Dropping the F-bomb on students

The OC Reg recently reported that gun sales are way up in Orange County. How come? The reporter asked the gun-mongers at The Grant Boys in Costa Mesa and Army-Navy in Orange, and those guys claimed that their customers are afraid. They fear that President Obama will take away their right to bear arms. They fear “civil unrest” when the recession shifts to a depression.

So, naturally, they’re arming themselves.

As you know, there are lots of stupid people in the world, and we’ve got more than our share of ‘em right here in Orange County, which explains a lot. OC is, of course, a seriously red county, and so, during the recent presidential race, lots of OC’s gente estúpida embraced the notion that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.A. (There’s an OC preacher who’s suing somebody over that.) Then there’s the notion that Obama is a Muslim, and a socialist, and a terrorist.

I seem to recall that Huey Long once got people riled up against a political opponent when he accused the guy of living in “open celibacy” with his sister. Hell, I’m living that way right now. And I’m sick and tired of it, too.

Most stupid people aren’t literally stupid, of course. Mostly, they’re ignorant and willing to allow demagogues to fill the empty spaces in their heads with a simplistic and attractive worldview, no questions asked. So they’re sheep, not dodo birds, basically.

Stupid People may be simpletons, but they're also complex, ‘cause they’re simultaneously trusting and cynical. They have a child-like faith in their noisy demagogues—who instill in them paranoia and skepticism regarding everything excepting the Official Demagoguery. So they sound as hard-bitten and cynical as Dr. House, even though they’re actually as naïve and trusting as Dr. Cameron.

You can’t reason with these people. They may as well be literally stupid, for all that you can achieve arguing with them. That’s routinely revealed in the comments to this blog. Have you noticed?

Winston Churchill famously opined that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." The Stupid People demographic is always pretty large, and so it’s easy to see where Winnie was coming from. Some days, I think that democracy is the worst form of government period.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, now does it? People can avoid sheep-like behavior and think competently on their own (this entails a rejection of skepticism)—if you educate ‘em properly. Still, I don’t see how we’re ever gonna make much progress when society is so big and messy. Modifying the thinking and habits of a huge, heterogeneous population is difficult, maybe impossible.

If you’re like me, you are continually stunned by how hard it is to get even the simplest ideas across to our large population. “You can’t get AIDS from a doorknob.” —Remember that one? It took forever getting the doorknob idea across.

Every once in a while, I discuss the state of education in the U.S. with my students. That state is dismal, of course, and the signs and proof of abject dismaltude are everywhere. But when I clue my students in on this (I start by reading from the opening of "A Nation at Risk"), many of them look surprised. Or they think I’m just telling liberal lies.

How can that be? Don’t they read the paper or watch the Daily Show?

I don’t know what’s the matter with me. If anybody should be accustomed to Stupid People behavior, it should be me, ‘cause I’m a teacher, and a teacher is someone who makes a BIG FREAKIN’ POINT of explaining to students what they are required to do, who repeats that info endlessly, and who, at the end of the semester, is invariably overwhelmed by students who explain that they had no idea that they were required to do the writing assignments.


I’m in the thick of that right now. “You had to get 6 points out of 16 in the writing assignments. That's all. Just 6. You got 2. So you’re getting an F. That’s all there is to it.”

I hate having to say that.

At the start of each semester, I explain that, in a few months, I’m gonna be saying those very words to several of the students in the room. They all smile. “Not me, boy,” they think. So I say, “Yeah, some of you are thinking, ‘not me, boy.’ But it’s gonna be you, unless you listen to me now!”

They don’t listen. I say, “No really. I don’t want to give anybody an F, believe me. But look at things from my perspective. I’ve gotta do things to motivate you guys to do the work for the course, and this is one of those things. And if I tell you now that you’ll get an F if you don’t do the assignments, and I don’t actually give those Fs, then nobody will believe me in the future!”

Some students stare back at me like fish.

So I show ‘em a clip from Dr. Strangelove, when the good doctor explains the concept of deterrence and the idea behind the Doomsday Device: it’s “simple to understand... credible and convincing," says Herr Doktor Merkwürdigliebe.

I then explain that, when students fail to do the absolute minimum amount of work, they’ve gotta face consequences. “I can’t not mete out the promised consequences,” I plead.

Near as I can tell, none of this makes much of a difference. At the end of the semester, I’ve gotta drop the big one all over the place.

I’m thinking about escalating. Maybe I should pin notes to students’ shirts, explaining the requirements, the consequences of blowing those requirements off, in that stupid note, which, no doubt, will be read by no one.

Or maybe I should write warning tattoos, in reverse, on their foreheads. "Do the goddam assignments!"

It’s depressing. And, at the end of the semester, the predictable catastrophe surprises and amazes me anew, even though I’ve been here, in this bombardier’s station, dropping these bombs, a hundred times.

Yeah, I’m stupid too.

See Study Cites Toll of AIDS Policy in South Africa (aka 365,000 unnecessary deaths caused by a stupid idea)

P.S.: Gosh, I was driving earlier today and, on the radio, I heard a song from my youth. Somehow, it was devastating. I nearly had a panic attack. I'm not so hard-bitten myself, you know.

THE SEEKERS ~ "I know I'll never find another you"


Dr. Strangelove explains: