Rules for fools

 Above, the Fool on the Hill: Too bad there were no rules for him 

Two weeks ago, when I was preparing for the second coming of the UK Driving Test in Norwich, the classroom instructor answered a student's question as follows:

"Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of wise men."

After the class, I asked him for the origin of the quote, and he wrote it down and attributed it to Douglas Bader.

I had no idea who Douglas Bader was until a few moments ago, when I looked him up on the endlessly useful, not-much-less-accurate-than-Britannica, Wikipedia. (Truth: someone studied it and found little discrepancy.) Bader was a WWII British flying ace who brought down many German aircraft before being brought down himself and spending time trying to escape from a German POW camp. Amazing enough to survive and badger one's captors, but Bader had two prosthetic legs to contend with, one of which was damaged when he was ejecting from his plane. He had the prosthetic legs before he became a WWII flying ace.

I suspect Bader broke a lot of rules, although he broke them carefully. He successfully made his case for his flying ability despite having lost his legs in an earlier flying accident, and was returned to the air in time for the Battle of Britain. Courage, it would seem, must accompany wisdom when one wants to break the rules. But wisdom sometimes accompanies age and experience; when he was a flying cadet, in 1928, Bader was almost expelled because of his fondness for forbidden romps in motorcars. Racing motorcars.

One can see how Bader might have developed his attitude toward rules, though. It would seem a bit ridiculous to forbid energetic young men engaged in the dangerous pursuit of flying airplanes to cavort in cars.

By the time he engaged German airplanes in battle, Bader had developed three additional beliefs. They were:

• If you had the height, you controlled the battle.
• If you came out of the sun, the enemy could not see you.
• If you held your fire until you were very close, you seldom missed.

These apply as well to life in general. You are foolish to "attack an enemy"--that is, proceed in some adversarial contest--unless you hold the high ground, ethically, monetarily or whatever pertains to the situation in question. The concept is often more mundanely rendered as, "Don't piss into the wind."

You are also foolish to show an enemy your position in a negotiation. If you want a good deal on your new house, do not flash your money around, nor by the same token, present yourself as a penniless sad sack. In either case, you are giving away your position, which the other side may then use to its advantage. Again, there are mundane versions of this concept. Keep things close to the vest is one.

If you can hold your fire, you will prevail in life as in combat. Do not prematurely fling your talking points at others; the longer you wait and let others talk, the more likely you are to gain the information you need to succeed in any negotiation. Years ago, a woman I was interviewing for an article used the term, "Ears open, mouth shut." It works. Every time. And it's simple, but not easy, especially if you have a tendency to let your ego gain control.

Which is precisely what Douglas Bader must seldom have done. His ego didn't seem to enter into his thought processes. He paid attention to business, not to his growing reputation as the British answer to WWI's Red Baron. As a POW, he took it as his mission to bedevil his captors as often as he could. After the war, he became CEO of the aircraft division of Shell.

He wasn't, however, perfect. Another of his great quotes, on entering a gathering of former Luftwaffe pilots in Germany after the war, was, "My God, I had no idea we left so many of you bastards alive," according to a Wikipedia-cited source. He was a political conservative, Victorian in his beliefs and just a tad bigoted. He absolutely objected to Rhodesia gaining independence, for example.

Still, one needn't throw out the baby with the bathwater--since we are on the subject of pithy sayings--and so may consider Bader's best quote for what it is, a darn good prescription for a reasoned life by anyone except morons.

I was going to take a cheap shot and note that thereby, Bush, Bachmann, Palin et. al. are left out of it, but I won't.

BTW: I passed the driving test, despite telling the examiner, when he asked what I'd like to be called, that he could call me Your Grace. 

Writing to sell ain't what it used to be

Could THIS be a search engine? (Wiki commons)

There can be little doubt that one of my household gods is good writing. Mine (I flatter myself), my friend and colleague Judy Carmichael’s (see her blog here), and the great authors of all times, places and styles. I have altars to those gods, myriad bookcases that overflow faster than a stopped up sink. I have prized every unique phrase I’ve ever read. And as a result, I have expanded my vocabulary if not to the point of an Oxford scholar, at least to a serviceable magnitude for all the kinds of writing I do, from journalism to junk.

SEO

And now, learning more than I ever wanted to know about keywords and SEO (search engine optimization), I have begun to understand that soon, Susie will not only be unable to read, Susie will have a vocabulary driven to drivel by the need of authors to construct their offerings around those few words and phrases the internet gatekeepers say are the ones searched for most often.

Morons, because it's a good key word...and also fits Bush

In short, if one wishes to be read, one will have to stuff one’s pages with repetitive―but not TOO repetitive―terms that the lowest common denominator of internet searchers will find. Duh. Maybe I should use that term again. Duh.  OK. So now I have at least one repetitive term that should appeal to morons and is used even by people of normal intelligence when imitating morons. And no, this is not about George Effing Bush, although I suspect he wouldn’t do well on the internet, despite his miniscule vocabulary, mainly because his vocabulary has no repetitive terms. How could it? He made most of them up, or at least, the incompletely firing synapses within his cranium made them up and his monkey mouth spit them out.

This is about making sure every page on one’s website or in one’s blog contains high visibility words, and that the same words appear enough times for a search engine spider to find them and properly catalog (not the right term; still in actual writer mode, sorry) the pages so that googlers will discover them and read them and click on the ads and enable the writer―who used to write as opposed to spending precious hours of intellectual life learning geek-crap―to earn a few measley bucks.

Journalists' tools? Not so much

OK. Journalists have been warned for years not to use the term yellow elongated fruit when banana will do. But this goes beyond repeating banana in the second and third references and avoiding the use of yellow elongated fruit. It means choosing one’s subjects according to what various “tools” will tell you are popular terms in the public’s so-called imagination at present. I actually bought such a tool. It’s called Traffic Travis, and is has a cute little cartoon of a nerd. Uh huh.  Also, one can use Google’s own tool, the Wonder Wheel…if one can only recall how to get to it from one day to the next. (As far as I can tell, you actually have to do a search, which still won’t put it onscreen. You must also open one of the websites arrayed and then, if you’re lucky and the stars are not in Jupiter or something, it will appear.)

So let’s assume that one of the best search terms for me to use would be Cornwall acommodation. Yup, misspelling and all. I mean, can I really write an article about Cornwall acommodation rather than Cornwall accommodation? How illiterate. But that’s how the peckerheads* that apparently know or think they know a word longer than hotel will search for it.

No, I can’t do it. I’ll use hotels. I’ll use lodgings. I’ll use hostelry. But I won’t use acommodation. I suppose I could try accommodation and see if search engine spiders can correct misspellings when they crawl my work. (Isn’t that, in itself, a bit creepy?) Might as well. Hotel, lodgings and hostelry are WAY under the search engine radar.

More search engine points to ponder

I must also remember to use a bunch of H1 headings; is that the same thing as a larger point size? And I must remember not to stuff my pages with the chosen words too much; apparently, spiders get full after about five helpings of each word per page and spit it out thereafter. Their keepers can even ban your site if you try to force feed the little arachnids too much. Oops. Sorry. Fifty-cent word in a two-for-a-penny world.

I really only have one question. It was going to be, “Whatever happened to librarians and recommendations of good books?” But instead, I think I’ll cut to the internet chase, and just ask, “WHY?”

* I'm not sure the journalistic debate over whether dickhead or peckerhead is the preferred term has been definitively decided. Votes?

(Oxy)Moron Bush*: Education failures to be trashed

Moron Bush's school days? (Wiki Commons)

Is Amurika goin too git smarter? Are it feesabal possabale two over tourn Goerge W. Bushes Know Child Lift BeHind inishativ? At the same time, are well we be abel to git rit of boguz collages like FeenixPheenix?

***

President Obama would like to do two things that cannot help but have a positive effect on American education. He would like to diminish the prevalence of pseudo-colleges like the University of Phoenix and DeVry. And he would like to abolish his predecessor’s addlepated excursion down a road so unfamiliar to him  (education) that his pet program, No Child Left Behind, has put American kids at the forefront of the world’s dummies in a less than a generation. That's quite an achievement for the barely educated Mr. Bush, a man who derived little from the educational opportunities bought for him by a rich daddy whose pockets were not deep enough nor connections wide enough to keep the world from finding out little George was not even a ten o'clock scholar.

The problem is, of course, that No Child Left Behind, if it were replaced tomorrow by actual education (that thing requiring scholarship, dedication, independent thought, etc.), it would take a decade for produce a crop of publicly educated kids capable of anything with greater similarity to a college or university than the University of Phoenix. To cavil about the fact that such paper mills charge outrageous fees for virtually worthless degrees is one thing; it’s quite another to instantly create an educational opportunity, or even a chilling-out place, for thousands of students short-changed by their experiences in Mr. Bush’s educational quagmire.

Perhaps the answer, then, is to create some sort of publicly funded remedial educational system that will prepare the less successful NCLB graduates (is that even possible?) to do something other than collect a dole check and skip out on humongous so-called higher education bills when they come due. If going to a for-profit culinary institute makes a student into a pot-washing grunt for ten bucks an hour rather than executive chef for a resort Hilton, then perhaps the answer is to rectify the gaps in that student’s education at public expense. And then, if he or she really wants to be a chef, let that person do it the traditional way―by working a food-prep job in a big kitchen for ten bucks an hour and learning as they go. Only a few would make it to executive chef. Some would change fields. Some would stay low on the kitchen-work ladder, and accept that. But at least they wouldn’t have $100,000 in loans to repay, and may well have acquired some general knowledge they can use for working or living.

But how would the newly impoverished, post-Moron Bush United States ever pay for such a thing, for two or more extra years of public schooling for those ill-served by the Moron’s juggernaut? Darned if I know. Possibly the government could seize some of his or Neil Bush’s assets (Neil sold the computer garbage that made NCLB lucrative for the family) to help pay for it.

Or maybe they could simply use what’s being shoveled into the pockets of the for-profit stink tanks now. According to Huffington Post:

Students enrolled at for-profit colleges make up only 12 percent of college students nationwide, yet the sector takes in nearly a quarter of federal student aid dollars and accounts for 43 percent of student loan defaults, according to a recent analysis from the Education Trust, a student advocacy group. Students at for-profit colleges typically carry an average of $14,000 in debt--almost twice as much as students at non-profit colleges, according to the Department of Education.

Preventing the student loan defaults alone would probably help the economy enough to eke out some extra dough to use for real education.

Real education encompasses infinitely more than Moron Bush’s notion (calling it a concept or even idea would be to falsely elevate the substandard snapping of his mental synapses), encapsulated in No Child Left Behind.  Mr. Obama would like states to adopt “standards that ensure students are ready for college or a career rather than grade-level proficiency – the focus of the current law.” (Could it be that Moron Bush could hope for no more himself, and in typically greedy and self-centered fashion, desired no more for others?)

Huffington Post also noted that, in Congress―THANK THE LORD AND PASS THE DIVIDED NOTEBOOKS―

Lawmakers also said they want to allow states to use subjects other than reading and mathematics as part of their measurements for meeting federal goals, pleasing many education groups that argued No Child Left Behind encouraged teachers not to focus on history, art, science, social studies and other important subjects.

Moron Bush had destroyed American education well before the end of his first interminable term. It will take a lot more than Mr. Obama’s current term, halfway finished already, to begin to turn American education around, and another decade before public schools in many locales produce graduates capable of performing well on a job or benefitting from bona fide higher education.

Moron Bush has much to answer for, but possibly the most egregious of his multiplicitous attempts to terminally weaken the United States was NCLB, a program that rewarded schools for failing to educate, and that rewarded teachers for making their students into gormless, clueless parrots unable to synthesize and analyze, unable to use logic, unable to understand ethics, unable to succeed beyond subsistence in a wildly complex modern world.

But in a Moron Bush world, it made sense. Uneducated citizens are essential to the sort of world Moron Bush―and to be fair, his one-worlder father―envisioned. A world where a few wealthy, powerful people are able to do as they please with the rest of us, making us into cannon fodder, paupers, petty thieves stealing for survival. In short, a world that would not be acceptable to a population with a decent education, and which those decently educated people would be at pains to renovate or overthrow.

*The Education President