Kafka's Gauntlet, part 1

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Okay, so there's this soldier, right?  And he's been sent off to a foreign land to fight for our freedom our way of life.  There's nothing new about that, nothing special, same old song that was playing when Smedley Butler was doing his thing.  We don't ask the soldier to analyze this...As a matter of fact, it's actively discouraged, just as it is actively discouraged with respect to the general population.

The thing is, if you start analyzing it, you start to think "What exactly IS our way of life?"  Is it baseball, mom, and apple pie?  Nobody has taken that idea seriously since the 60s.  No, it's a little grimmer than that, I'm afraid.  The American way of life is a pipeline, a sort of Boolean logic diagram that runs from the home, where the first decision point is reached, to school, where the second decision point is reached.   

For the well-off, the decision made at home is, "are we rich enough to send our children to college?"  If the answer is yes, then congratulations...Your kid has a reasonable chance to be themselves.  If no, go to the next paragraph.

For the poor, the decision made at school is, "Can the child run Kafka's Gauntlet, and avoid getting into enough trouble to go to prison?"  If not, the story pretty much ends here, whether the kid screws up in school, or at some point later on.  If yes, then the kid has the military as the only real alternative to some poverty-stricken drone existence that will almost invariably lead back to the prison thing.

So the kid's answers are, in order:  No, yes.  So there he is, in some horrible 3rd world nation, fighting for the sake of fighting, fighting so that future generations can have all the wonderful choices he had. 

What it also means is that there is an ever-shrinking percentage of educated people, and an ever-growing number of people in the prison system and the military.  This is not a new road...The British had this wonderful system at the turn of the last century.  It was called "The Victorian Age", and it was a rich man's heaven and a poor man's hell.  It was arguably the worst era ever for the common man.

So, of course, we're going to do it again.  And the reason they CAN do it again is that by keeping the common man uneducated, most of the common people won't recognize what's happening.

Way to go, Monkey Boy.

Or Kill Me.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Spells the whole thing out pretty simply. I also like the comparison to the Victorian Era. Looking forward to part 2.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Spells the whole thing out pretty simply. I also like the comparison to the Victorian Era. Looking forward to part 2.

Yeah, part 2 is going to deal more with public perception.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Roger, they should teach you in school. When I'm teaching I'm going to give my students handouts of this stuff.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Roger, they should teach you in school. When I'm teaching I'm going to give my students handouts of this stuff.

I mostly got this idea from you, you know.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Roger, they should teach you in school. When I'm teaching I'm going to give my students handouts of this stuff.

I mostly got this idea from you, you know.

I guess that partly explains why I agree with it so hard.

Regardless, very well put.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

Somebody told me the other day that fruit gives people intestinal polyps (as he crammed chickenfried steak into his gaping maw).
And this besides the stupid shit I see on the net and in the local paper. "Uneducated" doesn't begin to say it.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I guess I should have defined Kafka's Gauntlet, now that I think of it.

When I say that, I mean to coin a term for the fact that you cannot get through a single day without committing a punishable offense.  This isn't because people are bad, but because the laws are so Byzantine that almost any human behavior is covered by one or more laws, that can be enforced or not at the whim of the police and/or court system.

So every day, you run the gauntlet.  If you get through the day without being arrested for your "offenses", you win.  Until the next day.

[LMNO]

Great term for something I've been seeing evidence in support of for many years.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Great term for something I've been seeing evidence in support of for many years.

I wanted to tip my hat to one of the two men who spent a lifetime pointing it out, and who pointed it out long before it was nearly this bad.

The other one, of course, is Ken DeVries, from the Church of the Subgenius.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

I guess I should have defined Kafka's Gauntlet, now that I think of it.

When I say that, I mean to coin a term for the fact that you cannot get through a single day without committing a punishable offense.  This isn't because people are bad, but because the laws are so Byzantine that almost any human behavior is covered by one or more laws, that can be enforced or not at the whim of the police and/or court system.

So every day, you run the gauntlet.  If you get through the day without being arrested for your "offenses", you win.  Until the next day.

This is the first time I've seen it named. Anywhere.

[Pæs]

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Fucking BRILLIANT!   

Paes is my SDPS for the forseeable future.

[LMNO]

One slight layout suggestion (non-pedantic): It would look better if the Meat Sack "NO" arrow started at the bottom corner and moved counter-clockwise to the leftmost corner.

[Pæs]

One slight layout suggestion (non-pedantic): It would look better if the Meat Sack "NO" arrow started at the bottom corner and moved counter-clockwise to the leftmost corner.

Yeah, good call. Pedantic suggestions are probably worthwhile as well, if you have them. The layout is fairly 'meh'.

Roger, are you behind nannywall and able to see that? If so, uploading into a gliffy document might be a good way to show you pictures.