My Trip to the County Courthouse, by Kevin A. Carson
I just finished negotiating the bureaucracy at the Washington County Arkansas courthouse in order to get my mom an absentee ballot.
Both yesterday (when I picked up the application) and today (when I picked up the actual ballot), I had difficulty parking because of all the political campaign workers (including some of the politicians themselves) standing around with signs and obstructing the drive-thru area. I actually had to circle around and pass up empty spaces because the people holding signs didn't give me room enough to maneuver and pull into the spaces at the proper angle.
On the plus side, one of the people holding a sign was mayor Lioneld Jordan. It's not every day you get to glare at a mayor and refuse to shake his hand.
Inside, I had the joy of going through Security Theater with a metal detector staffed by County Sheriff's Department deputies, taking off my belt and handing over my phone, keys and wallet. First of all, nobody in Al Qaeda is going to bother blowing up some chickenshit county courthouse in Arkansas. And second, if they did they'd be smart enough to find a way around that perfunctory bullshit.
Mayor Jordan and his campaign staff had apparently been taking in my (pro-gun, pro-drug, anti-police, anti-publik skool, anti-Walmart, pro-anarchist and pro-Wobbly) bumper stickers while I was in the building, because I was spared any attempted gladhanding on the way out.
Aside from that, my only inconvenience was finding parking at the brew pub (thanks to some wonderful folks playing the game of "make the neighboring parking space unusable as possible while technically keeping within the lines"). And now I'm working on my first IPA, getting ready to write some columns, and trying to rinse the memory of my "public servants" out of my mind.
Both yesterday (when I picked up the application) and today (when I picked up the actual ballot), I had difficulty parking because of all the political campaign workers (including some of the politicians themselves) standing around with signs and obstructing the drive-thru area. I actually had to circle around and pass up empty spaces because the people holding signs didn't give me room enough to maneuver and pull into the spaces at the proper angle.
On the plus side, one of the people holding a sign was mayor Lioneld Jordan. It's not every day you get to glare at a mayor and refuse to shake his hand.
Inside, I had the joy of going through Security Theater with a metal detector staffed by County Sheriff's Department deputies, taking off my belt and handing over my phone, keys and wallet. First of all, nobody in Al Qaeda is going to bother blowing up some chickenshit county courthouse in Arkansas. And second, if they did they'd be smart enough to find a way around that perfunctory bullshit.
Mayor Jordan and his campaign staff had apparently been taking in my (pro-gun, pro-drug, anti-police, anti-publik skool, anti-Walmart, pro-anarchist and pro-Wobbly) bumper stickers while I was in the building, because I was spared any attempted gladhanding on the way out.
Aside from that, my only inconvenience was finding parking at the brew pub (thanks to some wonderful folks playing the game of "make the neighboring parking space unusable as possible while technically keeping within the lines"). And now I'm working on my first IPA, getting ready to write some columns, and trying to rinse the memory of my "public servants" out of my mind.
posted by Kevin Carson | 2:21 PM
6 Comments:
Just watched this TED Talk and I thought about you. Not sure if it relates to your research.. http://www.ted.com/talks/geoffrey_west_the_surprising_math_of_cities_and_corporations.html
Why do you say you're anti-public school and what do you offer as an alternative?
I'm anti-public school because the first public school systems were created in the early-mid 19th century -- about the same time factory owners needed workers who were trained to line up on command, eat and piss at the sound of a bell, and cheerfully take orders from authority figures seated behind desks. And if you look at the public educationist literature of the turn of the 20th century, the school curricula were designed to shape human cogs to fit into the 20th century industrial machine. The schools, as an arm of the capitalist state, have always been about reproducing the kind of human labor-power capitalism needs to survive. That means, even more than skills, an ingrained assumption that the present system is natural and inevitable.
You might check out the work of Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, Joel Spring and John Taylor Gatto, much of which is online.
I'd like to see a self-organized, horizontalist alternative in which the students are an equal party, so that the educational requirements for work and the terms on which work is accepted is a matter of equal bargaining, rather than young raw material being processed ex ante into the kind of "human resources" employers need.
lol, do you post like four times a year?
If that much. Most of my occasional writing's at C4SS or P2P Blog now.
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