Patty, calm down, you should have noticed by now that you and all
your wonderful intelligent educated and cultured friends are in the
MINORITY.

Patty wrote: Serv, just as a side note....not that it matters �

But Patty, your side notes always matter to me, you know that. Now stop being so self-effacing and feel free to continue to rant either along with or opposed to the lot of us, as the case may be.

Quote: � when I watched the one 3 minute episode of American Idol, I was at a friend's home on vacation......in Nova Scotia

Oh, no, Servie says!  Call in Albert Gore!  Please don�t tell me that we are, as a body, evacuating our toxic cultural waste upon the otherwise pristine and formerly virginal Nova Scotia.  As if acid rain isn't bad enough.  Watch out, UmmZiba and all of my other Canadian partners up north in free trade.  I mean, I knew that our popular culture needed a good colonic irrigation, or cleanse, but that is truly shameless! 

By the way, for those -I have no doubt- few of you who might be interested, I realize that the honorable, at least at times, Robert Bork has been on my show, Radio Free Serv, a bit too often lately.  I don�t want him to become over-exposed and to thus fall in the ratings, so I have decided to reach way, way, back into the archives and to call in another eloquent American bloke, dedicated, in this case, to the fine art of ranting.

I recently discovered him while I was looking through an old book shop and I plan to make him a somewhat belated star.  He wrote in another war era, because, after all, America is always at war, the early 1940�s, and was a literate, world-wise, pedantic and seriously disgruntled son of a Presbyterian minister.  Unlike Robert Bork in our time, though, this author kicked against the cactus of what was to him, at that time, an altogether too restrictive, entrenched and hypocritical American morality.  The people in Lawrence Welk's audience (who I saw in the re-run of the '70's show) probably would neither have muched liked him nor appreciated some of his more controversial points.

Anyway, some of his observations are worth noting, even if his accusative, funny book, �Generation of Vipers,� has, at least according to the knowing Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post, since quite lost its bite.  But hey, haven�t a lot of us lost our bite?  Just ask Faye Dunaway, who has recently and fortunately regained hers (see above).

With that said, Ladies, Gentlemen, Wimmin and Transgendered others of the listening and participating audience, please give a warm welcome to Mr. Philip Wylie, who enters saying �

�We are a �literate� nation.  But there are not a million adults in America today [1942] who could comprehend even this casual treatise.  There are hardly a million who voluntarily read nonfiction books.  That is a satisfactory comment on the educational system, from the standpoint of the essayist.  It shows that, in the matter of teaching English, either our schools are incompetent to deal with our moppets or else society has produced a gaggle of Dodger fans, impervious to any literary schooling.

English, it happens, is our only common means of communication � The way to teach English would be to divide pupils by aptitude rather than by age, to insist on grammatical precision from the start � Children who are unable to learn or who will not learn the exact use of the only tongue in which, probably, they will ever try to articulate their ideas should not be permitted to listen to radios, go to movies, or otherwise amuse themselves with the ideo-onanisms [] of our society �

There must be reason in our collective behavior soon, as all can perceive.  There must be an end to a government of boobs [slang term for 'incompetents'], by boobs, for boobs.  Because there are already more boobs in our society than wise men, or even than scrupulous men, and the machines devised by science are so exact, so productive, and so powerful that a government which is in the hands of boobs will as surely commit national suicide as a sixteen-year-old kid, blind drunk on a blind curve, doing eighty in a twelve-cylinder sedan.�

�Ideo-onanisms.�  Ha!  Hey, speaking of drinks, I need one (of freshly squeezed, organic carrot juice).

This is Radio Free Serv, signing off ...

Ref:  Wylie, Philip, Generation of Vipers, Ferris Printing Co., New York, 1942, pp. 87-89

Edited by Servetus

"The question, again, is this: how many pounds, or kilos, did Oprah Winfrey
lose last week?"

Trick question. Oprah's 'weight' is correctly measured in joules and/or
kilowatt-hours.

I'll forfeit the shiny prize (since I already have one) and donate it to the
Resurrection of Baudrillard's Absolute Event Community since they are better
armed to take on these big questions along your side, Mighty Serv.

On this bleak day, when my (Radio Free Serv�s) ratings are at their reported lowest and the FCC are threatening to close me down on decency charges �that is to say, on charges of being overly decent- I am pleased to see that a couple of listeners have called in.

 

Welcome back, Whisper!  Things are 2 boring around here when U R gone.  Next time, don�t be gone so long.

 

Jam wrote: Trick question. Oprah's 'weight' is correctly measured in joules and/or kilowatt-hours.

 

Dear Jam, it is not a trick question, but nice try.  There has to be a definite answer and I intend to find it and, if need be, win my own shiny prize.  I strongly suspect but cannot prove that, just today, while untold millions of primarily American women watched Ms. Winfrey on the tube, or telley, they thought something very much like this to themselves:

 

�Hmmm, I wonder how many pounds, or kilos, Oprah lost (or gained) last week?�

 

I don�t think they are doing a joules-to-pounds conversion with their TV Guides and calorie counters.  I also notice, and this is less important but seems at least thematically related, that one of our arbiters of acceptable national discourse, ABC�s Good Morning America, all wily and smiley as usual, seems yet to have satisfactorily answered their own, yes, tantalizing question concerning just what, exactly, is behind Star Jones�s �metamorphosis.�  

 

Serv

Edited by Servetus