whatever happened to excellence?

you know you're in the middle of America when the first notable sign coming into town is not the green city limits sign, but the high school state championship sign. If you were state champions in Football, Basketball, Baseball, or Cross Country, that year is proudly displayed for school bragging rights. But what you won't see is a proud sign indicating that your school and town was # 1 in successful business owners, # 1 in tech entrepreneurs, or # 1 in inventors in the state. And, maybe, it is time to recognize that kind of excellence. After all, why do we have public schools in the first place?

any state department of education can give you a wealth of raw and analytical data. students not only go through a school system, their footprint, not just academic, follows them through that process. every student who has ever been to Millard Fillmore High can be tracked from freshman entry date and beyond. in less than six years, an estimation of a school's impact on students can be ascertained by following up and crunching numbers to determine what became of the class of '09. while this analysis cannot determine how much the teaching from that school did contribute to the success of that student body, it can reward that school and town for helping that class body reach such success by establishing championships for real world successes.

Imagine coming into town and seeing that your old school and town was awarded a state distinction for being # 1 in producing plumbers, engineers, or certified mechanics? How encouraging would it be to your school and community to have your school and town awarded #1 in patented inventions? # 1 in quality of life? Wouldn't that sign, that distinction, reflect a real school and community of excellence?

  

Crazy Days and Crazy Nights

 When you’re an undergrad, living in a college town known for anarchist wine and cheese parties, and you're sharing a house with three radical Pentecostal students, you never know what you're going to come home to. 

 I worked from Friday evening into early Saturday morning, at a hole-in-the-wall donut-hot dog shop. while many were partying uptown, i served stoner dogs and donuts to inebriated, drug-fueled students in the later hours of existence, going home in the wee hours just before dawn, when the city fell into a silence rarely seen.

Compounding the slow walk home, when faced with all-you-can-carry free "day-old" donuts, I would carry three waxed-paper bags of donuts in one hand and a 32 ounce mountain dew in the other. Dropping off one bag on my girlfriend's front steps, I would carry the two remaining bags home, finishing my caffeine drink as I climbed the front steps of the beige house, and wandered in to stash my donuts in the fridge. That morning, like most Saturdays, I lay down on our tie-dye couch cover on the living room sofa after gobbling a circa 4 AM cruller, only to awaken sharply to a wet patch on the back of my stinky shirt. 

Peering over the edge of the sofa, I smelled the wet carpet first. Just water. But a trail of it. Leading into the next room...and up the stairs. Hmm. 

By the time I opened the upper bathroom door, it was obvious. Someone must have been sloppy in the bathtub last night because there was water all over the floor. The light bulb revealed more danger as I maneuvered from one spot to another attempting to skirt the incident zone. Finally, gripping the side of our clawfoot tub, I discovered damp lint, curly hair, and what looked like an emptied bottle of anointing oil. It had all the earmarks of a serious Pentecostal Party.

I headed to my room, worn out from having to slap Stoner Dogs together at record pace to keep up with the night’s demand. I collapsed on my bed and fell asleep. When I woke, noon had passed, and the house seemed quiet. I ambled down the stairs to find our resident journalism major sitting on the couch nonchalantly reading a textbook in the same area I discovered serious water "damage" in the wee hours of the night. When I asked him about the evidence, he said that several people had followed him home from a fellowship where a young man expressed the need to be baptized. Seizing on the opportunity, our man had offered our bathtub…and a place on the sofa…

When I reflect on the antics of my housemates in those years, I am amused by how unpredictable our lives were. It seemed like we constantly entertained some wanderer, who often found themselves sleeping on our one-brick-leveled couch. From the Birdman with the weak bladder, the radio broadcast engineer who didn't like walking home alone, to the bespeckled Nazi Henchman look-alike (in Raider's Of The Lost Ark), the tie-dye covered sofa saw more characters than an old B movie. Meanwhile, we kept our clientele stuffed with ladles-full of hot chicken soup, Gem Soda (with a delightful amount of yellow food coloring) or Ski (a concoction so lethal you could watch the caffeine floating around in the bottle) and enough ice cream to build an igloo before crashing on the said sofa... 

Those may have been “crazy days and crazy nights,” but the most potent drug we possessed, other than caffeine, was our random humor...original music pieces featuring "the screen," slam-dancing to worship music, and poetry readings of the good, the bad, and the ugly. 

So, to come home to wet carpet, and a trail to...or from...the upstairs bathroom, was not so unusual that it should have surprised me. In fact, it was all good experience for the stranger things that came my way later in life...when I held an air hose at a toilet paper machine for ten hours at a time, when I appraised a white supremist campground for tax purposes, and when I ran away from the young Amish woman chasing me around the barnyard...until I could speed away home...

in the hiding place

the banjos played Dixieland

when my felt hat fell from grace

a little lad sliding beneath the table

scraping that black shiny place 

double cheese pizza plaster was

hiding in the long-legged space...

shoes and sandals, and feet and toes

forks and knives and things that slice

the sounds, the scenes, the moments galore

are a mix of memories that one must store.

the song unsung

your sad passing, it said

as if we would forget 

the song unsung.

as long as the shore is kissed 

by the storm's waves,

shaped by weathering, 

away beneath our days

like an old treasure 

caught undertow,

the memories out to sea

come back in a bottle-

sorrow still, in silent pain.

halting chaotic decay

 What is culture? Is it what sociologists and psychologists claim? Is it what public school teachers push? Or, is it what Hollywood and those like them believe?

The definition of a culture has changed. The New World Dictionary, 1927, stated that a culture is an enlightenment or development resulting from education and refinement. The primary meaning of a "cultured person" in 1927 was one who was enlightened or refined. 

Sociology, a science based upon certain predilections that may or may not be correct, has imported meanings into the cloud containing the standard definition of culture, to include what one in 1927 would categorize as a deviation, a vague and less tenuous attempt to categorize and systemize what culture actually is. Gone is the desire for improvement or refinement, replaced by characterization of a particular subgroup's behaviors, regardless of their moral or educational value, insisting the sum of those experiences and thoughts, from a vast populace with similar beliefs, somehow represents a culture. 

In the later part of the last century, for example, one could base popular music, art, and fashion that could be labeled according to period as a culture. In a sense, the old standard could be applied, however, the lack of improvement or educational development exposes the truth- that cannot be a true culture. 

We have replaced the desire for one's improvement and refinement with characteristics of a generalized theme of debased behavior and lifestyle. 

Can anyone rationally argue, based on the standard definition of culture that degenerative music, art, and fashion represents a culture? Is it not the opposite that it reveals? A lack of intelligence, excellence, a lack of refinement, a lack of sophistication is simply a lack of culture. Where culture does not exist, there is a tendency for society to descend into dysfunctionality. 

Disjointed music, based upon an excess of primitive percussion, does not reflect culture, it reflects a lack of it. A constant droning, a constant repetition, a constant disharmony is not refinement. A chaotic arrangement of poison-based art, adorning one's body, is the pinnacle of that lack of culture, that lack of refinement. 

In light of the loss of true refinement, we should rebel against that which the masses drink, that toxicity that clouds the mind and sends the soul toward Hell. True refinement is unadorned beauty, wearing the same unadorned skin as God gave you, singing in harmony as the angels sing in harmony, adhering to a higher level of moral rigor...pushing aside the decrepit, embracing the excellent.

There was a time I remember, when one of the purveyors of the current morass of culture-less propaganda, was preaching the need for refinement in the sense of being excellent. A grain of wisdom, a grain of beauty and richness was proposed as the pinnacle for a better education. For refinement. Yet, those wanting to control the future masses, rather than see them enlightened, threw out the virtues and exchanged the push for a more cultured life with a virus from the pit of Hell. This Leftist agenda, which was born in a foreign land, promised an elitist future where the few could rule and reign over peasant-like zombies who were uneducated and lacked a desire for refinement or culture. 

That evil has many sisters, including woke ideology, "democratic" socialism, and the like, always leading down a dark hallway to an end without culture, without hope, and without God.

In a truly great society, refined music, art, and literature speak volumes about the achievements of that land and era. It is time we return to the concept of culture as it was nearly 100 years ago and pursue and teach our young to pursue a world with refinement, not chaotic decay.