The "C" Virus

 The news has been divergent, convoluted, and negative as of late.  It doesn't refer to anything useful for American life.  In a long list of male sexual abusers, Governor Cuomo is lonely and randy.  So what?  The millennial generation is so naive, brain washed, and self-centered what else can they do except complain?  Perhaps the idea of thwarting an indecent proposal does not come to mind.  If the idea of a governor and their accompanying power and influence is so great that one's speech is stymied, what else can one do but complain?  In previous decades a young working professional might be able to muster the verbal skills to parry such an attack.  What was the clip I saw of Ashley Judd putting Harvey Weinstein at bay?  It took a seasoned experienced actress to be able to use her words and demeanor to quell a sexual predator.  We are living in a vacuous time with a millennial generation so spoiled there is no way they could fend for themselves.  Words are a powerful tool, and America as a nation no longer is teaching this.  We are not teaching anything useful.  I am a certified teacher K-12.  Still I have a teaching certificate from the late 1980's, and still have I yet to use it formally.  Who would want to teach anymore when bigoted, affluent, self serving parents want to control everything?  I interviewed for a band directing job in Columbus, Ohio years ago, and most of it was administered by the faculty advisor of the flag girls.  She explicitly explained that they got to choose the music.  The flag girls and their parents would choose the music for the band to use.  Needless to say I did not appear favorable to such a regime.  I was taught to think, to question established norms, and to fend for myself.  In retrospect it has proven to be financially unrewarding.  There was no Kiss Ass 101 at UNC-Chapel Hill.  What I learned was to be the best musician I could.  Why take the time to accommodate inhibitors?  You just barrel through making enemies, and I made a lot.  None were of real consequence except Kim Duker, who took issue with my lack of knowledge of the artist Robert Mapplethorp.  I didn't see how photographs of large African-American penises, bullwhips inserted in anuses, and the rest of his work was artistic.  My sentiment readily was apparent in my teaching, and I was guilty of writing "leading questions," questions which were meant to evoke a negative opinion.  These questions were so poorly received and Mr. Mapplethorp's work so revered I lost my graduate teaching position because of it.  Twenty-five years later Mapplethorp is long dead, his memory a faint whisper of exploitative homosexuality, and me stuck with his scar on my teaching career.  Robert Mapplethorp, whose work I was supposed to present as artistic, won.  A bullship handle in a man's anus, and this was beneficial to someone in college?  I reckon it was the sheer controversy that was important.  I was a music student in the DMA program in composition, but the faculty felt I was too dynamic for a music theory TA grading papers.  They sent me to Arts  College 160 two weeks before the quarter began with absolutely no preparation.  I knew none of the course material and didn't have time to learn it before I was required to teach four recitations each week.  I improvised, and the kids were not appreciative.  Later I learned my job was just to give them handouts when they lost them, remind them of quizzes, and show them affection.  That was it.  Somehow I thought they should learn something about music.  Now as I lay here with symptoms of Covid for the umpteenth time and no vaccine in the near future, I am unhappy.  I am sick again.  Covid is in the food chain.  It is being dropped on us from the air as an aerosol, and we do not know yet who the enemy is.  Maybe it is my imagination, but as I am driving my vehicle down Bragg Blvd. during the middle of the day, I look over my shoulder and there is a full sized commercial jet directly behind me above the tree line.  Not a Cessna.  Not a Kingair 350.  Not an Apache helicopter.  A jet, most likely a sixty million dollar Gulfstream.  What is it doing?  Why do we have a Covid pandemic in America?