"Eating" the News: Always Pretending It Is What It Isn't

Watching the news? Always remember what they are doing. Uh, wait. What are they doing?

Now, we have observed the "secret scheme" employed during the autocracy to sustain the "Endless Campaign" idea all through those gut wrenching years. The agenda was simple enough. The hill billies and bigots, the W's propaganda militia, had to remain engaged at any price -- a rather tall standing order when one considers that the attention capacity of such folks is roughly equivalent to a marble in a mayonaise jar in the hands of a bored five year old.

What had, in previous decades, been presented by our nation's leadership as more lasting points defining and justifying policy, had to be reborn and revived almost daily to keep these semi-literates inflamed. Anything less and they would not be able to remember exactly what had set their "hair on fire" an hour before. As a consequence, during the eight long years of the autocracy the mindless blather emerging from the White House Press Secretary and every neo-con Congressman who could find a microphone amounted to a daily repetition of fear creation and war mongering.

Exaggerated? Try to remember phrases such as "Cut and Run," or "Stay the Course." Most of the selections were three words, each one constructed with a single syllable -- a tasty treat indeed, one blandly palatable for the otherwise seriously challenged, Republican voting Troglodyte.

The point here is that this torrent of hate inducing nonsense never ended! The same point presents the essential premise of this MeanMesa post. All this investment of time and money masqueraded as something as innocent as "managing public opinion." The American voters heard essentially nothing else besides more of this same "amping" from their government, and, they were clearly, ah, "well managed" as a result.

Well, the idea of "managed public opinion" is something of a new creation. Prior to this most recent refinement of the practice, public opinion used to materialize from public consideration of, rather than "talking points," the actual consideration of information. That is, information would disseminate through the "news," the public would consequently inform itself as to what the information was and its relative credibility, and then the public, usually after long, heated discussions over back yard fences and in beer parlors and barbershops, decide what public opinion was to be, all derived roughly from the information.

Such a process left "memory challenged" hill billies and bigots stranded on the sidelines. Generally speaking, most of them could not endure a torturous, thirty minute long news report, read a news paper or magazine or, in any other fashion, effectively access the news. The GOP saw this interesting phenomenon as a strategic asset which could be exploited with the "endless campaign" idea.

In so many words, the process of receiving and considering the news, forming an individual opinion based on such facts and then becoming an element in the national public opinion about whatever the "burning question of the day" might be, was replaced by a new process very similar to the duties faced by a juror. The logical necessity of hosting any meaningful consideration of factual information, a task now deemed far too demanding, was replaced by simply forming an opinion about the hypothetically "opposing sides" which were now presented as the exclusive "ultra-digestible with minimum chewing" choices in any debate.

The invitation from this new, slicked down media philosophy was simple. "We will fabricate both sides of an issue. These will be the only sides which need to be considered. In fact, there will be no need to consider them at all, just pick one. After you have done that, we will all pretend that your have formed an opinion which will, as streams flow together into rivers, become your contribution to 'public opinion.' You won't need to tire yourself out thinking about all sorts of facts and stuff."

The promise was also rather simple. "Everyone, especially the hill billies and bigots, will be able to -- absolutely effortlessly -- have their own 'opinion!' Just think of all the time and energy you will save by simply picking one or the other of the two choices we have created for your consideration. As a citizen of the democracy, we are certain that your have far more important things to occupy your time than fiddling around with complicated government stuff."

In a jury deliberation room, all the weight lifting will be done on machines -- no free lifting will be required. The lawyers have presented both sides of the case, and all that is required of you, the juror, is to pick the one which seems to make the most sense. No verdict other than one of two is possible.

The "endless campaign" idea very effectively exploits this same theme. The corporate media and, very often, the government presents not robust information which might be considered until one has arrived at some conclusions, but instead, a dull flock of rather sterile opposing possibilities. There will be no choices made which are not either one or the other side of one of these amateurish, puerile pre-packaged, pre-digested, sinister "closing arguments."

The success of this plot is now all around us. Presenting such limited choices for public debate is now a full time infatuation of not only pundits, but, in most cases, also of the corporate news delivery organizations. Every "burning question of the day" will be presented as a dichotomy, a fear inducing threat, not a problem to be solved. Any factual information will be savagely dismembered long before it reaches the air waves. Basic facts will be obscured in favor of barely disguised, re-framed, frightening, manipulative opinions or outrages.

The consumer target of news presented in the old fashion was the interested citizen. Our democracy was squarely based on the idea that citizens, once aware of the facts in any matter would, sooner or later, arrive at the best solution to any challenge -- one which would reflect their well informed interest in goals such as security, prosperity and idealism.

However, with their abiding obsession with maintaining and expanding a crippling diviseness and its conveniently polarized electorate, the neo-con media's corporate masters now present only a carefully groomed "multiple choice" version of the possibilities in any given circumstance. Remember, they consider the "burning question of the day" absolutely central to the levels of their continued viewership and, hence, their corporate profits and influence.

Their new mottos are: "No threat, no news." "If there are no effortless decisions, then the question is too complicated." "There are exactly two sides of everything. If there happen to be more than two sides, just pick two and refer to the rest as fringe lunacy."

To bring this issue to a more immediate realm, consider these questions.

If, after watching your favorite media news program, are you ever curious about information which was obviously omitted?

After watching representatives of the exclusive, opposing sides of some current event, do you ever have the suspicion that you really don't agree with either one?

After following numerous commentators about some issue which interests you, do you ever notice that certain phrases seem to recur -- spontaneously, of course -- over and over?

Do the various options presented by news casters and pundits concerning a specific issue ever seem to be suspiciously limited, that is, are they presenting false choices?

Further, consider the following examples of cynically fabricated propositions which have emerged in the media with far more implied factual viability than the facts support.

The Tea Baggers are a terrifying new third political party.

Homosexuals will degrade military effectiveness by upsetting unit cohesion.

Sadam Hussein was behind the 911 attack.

Climate change is a fraud, designed to channel tax money to environmental crooks.

The FBI is unable to effectively interrogate the "under wear bomber" without torturing him.

The Stimulus Bill did not work.

There is a terrible crime wave which requires any reaction necessary.

Health Care will raise taxes and destroy jobs.

Hey, feel more involved and add your own examples to the list. This poop is being sold as factual. After American citizens consume this poop, they become more and more divided, effortlessly choosing one slanted position or the other without every really thinking about their own interests or the interests of the country.

MeanMesa encourages all visitors to find and deploy a new determination to find news sources which can be trusted, follow them daily and then think for yourselves. It is high time for ideas which arise from such a process to, once again, become the guiding light for our futures. The information -- "public opinion" --  "gang rape" must end.

Beyond the Hyperbolic: 11 months of Obama

The liberal criticism of President Obama's record -- and reality.

MeanMesa continues to hear the irritating rush of utterly flaccid pseudo-liberal critics as they bewail the "deceptions" and "failures" constituting the Obama administration's performance to date. One would think that the first eleven months of this government have produced nothing more than a dismal string of half-hearted surrenders to the Right punctuated by far too many "pick-up" basketball games.

Pooey!

Any MeanMesa visitors with an inclination to join in with this unsettling "whining" had best be prepared to avoid the rather significant evidence to the contrary. "Avoid evidence to the contrary?" Let's take a look at exactly what that means. There have already been plenty of accounts of the administration's successes, so there will be little to be gained from any repeat of accomplishments. Instead, MeanMesa is interested in exploring the psychology of this troubling new "glacier in the potty" before we all sit on it any longer, bitching about how cold the seat has become.

A Matter of Long Term Memory Failure

Amazingly, even Liberals inclined to support the President are now entering into a crescendo of wave after wave of complaints. The most noticeable visibility of this phenomenon arrives in the MeanMesa kitchen via the progressive radio hosts. If one had only begin to follow the daily chatter of such folks as Ed Schultz, Mike Malloy, Thom Hartmann and even the usually objective Rachel Madow, and unavoidable conclusion would be that none of these voices was particularly happy with the performance of the President or his administration.

The comments? Speaking in the AM radio equivalent of a depressing stereophonic wail, the criticisms are typically based on disappointment with the schedule of correcting the disaster left by the autocracy in its withdrawal. The unemployed should be employed by now. The carbon emissions legislation should be on track for an Obama signature by now. Wall Street should be regulated by now. A health care reform bill astonishingly similar to precisely what all liberals were dreaming about should be in force by now.

The list of complaints goes on. Afghanistan is escalating when it should be winding down by now. The W's Church of Death in Iraq remains the grisly meat grinder it has always been when, instead, we should be out by now. The civil war in Iran should have already toppled the medieval terrorist clergy by now.

And perhaps the most chilling of all, the economy should be back to where it was just before the bubble exploded -- by now.

So, if this is a problem of Long Term Memory Failure, how long is Long Term?

Actually, not that long. Eleven months ago the single pressing question foremost in the minds of those interested enough to know what was going on was simply: "Is this the end of the Republic?"

Of course, there were lots of other reasonable questions lurking around the periphery, but only for the citizen interested enough in the country to have second thoughts about the legitimacy of a continuing exclusive obsession with his own fortune. The "big screen tv" and "new Malibu every two years" crowd didn't even bother to watch what scraps of news managed to trickle through the remnants of the media.

"Our credit score went back up to 761. My wife and I were overjoyed!"

One would, perhaps over generously, think that maybe this happy couple would remember that their 401K had just finished being gang raped. Had they been actually watching fifteen minutes of news once a week or possibly following a blog reportage, they might have even realized that the country was bankrupt, thoroughly looted by a few Americans at the top of the stack under cover of the autocrat's crime family.

Of course this "overjoyed" couple with the new credit rating were aware -- at some brief point along the path of their financial collapse -- that they had been screwed, but that "moment of clarity" apparently passed quietly far afield under the constant blithering about Obama's birth certificate, the moans and groans of the hill billies and bigots at the tea parties and the dire warnings of the worst remaining looters claiming that the Democrats will wreck the economy.

MeanMesa suspects that the "overjoyed" couple was actually so extremely fickle in their fleeting lack of political realism that their indifference to "events of the ground" paid its own fair wage -- no matter how cruel that might be in terms of their financial survival let alone their future plans. The psychological sensation of having been savagely stripped of half of all their assets for which they had labored hard and long must have been unpleasant indeed.

Still, all this never rose to a level of serverity which they couldn't conveniently handle exactly as they had handled all the other outrages and insults before. They simply forgot about it. And, once all that nerve racking worry was removed, the "overjoyed" couple found that they had time to bitch! No need to remember where all that money went! No need to remember who had their nest egg and why! No need to allow the memory of what had transpired in the last eight years to remain an explanation of their new, desperate poverty. Nope.


"Now that we have our credit score back up, we're going shopping. Maybe we'll think about political realities later."

"And then, maybe not. Selective memories and denial always worked before -- so, here we go -- off to Macy's!"

Mastering the Art of Being Uninformed

How in the world could our urbanite examples move along so comfortably with such irrational plans? The answer is fairly clear.

Long Term Memory Failure is exquisitely easier when there wasn't much in those lost memories in the first place.

Has any MeanMesa visitor ever heard a house guest utter "I don't want to watch the news. It just brings me down." or some other, equally curious phrase? Might such folks dream that, absent any information about what was happening in their country, no consequences could reach them if they simply avoided knowing about it?

The matter could be additionally lubricated by a over-riding self-calming cynicism, not an unexpected result based on the quality of news information reaching them. Of course, there would be no effort made or initiative taken to access any facts -- ignorance is bliss. Further, if the actuality of the matter remained conveniently confused and incomplete, anything particularly laborious or challenging about shelving the whole thing for Long Term Memory Failure would only be that much easier.

Why worry about one's life savings being suddenly missing when there are far more important matters at hand. "Important matters?" Of course.



For example, the President said that health care reform would be revenue neutral. The idiot Senator from "somewhere down South" said that it would plunge our grandchildren into economic slavery.



The President said that he intended to "get to the bottom" of the Nigerian lad who smuggled a bomb onto a US passenger jet on Christmas day. The half-witted neo-con Congressman sobers up long enough to say that the President has taken a lackadaisical approach to terrorism, nevermind that his outfit was in charge when 911 happened!



And that they were warned -- in writing -- that the attack was coming!



Now, these are only a couple of examples. The point here is, however, that such nonsense can be delivered for public consumption with a straight face! How can they do this? In the MeanMesa household, they can't, but it's fairly clear that the most reactionary forces in the country believe that they can sell this hogwash to enough uninformed citizens to make it worth their while to try it.



The neo-con media corporations are certainly not going to stop them. That would be integrity and commitment in delivering the news, the First Amendment, Free Press. Screw all of that, those boys are in it to sell toothpaste and wreck the country for their billionaire masters. America be damned! Snatch the profits!

So, What Has Obama Accomplished?

Well, the President -- as is trotted out perhaps over frequently -- inherited a country in a state of collapse. Yes, the economy was a train wreck, staggering under the Bush-Reagan deficits. Yes, the military was a train wreck after being consumed by the W's war for oil (the Iraq Hydrocarbon Treaty). Yes, the hill billies and bigots had been inflamed to a maximum craziness ("We want our country back!"). But, these were only symptoms of the most frightening aspect of what he inherited.



In the mind of a Constitutional scholar, the real threat was a structural one. Obama inherited a country where the richest had managed to almost take control of the government, where the Constitution (start with habeus corpus and plunge down hill from there...) was in tatters, where the Senate and the Treasury were owned by the Masters of Wall Street, where there were private armies of mercenaries walking around US cities with automatic rifles (Blackwater in New Orleans).



Now we come to what Obama has accomplished. Of course, there is a stream of legislative corrections, each one bearing the scars of Republican looting. Of course, there are international successes such as the closing of W's torture dungeon in Cuba and the withdrawal from W's war in Iraq. Of course, there are economic successes such as a lowering unemployment rate and avoiding the Great Depression of 2008. But none of these accomplishments really reveals the most serious successes of the first eleven months of the Obama administration.

What would those be?

MeanMesa's take on the matter is as follows:

The cockroaches are out in the light.

Day by day for the last eleven months, Americans have been carefully brought along to a new understanding of who exactly owns this country. Of course, that "ownership" is utterly illegitimate -- it has only gone on for so long thanks to Long Term Memory Failures and Mastering the Art of Being Uninformed.



No amount of "lazy anger," denial or lack of interest can camoflage the reality of what is emerging -- unstoppably -- into the light of day. Obama isn't the only one who has inherited something which is critically, foundationally not what we all thought it was. We all inherited that.



It is Childhood's End.



What we were convinced was a national democratic Republic turns out to be a thinly disguised oligarchy with wet dreams of becoming a permanent nobility of wealth. What we always thought was a representative government turns out to be a literal den of thieves, thinly disguised as sincere ideologues. What we thought were reasonable hopes for our future were subject to approval by our new, silent masters.




Obama could never stop this headlong destruction of American ideals until we -- the uninformed and the amnesiacs -- were carefully brought back to our senses. This has begun.



This is what Obama has accomplished in his first eleven months.



"Jest lahk them tea baggers done said last summer -- we plan to take our country back."

Polls and Policy from TV Guide?

The neo-con effort to establish security necessities
justified by television scripts

Dreary psychopaths reinventing their integrity, their torture
and their sexual fantasies 90

A brief glimpse of the scandal as seen by MeanMesa:

As more and more details emerge from the now “out of control” scandal of the Bushite Autocracy’s torture habits, we have to wonder: “How could they (we) have been drawn into this disgusting mess?” Of course, they somehow have found the last, allegedly justifying shards of their subhuman, caustic vitriol to trot out as their last frantic vestiges of their claims to humanhood slowly disintegrate. Of course, they make desperate, whiny cries that all their midnight pornography torture episodes were effective -- and in their (our) twisted issue of odorous dishonor -- hence, justified.

It’s time to “kiss the girlfriend!”

Pundits across the air waves, both reactionaries and progressives, have tried to salve the horrifying national embarrassment with an endless addition of more and more “discussion,” always convincingly presented as if the speaker were privy to actual observation of the practices or enjoyed some other kind of credible authority about them. As with so many other matters, none of us is -- any longer -- particularly surprised to find that massive campaigns of lies and misdirection from the Bush regime have left us stunned and remorseful, again. All those who hold up the honor of our country hide our faces and ponder -- “Will there ever be an end to this disgrace?”

The psychopathies of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeldt-Gonzales “horror family” seem to emerge into the light with the sickening regularity of an episodic series of television shows, each one more hideously depressing and outrageous than the one before.

One hundred eighty terrifying, water board driven sensations of death by drowning to “uncover” the same information available on Khalid Shaik Mohammed's previously broadcast Al Jezeera television interview?

The details of these gruesome, sexual gratification fantasies and other facts are still developing, but there is an aside which may be “ripe” enough for MeanMesa’s attention today. What could have inspired this terrible indulgence on the part of someone like Dick Cheney? Although an interesting question, we now face the unnerving material task of trying to rectify the consequences of the matter. Still, we remain curious. What was the motive for all these acts? What was the source that provided the insane motives for these subhuman escapades carried out in our name?

The answers are worse than the questions. Raw vengeance can carry the day only so far. Can we discern the reasons? After all, what else would satisfy the appetite for power and ascendance amid the otherwise humiliating, self crushing boredom of being overweight, effeminate cowards armed -- thanks to us -- with the world’s most powerful army?

Now to the point of this post:

Let’s talk television. (We can painlessly include movies and novels, too. In this case, the medium is NOT the message.) A sinister cycle of carefully grooming the public, both here and abroad, with deceptions disguised as news by the likes of the Foxes and Murdoch’s is no longer a “shocking revelation” to anyone any longer. But what about the fiction? Are the equally carefully crafted themes of fictional plots designed to slowly reconfigure the glacial consciousness of the viewing masses?

For example, the codependent narcotic of CSI reassures us that police investigations can reveal the “truth” necessary to catch any criminal, no matter how ingenious or cautious he might be. We ignore the fact that prosecutors from all across the country now complain that jurors expect this fictional expertise before they convict defendants. Perhaps they simply don’t realize that the popular CSI equipment is more akin to Star Trek technology than fact.

In any event, the message is clear. “Eluding the power of the state is hopeless.” Does it have to do with deterring crime or establishing submission? "Resistance is futile!" (... the BORG...)

Fox’s Jack Bauer -- 24 Hours -- establishes the fictional foundation for the now famously cited H-bomb, anthrax, death ray, insane terrorist in Los Angeles, New York or Atlanta which justifies the necessity of ripping someone’s arms and legs off in order to “foil the plot.” We wonder if Sean Hannity has found a way to watch these films twenty-four hours every day.

The question is, “Did shows like 24 Hours successfully embed this crazy idea into the minds of the electorate? Or even, part of the electorate?”

El Cartel, broadcast here in Albuquerque on the Spanish language Telemundo Network, presents the vindicating tale of government efforts to quash drug cartels. Are these (rather entertaining) tales a move to prepare citizens of Mexico and the Untied States with a fictional model which persuades them that such programs are worth the sacrifice of enduring the inevitable violence they will precipitate? They may be effective. El Cartel may even produce a positive image and acceptance of the value of the policy. But wait, is this the rational approach to prepare a populous to take the right action?

Isn’t it a bit cynical to assume that the citizens of any country can only be convinced that the right course of action is the dramatically simplified motive presented in a fictional construction? What about the mature, educated citizen who is naturally inclined toward governments and policies which reflect his individual interests in doing the sensible, reasonable things necessary to sustain an orderly civilization consistent with his own values -- that is, values which haven’t been predigested, simplified and presented as caricatures of solutions to the real challenges he and his country might face?

It’s easier for the lazy mind to simply be frightened into agreement with the radical actions taken by a desperate, yet imminently -- and artificially -- honorable television star. This seems to be the case whether a government wishes to vindicate torture or campaigns to defeat drug lords.

Good old Jack Bauer has made legitimate all these responses as unexamined, gaseous justifications for non existential, hypothetical terror threats. Once that was accomplished, the justifications went directly to the neo-con wing nuts in the government even as the hypothetical terrors were left behind on last week’s show.

Good old Jack Bauer laid the groundwork. And from that insane foundation, after Fox “innocently” participated in its introduction, propagation and justification, there emerged all sorts of even more bizarre and grotesque further refinements. For example, Cheney’s torture program, since it apparently never produced much in the way of information, can be assigned to the ambition of terrifying the terrorists, perhaps extracting some sort of vengeance. Vengeance? Useful for national security? In the world of Cheney and Rove, any kind of outrage represented the possible utility of its use for political expediencies. That isn’t news to anyone currently still breathing.

Heh, heh, heh. Tune into channel 69. We are now listening to this same, hopefully rather nervous, idiot (Cheney) insisting that our torture techniques are national security secrets. How do we intend to frighten terrorists with his exquisite torture accomplishments if they remain secret? In his next breath, the old crook insists that the Justice Department has intentionally refused to release the documents supporting “all the lives saved” by this violent extraction of terrorist “information.” Naturally, something like that might assist in his defense in court, in his mind, even if it had to be quickly fabricated at the last minute (maybe in a way similar to the official lies he spread like sunflower seeds to start the war in Iraq...).

We must disabuse ourselves of the trash these television scripts have insinuated into our thoughts. The first step will be to finally reveal that they are no more than cheesy manipulations of our fears, vomited out to make us more accepting of the horrors of our actions and more accepting of the necessities of abandoning our ideals and our Constitutional protections.

If the neo-con monsters who so craftily deceived us before can reinvent themselves into something even remotely coherent, we will have been destroyed by our own televisions! Thanks to them, we now find ourselves not resisting external forces intent on our destruction, but instead, sorting uncomfortably through our own thoughts to detect and eliminate the toxin which has been placed there.

Yes, the Bushites created immense poison all around the world, but our first mission will be to cleanse what their incredible network co-conspirators have placed in our own minds.

Not familiar with the al Jazeera network? It is part of our world and definitely worth knowing about!
http://english.aljazeera.net/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Jazeera_English

Any appetite for Chris Matthews? Here he speaks about Cheney's torture justification:
http://www.ecofactory.com/community/green-tv/cheneys-defense-torture-addressed-chris-matthews-hardball

Have we been neglecting our appropriate attention to 24 Hours or El Cartel?
http://www.fox.com/24/
http://foro.univision.com/univision/board/message?board.id=telenovelas&message.id=1135221

Finally, for those with an "appetite" to see a "fictional" representation of an extremely troubling traditional example, may I recommend a movie. The important feature of this movie has no particular relevance to torture scenes or techniques, but rather to the outrage of the attitudes of those in charge.

CAUTION: This film is EXTREMELY PROVOCATIVE. DO NOT FOLLOW THIS LINK UNLESS YOU ACCEPT AND UNDERSTAND THIS WARNING!

http://www.criterion.com/films/532

Obama's Next Stink Hole: Educational Performance Testing

Will it be possible to test public school students to improve the educational system?87

A Proposal for A New Direction in Public School Student Testing

The “No Child Left Behind” idea has probably spun out its last ideological talking point. The ill fated program’s most destructive quality was that it provided way too much fertile ground for ideological “talk show” nit picking from both sides. It will die quietly among the corpses of other momentary political educational “snake oil” cure-alls dating back at least as far as the Eisenhower years.

All these programs died from the same pair of plagues. The first was that none of them could breathe itself into life without funding. Whatever funding was proposed was gradually eliminated by questionable Congressional opinions about results. The second was that none of these legislative efforts could present proof of effectivity adequate for its own political protection. There were never any credible, unassailable test results to substantiate progress which could survive the Congressional looting operations.

Now, President Obama has, predictably, propped education up as one the legs of his three legged stool. He has even dared to trot out the seemingly good idea of merit pay for good teachers, a traditional bipartisan "meat-puppet" fun factory with a history of utterly destructive results. No one in Congress from either side of the aisle can agree on a concrete approach for testing public school students or school teachers.

The truly new feature of the debate this time around comes not from the studied educators but from the headlines of the newspapers still surviving that industry’s head long slide into the irrelevance of its neo-con news manipulation. The United States, in a performance record eerily similar to our health care disaster, spends the most money for the worst out comes (36th in the industrial world in most areas) from public education. Today, we require neither a wizened old educational expert or a tax craving politician to tell us that the public schools are a mess. The Chinese, Scandinavians, Europeans and Asians are running laps around our graduates.

That is what our testing vacuum has led us into as a nation which was originally famous for its innovative public education. Facts on the ground always trump expert educational opinions if the media presents them to the American people. These current educational “facts on the ground” are all around us in a troubling, unavoidable way, yes, just like a herd of homesick wildebeests in the parlor.

So far we have managed to fill in the gaps left by the shortage of our own educated workers by siphoning off the best from Eastern Europe, India, China and other places where education is still being taken seriously. However, with the waning purchasing power of the new “Paulson” dollars, that solution may well be ending. In recent years we have focused most of our attention on exporting colonial, greedy aberrations of our export style of free market capitalism and crooked elections and the rest of the world has returned the favor by supplying the best and brightest of its chemists, doctors, mathematicians, physicists and programmers to run our country.

The dilemma with educational testing has a few issues in common with the wildebeest problem. Just as was the case with medieval martyrs who were to be torn apart by bulls attached to each arm and leg, the educational testing quandary is characterized by its own four, self-serving flesh tearing bulls. We will consider a definition of precisely who those parties might be in modern terms, then we will look at a possible -- and delightfully simple -- solution to the whole affair of sensible educational testing.

Flesh Tearing Bulls Type One: The dogmatic, ideological arsonists.

This bunch is always willing to rant about big government intervention in the educational system. The threat they harness so effectively is to suddenly arise during elections with their prepackaged inflammatory rhetoric. They are able to convert any outcome, good, bad, or indifferent, related to changes in the educational system to a creeping, liberal contamination of traditional American values, those would be values such as illiteracy. More importantly, they seem to be consistently able to do this at election time.

Consequently, these ideological arsonists, already suspiciously under educated, are able to impose their “fire up the crowd” generalities at just the most strategic moment, term and after term, repopulating the legislative bodies of the House and Senate with more talking point zombies.

Flesh Tearing Bulls Type Two: The "free market" educational profiteers.

By sustaining their influence with copious campaign contributions, this crowd is able to sell text books and tests of incomprehensibly low quality to school boards, state legislators and governors. The secret of accomplishing this travesty year after year lies in the careful marketing of the content of these books of theirs and the emphasis implied by the questions in the tests they provide.

This means that such obsolete concepts as a 6,000 year old earth, tax and spend liberals, historically justified wars of aggression and the like can be injected into public school text books on a “pay as you play” basis. The procurement offices of state and local governments purchasing these text books and tests are only too happy to get an opportunity to “reinforce societal norms” with the both the content of these shabby, confusing standardized books and the rather shadowy “right answers” which correspond to the shabby, confusing standardized tests.

Flesh Tearing Bulls Type Three: The Ensconced Educational Credentialists

This bunch seeks primarily glory, but very often find tenured job security a close second. If they are able to insinuate their consistently ineffective educational ideas into the testing system, their credentials as absolutely indispensable, educational geniuses are sustained. This may seem silly, but these Type Three Bulls actually labor constantly in the hope of complicating things so profoundly that the test questions they might approve have twisted, tormented baggage so circumnavigatory that graduate logic students would simply surrender when they read them.

The effect of this priority on typical public school students is to train their young minds to the elaborate "agenda dodging" tactics necessary to survive the test questions at the expense of what most tax payers would consider legitimate educational materials. Having materially failed at designing effective educational systems, these “parasites of complexity” have adopted a last, desperate ambition to keep all educational policy issues -- and test questions -- so complex that only they can interpret the results, an interpretation which, not surprisingly, usually suggests educational successes based on their plans.

Flesh Tearing Bulls Type Four: The Insistent Anti Intellectuals.

Although this group may also provide denizens of Type One when properly groomed by campaign strategists, or even otherwise, they are numerous -- and vociferous -- enough to qualify as an independent category. They prefer to compare all contemporary education systems with imaginary ones which have been dredged up from their memories of their own childhood. Of course, 95% of ideas introduced by them with phrases such as “In the old days ..” or “When I was young...” are entirely fabrications of equally unexamined appetites for a return to “The good old days...” In fact, these memories of theirs are not memories of their youth at all, but rather no more than poorly detailed constructs which have been placed in their minds by others (Types Two and Three).

Incredibly, these test complainers, considering their own uncertain educational status, would actually prefer that public school students not be educated too effectively. The prospect of losing an argument with one of their children is vastly more threatening to them than creating a nation where education is completely below the standards of its industrial competitors.

The Flesh Tearing Bulls have thwarted every attempt to adopt a rational testing program which might provide for merit pay for good teachers, lead to the selection of reasonably truthful textbooks or even provide some rational means to direct Federal educational subsidies beyond the current “graft and extraction schemes.” We might recall that George and Laura Bush “contributed” $10,000 to the Katrina emergency funds to restore education in that ravished city. What we might not recall is that this altruistic couple selected a gospel based history text written by the President’s brother as the exclusive “educational material” to be purchased with their money.

Somewhere, almost certainly, there was a test available to measure the success of that, ah, text book. Can we guess what sorts of answers might have been the “right answers” for public school students taking that test?

So how can we solve this testing problem? We have very confidently exhausted the more ideologically biased, the more expensive and profitable, the more credentialist innovated and the more anti-intellectual options. In various times and in various school districts we have experimented with every one of those approaches, and the result was a uniformly skeptical electorate which had reasonably concluded that none of their results measured any more than which interest had threatened or paid off the purchasing department most effectively.

What kind of test can actually measure educational progress? Certainly nothing similar to these previous cynical attempts. It will have to be a new approach, and here it is.

1. Unmanageable question selections.

The proposed test should present roughly 15,000 questions with topics scattered in an entirely random sequence. There should absolutely not be an English, history, literature, mathematics, civics or science section. Everything should be entirely mixed. A wildly uncontrollable collection of questions will end forever the lament of those who claim that testing means “teaching to the test.” No teacher can “teach” to this test.

2. No Grade Level Testing

There should be no implied educational level for any of the questions. In the body of the 15,000 questions should be plenty of choices for both first graders and seniors in high school. The public school students taking the tests will select the questions they want to take the risk of answering. The number of correct answers minus the number of incorrect ones will establish the educational status of the student. There will be no “upper” or “lower” limits on the knowledge level of the student respondent. If a senior scores at the tenth grade level or a third grader scores at the eighth grade level, so be it. The tests will have begun to generate some credible results which can actually be useful in tailoring an education for actual students, not theoretical ones.

3. Incorporate Real Critical Thinking

Probably the most lethal attack on measurement of critical thinking occurred when test results became little boxes to be filled in to answer multiple choice questions. The message of that “leap to efficiency” was that essay questions were simply too expensive to grade, and hence, not revelatory. Further, one unavoidably valid feed stock of critical thinking is the width of the spectrum of information available to the thinker. The Type Three folks have effectively controlled this area of testing for long enough. The results, with or without their confusing excuses, are abundantly -- and discouragingly -- clear.

4. Include Easy and Hard Questions

The test questions can have weighted difficulty. The first graders will be attracted to the one and two point variety, the juniors and seniors to the five and ten point variety. There won’t be enough time for a senior to select all the grade school questions and emerge with a good score. In fact, there won’t be time for any student to answer more than 10% or 15% of the questions in the difficulty -- and point -- range which will yield a good score on the test. That is the point. By selecting the questions they will attempt to answer from the vast number of questions offered, each student will effectively configure his own test. Good test results require a wide open testing process without preconceived limits.

5. Totally Random Question Selection

Let all the experts interested in participating submit their own questions. A good, rough estimate of the number of questions needed in the resource collection would be, say, 250,000. By the way, that would be 250,000 per year. Each annual test should be taken at random from a new, fresh collection of 250,000 possible questions. If the random questions selected are accidentally weighted toward a certain age group, the results can be quite rationally adjusted without impacting the objectivity of the effort. On the other hand, with 15,000 questions presented to students in the final form of the test, such a coincidental shift would be rather unlikely.

The testing regime could easily be spread over a three day period with 5,000 fresh, random questions being presented each day. If that approach was too exhausting, the tests could be issued in 1,000 question sets on fifteen school days distributed throughout the year or even at varying rates for students from different age groups. There would be no cheating, no prepping and very little arguing about the results. When such tests were administered annually on a nationwide student population, district by district comparisons might well prove chilling, indeed.

Legitimate testing results would deliver usable and effective data for directing and targeting the efforts of the entire public -- and private -- educational system. When test results are finally lifted above the contentious, yelling Bulls who have managed to neutralize every effort so far, we might see some material advances we urgently need in our national educational product. Until then, we will continue to fly blind.

We need them, and we need them soon.

For an interesting blog post on this subject, NCTE Elementary:
http://ncteelem.blogspot.com/2007/04/onerous-testing-in-public-schools.html
and for a sample of the confusing Type Three action, ( there are plenty)
http://www.fcrr.org/assessmentReadingFirstCriticalElements.htm
For example, the following article from the BBC concerning science testing in the UK:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7966688.stm