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My Childhood
I'm the product of a government experiment called the public school system.
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Posted April 30, 2007 I suppose you should know this about me. It
explains a lot. I've never told anyone because it's so ridiculous you'll assume
I'm making it up. That's the price of satire - no one believes you when you're
telling the truth.
I was born a rich kid, Beverly Hills, north of
Santa Monica Blvd., big house, tennis court, Cadillac in the
driveway, all needs met. One neighbor had an Oscar I played with (I.A.L.
Diamond, for writing The Apartment), another had a lavish
vomitorium for those really GOOD parties with endless courses of too much food.
I'd go to a friend's house after school only to discover they actually had their
own house behind their parent's house. When my dad died, we started a gradual
descent, moving to a smaller house, then a smaller house, then to an apartment
in the slums of Beverly Hills below Santa Monica Blvd., all to keep me in
what was supposed to be the best school system in the world.
None of this stopped me from being a holy terror
in class. I was thrown out of the fifth grade at Beverly Vista Elementary in BH,
sent to military school as a "disciplinary problem," sent back to the sixth
grade at Horace Mann Elementary in BH, thrown out, sent to another military
school where I advanced to the rank of corporal, sent back to the seventh grade
at El Rodeo Elementary in BH, and finally declared "emotionally disturbed" and
thrown out of the entire Beverly Hills Unified School System.
How did this happen? In 1960 or thereabouts, the
Beverly Hills Unified School District decided to be the very first to give every
single one of their students one of them fancy new standardized IQ tests in
order to scientifically analyze the entire student body. Officially they weren't
supposed to tell me, but afterwards I found I got fourth highest in the entire
district. All the other students with high IQs were the top straight A students
except me. I had Cs and Ds and Fs so I became a case study. How could someone as
bright as me be doing so poorly academically? They sent me to UCLA Psychiatric
Institute where I was tested and observed for weeks, test after test,
observation after observation, drawing, piling blocks, answering endless
questions. They had to figure me out
because if the problem wasn't me, it would have to be them.
I was actually surprised I did so well on the IQ
test because I had such difficulty answering certain questions, particularly the
ones showing a list of words saying "which one doesn't belong." The list would
be something like...
a) banana
b) potato
c) petunia
d) candle
One might think the obvious answer was d) since
it's the only one that isn't a form of vegetation, but I'd be able to come up
with a rational reason why every single word didn't belong. Each word has an "a"
but banana is the only one with three. Potato is the only word with an "o."
Petunia is the only word that isn't six letters. I'd sit there not trying to
figure out which was the right answer, they all were right, but trying to figure
out which right answer the jerks who came up with the test were
expecting.
The same problem crept into my studies. Teachers
didn't know how to handle me. I figured if they had the right to test me, I had
the right to test them. I noticed they used a template for grading tests. I'd
reorganize my answers so they couldn't use it. For my answer to question 1, I'd
write "see answer #6," where the correct answer would be found. I got Fs
on tests where I got every answer right, just not in the expected order. I
used this technique from the first grade, elementary school arithmetic, if
the question was "What's 3 + 8," I'd answer "5 + 6." Correct, but not
the answer they were looking for. When did Columbus discover America? 320
years before the War of 1812.
It never occurred to anyone that the reason I was
acting like this was because I was bored out of my skull. Anything to pass the
time. I managed to learn absolutely everything they were teaching, just as
reliably as their finest students. I just wasn't mirroring it back to them
properly, thus, Cs and Ds and Fs.
 Teachers were warned about me before I ever met
them. They kept their eye on me from the first day so I couldn't get away with
anything. I was the first to be blamed if anything happened, and half my time
was spent exiled to the hallway for insubordination.
When I got my first history book, I drew a little
B-52 bomber in the lower left margin of the first page, along with a little city
on the far right. On the next page, I drew the bomber a little bit to the right,
closer to the city, continuing on each page until eventually, if you flipped
through the book, the bomber would fly across the page till it dropped a big one
on the city, causing a mushroom cloud to go up the right margin.
When my teacher saw this, were they impressed by
the fact a seven-year-old had seemingly invented animation? Animation wasn't the
day's lesson. Did they simply ask me to erase it? Did they encourage my
creativity by handing me a pad of blank paper and asking me use it for my
animations instead of the textbook? Nope, they suspended me for defacing school
property.
How do you get thrown out of the 5th grade? I was bored with what they were
having me read. One day during a PE period where I was excused for some medical
problem, I had nothing to do, so I started reading a paperback I saw at the
student library, Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, the first book I
ever read so it was the best book I'd ever read, way better than Dick and
Jane. I couldn't stop reading so I took it with me to class. Nobody
had ever explained that school books had to be checked out. I left
school on my bike and got chased by two bigger kids who threw me
to the ground, searched my backpack, found the book, and dragged me back to the
school office for stealing school property.
Upon finding a fifth grader caught trying to read a tenth grade book, did
they advance me to another grade? Nope, it was the final straw, they threw me
out of the whole system.
Despite this particular moment of idiocy, it
turned out the BH school system really was better then the rest, which caused a
very strange problem. They'd get rid of me, I'd end up in a school in the LA
system that was teaching what I'd learned the year before, I'd get straight As,
they'd say to Beverly Hills "what's the matter with you, this is a fine
student," BH would take me back, I'd be a year behind, learn everything but
fail, they'd throw me out, send me to another LA school where they were teaching
everything I'd just learned, I'd get straight As again, and end up right back in
BH.
 Finally I found myself at Beverly High for
four years, class of '69, WAY before Beverly Hills 90210, with a
magnificent theater department and a separate parking lot just for students,
full of much better cars than those in the faculty lot. I took swim lessons in
the "swim gym," the pool under the slide-away basketball court made famous
in the film It's a Wonderful Life. Hung with Patricia Cummings
- daughter of Bob (You don't know who Bob Cummings is?), Cathie
Amsterdam - daughter of Morry (C'mon, Morry Amsterdam, from The Dick Van
Dyke Show. Who's Dick Van Dyke? Jesus!), and Phil Ritz, son of Harry
of the Ritz Brothers (they replaced The Three Stooges in Blazing
Stewardesses when Moe died before filming, but you knew that).
When Ella Fitzgerald moved to Beverly Hills, her
son Ray Brown became the very first black in the school system. We went out of
our way to treat him as an equal. For many of us, he was the first black we'd
ever met. I directed him in the school production of Marty.
One day I was called to the office where Dr. Morgenstern, an official with
the school system, now the school psychologist, told me he'd read my file
and wanted to talk. He told me I was still one of the smartest students in
the system, that they were proud to have someone so brilliant at the school. He
sincerely apologized for the way I had been treated so far. He couldn't
understand why they didn't realize the problem wasn't me, it was their inability
to cope with anybody challenging the status quo. Dr. Morgenstern followed
my career as a journalist and wrote me decades later with pride at how I had
turned out.
 Though I went through the ceremony with my
classmates, I was given a blank sheet of paper instead of a diploma. I never
actually graduated BHHS because I was lacking 2 grade points. I learned
absolutely everything they were teaching without having to bother with crap
like homework, which I never handed in, or daily quizzes, which I
inevitably failed. I aced my finals, proving all the other stuff was
unnecessary, but not to one teacher who flunked me anyway. I'd already been
accepted to LACC so who cared.
Time went on and the story continued. It was a
gradual descent from uptrodden to downtrodden, from all needs met to most needs
met to some needs met to few needs met to no needs met, from Paris Hilton to
Motel 6, from hobnobbing with the got-alls to scrounging with the rest, but the
gravity of life can tend to run downhill.
 I always intended to move back to Beverly Hills to
see how my own kids would fare in the same system that had such problems with
me, but that ship has either sailed or never docked. Now my kids are the
products of completely different bad school systems.
Maybe telling me my IQ wasn't such a hot idea, but
how else could they explain what they were doing? I never bragged about it and
fifty years later, this is first time I've ever mentioned it. It was too
traumatic for me to consider it a plus. I can't think of any circumstances in my
childhood where knowing I was supposed to be so smart did me any good. On the
contrary, the guys watching me with clipboards only instilled the belief there
was something wrong with me, a belief I apparently still hold to this
day.
Thanks for reading this. Now I don't have to pay
for a therapist.
MD
"The past is our definition. We may strive, with
good reason, to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it, but we will escape it
only by adding something better to it."
- Wendell Berry -
News for
Superheroes
 "Warning to Superman: Stay clear of Ottawa. With the
help of our very own National Research Council, scientists have identified a
mineral with virtually the same composition as kryptonite, the space rock that
makes the Man of Steel more like a man of straw.
"It all started in Serbia, where geologists working with
mining giant Rio Tinto unearthed a drill core of a rock they couldn't match to
any known mineral. So they contacted Chris Stanley, a mineralogist at London's
Natural History Museum...
"When Dr. Stanley typed the composition of the new
mineral - sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide - into Google, he was
astonished to find that it matched up with kryptonite. He said, 'I nearly fell
off my chair,' says Dr. LePage. 'And we had a good laugh.'
"The composition matched the scientific name written on
a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen from a museum by Superman's
arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor, in the film Superman Returns.
"'I don't know of any other instance of something being
imagined in fiction and then found in nature,' Dr. Stanley said."
- Globe and Mail: Superman's
kryptonite confirmed in Canada -
Aerobic Exercise of
the Week
I suppose you already know that if you ask Googlemaps to plot a
course from
New York to Paris, instruction 24 tells you to "swim across the Atlantic
Ocean."
I Feel So Much Safer
Now
"An Indian court ordered the arrest of Hollywood star Richard Gere on
Thursday for kissing Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty at an AIDS campaign event
this month saying it was an obscene act committed in public."
- Reuters: Indian
court orders Gere's arrest for 'obscene' kiss -
"What's wrong with a kiss, boy? Hmm? Why not start her off with a nice
kiss? You don't have to go leaping straight for the clitoris like a bull at a
gate. Give her a kiss, boy."
- John Cleese in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life -
Answers to Last Week's
Stupid Question
How do you convince stupid people to do things?
Another Stupid
Question
For me, it was Martian Chronicles. What book
turned you on to books? Please answer here.
 Let Me Get This
Straight
The ex-head of the CIA, George Tenet, went on 60
Minutes to explain that when he told Bush the war would be a "slam dunk,"
he meant putting together a report containing all the reasons for going to war
would be a slam dunk, not the war itself. Oh yeah, that's a LOT better.
Convincing people the war would be justified actually WAS a slam dunk, it's
just the war itself that sucks. Thanks a lot, George.
Satan Doesn't Care If You Know
There's a metal complex that acts like an enzyme. Ni-Ru complex
mirrors a hydrogenase's active site and is catalytically
active.
Don't Take My Word For
It
"Ambition is a poor excuse for not
having sense enough to be lazy."
- Edgar Bergen (Charlie McCarthy) - "The ultimate end of all revolutionary
social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man,
the right of every human being to liberty and well-being."
- Emma Goldman -
"Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." - Jean-Paul Sartre -
"First, it has been well-known
for several years that the U.S. military outright invented lies regarding
literally every aspect of the Jessica Lynch story. And the Tillman family
for years has been vocally complaining about the lies they were told by
the Pentagon regarding the circumstances surrounding Pat Tillman's death, the
pressure on other soldiers to conceal the truth, and the crass and disgusting
exploitation of those lies to serve the administration's political interests.
None of this is new. So why is Congress holding hearings to investigate these
matters only now?
"The answer, of course, is because the Republicans who
controlled Congress for the last four years absolutely suppressed any attempt
whatsoever to exert oversight on the administration. They not only investigated
nothing, they aggressively blocked every real investigation into allegations of
wrongdoing and corruption on the part of the administration. Our government
literally ceased to function the way it is designed to, because Congressional
Republicans deliberately abdicated their duty of checks on the executive and
actively helped to conceal every improper and deceitful act.
"The only reason any of this is being aired now is
because the American people removed the President's party from control of
Congress and they are no longer able to keep concealed the Bush administration's
misconduct.
"Second, I defy anyone to go
back and read the April and May, 2003 tongue-wagging, mindless American press
accounts of Jessica Lynch's epic firefight against the Enemy; the severe gun
shot and stabbing wounds she suffered; the torture to which she was subjected
while in the Iraqi hospital; and the daring, gun-blazing rescue of her by our
Special Forces, and then try to claim that we have a functioning, healthy
political press in this country that serves as a check on government deceit and
corruption. It is impossible for any minimally honest person to make that claim
in light of those stories.'
- Glenn Greenwald: The
Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds -
"These are the workers, mostly
poor Latinos, who are lured here by U.S. businesses with promises of decent jobs
only to be cheated out of their wages; forced to live in squalid conditions; and
denied medical benefits for injuries. If the workers complain, they face
deportation, blacklisting, and other forms of retaliation...
"Right now, President Bush and
many in Congress are pushing to create a vast new pool of temporary foreign
workers. This will only cause more suffering and injustice - and it will
undermine the rights and wages of American workers as well.
"As a nation, we must fix our broken immigration system.
But we must not condone a program that abuses and enslaves poor workers from
other countries who are lured under false pretenses."
"This southern Lebanese village of about 3,000 - less
than a kilometre from the heavily guarded border with Israel - was one of the
first places bombed by Israeli warplanes during the war last summer. Residents
here grow tobacco and work on their small farms.
"The Hezbollah raid in which two Israeli soldiers were
detained took place nearby. The village was hammered by incessant bombings by
Israeli warplanes throughout the conflict.
"But rather than turn people away from Hezbollah, the
attacks seem to have made residents fierce supporters of the political group,
now providing some of the only reconstruction assistance.
"'The sound of the bombs, the warplanes, the drones was
relentless for us,' Fatima Ridda, a mother of 11 whose husband was killed in an
Israeli rocket attack told IPS, as UN helicopters buzzed overhead. 'Now
Hezbollah, Iran, and Qatar are the only people helping us try to rebuild our
lives. Our own government will do nothing.'
"Hezbollah members distributed 12,000 dollars to each
family whose houses suffered damage during the war, to help them with
reconstruction."
- Dahr Jamail: Political
Loyalties Being Rebuilt -
"Economists have long observed that regulators at, say, the Food and Drug Administration face unbalanced incentives. When people die because an unsafe drug got FDA approval, everybody blames the commissioners. When people die because a potentially lifesaving drug never made it to the marketplace (or was never developed in the first place because of costly regulations), the FDA's role is largely invisible. Therefore the commissioners are biased toward excessive caution." - Steven Landsburg: Regulatory
Reform -
"Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The
leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they
had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy
had been closed down: the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers
into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on
the press, tightened some limits on travel, and took certain activists into
custody.
"They were not figuring these things out as they went
along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint
for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used
again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it
is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a
democracy - but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply
have to be willing to take the 10 steps.
"As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if
you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated
today in the United States by the Bush administration."
- Naomi Wolf: Fascist
America, in 10 easy steps -
"With Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and the Walter Reed
hospital scandal maybe you thought that the incompetence of the Bushites had
bottomed out.
"But... here comes another embarrassment bubbling to the
surface. While George W keeps popping back to New Orleans for political photo
ops showing him posing with Katrina victims, he hasn't mentioned that his budget
whackers have been steadily shortchanging the National Hurricane Center on the
money it needs to do its job which is to give us as accurate a picture as
possible of when and where a Big One will hit our people.
"Indeed, the Center's new director says that our
nation's hurricane protection program is now under funded by 'hundreds of
millions of dollars.' He also warns of another funding failure that could result
in disaster during this year's hurricane season: The Center's QuikSCAT satellite
which is crucial to providing accurate, up-to-the-minute forecasts of a storm's
intensity and where it's headed is about to go on the fritz. He says that the
satellite could fail 'at any moment.'"
- Jim Hightower: Shortchanging our Hurricane Watch
Center -
"On May 15th 2007, all myspace members are asked to not go to a gas station
in protest of high gas prices. Gas is now over $3.00 a gallon in most places.
There are 73,000,000+ American members currently on the MySpace network, and the
average car takes about 20 to 30 dollars to fill up. If all myspace members did
not go to the pump on the 15th, it would take $2,200,000,000.00 (that's BILLION)
out of the oil company's pockets for just one day, so please do not go to the
gas station on May 15th and lets try to put a dent in the Middle Eastern oil
industry for at least one day."
- Futile Gestures 'r' us -
"Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before
breakfast."
- Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland -
"Day and night he danced in ecstasy,
revolving on the earth like the heavens. His ecstatic cries reached the zenith of the skies and were heard by all and sundry." - Rumi: The Life and Thoughts of Rumi -
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The Best of Disinfotainment Today - 2006 A Year of Journalism with the Crap Removed  Or The Best of Disinfotainment Today - 2005, you slowpoke. |
My website Emulsional Problems was chosen as the
 Cost of the War in Iraq (JavaScript
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Who am I?
and so is Issue #216.
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Iraq Body
Count
Contact George W. Bush - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact the Freemasons - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact Skull and Bones - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact the Carlyle Group - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact the Illuminati - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact
Satan - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact both houses of Congress -
president@whitehouse.gov
Contact the Supreme Court - president@whitehouse.gov
Contact Dick Cheney - vice.president@whitehouse.gov
Contact Halliburton - vice.president@whitehouse.gov
Contact Bechtel - vice.president@whitehouse.gov
Contact Saddam Hussein - tightywhities@whitehouse.gov
Contact Osama bin Laden - thetwins@whitehouse.gov
Contact Jeb Bush - jeb.bush@myflorida.com
Contact Fidel Castro - jeb.bush@myflorida.com
Contact Kim Jong Il - eng-info@kcna.co.jp
Contact Jacques Chirac - france-presse@un.int
Contact the new Pope - accreditamenti@pressva.va
Contact the old Pope - thirdlevel@hellfireanddamnation.com
Contact God - president@whitehouse.gov
Not the Previous
Acknowledgment
Disinfotainment Today is emotionally
disturbed, a disciplinary problem, and has no use for fair use. Disinfotainment Today is
absolutely certain about absolutely nothing. It doesn't beg to differ, it
demands to differ, wallowing in any evidence to the contrary of anything. It
borrows from everything that has ever existed and several things that have never
existed, daring you to tell the difference.
Thanks,
Alicia
Gottapair
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Bush
Administration Dareland
US Press
