Archive for January 12th, 2006
The Point Is …
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 01/12/2006
In the last article I went round and round and didn’t get to the point.
This blog format is good because it puts the conclusions on top.
What I am advocating, my intellectual dream world, would be where people like you would realize who you are.
You are not some tiny elite of people who CAN be what you are. You are a tiny elite of people who want OTHERS to be what you are. There are millions of people you ache to teach if they would listen.
Take farriers, for instance.
The average farrier maker of horseshoes is, as Elizabeth pointed out, also a maker or medically correctional horseshoes. This is NOT unskilled labor.
But the range of farriers is very wide, as Elizabeth is well aware.
Too many farriers are bored drunks.
Elizabeth or I could give you some stories on that, and E is welcome to do so if she remembers any.
It’s been a long time.
But I could tell after a few minute’s conversation whether a farrier was in our intellectual class, and some of them are. You and I are not looking for some etherial, exclusive group that calls itself “intellectual.”
We are looking for people who can think and say what they are thinking.
And we want to make them do so.
In my ideal world the person who can THINK would despise those who get paid for commenting and professoring. If they claimed expertise he would demand RESULTS. If they are getting a salary, he would demand to know why he couldn’t get that salary for memorizing the same predictable crap.
You can GET a job as a farrier by showing that you have been in the field for years.
But you can’t KEEP a job as farrier unless you make good horseshoes.
Why in God’s name can’t farriers apply the same rule to the people they pay to be professors or commentators or experts in other fields?
What we desperately need in this country is some good solid VOCATIONAL self-righteousness.
“What have you done for me LATELY?”
That’s the ticket!
I Am not Your Average Braggart
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 01/12/2006
If you will look carefully at the articles below, you will find I am doing a lot more than mere bragging.
I am saying that I am so truly educated that people who make a point of “education” are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.
I am saying that I am so truly sophisticated that people who make a point of “sophisticated” are so low that I am desperate to disassociate myself from them.
And so forth.
I am saying that, in order for me to accept you as an intellectual equal, you have to share my complete contempt for what passed as respectability and education and sophistication.
This is one hell of requirement.
It would astonish a working man who has spent his entire life being put down by people with degrees that he has already passed all these tests after a few minutes of conversation with me.
Does this strike anybody as modesty?
IN MY OPINION anybody I encourage to comment should recognize that he has received a compliment that is unavilable anywhere else.
So now let me explain again the best compliments I ever received.
I had organized a joint march in Washington, DC against the education establishment of those protesting racial busing in South Boston and Louisville and other places and those protesting offensive textbooks in West Virginia. THOUSANDS of WORKING people had chartered buses AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE to come to Washington to join the march.
If you understood reality, which nobody but Ole Bob does, there has never been anything like it except the Million Man March.
The Million Man March was also done at the personal expense of the black men who participated in it. I will never quite forgive myself for having criticized it at the time. I of all people should have known what it meant to the people in it.
Compared to these phenomena, my march and the Million Man March, all the other Washington demonstration were nothing.
Bored college students or liberal blacks descending on Washington by the hundreds of thousands is no great surprise. They have plenty of time and plenty of money is provided for them.
In the two demonstrations I describe, every single person made a real personal sacrfice for something that was routine on campus, a political protest, but is outside the ken of people who work for a living.
Not to mention the time I got independent truck drivers to stop all the traffic in Washington, DC and a few other incidents.
I call myself a redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina, but my modesty is a bit limited.
I’m just so subtle you never notice it.
So I expect you to take my compliments very, very seriously.
How do the words, “They are sinking in a swamp and we are looking down on them from a tower” strike you as being subtle.
That is the reality.
As to what I gloried in as compliments, during the joint march against the education establishment described above, I happened to be walking up just as a couple of West Virginia coal miners who had paid their way to the march were talking to lady from South Boston.
The South Boston anti-busing movement was huge. So there was a lot of debate about who would speak for them at the press conference I had arranged.
As I walked up, nobody noticed me. One of the coal miners said, “Well, Whitaker speaks for us and he’s not even a hick.”
Coal miners are not the most trusting of people. For him to say offhand that it never occurred to him that anybody but Whitaker would speak for his crowd was a compliment I cannot replicate.
In top secret clearances, one of the incidents I have had to explain was when a Ku Klux Klan put thousands of dollars into my checking account about 1961.
That caused me a LOT of trouble, but I do remember one moment when I wished it hadn’t happened.
Before Joe lynches me for too long an article, I’ll end this one and explain the entire situation in another.
To wind up my point here, one should judge compliments by quality not quantity.
I am not free with them, and I hope some of you value the one I give you here.
The Truth is no Excuse
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, How Things Work on 01/12/2006
I said in the article below that I am sure that the absolutely unique “loophole” by which I entered the University of South Carolina has since been closed.
That “loophole” was even unique in 1957. As I said, there was an article in TIME magazine about it.
The loophole I refer to was the fact that, even if you had never been to school in your life, if you could prove that you knew more than three-quarters of the high school graduates taking the college entrance exam inthe United States, you were automatically qualified to enter the University of South Carolina.
As TIME magazine made it clear, our USC was the only university in America that had that “loophole.”
If you knew what you needed to know, only our USC in the all the land would let you go to college.
Since then the University of South Carolina has integrated and gotten rid of all such provincial ideas.
Henry Clay is generally admitted to have been a terrific lawyer. Whatever you may say about Huey Long, his legal ability is not in question.
Henry Clay became a lawyer by passing the bar exam, and nothing else.
Huey Long studied for five months on his own and passsed the legal exam.
My father, who became an engineer, studied and passed the legal exam just for fun.
Many law school graduates have to take that exam more than once. Some never pass it.
One lawyer I know moved from, I think it was, Oklahoma to Colorado. He got a good job in Colorado on the basis of twenty years of great success in the legal profession.
But he ran into a problem that, while it may amuse you, did not amuse HIM.
In Oklahoma he had been allowed to go to law school with only two years of pre-law study in college. In Wyoming you had to have three, and today you have to have full degree.
In order ot practice law in Colorado, he had to agree to go back to college for another year, and that was a special exception.
So now let us examine the word “education.”
Nothing is made more clear than actual education has nothing to do with this process. The way I got into our USC is now banned as a “loophole” because I had an education but no degree. My lawyer friend was a highly successful lawyer. He had long since demonstrated a complete legal education.
Henry Clay and Huey Long and even my father knew their law, but that was no excuse to let them practice law.
In 1986, in the The Crown Versus Joseph Pearson, a British court sentenced Pearson to a year in prison because he had violated the Hate Law. The court freely admitted that every word Pearson had said was true. But, they said,
“The truth is no excuse.”
In Austria today, David Irving is facing a twenty-year sentence for saying that too few Jews died in the Holocaust.
He cannot defend himself by proving that his thesis is true.
The truth is no excuse.
So I went to college by proving that I was an educated man. People who can prove a terrific legal education are not legally educated.
The truth is no excuse.
In This Graduate Seminar, Degrees Are Tolerated
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 01/12/2006
This article is part of a series generated by CL giving me hell, making me think, Derek’s having a revelation as a result and my series of replies to all this mental activity.
In the piece below I happened to mention that a person with a degree is immunized from learning anything from anybody WITHOUT a degree.
This graduate seminar is for people who have OUTGROWN their college indoctrination. A college degree is not necessarily a minus — I have one so I can’t cast stones — but you have to prove you can think DESPITE it.
All the log cabin crap aside, I honestly find that the average skilled working man with a good brain starts ahead in the race to qualify here.
At Mensa meetings, I hear, there are a lot of working people. There would be a lot more if working people actually thought of joining, but most of them don’t know that Mensa is and don’t care.
FYI: Mensa is an organization of people who score above 130 on an IQ test. It used to be higher, but that kept the dues payments down.
The fact that there are so many working people in Mensa, despite the fact that very few working people even know it exists, is often mentioned
But absolutely nobody says it might point up some flaw in our education system.
When I was flunking our of high school the teachers were very grateful to me. Each year there were what was something called the National High School Cooperative Exams which we all took. The NHSCE were limited to a few schools, among them Columbia High School which I attended.
The National High School Cooperative Exams compared students in courses nationwide in what they KNEW about the subjects they were studying. Southern teachers always preached the doctrined that Southern education was hopelessly inferior to Northern teaching in general, but they wanted THEIR OWN students to do well on those exams.
I never got less the ninety-fifth percentile in the national rankings of what I knew about the subjects I was taking. I broke nienty-nine percent a number of times. This made my teachers look good to the Northern teachers they worshipped.
My teachers expressed their gratitude to me more than once, which was good of them.
But they kept giving me C’s and D’s in those same courses.
It never OCURRED to them that since I knoew the subject there might be a problem with their grading methods.
I might add that such a thought not only never occurred to them. It never occurred to them that it SHOULD occur to them.
It turned out that the University of South Carolina, because of the number of veterans who had never been to school, had a unique rule. Then as now, South Carolina had the highest percentage of military veterans of any state in the Union.
So if you took the National Comprehensive College Examinations, which are now called the SAT’s, and you scored in the top quarter of the NATIONAL rankings, you could enter the University of South Carolina if you had never SEEN a school before.
TIME magazine had an article back then about a young female dancer who entered our USC at age fourteen.
To repeat, the University of South Carolina was the ONLY college in America that had that loophole, and I am sure it has been closed since.
So, since I was flunking out of high school, that exam was my only recourse. My brother had entered USC at the age of fifteen. If he had gone to summer school he would have been still been fourteen.
I took the exam at age sixteen.
Not only did I make in the top quarter of the national ratings of high school gradautes in the exame, people who were at least two years older than I was, I outdid many of the straight A students.
I know this because when I registered and went to the Dean of Students for his signature, he actually raved about the high level I had scored.
Just as my high school teachers had done.
If I had not been in the benighted state of South Carolina, I would have been one of those people who flunked out of high school and who qualify for Mensa.
So if you DO have a college degree, you are welcome here. But only if you prove you’ve outgrown the damned thing.
Sex Education
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session, Comment Responses on 01/12/2006
As Peter says in the article named “Peter” below, it is amazing where your mind goes when you are in a company which is exchanging real thoughts.
A mind is indeed a terrible thing to waste, and when you don’t think and express your thoughts here you are wasting mine.
So doing the last article directly below this one made me start thinking about a true Whitakerism.
As I say, a True Whitakerism comes from thinking about a point that is so overwhelmingly obvious thatno one else ever gives it any thought.
The theory behind Sex Education is that if children know all about sex at an early age, they will be able to handle it better. Sex Education is said to be the solution to our spiraling rates of rape and illegitimacy.
It finally occurred to me that there IS a population in America that knows all about sex and have practiced it almost since the day they were physically capable of doing so.
This population consists of the vast majority of what we call “African-Americans.”
It must be worth getting bused all the way across town for the average black kid to hear some sex education teacher theorize about sex.
I remember when I worked in a prison that a major source of amusement was the Prison Psychologist.
This guy had a master’s degree and he honestly believed that prisoners were nice people trapped by the System.
So he believed every word they said.
Prisoners would go see the psychiatrist just to tell people everybody, including me, about the what this guy actually BELIEVED.
Another Whitakerism: prisoners who have commited violent crimes also tend to LIE.
There’s not a lot to do in prison. So prisoners would think about what to tell the prison psychologist taht would make a good story.
One trip to the psychologist after the prisoner had come up with some things nobody could possibly listen to without laughing and dropping on the terminally sympathetic psychologist gave the rest of the population a great laugh for days.
Prisoners would COMPETE to seeif there were any limits to this guy’s credulity.
So the ghetto kids being bused home from a Sex Education class must have laughed their backsides off after Sex Education. The teacher with all the degrees could have learned a lot from them, but of course people with degrees are immunized against learning anything from anybody.
Naturally if the theory of sex education is true, the African-American population would already have solved the problems of rape and illegitimacy.
The prison psychologist and the sex education specialist probably have some statistics that prove they have.
Sex, Rednecks and Hicks
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 01/12/2006
Some critic once wrote of a book:
“Some of it is true and some of it is new. ”
“Unforunately nothing new in it is true and nothing true in it is new.”
“I’d give it a miss.”
My knowledge of sex falls into the exact same category. What I know that is new about sex can be comfortably fitted into a matchbox with the matches still in it, but what I know is NOT true about sex would fill volumes.
But my main job in this blog is to express exactly what you are thinking and to amuse you while doing it.
I expect my discussion of sex to do exactly that.
My whole life has been spent building up a total contempt for people who are trying desperately to be “sophisticated.” Hick, redneck, ANYTHING is better than being accused of trying to be one of those pathetic little self-styled sophisticates the Southern white suburbs and country clubs are so infested with.
By the same token, I have steadily built up a truly militant contempt for guys who talk about how sexually sophisticated they are.
Naturally I have made up a joke that goes with this particular bit of tired contempt:
“From my conversation with other men, I have concluded that I am the only heterosexual male who did not lose his virginity before he lost his umbilical cord.”
Men who are secure in their manhood don’t brag about sex. The ones who do are the ones who do the talking, so my joke is very nearly true.
Every time guys start talking about sex, they say they not only lost their virginity before the rest of us reached puberty, but the girl they did it with said they were better than any man she had ever lain with.
The adult males in the room remain quiet, but another guy of this sort then pipes up and claims he lost his virginity even earlier and did it better.
The original speaker is then reminded of an earlier incident.
And so it goes, down to the umbilical cord bit.
If I am ever more or less forced to make a remark by somebody saying he saw me with some attractive girl and I probably started early with my gift of gab, I have a standard reply:
“No, I was a late bloomer. I did it late and I did it badly.”
This is the exact equivalent of my reply to some “sophisticate” who indicates that I am a fellow sophisticate. When I reply that, under all my education, I am still a redneck from Pontiac, South Carolina.
It is an expression of bored contempt.
Nothing is a grosser insult than some sex-braggger including me as one of his fellow sex-braggarts or some pitiful little aspirant to “sophistication” counting me among his kin. But I try to react kindly by a self-deprecating joke instead of breaking into the physical violence I would like to commit on him.
Hciks, Rednecks and Our Graduate Seminar
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 01/12/2006
This is the first graduate seminar in history in which the professor has explained why he calls himself a hick and a redneck.
I did that in the article below, which is repeated here because I inserted it, along with my explanation, into the Townhall (main) section of Stormfront. In doing so I explain once again exactly what my commenters in “Bob’s Blog” are expected to do for me by way of nonmonetary tuition fees:
In Stormfront TH:
There was some discussion among my commenters, who are really making me hop, about my constant reference to myself as a rednecka nd a hick.
That discussion made me think the question in a complete way that no man can do on his own.
Here is what I came up with:
From Bob’s Blog:
In response to my article “CL,” Don says,
“I like the hick bit. I like that fact that hicks can have more common sense and be more in touch with reality than a thousand social scientists (ha ha, what a joke, these idiots think that by using this word that can take avantage of the cachet attached to real scientists) combined. long live hicks.”
“Having said that, what is a hick anyway?”
At the far end of Long Island away from from New York City is a city called Hicksville. The island of Long Island is larger that the state of Rhode Island and so Hicksville was a long way from New York until fairly recently. Long Island was in fact mostly farm country, so Hicksville was very much a country town.
On one end of Long Island you were in New York City. On the other end you were a hick, which I suppose is a hortened form of hickvillian or something similar.
This endeth the etymological lecture for today.
I call myself a hick for the same reason I called myself a Methodist when that was still a church. The word “Methodist” was a term of abuse invented by Wesley’s enemies. But I don’t know what the church was called before because Methodists were so proud of the condemnation that they adoped it as their official name very early on.
You know tht “Yankee Doodle” was written by a Britisher to make fun of Americans and it was quickly adopted as the official song of the Revolution. The term “Baptist” was originally a word invented by people making fun of the insistence on full immersion at baptism.
If you ask a Baptist minister or a Methodist ministger what the name of his church was before it adopted the term of abuse as a matter of pride, he won’t know.
I am very bad at coming up with lists, but the list of names people proudly use for themselves that were originally terms of abuse would make a very long paragraph. I know that in my youth Southerners proudly referred ot themselves as “Rebels” and that is still the name of the University of Mississsippi football team. When I worked in the Polish steel district of Chicago inthe 1960s they would not let me refer to them as “Polish.”
They were “Pollacks” and proud of it.
British conservatives call themselves Tories, which originallly meant an Irish highway man. The main opposition party in America before the Republicans was The Whig Party. American revolutionaries had called themselves Whigs as opposed to the Loyalists, who called themselves Tories.
But Whig, the name opponents to the Tory Party called themselves in England, was originally exactly the same as Tory, a term of abuse. In fact, just as tory meant an Irish highway robber, whig meant a Scottish highway-robber.
In fact to people a century before, the adoption of names like whig, rebel, tory, methodist and baptist would be as strange as the NAACP changing its name to “The Niggers.”
In fact the latter indicdent has already happened. When blacks started calling THEMSELVES blacks, it wasw an act of defiance.
The switch from “Negro” to “black” occurred at the same historical moment that blacks elected the first black president of hte NAACP that it had had in its sixty-year history. It came with Black Pride. No one ever mentioned “Negro Pride” or “COLORED pride.”
A “Newgro” or a “colored” man was above a non-white man, and his ambition and the ambition of Boasian Jews was to get rid of that color and assimilate himinto the white community.
When I say “hick” I am associating myself with the old Hicksville side of Long Island. I have not the slightest ambition to be good New York City type or a Yankee — hence “Rebel” — nor was my circuit rider grandfather the least bit interested in being mistaken for an Episcopalian, the folks who labeled us Methodists inthe first place.
When you adopt the term of abuse the enemy uses it is an open declaration that you are anxious above all for people to know you are NOT one of the group doing the abusing. The worst name they can think of is much better than being mistaken for one of them.
In fact, when people ADOPT the term of abuse it is the most vicious insult you can throw at your enemies.
In fact, I have already seen a number of conservatives use the term “respectable” for the exact purpose of distancing themselves from it, “The respectable answer to this would be …”
That deprecation of the word “respectable” is a symptom I have seen many times before when I have turned a word into a killing insult. The delay between the time I started using “respectable conservative” and the appearance of other terms and arguments I came up with into the public dialogue.
The term “respectab le” was never a term of abuse among conservatives before my introduction of “respectable conservatives” in Whitakeronline in 1998. It must come up a LOT at conservative cocktail parties in DC.
Like “Political Correctness” the term “respectable cosnervatives” gave a NAME to something people were heartily sick of but could not identify quickly.
I have routinely told people that the term “redneck” now just means any white man with balls. It wasn’t many years after I started saying that the top country hit was “Redneck Woman.”
And by the way, “country music” was also originally a term of abuse.
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Peter’s Compliment
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 01/12/2006
In reply to “I Am not Your Average Braggart” Peter says,
“You might not be your average braggart but you are the funniest.”
Can you imagine how a person in the group that calls itself The Greatest Generation would take that?
Here Ole Bob has described sufffering, fighting, insults, and Peter says I’m funny.
That’s because he knows I WANT to be funny. The worse things get, the more you need humor.
I suppose the Greatest Generation is thinking in terms of veterans’ benefits. The more sympathy the Peters of the world feel for them the more they’ll demand money for them.
And they want everybody to shout about how they SUFFERED.
It never occurs to Peter that I would give a damn about that. He knows me too well.
You know, if Peter could go back in time and spare me some of that suffering, I have a strong suspicion I would have to hold him back. But a time machine is not available, and neither of us think it is.
So Peter routinely tells me the one thing that the Greatest Generation would never have forgiven: You’re funny.
Which is exactly what I want to hear.
A sense of humor is a sense of proportion.
One of the lessons I am trying to get across here is a sense of proportion.
Peter has got all that.
Peter can help laugh the whole world into sanity.
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