Texas Caught in Time?

The answer, of course, is about money. The beauty of free-market capitalism is that money walks, even if it means that the only ones walking are the ones dragging their knuckles on the ground. Texas, it seems, has tremendous buying power in the textbook world. Due to their high population, their standards drive publishers to pander to their every whim in order to get their business. So, when they dumb down their own textbooks, they also dumb down the textbooks of other districts in the US who don’t have the “purchasing power” (read “money”) to get custom-made texts.

It’s not as bad as it seems. As someone working in the educational publishing industry, I can tell you that both New York City School Districts and Los Angeles School Districts also have a major influence in the textbook market. Still, if Texas pushes standards to (what shall we call it?) the intellectual right, it can affect many other districts that aren’t looking for content that’s geared toward NYC and LA’s urban populations.

The obvious question is, why isn’t there just a Federal Textbook Standard? Wouldn’t that solve everything? Not gonna happen. I can already hear the pundits crying “nanny state” at the top of their lungs. So, my question is: If money talks, then why aren’t the saner states combining purchasing power to make Texas into small potatoes? Hey, New England! Combine your individual district and state standards into one New England Textbook Standard that makes you all able to purchase as a unit! It seems such a simple solution, I wonder why no one does it? And while you’re at it, combine your standard with NY State, NYC, and Pennsylvania standards to create the Northeast Textbook Standard!! Get North Carolina and Maryland and Virginia to adopt the same standard and turn it into the Atlantic Seaboard Textbook Standard!! And as soon as everyone agrees on the history, the science, and the health curriculum, maybe THEN we can have a Federal Standard.

Of course, it’s not this easy. Politics will get in the way, and everyone will want to do it their own way. “We want to educate our children the way we want! Freedom to learn our own version of the truth!” But people wanted to know what could be done….there you have it. Or maybe nobody really wants a solution.  I have to admit, it is fun to just rip on Texas.

                          

What I wondered about then, and indeed now, is about the slow influence of natural selection on species with longer life cycles…namely humanity itself. Is it possible… that natural selection would be brought to a standstill by modern science? I mean, if we no longer die (or, more accurately, cease to reproduce) because of mutations, how would humanity ever select for those without certain traits? Being nearsighted brings this to mind. Much of human kind is nearsighted, and given true natural evolutionary pressures, a species would not have this problem, because subjects with such a disadvantage in the wild would doubtless die before reaching reproductive maturity. Of course, with modern science and healthcare, there is nothing life threatening about nearsightedness, so many go on to reproduce. The result is that nearly 30% of the population is nearsighted.

These were simple, vague wonderings from years ago, and nothing I took very seriously. Of course, bringing us to the “On Cinema” portion of this post, now I wonder if maybe natural selection could have a more sinister course in mind for humanity after seeing the film Idiocracy, by (ironically) Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge.

The film is a comedy, ostensibly, but watches more like a horror film to me, depicting what happens when an “average” human specimen from 2005 is frozen and awakes in the year 2505 to find he is the smartest man alive. The world is overrun with stupid reality TV, corporate consumerism, and an over-sexed, dumbed-down populace. Nothing works, the infrastructure is rotting, and the president is a former American Gladiator-type TV star. There is a new “dust bowl” scale crop failure, since the Brawndo Corporation has decreed that it’s Gatoradesque drink should be used to water the nations crops (“it has the electrolytes that plants crave”), and has purchased the FDA in order to rewrite the food pyramid. Hospitals have stoner doctors, that prescribe treatments using an oversimplified push button screen with pictures of people vomiting and giving birth to select from. People seen trying to read words are labeled “fags,” and anyone speaking with any sense of eloquence is seen as femmy. Everyone loves the sight of someone being kicked in the balls (the most popular TV show is entitled “Ow! My Balls!!”), and the winner for Best Screenplay is a movie that simply shows an ass farting on the screen.

Yes, it’s silly. Yes, it’s funny. Yes, it’s hyperbole. But I’ll be damned if the depiction, at the start of the film, of how natural selection could lead to just such an occurrence didn’t bring shivers to my spine. The flow chart, comparing the reproductive rates of two intelligent persons with the rates and subsequent genetic spread of the trailer trash couple, was one of the most horrifying calculations I have ever seen depicted on the silver screen! Soylent Green? Ha! If only the future was such a rosey picture!

Damn you all to hell! You’ve finally done it!!