Did you have some teacher who said something similar to, “Think of this test as a lesson. It will allow you to consolidate your knowledge by giving you a chance to rethink what you learned”? The general idea is that a review of both your correct and incorrect answers will enable your long-term memory to absorb the information or ideas. So, let’s put this to the test by offering a test and a post-test discussion.


Who said the following?


1.    “For formerly it was necessary for the accusers to show the enmity which they had toward the accused; but now it is necessary to ask from the accused what enmity they had toward the state, on account of which they venture to do such wrongs to it. But I do not use these words as if not having private enmities and misfortunes, but as if there were plenty of reason for all to be angry, on account of their private and public affairs.”


____________




2.    “My father…was persuaded by ______ to come to this land, and lived there thirty years; and neither we nor he ever brought an accusation against anybody, or were accused ourselves; but we lived in such a manner under the Democracy, that we neither wronged others nor were wronged by others. But when the ______, being villains and sycophants, where established in power, affirming that it was necessary to rid the city of those doing wrong, and turn the remaining citizens to virtue and justice there was very good pretext to seem to punish them, but in reality to get their money, for the city was poor…and the government needed money…[They went to my house where] they found me entertaining guests…[To avoid imprisonment and possibly death] I asked _____ if he was willing to save me, taking a bribe…[but he took all my money and possessions and] said I should be happy that I still had my life.”


____________


ANSWER for both: LYSIAS, author of The Orations of Lysias


It was during the Second Peloponnesian War that Sparta gained control of Athens and installed an oligarchy that ran like a linebacker into the remaining democratic populace. The installation of The Thirty began a period of vengeance for vengeance’s sake and for acquiring what belonged to others who were out of favor. These thirty oligarchs exerted control by thievery, exile, and even murder.


Many members of Athenian society had their lives ruined simply by groundless accusations by those in power. Lysias’ brother died at the hands of Eratosthenes (not the famous geographer who lived much later), so he went into the public judicial system  of the times to accuse the murderer and seek justice for his brother, his family, and himself. Oration XII is his personal account of the affair, and the quotations above are his loosely translated words. *


I’m not sure how you might relate to these quotations, but I find them very much relevant to our own times. Sure, we hear of the Russian oligarchs, but they live in a country where nothing but a superficial semblance of democracy and freedom exists. But in the West, and especially in the United States, democracy, that is the democracy of a Republic, supposedly ensures freedoms not found outside western style governments. I say “supposedly” because we’ve entered an age that is in some ways parallel to the post-Peloponnesian War period in ancient Greece.


And in that period accusations were as much condemnations as they are today—and they were so without the aid of Twitter, FaceBook, TikTok, and other avenues of vengeance and hatred.


Lysias’ father had been encouraged to move to Athens by the great Pericles, so as a child and young man he knew something about the Golden Age of Greece, especially about the Athens of the Acropolis with its magnificent Parthenon and the nearby agora, or marketplace. No doubt, of course, that, human vices being what they are, there had been squabbles and accusations thrown about during that Golden Age as Socrates' enforced suicide attests, but generally, nothing then matched the time of the Thirty Tyrants and the subsequent Councils of 40 and 5,000 members.


In that progression of tyranny posing as democracy, we can see an analog of today’s big government bureaucracy in which agencies “make laws” driven by special interest agendas.  And in the attempt to restore what had been Athens’ glory, the burgeoning government that went from 30 to 5,000 rulers meant a multiplying of special interests, bickering parties, and wild accusations as various factions vied through ad hominem attacks for power over the purse. Except for modern technology, Lysias’ world wasn’t much different from today’s.


Regardless of relative stability of the United States government, we always find ourselves in the tug of war between oligarchic tendencies and democratic freedoms. Take, for example, the First Amendment and its many challenges by those who would quash speech advocating a different point of view. In the current Administration, free speech means speech that is preferred speech, and that can be demonstrated by the Justice Department’s raid on the home of a Pennsylvanian man whose pro-life stance seems to have offended the powers that be, an intellectual oligarchy that quashes opposition through government retribution.


Throughout American history, the party out of power has felt suppressed by the party in power, and the “outs” have felt persecuted and wronged by the “ins.” With regard to the FACE Act, the current Department of Justice chose to send an armed contingent to the home of Mark Houck, arresting him on a charge that comes with an 11-year prison term and $350,000 in fines. Recently, a jury found him innocent of all charges, but his life, like the life of Lysias more than two millennia ago, has been altered, and his children, witnesses to the late-night door-breaking arrest by agents in full battle gear, will be forever distrustful of the US DOJ, now used for political reasons. Could Houck echo the words that Lysias hears from the armed home intruders backed by the government that he could “still be happy” because, in the case of Houck, the DOJ, though taking his reputation, money, time, and feeling of being secure in his home, yet allowed him to have his life? Will the DOJ apologize for the heavy-handed arrest? Will any government official acknowledge vindictiveness and inappropriate behavior that unbalance the scales of justice in favor of a ruling oligarchy?


Houck was, as Lysias was, unaware that he was about to be accosted in his own home, Houck in the middle of the night and Lysias in the middle of a party. The unwarranted and heavy-handed attack ordered by the DOJ was disproportionate to the alleged crime. Houck, a pro-lifer was exercising his free speech right; in contrast, only two people who actually destroyed property belonging to pro-life agencies have been arrested, and they were so without the threat of violence shown at the Houck home.
We’ve seen the same kind of overreach by an oligarchic government in the Elián González and Waco incidents and in the use of armed forces to invade Trump’s Florida home. No such heavy-handed tactics were used at either the Biden or the Pence homes over “classified” documents.


Lysias, Houck, and others so treated are victims of the political pendulum that swings in every society professing democratic principles. Will the back-and-forth swings between oligarchy and democracy ever cease swinging? The lesson is that the pendulum will swing in the future as it swung in the deep past.




*Project Gutenberg. Online. The Orations of Lysias.

As Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw point out in Why Does E = mc^2?, a hot cup of coffee is more massive than a seemingly similar cold cup (Yes, same size cup, filled as far as one can tell to the same level). *  Hotter things (masses) are more massive when they are, in fact, “hotter.” The reason is that energy really does equal mass times the speed of light squared. The “colder” cup of coffee has lost energy, and thus, mass. Seemingly strange to our macro-world eyes, but nevertheless true.


Maybe lack of will power and diet aren’t the problem. Maybe you’re carrying more mass because you’ve allowed yourself to become enflamed by all the inflammatory rhetoric to which you subject yourself. That lack of will power and diet apply as much to your consuming anger that is as easy to come by as a Big Mac or Whopper. Everywhere you look there’s a fast-anger outlet ready to serve you a diet that increases the inflammation, not in your body, but rather in your emotions and mind. You consume the ready-made anger fashioned by short order cooks eager to get you addicted to their menus. Your actual body temperature rises with the increase in adrenalin, and you thus become more massive—just like that hot cup of coffee.


Need to lose some mass? Start consuming cooler, more cerebral messages; change the menu, lower the mass.


* 2009, Da Capo Press (Perseus Books Group). p. 145.

We’ve been warned. All those well known books by Orwell, Rand, Bradbury, Golding, Huxley, Dalcher, Eggers, Lowry, and sundry others are signposts that a sixth great extinction is at hand; it’s not the physical extinction comparable to the loss of the dinosaurs: It is, instead, the extinction of the individual. We’re on the verge of life in the canaille.


Not that life in a canaille hasn’t occurred before. In fact, every age has exhibited the press toward conformity. But like the mammals and birds that survived the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction, so individuals have survived all previous attempts to eradicate them. Individuals have survived Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and even American Public Education, which is arguably one of the greatest threats to individuality.


But the threat to individuality in the current age is slightly different; the threat is greater by an order of magnitude or more. All those books warning of 1984-like societies were hypotheses. If we follow “this path,” then we’ll end up “here.” As in bad weather reports, their prophecies were watches, not warnings, probabilities, not storms. Now the tornadoes are already on the ground, and they are sweeping ever broader paths of humanity into one swirling and chaotic mass. Think of Martian windstorms that begin with isolated dust devils merging into planet-wide haboobs. Look around, the storms that mix earth and sky envelope us: Mob action has increased, not diminished with the rise of cyber-connectedness. Populations separated by geography are joined across a virtual world, a flatland of sameness. We’re becoming ONE; individualism is fast dying. Extinction is at hand.


Hyperbole? Maybe. But think of the rise in globalism in recent decades, a oneness of belief in climate change that will ruin economies, in socialism as a panacea, in universal policies affecting almost every aspect of life, in identity politics that wear the aegis of equity, and in unified talking points broadcast 24/7 coupled with censorship that stifles all opposition.


No doubt you are saying, “Not me. I’ll survive. I’ll maintain my individuality through the extinction event. My legacy will be individuality passed on to intellectual descendants. I will bequeath a heritage of independent thought to all who come after me.” Maybe. But to be truly “individual” you’ll need perseverance that so many around you do not have.


All those authors that foreshadowed the coming extinction of individualism warned us. Look around. Look over the likeminded crowds, over the canaille. You might be hard pressed to find someone who heeded their warnings.

Daaaa—daaaaa^—daaaaaaa^—dadaaaaa—BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOMmm


Used by Kubrick in his film version of Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Strauss’s fanfare to Also Sprach Zarathustra begins quietly with what sounds like a machine humming and progresses through a crescendo capped by powerful vibrations of the tympani. The musical piece builds to a powerful end and a switch to chords on an organ. It’s rather glorious, so Kubrick couples it with the appearance of the Star Child, the next stage in human evolution.


Unfortunately, real life isn’t like that—or, at least it isn’t very much like that very often. Take the Russian invasion of Ukraine as an example. Putin envisioned his military moving quickly into Kyiv to meet a crescendo of cheers from Ukrainians. Instead, and unlike Strauss’s music, he found not a triumphant BOOM,BOOM,BOOM…, not a fanfare of joy or triumph but a muddy slog, slog, slog. The Russians have had a rough go in Ukraine, where they have lost tens of thousands—if not more than 100,000— of their youth to injury, death, and desertion. Not very glorious. So far, Putin hasn’t had his Thus Spoke Zarathustra moment.


It’s difficult for us humans to live through any prolonged experience at the level of Strauss’s opening section. Even Strauss couldn’t maintain the intensity. In fact, the rest of Also Sprach Zarathustra is rather soapy in my opinion, very much fin de siècle: The fanfare heralding the promise of the coming twentieth century, automobiles, airplanes, and spaceships, but the end of the music looking back to the all-too-fast rise of industrial urban centers smoggy and dirty, built on laborers with dull lives living in rather squalid apartment blocks. Is there a lesson in Strauss's work? Is there a parallel in the history of the 120-plus years since he composed it? 


Maybe most ambitious undertakings begin like Strauss’s work, all fanfare and promise of glory. Certainly, Hitler began with a glorious entrance into Austria, in taking the Sudetenland, and in crushing Poland. But then the long-term realities of war occurred, muddy slogs and the counterattacks of the Allies, the bleeding-white of a generation of youth, the betrayals and losses. The triumphant BOOM BOOM of the beginning attacks by Hitler on perceived enemies turning into the BOOM BOOM of the ending attacks that destroyed Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin. And after the war? The slog, the same question: “How did we begin with so much promise of glory for the Motherland (or Fatherland), and end with so much loss?” 


Putin grew up in an age of music designed to extoll the glory of the Soviet Union. Maybe he should have listened to Strauss to know that a glorious ambition and fanfare often ends in a progression toward the kind of unmoving trench warfare he finds his troops in one year after the invasion. And the losses of tens to over 100,000 soldiers? Is Putin the latest incarnation of Erich von Falkenhayn, the German general who sent many to their deaths in a battle of attrition that had hundreds of thousands of casualties and that resulted in nothing but loss, 143,000 dead Germans and 163,000 dead French. And Verdun, that place of such death? It wasn't strategic, it didn't have gold and precious metals; it was just a place where needless loss of life was the only accomplishment. 

To what avail? All those rockets and shells, all those bullets and drones, and all those dead who will never hear any glorious fanfare. All the promise of a fanfare, but none of the evolution to a Star Child, the war will simply be more of the same, more human suffering that ends a false promise and a blind ambition. 

Daaaa—daaaaa^—daaaaaaa^—dadaaaaa—BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOM,BOOMmm *
 
*See YouTube for several versions. Strauss's fanfare without the rest of the composition is online under the piece's title and is performed by Berliner Philharmoniker under the direction of Gustavo Dudamel. Fanfares always leave the audience wanting more. For another fanfare, listen to versions of Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, a work that also employs tympani and brass.

Keep this in mind: What you anticipate is rarely a problem. Come on, say it with me, "What you anticipate is rarely a problem." Let's make it personal: "What I anticipate will rarely be a problem." Say it every morning. Say it before every event for which you are responsible. 

Would that someone in the US government, NATO, and Ukraine had known that a year ago before Russia invaded.

Would that Europeans and Russians had known that before Hitler invaded, the Chinese before Japan invaded, the Americans before Japan attacked.

Would that someone in the US government had known that before the withdrawal from Afghanistan and previously before the withdrawal from Vietnam. In fact, would that someone had known that before beginning those wars or before executing them in an unwinnable or ineffective manner.  

Would that someone in the US government had known that before COVID spread, most likely from a lab partly supported by American taxes.

Would that city politicians had known that before agreeing to defund police departments in a policy that has led to increased crime, loss of life, and loss of businesses.

Would that Seattle had known that before the morgue ran out of room because of fentanyl deaths; would that states where drug overdoses have increased would have known that before legalizing drugs now readily available to younger and younger victims. 

Would that someone in the US government, state governments, and educational institutions had known that before closing schools to the least vulnerable to COVID, forcing them to lose a year or more of learning.

Would that someone in businesses and entertainment that lost money had known that before Woke policies repulsed many of their potential customers.

Would that policy makers would learn that lesson before they force people into accepting special agendas. 

And, of course, would that I, as I advise you above, keep it in mind before I fail to anticipate a problem.

In the epilogue of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero says:


    As you from crimes would pardoned be,
    Let your indulgence set me free.


Could there be more appropriate lines for any age driven by political contention and biased justice? That, by the way, would be any age, any century, maybe going all the way back to Karahan Tepe and Göbekli Tepe thousands of years before Druids built Stonehenge.


This current kerfuffle over classified documents found first in President Trump’s home and then in multiple places associated with President Biden, including his garage, brings Prospero’s statement to relevance. Those who were in favor of prosecuting Trump now find themselves stammering excuses for Biden’s multiple classified document offenses. Those who see Trump as victim of a DOJ/FBI-driven injustice voice Prospero’s plea. “Look, if you are going to pardon or excuse Biden, you should in the name of blind justice, also pardon or excuse Trump, especially in light of Biden’s having documents that date to his time as senator and VP."


It’s that “what goes around, comes around” malady that humans have probably faced since those ancient cities were built. It’s a tempest in every teapot, maybe as much a tempest as brewed in the Teapot Dome Scandal during the Harding Administration which, by the way, might be an appropriate reference in light of the Biden Administration's selling off some of the nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a foreign entity with pervious ties to Hunter Biden and then buying replacement oil at a higher price.


Back and forth, changing governments mean changing rules of accountability. Back and forth, changing governments mean different applications of justice. We might not be able to stop the pendulum swings of justice in government, but we might learn a lesson here about hypocritically condemning others for the same offenses we commit.


    As you from crimes would pardoned be,
    Let your indulgence set me free.

Let’s start with Putin’s war against Ukraine. Whatever his motives, his consequence might last a millennium. What consequence? Why, the consequence of a stewing hatred, one that will divide Slavs from Slavs, Ukrainians from Russians. Generations from now, regardless of the outcome of the war, descendants of today’s Ukrainians will harbor ill feelings toward Russians, even though neither tomorrow’s Ukrainians nor tomorrow's Russians will have had anything to do with the past.


Or, take the persistent conflict in the Middle East. The emotions today were generated in power struggles long gone, the original antagonists long dead. Or take the antisemitism of Europeans from  ancient to modern times. Was Christ’s hanging on a cross one of those moments buried in the heritage of Christians that made them anti-Jew? Was Joseph ben Caiaphas yesteryear’s Putin? Did he set in motion the judgments of the ensuing two millennia, judgments that we see today?


Much of what each one of us is lies deeply rooted, sometimes so deeply rooted that we are unaware of the connections between today’s leaves and yesterday’s roots. How many of your judgments belong to eras long gone? Are you, in effect, today’s equivalent of tomorrow’s Ukrainians?


Along the path that led to your present lay numerous Putins and Caiaphases, some known, but many unknown. You, a leaf on the twenty-first century tree, grew on a branch that emerged seemingly recently, but that is an offshoot of a very old tree. The winds that shake you are frequently the same winds that shook your known and unknown cultural ancestors. The inheritance they left you was attitude, prejudice, and preference.


About ten years after the attack that led to American involvement in Afghanistan, a reporter asked some young Taliban fighters what they knew about 9/11. They hadn’t heard of it. The very reason they were fighting was buried in a past only a decade deep. Some, maybe all of them, might since then have lost their lives in fighting for…


Maybe tree leaf is the wrong metaphor; maybe grass blade is better. Those rhizomes that creep beneath the surface emerge where and when opportunity affords new growth. To what cultural rhizomes are you connected? Discover that, and you’ll see you aren’t as “modern” as you think, not as independent as you wish, and not as rational as you pretend.

​Rocker Talks to AG Garland


Rocker: So, AG, what’s going on with this classified document stuff found in the Biden home, garage, and “think tank”? What’s up with that, man?


AG: I cannot discuss matters that we might have under consideration.


Rocker: “Under consideration?” C’mon, man. Don’t you mean “under investigation”? Shouldn’t the Justice Department be open, be transparent, be as blind as that statue with the balance? And what’s with that raid by armed agents on a former President’s home that was guarded by the Secret Service, a raid that was leaked to the Press, a raid for documents that were in a locked room surrounded by those Secret Service agents?


AG: I never opened myself this way…All these words, I don’t just say. And nothing else matters. *


Rocker: Trust I seek. Do I find it in you? Gimme some sign you are trustworthy and nothing else matters.


AG: You should be forever trusting who we are. No, nothing else matters.


Rocker: You know, as a rocker, my focus has been my music. Life is ours; we live it our way. With regard to politicians, well, I never cared for what they do; never cared for what they know. Music, I thought, and nothing else matters. But now that I’m a little older, I think I’m beginning to care for what they do, about what they know. C’mon man, lay it on me. What’s going on with this classified document stuff in an unguarded garage and house. Today I heard that more documents turned up in Biden’s home, his unsecured home.


AG: I just want to say that you should be forever trusting who we are, you should know that we have America’s best interest at heart; in fact, it couldn’t be much more from the heart. And nothing else matters.


Rocker: But this stuff does matter, man. Every day for us something new, some new revelation. And on top of that, now we learn that the Justice Department not only knew about and withheld the information about the documents before the last election, but it allowed lawyers without classification clearance to handle the documents. You want to tell me that nothing else matters?


AG: We treat these matters seriously. And I mean that they couldn’t be much more from the heart.


Rocker: So I never cared for the games they play, never cared for what they do, but now all this trust is lost in you. And nothing else matters.


* “Nothing Else Matters”—Metallica
So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters
Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words, I don't just say
And nothing else matters
Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters
Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know
So close, no matter how far
It couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters
Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know
I never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words, I don't just say
And nothing else matters
Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters
Never cared for what they say
Never cared for games they play
Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
And I know, yeah, yeah
So close, no matter how far
Couldn't be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No, nothing else matters
Source: Musixmatch
Songwriters: James Alan Hetfield / Lars Ulrich


See the original by Metallica and many versions by various musicians and groups on YouTube.

Should you care about our oceans boiling away? Al Gore thinks you should not only care but you should also do something to prevent its happening.


Sorry to say, “I ain’t worried.” And I don’t worry because they won’t. As the Sun turns from an average star into a red giant about four or five billion years hence, it will engulf the planet. Being inside the Sun? Now, that’ll change climates and boil oceans! But right now? No, I ain’t worried.


Yes, coral reefs might die out—bleached as their zooxanthellae die in warmer waters—but they won’t necessarily go extinct; when higher latitude waters warm sufficiently to support coral growth, the polyps will thrive outside their current tropical range. Maybe the American Bight will house a new Great Barrier Reef off the Outer Banks. Imagine. Turquoise waters and carbonate sands lining the littoral zone of North Carolina. Scuba divers galore, bigger mansions on the beach, and glass-bottom boat tours for the swimming-challenged.


Al Gore delivered his recent tirade about inaction over climate change and about “boiling” oceans in Davos at the World Economic Forum. A bunch of people attended, in fact, so many attended that they needed more than 1,000 private flights to reach the conference. Those planes spewed emissions equivalent to emissions from 350,000 cars, according to Greenpeace. If people can’t see the hypocrisy of the attendees and the attendees of conferees at COP meetings in exotic places, then they are probably the attendees themselves. Just about everyone else notes the folly of flying to fun places to admonish the rest of us paeans who are guilty of crimes against the planet. “What do you mean,” confesses a paean, “all I did was drive the family to the shore for a week’s vacation”? To which Al replies, “Don’t you realize that the trip endangered all of us? Endangered the polar bears? Boiled the oceans?”


Al Gore’s hyperbole was delivered with the skill of a melodramatic actor. He was loud enough to project his voice to the back of an outdoor amphitheater in ancient Greece. The ancient comedic playwright  Aristophanes could have used his talent. Gore, one of the elite boulai at Davos, employed hyperbole as an effective rhetorical mechanism that works when listeners are already emotionally involved. Unfortunately for Al, many of us aren’t so emotionally wrapped up in the urgency he proclaims. Maybe Gore should read Aristophanes’ The Knights, Acharnians, and The Frogs to discover the fate of the demagogue Hyperbolus.


With a little imagination, one can find parallels between Hyperbolus and Al Gore. Both can be accused of demagoguery. Derived from “people” (demos) and “leader” (agogos or agein, “to lead”), demagoguery implies manipulation, high emotion, and hyperbolic expression. That speech of Gore in Davos was demagoguery.


But as Hyperbolus discovered upon being ostracized, the “people” can take only so much demagoguery. Sure, the demagogue will get people’s undies bunched up for awhile, but eventually, bunched undies become uncomfortable even for the throng wearing biodegradable thongs. The only recourse demagogues have is more demagoguery and more hyperbole. Gore has become more shrill and has been joined by demonstrators equally as shrill and foolish. Ruining a famous painting does nothing for the environment and nothing to convince the “average” family to stay at home instead of going to the beach.


The “rain bombs” and boiling oceans Al Gore cites as evidence of climate change really aren’t new in the planet’s history. Records of floods go back many centuries, and, if we could go back to pre-human times, back millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions of years. Waters have warmed and cooled—once so cooled that much or all of the planet looked like Pluto. Continents have moved, oceans have spread wide and subsequently closed, currents have shifted, the orbit has reshaped itself, the planet’s poles have “wandered,” and the Sun has increased and decreased its radiation of the planet. And by the way, the composition of the atmosphere has changed, also.


Hyperbolus-Gore nothwithstanding, the atmosphere does seem to have warmed a bit since the fright of a “new” ice age that kicked off the practice of Earth Day. Warming might be good for some people in some places and bad for other people in other places.  The histories of Viking expeditions during the Medieval Warm Period, pre-Columbian Mayan droughts, European Little Ice Age, and ancient flooding indicate that environments change even in the short term of days, to years, to hundreds of years.


Al is convinced that we’re headed for doom. Many in his retinue are also convinced of that scenario, and their undies are tightly bunched. So, they want us to spend our wealth keeping ourselves from being wealthy and healthy. They want us not to have what they have. What would happen to the planet, they worry, if we could all jet off to Davos to scream the way they do about how destructive humans are?


So just as there will be successive COP meetings, so the World Economic Forum will continue to meet, continue to fly in the wealthiest among us to some place like Davos instead of meeting by Zoom on their personal big smart TVs in their many-roomed mansions. They will fault us for what they do on an order of magnitude greater. You drive your little car; they fly their planes and sport about in SUVs and sports cars. You use a little electricity. They use enough to run a town.


And they preach and demagogue, all in melodramatic hyperbole. Time to run them out of town as the Athenians did to Hyperbolus. Time to tell them to lead by action and not by blaming us for what they do on economic steroids. But, of course, the people of Davos wouldn’t run them out of town. Their wealth helps keep the lights on. Their wealth makes the valley a successful tourist trap.


“Look Al, if you’re really serious, go home, dim the lights, and give us a call. Maybe we’ll listen to a rational talk backed by rational and productive action that doesn’t bankrupt the world and cast those who want what you have into a new Dark Age of poverty. Otherwise, just shut up. Most of us have unbunched and untwisted our undies after repeated unfilled predictions of dire consequences like “only eight years left,” “by 2020 the seas will destroy the cities,” “all the glaciers on Greenland and in the Himalayas will melt,” and other such erroneous prophecies. If sea level rises as it has been rising for the last 10,000 years, recognize that it’s our personal choice to build by the shore like Obama, who owns not one, but two seaside homes. But please, Al, no more conferences with happy conferees eating, drinking, and merry-making while decrying the wickedness of people who want what you have. Just shut up. We’ll pay the consequences of living where Nature deals occasional bad hands. Life on this planet is always a gamble. By the way, how many of your Davos colleagues visited Graubunden’s casino during the evenings of the conference? Nothing like a resort town’s amenities to fill the needs of the rich and powerful! Nothing like meeting in a heated building below alpine slopes covered in snow!”    

I regret that I didn’t put more effort into learning Latin. English, rudimentarily a Germanic language, evolved under the influence of the ancient Romans and the medieval Church, the latter the repository of the “dead” language I had to study as a freshman in high school. In fact, I didn’t spend the effort I should have spent in the subsequent years of Latin classes. But years later the Latin I did learn still sticks with me, especially when I search through the etymologies of English words. I also regret not keeping up with what I learned in a graduate course on Old English, that is, Anglo-Saxon. But, again, these many years later some of what I learned remains in those memory cells.


Two nouns and two verbs come mind in the context of what appears to be happening in Virginia school districts. The first is educator, a word that retains its Latin form educator (m.) and eudcatrix (f.), which are cognates of the Latin verb educere,  “to lead out” or “to lead away from” (e, or ex, meaning “from,” “away from” plus ducere, “to lead”). Educere, like so many other words, had shades of meaning, but suffice it here to say that for the Romans it meant to rear a child both physically and mentally. That ducere had the prefix e is significant. “Lead out of what?” we might ask. I surmise the answer is ignorance.



The second noun and cognate verb that come to mind are teacher, which derives from the Anglo-Saxon tacen, or guidepost, and teach, (from taecen). And here is where those nouns and verbs merge: Teachers, as the etymology reveals, are guides who lead students out of ignorance. They point the way.


But which way? And that brings me back to Virginia’s agenda-driven educational perspective and practice. Apparently, under the influence of the national teachers’ union,   what had been a “leading out” became a “leading into.” The leading into being some limited sense of the world, one in which “equity,” “fairness,” and “social justice” prevail to the exclusion of “merit,” “success,” and “free thought.” And along the path of inward-pointing guideposts, lies guilt—not personal guilt, but guilt for those who came long before, guilt for the thinking and actions of ancestors both known and unknown, guilt imposed on youth ignorant of their ignorance.


While I’m about it, I feel obligated to mention docent, a term used for a museum “guide,” and for a university professor. That word derives from docere, the Latin for “to teach.” It is in the context of these agenda-driven educators also the root of indoctrination, a process that has in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries led to the rise of socialism among other ideologies. Of course, the charge of indoctrination could be leveled at any group with any ideology, from Jehovah’s witnesses, to the Roman Catholic Church, to ISIS. Nevertheless and in spite of any group’s “leading into” an ideology, behavior, or belief, there does seem to be a rather obvious Leftist indoctrination in today’s institutions of higher education. As one who taught in a university, I can say anecdotally that many of my colleagues in the liberal arts seemed to espouse a Left-leaning view of the world that was, ironically, less “liberal” than it was “conforming.” That many of my colleagues were self-proclaimed elites was also ironic, since elite derives from eligere, “to pick out,” “to elect.” The hubris of humanity! Individuals and groups “electing” themselves! But before I am accused of hypocrisy, I’ll say that the nature of university life lends itself to self-apotheosis (Greek apotheoun, “deification”); so, I had to struggle at times to prevent my own thinking that I lived on an intellectual Olympus. Oh! Humility. How hard to find and harder to keep, especially in academia, where a whole class of people, the student body, depends on the whims and will of the elect.    


Thus, all the politically correct positions in education amount to a reversal of teachers’ roles in the lives of their students. Those whose original mission was to “lead out of” ignorance found themselves in an elect position with the rise of formal education, and they began a tradition of intellectual elitism that subsequently became a submission to an agenda of inward looking ideas and enforced limitations. Think this way—or else. Walk this way—or else.


Each of us has followed some “guidepost(s)” along the potential paths of life—“paths” because there are more than we can individually walk. Each of us can look back to those signposts that directed us to the present and those, to use Robert Frost’s famous words, that pointed to paths we had “not taken.” Maybe a fortunate few still encounter a tacen that points the way out of ignorance. However, for many in both lower and higher education, the signposts all seem to have the same message, a message that must be followed but that points no individual to a separate and free path out of ignorance.