I love the Mike Judge film Idiocracy. An Army guy who is fairly dumb by today's standards takes part in an experiment that accidentally keeps him asleep for five hundred years and when he wakes up, he's the smartest guy on Earth because the stupid have had more children than the intelligent.
It's a very funny film ... but the humour is starting to become hollow for me.
I'm being victimized at work. I suspect it's because the men, mostly, I work with are too thick to get another job - my excuse is that I'm too old. Certainly they are crude, and at least one of the younger ones, I suspect, cannot read. And there's the problem: I like to take a book in with me and, well, read it - the job I do tends to have extended quiet bits between the actual work we do. I've had one book with the pages glued together and another with obscenities written in the back of it; I've had pills stolen out of my bag. It's not encouraging that, I suspect, the glue and pills incident was committed by one of the supervisors.
I haven't always worked among people quite so obviously thick, but I have always found that reading a book makes some people nervous and irritated. Why, I've never quite understood, but I now think it is because they are so thick, and feel threatened, somehow, by something and someone they can't understand.
This is part of a larger prejudice against education. Many, many years ago I first encountered that sneering, insulting phrase, "Those who can, do, those who can't, teach." I recently joined a Facebook group against high fuel prices, and saw a post from the organizer telling members not to criticize each others' spelling and grammar, dismissing as 'headmasters' those who can read and write and take notice of a spellchecker.
Something else occurred to me recently on this subject, too. I've seen two other films that I quite like, both biopics of popular singers - Ian Dury and Johnny Cash. If you believed the films, both of these guys were ordinary working-class Joes with no particular academic skills, who made it big through passion and luck. Not so, faplaps: both Dury and Cash were academic college boys. Why do the films edit these bits out? Presumably because we can't let anyone get the impression that our popular musical hardmen are academic pussies.
This is one of the many reasons why I know TWOP has to succeed, and True Democracy has to happen. It's not because I too am a headmaster; it's because we run the risk of allowing our society to splinter along yet another line, that between the educated and the uneducated. It is not that I think we all have to have some sort of pompous 'minimum standard of education' - it's that if we can't use our own language properly, and express our ideas clearly to each other, how the hell can we communicate at all?
And I don't think this is important just because I seem to be on the receiving end of hostility from the thick ... but that doesn't help, let me tell you.
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