorships. Meanwhile, the provosts appointed the deans and the assistant deans, and the deans appointed their assistants. Almost none of these six figure salaried administrators, and in the case of the president, millionaires, taught classes. They generally attended meetings and passed e-mails to each other.

The administrative chiefs often delegated the heavy university workload, innocuously called service requirements, onto the tenured professor managers. These administrators could dismiss any worker or terminate any job position at will – even if the victim had tenure.

This American university system resembled the old Communist Central Committees of Eastern Europe, or the old Corporations run by the family juntas of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts at the turn of the century. The top directors also referred to ‘their university’ as a not-for-profit corporations. The irony apparently escaped them.

The tenured professor managers were quite disappointing as both workers and people. They often acted in a cowardly manner. They never argued with the administrators, and never fought back against most university injustices. The few who did fight back, ended up fired. Most tenured university professors transformed themselves into institutional drones.

Most of them had already transformed themselves into servile workers through faithfully attending the Amerikan Empire school system.

The worst of the bunch were the other graduate students. I had thought that my fellow students would emerge as intellectual colleagues where deep discussions on history, culture and politics were commonplace. The opposite was true. With so little money at the bottom of the pyramid and with most of us gaining horrible salaries at the poverty level, every other graduate student was a competitor for the meager amounts of available money. Hatred ruled inside of those tiny and claustrophobic grad student offices.

The hatred and anger seethed at all levels on the campus. Administrators often blew their tops against recalcitrant professors. Some professors went ballistic against grad students. The grad students showed their rage through harshly grading the papers of the undergraduates – who represented the ‘lazy’ students. Yet it was the laziest of the bunch, the administrators, who received the greatest payouts. And from there, the pyramid of tension, hate and control regularly flushed down into the university cesspool.

I began to hear other horrible stories and legends. A tenured, professor-pervert got away with his sexual indiscretions due to his ability to garner outside grant money for the university, i.e., the administration. The uni donut cops managed a corrupt practice of busting drivers around the campus at night for Driving Under the Influence of Alcohol, (DUI) money; meanwhile, some of those same cops would get drunk and then receive free rides home. University administrators would physically threaten attorneys, coaches and professors that refused to bend to their wills.

I also heard about some departments where cowardly professor bullies formed mob actions against their non-conformist colleagues. The university environment functioned under some of the worst institutionalized behavior in the education industry. Only the Amerikan prison gulag or the US Post Office seemed worse off – and yet, I had voluntarily entered this sick world.

I stayed on for six years longer until I received my PhD. I had no where else to go. I was good at history, reading and writing. But I paid a serious price for my desperate and stubborn will to continue and finish graduate school. I too fell victim to the pettiness, the competitive meanness, the nasty envy, and worst of all, the frustrated anger. Yet, I prided myself in resisting such institutional vices. It took me four years after receiving my PhD to fully heal my mind from such a harsh ‘educational’ experience.

After reaching the long sought doctoral degree, I then realized something even more sinister – the Amerikan university had become a rotten extension of the Amerikan high school, which in turn, birthed itself out of the infernal concoction of Amerikan forced schooling, or ‘the public school system.’

The mandatory public school system was actually a recent historical phenomenon. About a hundred years ago in the USA, few people attended the local public schools. Kids might attend a local school-house, but the school was completely autonomous, under a schoolmaster or even a local teacher. Most children attended for a few years, but it often ended when they had to work at their parent’s businesses, farms or small ranches. Children mainly learned their life and work skills from their parents.

At about the same time, Amerika’s elite business capos, such as the Rockefellers, began to lobby the state governments for forced, mandatory schooling. They wanted a more ‘disciplined’ workforce, and so they united with German Empire trained, public intellectuals, such as John Dewey, to set up ‘school boards,’ ‘child labor laws,’ and ‘teacher colleges.’ The Amerikan federal and state apparatuses supported this school system because they watched the spectacular military power of the German Empire, or the Second Reich, which had compulsory state schooling. Other world empires, had also utilized this successful school model, such as the French Empire and the British Empire.

By the 1920s, most US states had some form of mandatory public school law, which gave states the legal right to take away parents’ kids, and hold them against their wills for a good party of the day. The elites however, such as the Rockefellers, never sent their kids to those obligatory public schools; instead, their sons, and eventually, daughters too, attended elite college preparatory private schools, and afterwards, attended the ivy league, elite universities.

The requisite state, Amerikan public schools had more administrators than teachers. They often sat in offices, never taught, and received great salaries, benefits and severance pay packages. Under them were the ‘education leaders,’ or principals, who also made very good money.

In order to earn a little money, I did some substitute teaching at some local public schools. During my period breaks, I overheard teachers recounting some outrageous stories of corrupt Board of Education bosses, often coming into the main office for a few hours and then leaving for the rest of the day. And these bosses made six figure salaries! At the same time, most of the teachers that I saw in the teacher’s lounge seemed tired, worn out, weird and their pay was average. The teachers did most of the work, since the principals never really taught any classes.

Working as a substitute also pained me to view the poor children harassed, categorized and ordered around by the school authorities. Bullying was rampant and the violence between students often exploded into nasty fights. The corporate media liars always blamed school violence on bad kids, bad parents and bad teachers. But I saw first hand that it was the institutional violence of enforced schooling, which had started this nefarious cycle.

The school system of the Amerikan Empire did teach a few reading and math skills. Most importantly however, those schools also taught more deceitful lessons.

The compulsory schooling scam has taught children about their low place in the social hierarchy, and how in order to ‘stay afloat in the world,’ the good student must lie, tolerate boredom, elicit favors, and maintain a false, hypocritical public persona.

The Amerikan state school has represented the most impressive institution for maintaining social control. As long as the Amerikan Empire continually murders and vomits out its casualties across this planet, this disguised jail system for children, adolescents and young adults, will rip apart and destroy its own sad victims.

History shall condemn such a monstruous institution clothed in the black robes of ideological deceit, or ‘educational policy.’ Compulsory State Education has forced millions of parents, under the terrible threats of the State, to hand over their own children for mind and personality mutilation.

An Anarchist and a Gentleman/Gentlewoman

I was loving life in this progressive-Western-hipster haven city near the Left Coast, USA, and yet I always felt a strange dread, or foreboding feeling, before going to social events at known ‘Anarcho-houses.’ Whether it was a party, movie night, discussion session, or whatever, I always feared running into enemies. I also felt anxiety over seeing people that I just did not like, or spotting a male jerk that was holding his hot girlfriend like a valued possession and evil eyeing potential male rivals, or even having to endure some loud mouth, obnoxious creep that seemed to go to most parties – just to ruin the ambience for everyone else.

I usually rode my bicycle to the event. When I arrived to the destination, I first made sure to grab as much free beer as possible, or score some free drugs, or enough free swigs of liquor to make the trip worthwhile. Late at night, I always rode my bike severely wasted in order to get back home. The local, donut cop brigade never gave me a DUI on my bike. White skin privilege did have its benefits. I definitely was not the only stoned Anarcho-hipster on his bike getting the breaks.

But when I look back on those days, I felt just as nervous before attending political Anarcho-events, as attending parties represented by other urban subcultures, such as theater people, taxidermists, service industry types, punk musicians, yoga teachers, or just drug-addled hipsters. Why was this this case?

The answer was due to the ego nastiness and common rudeness plaguing the ‘Anarcho-hipster’ scene, or as I liked to call it, Middle-Class Anarchism with lots of white skin masks. Yes, there were many black clothes outfits, lots of good music, many right attitudes, different hairstyles, ripped clothes, patches, backpacks with survival stuff, ripped Converse All Stars, street swagger, denim vests, hats of all shapes and even a few overalls and bare feet – but there was no real community. Anarchists were just as close-minded, mean and egotistical as the corrupt world around them, and once in a while, even more so.

I do remember a good amount of cliques and associations in that scene. The list included Books to Prisoner people, volunteer cabals at the local radical bookstores, Indymedia people, small Anarcho-house conglomerations, Anarcho-community center leaders, IWW guys, Anarcho-zine writers, Anarcho-journalists that organized and printed radical newspapers, and a few involved with the Freeskool. A lot of radical stuff was happening at the time, but without the camaraderie and fellowship representing real freedom and actual revolution, the events were just parties, get-togethers, and simple experiences representing both the good and bad of humanity. An interested bystander does not need any Anarchist philosophy in order to learn about this part of life.

Anarchy in the USA is just another subculture fielded by numerous cliques and associations, seen mostly within a rough sea of white faces wearing dark clothes. Unfortunately, the Leftist diseases of rudeness, weirdness, pettiness and vengefulness have sprouted some deep and poisonous weeds within this radical subculture. I personally have had to verbally fend off various Anarcho-assholes that have gotten angry with me over some inconsequential offense. I have also seen Anarcho-shit clowns verbally jump on some other person for saying something a little off kilter from the supported Anarcho-dogma. This situation is not good.

Anarchists do not have to necessarily act the part of a gentleman or a gentlewoman, but they do need to understand the importance of discreetness, politeness, friendly manners and prudent communication. These common, but very important behaviors are the most crucial and cohesive actions for any political, philosophical or religious group that seeks to transcend into a strong and marvelous community. An Anarcho-gentleman or gentlewoman would not be such a bad thing either – even though it does seem contradictory.

The cult or culture of the gentleman-gentlewoman began in the European Renaissance period, and more specifically, in the geographic region of Italy. A new occupation, or even a new social class, formed itself in late the 1450s, called ‘cortigiani,’ or courtiers. These courtiers were essentially social parasites that hung around aristocratic and royal courts. Those court bums or freeloaders became servants to their aristocratic and royal patrons.

Court parasites also became notorious in Europe with such names as, ‘hanger ons,’ ‘court followers,’ ‘flatterers,’ ‘leeches,’ ‘scroungers,’ ‘freeloaders,’ and just simple ‘human fleas.’ Even though these hanger ons annoyed their patrons, the various dukes, earls, counts, barons and kings to no end, they still had to perform some meritorious service to their patron lords. Most men performed military service, if they were not in the Church, and the women often had to become breeders, spiritual advisers, (if they were nuns that had political visions), or they could attain elite prostitute status with the name of ‘courtesans.’

An Italian writer, by the name of Baldassare Castiglione, published a book in the 1520s, which soon became a best seller throughout the rest of Europe during the entire 1500s. The title was ‘The Book of the Courtier.’ The writer staged his monograph around ten roundtable conservations between both gentlemen and gentlewomen, from some anonymous Italian Renaissance court, concerning their opinions of the right actions of a courtier. Most of the talkers emphasized an Italian term called ‘sprezzatura,’ or in contemporary English, intensity of action with simultaneous light relaxation.

The courtier-gentleperson had to perform his/her special skills through an excellence of work, and at the same time, show off his/her abilities with a sense of flair and sensual finesse. The courtier had to essentially transform his/herself into a public celebrity of notoriety. With these great abilities, the gentle person could hope to enter the social class status of the lords, or aristocratic parasites.

With this new class status, they also took the titles of ‘signore,’ or lords of estates, lands and their lower class subjects. This signore-courtier title then smothered itself across the rest of Europe like Castiglione’s etiquette book. Signore became ‘señor’ in Spain, ‘seigneur’ in France, and ‘sire,’ or ‘sir’ in England. In the 1680s, this cult of the courtier and a gentleman took on connotations that were quite a bit more insidious.

Our English-American gentleman title actually comes from the French, ‘gentil homme,’ which became a renowned-infamous title-status within the aristocratic realms of gluttonous dining and parasitical living. This degenerate lifestyle included ten course meals inside of a 200 plus room palace called Versailles featuring fountains overlaid with Italianate sculptures, brilliant silverware, maze like gardens, gold inlayed mirrors and marbled spit shined floors, all of this dishonorable waste flourished under the tyrannical reign of the Sun King, Emperor Louis XIV during the late 1600s.

Within the British colonies of the Americas, or as their name was back then, the American Plantations, and especially in the cavalier state of Virginia, later called ‘Old Dominion,’ the gentleman planter class emerged with his hundreds of eternal African and white slaves, a large plantation home, and a long political, ‘distinguished’ career in the state assembly. No wonder Anarchists hated the gentle person term and the actions associated with such despicable leeches. But the modern Anarchist tripped into one of the ruling class’ traps.

The trap was pushing the revolutionary into the brute world of lower class poverty and misery. Good manners and politeness cannot survive under the reign of capitalist wage slavery and the urban hells that it creates. The Anarchist became the knight of shining armor for the weak and defenseless, but he and she also took on the traumas of poverty with nasty cravings for vengeance. The Anarchist still suffers from this malady today. But we do not need to suffer like this.

If we truly want to experience beautiful street revolutions representing the fullness of humanity, or in other words, Anarchy, then we will have to change our attitudes and actions as of Now. We must keep the good thoughts in our minds, contentment in the fact that we do know the truth, and finally, we need to have compassion for the ignorant and hurting people around us. Let us listen fully to the rants and complaints of the angry and suffering working classes, then we can give them the perspective of Anarchy.

We should not say ‘sir,’ and ma’am,’ which represent false manners and actually support hierarchy. The elites of modern Europe understood that the cult of the courtier-gentleman kept them safe from the pitchforks and knives of the common slaves. The slaves outnumbered the parasites, and the lower classes could have slaughtered all of the rich and powerful within a month’s time. But they never did – and never will. The main reason was, and is still, that the poor and hurting secretly love and yearn for the ‘sprezzatura,’ or charisma of the old aristo-bums. Some people in the lower classes pine to see them, to read about them, and to experience their pathetic lives, somewhat fantastically, within their own lamentable existences. Think on the contemporary, and noxious popularity of gossip rags and media celebrity TV programs.

If any Liberal control freak, Marxist mad dog, or Fascist weirdo tries to harass us, then we should act accordingly. Remember that gentlemen also had the rights to publicly bear arms – and to use them on their inferiors. We Anarchists can lovingly take on that role, since the rich and powerful have lost complete respect in the public sphere. However, most pedestrians we see on the urban streets are not ideological true believers, nor are they like the elites that are destroying all life on our planet. Equanimity is the way.

The public’s lives are rotting before their very eyes and they know that something is very wrong out there. With all of the common distractions, modern spectacles and media manipulations, how could they know about who and what is destroying them? It is so much better to break out into a smile when we see the absurdity everywhere. We can change things slowly, but we first must have the right attitude with right actions: tranquility within ourselves, amiability with our fellow Anarchists, politeness with our neighbors, and compassion for the misdirected.