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Necking In The Guardhouse: The Underground History of Amercian Education by
John Taylor Gatto from archive.org
Necking
In The Guardhouse
About an hour out of Philadelphia there was once (and
may still be) a large U.S. Air
Force base from which officers being sent overseas to Germany, Crete,
and elsewhere, were transshipped
like California cabbages. During the early 1980s I drove a relative there, a freshly minted lieutenant,
late on the night before she flew to Europe for her first assignment and the first real job of
her
life. She was young, tense, bursting with Air Force protocols. Who could blame her for taking the rulebook
as the final authority?
By happenstance I took a civilian
highway outside the eastern perimeter of the base when her billet was on the western side.
Irritated, I checked a map and discovered to my disgust that the only public connection to the
right road on the far side of the base (where the motel sat) was miles away. It was late, I was tired. To make
matters worse, I knew this prim
young lady would need to be sharp in the morning so guilt prodded me. There
was just one way to avoid the long
detour and that was to take the military road through the center of the base leading directly to
where we wanted to be. Well then, we would take it! But the lieutenant was aghast. It was not possible. I wasn't
authorized, had no tag, had no
permit, had no rank. No! No! Not permitted! Listen to me, the young
woman demanded, security is
maniacal on SAC bases; we will have to take the long way around. What she said was perfectly reasonable, but
quite wrong.
One of the genuine advantages of living
as long as I have is that you eventually come to see the gaps between man-made systems and human reality.
Even in a perfect system,
functions must be assigned to people, and people find a way to sabotage
their system
functions even if they don't want to. Systems violate some profound
inner equilibrium, call it the
soul if you like. Systems are inhuman, people are not. On the principle
nothing ventured, nothing gained,
I drove toward the guard post sitting astride the transverse road, all the while listening to my passenger,
increasingly nervous, shrilly informing me there was "No way" I would be "allowed" to pass.
"And don't play games," she further told me ominously, "MPs have instructions to shoot people
acting suspiciously."
We pulled up to the guard booth. No one was in sight so I proceeded down
the transverse like a justified
sinner smiling, but the lieutenant beside me was so agitated, I stopped
and I backed up quite a long way
to the lighted hut again and blew the horn. This time a guard emerged, his tie askew, lipstick all
over his face. Before he could fully collect himself I shouted out the window, "Okay if I
drive through to the motel? The lieutenant here is leaving for Germany tomorrow. I'd like to get her to
bed."
"Sure, go
ahead," he waved and went back to whatever paramilitary pursuit he
was engaged in, repopulating the
world or whatever. The temptation to gloat over my officious kinswoman was strong but I fought it down in light
of her tender age.
Just outside the far
gate across the base was the ghastly two-story cinder-block motel, a type favored by military personnel in
transit, where a reservation waited in the young woman's name. As we pulled into the front parking lot a
terrible sight greeted my young
relative, a sight that reminded me of nothing so much as Monongahela on
a bad Saturday night around New
Year's Eve. At least two dozen men, some half in uniform, some bare- chested and bloody, were fistfighting
all over the first floor walkway and on the little balcony that paralleled the second floor. Dozens more
watched, hooting and howling, beer
cans in hand. Grunts and the sounds of fists smacking heads and bodies filled
the air. They were all enlisted
men, apparently indifferent to official disapproval, for all the world as if they had been Chechens or
Hmong instead of obedient American soldiers.
At first I couldn't believe my eyes. The
combat clearly had been raging for awhile, but no Air Force or local police had moved to stop it. Suddenly to
my dismay, from the new officer's
uniform beside me with a girl inside came something like these words:
"I'll stop this, let me out
of the car. When they see an officer's uniform they '11 take off
running."
"Don't do it," I begged.
"They should take off running, but what if they don't? What if that pack of fighting drunks goes for
you because they like to fight and think it's none of your business? Why don't we just find another place for you
to sleep? You've got a plane to
Germany in the morning. Let's keep our eye on the ball." Driving to
another motel, I said cautiously,
"You know, what they write in rule books and how things really work
are never the same. We all learn
that as we get older." She was too angry to hear, I think.
It's fairly clear to me by now that we
engage in our endless foreign adventures, launching military forces against tiny islands like Grenada, or tiny
nations like Panama, bombing the
vast deserts of Iraq, a country of 22 million people, or engage in our reckless
social adventures, too, patenting
human genes, forcing kids to be dumb, because our leadership classes are worn out from the long
strain of organizing everything over the centuries. Our leadership has
degenerated dramatically, just as British leadership did after Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking. Recently I
read of an American newsman who walked
unchallenged into a nuclear weapons storage facility near Moscow watched
over by a single guard without a
weapon. It tends to make me skeptical about any orderly scientific future. Is it possible that those who
sit atop the social bell curve represent the worst of evolution's products, not its best? Have the fools among us
who just don't get it risen up and
taken command? Think of the
valent symbols of our time: Coca-Cola, the Marlboro Man, disposable diapers, disposable children, Dolly the
cloned sheep, Verdun, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the national highway system, My Lai, fiat money, the space
program, Chernobyl, Waco, the
Highway of Death, welfare, Bhopal, hordes of homeless, psychopathic kids
filling the corridors of the
schools put out of sight and mind until their morale is deteriorated;
think of Princess Di and the Ponzi
scheme we call Social Security, the missile attack on the Sudan, the naval blockade of Haiti. The
naval blockade of Haiti? Is any of this real? People who walk the dogs and kiss the grandchildren are all
so tired of grandiose schemes and
restless Utopians I doubt if too many would really care if the planet exploded tomorrow.
Think of the never-ending stream of
manufactured crises like the invasion of Panama or the cremation of Iraq, principal products of a spent
leadership trying to buy itself time
while the grail search for a destiny worth having goes on in
laboratories and conference rooms
instead of in homes and villages where it belongs. Did the people who arrange
this sorry soap opera ever take
note how green the world really is, how worthwhile the minds and hearts of average men and women,
how particular the hue of each blade of grass? It's the terrible idleness of the social engineering classes that
drives them mad, I think. They
have nothing worthwhile to do, so they do us.
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