A Useful Idiot Abroad: The Absurd Arena Live Discussion Board
A Useful Idiot Abroad: The Absurd Arena Live Discussion Board
Live chat today at 12pm EST with Katie and Wilson in the Substack app chat!
Click here to join the live discussion board with Katie and Wilson in the Substack app chat
Hey Useful Idiots,
On Monday morning, like every Monday Mourning, we had commenters in the live chat saying “Greetings from…” Poland, Ireland, Australia, Venezuela, and so on, a joyous communion of Useful Idiots International.
Which got me thinking: we’ve got all this inward focus on the US, with some pundits and politicians calling it the greatest country in the world, and others in corporate media saying it needs just a liiiiiittle work to become the greatest country in the world.
But unlike them, we’ve actually got viewers all across the world, so we can find out the truth.
Who’s doing things right? From your lives and travels, are there any governments who are on the right track to creating a free and prosperous country? Or is the nature of government too narcissistic in itself, leaving no room anywhere for revolutionary ideas to break through corruption, bribery, and self-promotion?
Join Katie and Wilson at 12pm est to hash out the big question: who really is the greatest country in the world?
I do not pretend to be anything I am not. I am 75 and autistic. I live in Quebec and we have our own department and I returned to Quebec with my wife to retire and to eventually die in the early 21st century.
I was born in 1948 under the Padlock Laws in a place run by plutocrats and theocrats. I left in 1970 and believed much of what I now know is pure unadulterated toxic bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Padlock_Law
I couldn't do school I didn't have the proper equipment but they said I did because I was a genius in logic and linguistics and I just had try harder. The harder I tried the worse I failed. I had no bootstraps to pull up on.
I live in a world of abstract mathematics where logic makes sense and I don't understand speaking from the gut. I learned to adapt to a land of little logic and big guts.
I always had a friend. I can do one friend or maybe one and a half friends at a time. I was always trying to figure why I was lazy when if I only tried harder I would be a genius in things that were "important."
Everybody told me I was brilliant and I obsessed over my laziness because I didn't try hard enough to do the things I could do if I just pulled myself up by my own boot straps.
I failed every grade in High School and still went to evening classes at Aaron Matte's old alma mater when we had our first race riot. It was Sir George Williams back then and to be an Anglophone and Jew meant being everything I could not be.
I don't know why I wrote exams I didn't know any of the answers but I thought one day I would discover those illusive bootstraps.
There wasn't much I could do as well as "normal" people. I was left with the jobs nobody else could do or wanted to do.
I learned how to pretend to play bridge and became a life Master in the American Contract Bridge League and the African American American Bridge Association without ever acquiring the basic skills.
Anyways let's get back to basics.
The first race riots at Concordia saw me me supporting the rioters. I worked full time and took courses at night and the students were Montreal's working class anglophones and of course they believed the administration. I knew the administration and they were RACISTS or at least ethnocentric and the protesters knew they were getting the short end of the stick.
My wife inhabits her own separate galaxy. I met her at a Jewish Singles Stampede Party in Calgary where she was completing her doctorate in education. She had her Masters in Science Education from Chicago which she rightly deserved. She is retired but still studies philosophy.
We never lived among urban or suburban savages. We lived in aboriginal villages and urban ghettoes and now live in a working class neighbourhood in a large rural village in Quebec.
My eyesight is failing but I always loved cooking and taking care of the food. I used to bake bread and trade fresh bread for dry caribou meat. I couldn't do that in Chicago. I used drive our grandson to school on the Northside and buy CANADIAN flour on Devon Avenue and shop for Canadian food on the Northside.
There was only American food on Chicago's southside.
I was maybe five years old when my father told me Reagan was a fascist rat. My father was literate in many languages he graduated from High School in Poland and arrived in NY in the midtwenties. My father went to school with the people who destroyed his childhood in the holocaust. My father hated religion but loved people regardless of their understandings. In Poland he went to Catholic schools in Quebec we still had ghetto walls we still do and they are coming down very slowly they were built to last for eternity.
Today in Quebec race, gender and religion are fairy dust while America sinks in to a cesspool of paranoia and distrust.
In his A Doubter's Companion A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense 1994. John Ralston Saul Canadian philosopher and European historian defines cynicism as democracy's greatest threat. Thirty years later the two time head of PEN International and expert on Journalistic Freedom seems the prophet Time Magazine said he was in the late nineteen nineties.
Cynicism is America in 2023.
It is time for truth
God believes in evolution. She is not a magician. The time for prayer is over it is time to prepare for the constant changes of the universe before we become the fossil record.