The Dimwit Zone: Ignorance, your friend and mine!
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2003
Lifelong Learning: From whom and why for?
It has been our experience, here, at IPR, YFITA, that life is full of unexpected surprises.
When we initially started this enterprise, the Manglers and the Meddle Manglers hired a couple of bright folks from a Constultancy to hire and fire people based on alleged competency in various fields relating to broadcasting and it's concomitant office needs.
Eventually, enough liars were hired who could reasonably pretend to do the jobs that they were hired for that they could engage in creative reassignments of personnel and assets so that the place actually ran after a fashion.
Eventually, also, at least a couple, possibly more, of the liars inveigled their way into Meddle Manglement and managed to convince the Upper Manglement that hiring and firing (or, Intake and Exhaust, as we like to call it) could be more profitably and efficiently run in-house, so that few of our 'trade secrets' (we have none, but it never hurts to stroke the suits. It makes them purr...) could leak out when the Consultants inadvertantly did business with other firms.
Thus, we are now in the position of the inmates running the asylum.
It works for Congress and the House of Commons, so why should we be different?
Anyway, ignorance has it's place. So does lying. Just don't mix the two too often, or you'll find yourself asking us for a job. Which is what one of those fine 'consultants' ended up doing after we terminated his contract. Turns out they had no other clients and his partner was actually the sly cousin of one of the founding Members of IPR.
The sly cousin now runs a Battered Whelk stand in Brighton. And quite successfully, too. Next year, he hopes to welcome his wife into the operation... with a stand four hundred yards from his.
And now, our dear friends, Prof. Ingle Orville and Dr. Judith Ring, are going to tell us just how little it is safe to know:
It is better to shake your head than to wag your tongue.
Prof. Orville:
Much has been made over the years about 'cradle to grave' policies that are supposed to guarantee a population of healthy, reasonably educated, socially-aware, comfortable, thoughtful and civilized people who will cause a reduction in crime, unemployment, spousal abuse, and demands upon the consciences of the upper middle class.
Subsequent experience has proven that the very schools that the designers and administrators of this utopian pulchritude came out of with these wondrous, shiny ideas, were, themselves, hotbeds of ignorance, twisted-thinking, and socially-blindfolded mockeries of thought, reason and the most basic of philosophical tenets.
Thus, we have more than a case of the blind leading the blind, we have a case of the blind blinding the sighted, because, in their willingness to homogenize the hoi and polloi into a useful workforce that won't drink too much or watch too much TV or have too many children with too many illnesses, the designers and administrators of this new tomorrow forgot that education, like accordion-playing, is an iffy thing, if forced upon simply everyone.
Dr. Ring:
May I say something?
Prof. Orville:
I'm not done with my opening statement, yet.
When I am, you may weigh in on the topic at hand.
Dr. Ring:
How many more pages is it?
Prof. Orville:
SFX: riffling and flipping
Oh, about ten or eleven...
Dr. Ring:
That's not an opening statement, that's a declaration of war!
Prof. Orville:
Have you come here to mock me.
This is a document of great importance.
Dr. Ring:
Of course. You wrote it.
Prof. Orville:
Well, no, not exactly.
I have a staff who assists me.
Dr. Ring:
So, you don't know what you are talking about?
Prof. Orville:
Well, yes, I do. I am a Professor, after all.
Do you suppose they give out these badges after a few intense weekends studying knots?
Dr. Ring:
So, you could toss that sheaf and talk extemporaneously on this subject?
Prof. Orville:
Not with the specificity and citations and quotations from older authorities, with the figures and percentages rightly recalled, no.
Why don't you just let me get on with it and then we can move onto your portion?
Dr. Ring:
We already have.
I've been brought in by the National Board of Ignorance to observe you and calculate your Ignorance Potential.
Prof. Orville:
Pluh, peh, buh, what's that?
Dr. Ring:
It's a kind of reverse I.Q.
It is a new professional guidance tool that allows the authorities to determine just how ignorant one might become if allowed to continue their course of study. It is normally applied to lawyers and shopkeeper's assistants.
Prof. Orville:
So, you are not a real doctor?
You're just a socialist spy!
Dr. Ring:
Shuffle of papers
Here are my credentials.
I am not only and M.D. and a DDL, but a Ph.D. and
a certified oil-change technician and stereo HiFi repair person...
Prof. Orville:
chair scooting
You actually worked in the private sector?!
Get away from me! Unclean! Unclean!
How are you, a plebian hind-tit gobbler, hidden hand of the Government, qualified to judge ME,
champion of Knowledge, Truth, Research Funding and the well-fried donut?
Dr. Ring:
I know your mother.
We had a nice long chat over several winter evenings, pizza and warm Guinness.
I have also talked to the Proctor at your old school,
the beat bobbie in your neighborhood as a child,
your classmates at the Isnormalington Oaks public school for Emotionally Unchallenged Overprivileged Young Toffs....
Prof. Orville:
Fiendish, yes, I thought I burned my records when I bought a new set from that nice Swiss forger in Geneva,
but,
that's neither here nor there.
Why are you investigating me, a notable leader in my field of Recombinant Education Studies and Socially Relevant Government Failures to Change Anything but The Names In The Paper?
Have I not done what I was supposed to?
Played golf with the right people?
Asked the right questions and come up with answers in several parts that absolutely point up the problems with adding to the list of potentially embarrassing and expensive solutions?
Have I not kept my department and my staff happy with progressively larger budgets and wider-ranging studies?
Have I not kept the printing plant at Oxford happy with larger and more voluminously foot-noted tomes of the results of the investigation into the possibility of more research into the necessity of funding more surveys about how Sixth-formers feel about their teacher's mode of speech, with respect to talking down to them without actually helping them to learn to do anything but either reject their model in disgust or to suck up to them by mimicking, in a childishly sickeningly exact manner, those same supercilious tones?
Is not all this worthy of consideration in the veneration of the icon of modern academia that is ME?
Dr. Ring:
calculator and slide rule noises followed by short print-out effect and ripping off of paper
There you are. IP of 162.
You have reached your pinnacle of potential and are thus as ignorant as you should be.
I'll report my findings tomorrow and the Office of Ignorant Ignorance will be in touch with you soon about your sterilization and reassignment.
Good evening.
Door effect, opening gently and closing quietly, with a bit of a squeak
Prof. Orville:
Pluh, peh, buh.
Bribble, bribble, bribble, bribble, ...
Aw, don't feel so bad. They try to get rid of the best of us, y'know. There's a cherry cordial in the break room, under the tea cart, if you wish.
Prof. Orville:
Sniff..
That would be nice... thank you... I think I could do with some...
could I have it in a clean tumbler, with a bit of Pepsi?
Oh, I'm sorry. I can't bring it to you.
Prof. Orville:
Why not? Too good to serve a gentleman in distress?
Actually, no. I'm discorporate. I have no physical form. I am a series of echoate sound waves and magnetic disturbances.
Prof. Orville:
That sounds familiar. Are you related to anyone in Chubawubba?
Wait a second!
You're not real? I'm hearing voices?
Well, I am certainly real. And you are only hearing one voice. I am a.. a.. The Ghost Of Sound Effects Past and I am here to show you that you are not the first to be abandoned for the sake of expediency.
Prof. Orville:
I've got it now. This is one of those practical joke shows, innit?
At any moment an MC in a bad tie is gonna pop out and tell me where the cameras are, right?
You've been watching too much TV. That's not good. Not good at all.
As a spirit of wireless broadcasting, the Prince of Entertainment, News and Sport, I shall have to teach you the error of thwarting an occasionally malevolent spirit...
Prof. Orville:
Ha! So, what, you silly disembodied electronic has-been, could you possibly do to an ungullible educated fellow like me?
Hi! I'm Eddie, your shipboard computer! Hold on a second while I calculate your pain threshold. *click* gotcha. Now, are you ready?
I am now going to sing all three verses of "You'll Never Walk Alone" backwards, with bagpipe accompaniment.
Prof. Orville:
music begins
Nooooooo! Noooooo! Noo....
Dr. Ring:
Prof. Orville was found two days later setting fire to books in the Self-help section of a major chain bookseller.
It was determined that I had not fully understood his potential for moronity and that I, myself, should undergo an evaluation.
Ha!
As if!
I know where all the other researchers live!
They'll never catch me! I built the trap!
Haahhaaahahahahahahahah!
Excuse me, Miss?
Dr. Ring:
What?
Hi, I'm Eddie, your shipboard computer!
Dr. Ring:
Nooooooo!
sound of Dr. Ring's lower intestine leaping up through her throat and out her mouth to straighten her name badge and then bob in appreciation of Eddie's rendition of "MacArthur Park" in Welsh Pig Latin...
