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mightymikelechn · 7 years

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A Date With the Republican Wives’ Club (a Short Story)...

A Date with the Republican Wives’ Club (And other Socioeconomic Anomalies)

By Mighty Mike Lechner

(From, “A Crush Story”)

It was a sunny Saturday Morning. Michael Scheigermann was at his desk checking his email on his laptop while his same-sex mate, William Muzak was in the bedroom getting dressed. Then his cell phone rang. It was his best friend, Bob Cope. Both worked together as warehousemen for PlowShare Pharma.

“Bob, what’s up? Adele giving you a hard time again?” Schweigermann answered as he was printing out something off his computer.

“Not much. Mike, how would you like to join me and the guys for some Indoor Taser Tag at the WrexPlex?” Cope Offered.

“No, Cope! As much fun as that day was, I am gonna pass. I am fresh out of adult diapers and really am not into shitting and pissing my pants and having to be treated for A-Fib this week…” Schweigermann replied, then added jokingly, “And besides, I am still reeling from me being a contestant on that short-lived reality TV show, ‘Psych Ward-Stuck in the Shock Tank at Creedmoor State Hospital’...when they actually gave me Regressive Electroshock Therapy and I was a blithering dolt having to be spoon-fed and in diapers for a month after accosting that hunky orderly...”

“You were on that show on the XtremeChannel?? Was that the same one they Transorbitally Lobotomized that washed-up former child TV star and he died from encephalitis from a dirty icepick??” Cope inquired, playing along with the joke.

“Yes, unfortunately! But at least I made enough on that show to pay my rent and utilities at Mudslide Gardens for two years…” Mike answered.

“You and Bill have anything planned?” Cope inquired.

“Actually, as you know, Bill just got out of the hospital again a few days ago and has been cooped up at home here all week. To get him out of the house, decided to do some food shopping at ShopRite in Garwood and maybe hitting the Farmers Market by the Train Station in Westfield and grabbing subs at Hershey’s or Duke’s Deli with my neighbors, Gloria and Robert Bumgardner. Probably will be free after that…” Schweigermann answered.

“Well, I was thinking-Adele and I have tickets at the Meadowlands for ‘Monster Car Soccer’-it’s part soccer, part hockey, part demolition derby, and 100% fun to watch…”

“is that where two teams of cars knock around a huge soccer ball and the goalies are Bobcat operators in big backhoes? Maybe. I had seen them in action on YouTube videos...”

“Got two extra tickets-Adele got them from her new Radio Station gig in The City-want to go?

“Let me see how Bill endures it...I will get back to you in a couple of hours. How’s Adele doing with her new job at WTUP??”

“She loves it-although she misses working with Jim Blowhard and Big Joe Whalegut for that talk station near Philly….”

As Schweigermann was talking with Cope, Muzak walks in Mike’s Office wearing grey gym shorts, a white T-shirt, flip flops, and a straw hat with silk sunflowers hot glued to it around the band and reeking of Jean Nate cologne.

Mike looked up and said, “Bob, let me call you later-Bill is ready to go…”

“Okay, I will talk to you later, Mike!”

Schweigermann closed his phone and looked up. He whispered under his breath, Oh, No!

“Bill, I hope you are not wearing what you are wearing to Westfield…”

“Why not? You dress like we are going to war here…” Muzak Quipped back. Mike was wearing Digital Woodland Camo (MARPAT) BDU Shorts, Black TAC Boots and a T-Shirt depicting a SWAT team member with a battering ram ready to breach a doorway with the caption saying, KNOCK! KNOCK!!

“At least, where we are going, they are Right-Wing, Flag-Waving Warmongers...don’t think the members of the Republican Wives’ Club can handle a crossdresser-we aren’t just there yet…” Schweigermann Retorted, then added, “But then again, it just might be fun as all hell to shake things up a bit. Maybe I’ll even” “wear my MICH helmet and pretend I am an old war vet with a TBI. Still reeling from the ECT sessions I have been going for lately…last night, after you went to bed, I went into a staring spell and after, a mild grand mal and pissed my boxers. Just used my last diaper today and wearing it underneath now…”

“Michael! Why??!!...” Bill inquired.

“The Meds are not working well anymore. And while you were in the hospital, I had a breakdown like I did in 2000 when you had the Colostomy Reversal and spent the weekend in Carrier Clinic again...” Mike replied.

Then the doorbell rang. It was Gloria and Robert Bumgardner. Bill walked over to the door and let them in.

"Hi, Guys! Gloria Bumgardner greeted as her and her husband, Robert walked in. Robert’s face looked like he was weaned on a dill pickle. Gloria had a mild form of Down’s Syndrome and Robert was an extreme Dysthymic and also went into bad, crippling depressive episodes like Mike. Both of them are permanently disabled and collecting Social Security.

“Good Morning, Guys!” Bill Greeted them as he closed the door.

Mike stood up from his desk chair and walked into the living room and sat in his whitewashed L. L. Bean porch rocking chair with a green damask cushion set. Mike greeted, “Good Morning, Gloria and Robert! Ready for a nice day out?”

“Yes, Mike! We are!! Always a fun time with you guys…” Gloria replied as she sat next to her husband on the loveseat. Bill sat in his usual spot on his couch.

"Guys, before we go to ShopRite, can we stop at the Farmers Market at the Train Station in Westfield and from there, we’ll go across to Hershey’s Subs to eat-sound good?” Mike Suggested.

“Sure, Mike! Love Hershey’s Subs…” Gloria replied gleefully. Then Robert interrupted her, “Gloria, we don’t have a whole lot to spend until we get our checks on the third of the month…”

“It’s on Us, Guys! We know you guys been struggling lately and I’ll even fill your tank at the gas station on the way…” Bill interjected. Then added, “we appreciate you guys taking us. Mike’s BMW is in the shop up the street and Mike’s not been up to driving the last few days…”

“I know, Bill-I have been driving and/or picking up Mike for his ECT sessions at Rahway Hospital either from the Y or at Dr. Higgins’ office…” Gloria Revealed.

“Gloria, I thank you much for that-at least Mike is in hands I trust. I wish Mike would have told me, but I do understand that he doesn’t want me to worry more than what I have to already with my own bad health-Mike’s like that-sometimes stays too strong for his own good…” Bill said to Gloria appreciatively.

“Guys, I appreciate what you guys do for us, too!” Gloria replied.

Mike turned to Bill and said, “Really, I want to apologize for not telling you. I really should. But when I see you struggle with your health problems and how much you depend on me much of the time, it’s extremely difficult to do so. I always had to stay strong-for my Dad, for my Mom, for Steve, for Debbie Schwarzenkatz-and why I stay strong for you…”

“I know, Mick-because of your older ones being drunks and drug addicts and assholes…” Bill added.

“Well, are you guys ready?” Robert asked impatiently.

Everyone nodded in agreement, got up from their seats and left the apartment.

After stopping for gas and the repair shop where Schweigermann’s 2004 BMW M3 convertible was being tuned up in Gloria’s old Toyota Corolla, they finally arrive at the South Avenue side of the Westfield Train Station. Mike, Bill, and Robert exit the car by where the Flea Market set up shop in the lot. Then Gloria drove further down to find a parking spot in the train station by the station house.

No sooner Mike went over to the first produce vendor he encountered, he ran into his and Cope’s old co-worker, Dominick Stanhope. Mike and Rob nicknamed him the Donkey Stunatz. Mike was far from pleased to see him.

Dominick recognized Mike and greeted, “Mike! What Brings you here-Vegetables to eat-or to use as sex toys??”

Mike was checking out plum tomatoes and replied, “Come to think of it-both! See these plum tomatoes, I like jamming a couple up my ass before I start fucking myself with a greased cucumber and staining my sheets with the juice like I am having the gay equivalent to period sex…”

Stanhope looked at him weird and scared and walked away. Robert and Gloria were laughing their asses off-along with a few other people that overheard. But one older woman dressed in Lulemon yoga pants and top with a serious camel toe that looked like a mattress folded in half, was clearly repulsed. She blurted, “You are a disgusting cretin! You are that hairy ape at the YMCA that blasts on your iPod that horrible head banger and skinhead music…”

“And Yes! It’s so nice to be recognized…and I suppose you are here to purchase Produce here too for improvised sex toys, too…I take immense pride in being a subhuman animal that eats with his hands, pees in beer cans and soda bottles, shits in big pickle jars and brushes his teeth with his fingers while bathing in the creeks and rivers and then has sex with his brothers and cousins-I am a gay redneck…” Mike fired back.

The middle-aged woman walked away. Then Bill walked to Mike and asked, “what was that all about?

“Just a couple of humorless fucks that can’t handle seeing me…” Mike replied. “It was the Donkey Stunatz and he asked me what I was doing here. I told him I buy my sex toys here and pointed to the plum tomatoes and told him I like shoving a couple up my ass before I insert the cucumber to make like I am having period sex a having the red juice and seeds run onto the sheets like blood…”

Bill laughed so hard that he was in pain from hernia surgery a week before. Then reluctantly, asked him who the woman was. Mike told him he didn’t know her by name-but had seen her at the Westfield YMCA several times in the cardio area and the Nautilus Room working out on the machines. Mike told him about the conversation he had with her and laughed even harder to the point he almost had to call an ambulance for him.

After all of them made their rounds and purchased a few bagfuls of fruits, vegetables, and a few home baked pies, they head back to Gloria’s car to put in the trunk. Mike then suggested, “Guys! How about we go to Duke’s instead of Hershey’s?”

Everyone nodded in agreement. They crossed the street and made their way into Duke’s Deli. A few of Mike’s BMX buddies were there with their bikes flipped on their handlebars and seats by the big window overlooking the train station and South Avenue. Mike knew them from the Bike shop up the street-Pro Tour Cycles. Mike bought and had serviced three BMX bikes from there and would go all over the NY/NJ area riding with them.

“What Up, Guys!” Mike Greeted four of the BMX’ers and three Skateboarders Mike went riding the ramps and street areas with. Schweigermann was a Street Skateboarder and a Street/Flatland BMX rider and stayed with it well into his 30’s-40’s.

One of them asked, “Mike! Where you been?? Gary at Pro Tour finally snapped together a BMX team and a couple of the ‘Boarders made the team for Out of Bounds on Route 22…”

“Oh, yeah, Jeremy? That’s Great!! Where’s Macaulay, my fellow flatlander??”

“He’s at the Rutgers Flat Jam Contest in New Brunswick…” Jeremy replied.

“He will snag at least second place-he’s mad good!” Mike said.

Mike then turned to Bill, Gloria, and Robert and suggested, “Guys, go order a grab a table-order me my old standby with fries and a cup of mud...By the way, these are the guys from the bike shop and the skateboard shop I go riding with sometimes. Here’s Jeremy, John, Milton, George, Paul, Rich, Steve, and Marcella…” Marcella was a Skater chick in her 20’s.

Then Mike heard a commotion and argument outside on the corner where Duke’s was.

Mike stepped outside and saw the woman that insulted him at the Farmers Market earlier giving a couple of young skateboarders a hard time. Mike walked up to them and asked, “What’s Going on here??”

The blonde-haired boy, no older than maybe 12 or 13, replied, “This mean old lady called the cops on us for skateboarding here...”

“Is that so, guys? I’ll be back in a second” Mike said, seeing a road crew patching up a couple of potholes by the gas station next to the train station. Mike walked up to a worker with a spade in hand. Mike pulled out a $50.00 Bill for the shovel and walked back with it. The boys were scared shitless Mike was going to beat them with it. The Woman was enthralled at that same thought.

But Mike walked up to the woman holding it out like he’s going to hand it to her. Mike said to her as he pointed the handle to her,

“Here, You Miserable Bitch! Here’s a Shovel-GO BURY YOURSELF WITH IT! YOU ARE ALREADY DEAD!! YOUR BODY JUST HASN’T LAID DOWN YET!!!THESE KIDS AREN’T DOING ANYTHING TO HURT YOU…” Mike growled at her like a Siberian Tiger as he threw it at her feet.

She scampered away and got in her big wonking SUV and drove away. The boys ran across the street to the train station and down the tunnel to the North Ave. Side of the Station.

Everybody in Duke’s were either by the door or their faces pressed to the glass.

As Mike walked back into Duke’s, one of the guys he worked out and played Roller Hockey on Friday Nights at the Westfield Y walked behind him. His name was George Geronimo but nicknamed, “Hockey George”.

“Mike, how you are doing, Guy!” George Greeted.

“Not Bad-Not Bad at All, Hockey George! How You Are doing??”

“Pretty Good. Miss you at Roller Hockey on Friday Nights, Mike!

“Miss it too, George!! Hopefully, in a couple of weeks, I’ll make an appearance…You still a Season Ticket Holder for the Rangers? If you got an extra or two, like to start going to games at the Garden again…”

“I’ll keep you in mind, Mike! Great seeing you…”

“You, too, George!” Mike concluded as Hockey George was heading out the door with an order he phoned in.

Without further ado, Mike sat down to eat his cold cheesesteak sub and cold fries. Everyone else finished their meals. Then Mike and his entourage left Duke’s and headed back to the car. A few minutes later, they arrive at the ShopRite supermarket in Garwood. While picking up groceries, Bill had to go to the bathroom bad. Mike stayed outside the door with the cart. The Men’s Room was locked and someone else was in there and another man was waiting outside the door. Bill had to go really bad. So, her tried the Ladies’ Room door and was open and available. He went in and did what he had to do. Then as he was coming out, the Haitian man that took care of the carts outside was getting ready to clean the Ladies’ Room. The Man said to Bill, “That’s the Ladies’ Room…”

Bill Interrupted and said, “Well, I am a Lady…”

The Haitian man was shocked and horrified. He ran out the store and by the smoking area, he pulled out of his pocket a set of Rosary Beads and proceeded to say the Rosary.

Bill walked back to Mike and Mike inquired, “What the fuck happened? The Man that takes care of the carts ran out like he saw the Ghost of Papa Doc Duvalier…”

“I had to go so bad, I went in the Ladies’ Room and he saw me and told me that was the Ladies’ Room. I told him I was a Lady and he ran out, Mike….”

Mike laughed so hard, he almost pissed the diaper he was wearing under his shorts and shaking his head in disbelief. Then Mike said, “Let’s get the fuck outta here before we get arrested or hauled away to Carrier in straightjackets…”

A half-hour later, they all checked out their stuff and hauled it to the car. When they got into the car and Gloria started it, getting ready to pull out of the parking spot, Bill told Gloria And Robert what happened at the restroom area. Gloria laughed so hard, she already had the car in reverse and accidentally stepped on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake. And two guesses whose SUV Gloria’s car T-Boned in the Right Front and Right Rear Passenger doors? The Lulemon Mom with the serious case of Camel Toe!

She got out of her SUV as Mike exited out of Gloria’s car.

“What the Fuck-Are you trying to kill me???” She forcefully and angrily asked Mike.

“No, my friend accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brake. I am so very sorry, ma’am! Are you okay?” Mike consoled.

“Thankfully, I am! Are you guys okay??” The Woman asked Mike.

“Well, apparently, thy must be-they are still laughing at what happened a little while ago…” Mike answered.

“Oh, you mean when your crossdressing friend used the Ladies’ Room and the Cart Attendant caught him and your friend turned and told him he was a lady? He just called me-I’m his Psychologist…”

“Again, Doctor! I am so very sorry for today…By the way, my name is Schweigermann-Michael Schweigermann…”

“My Name is Dr. Jane Hilderbrandt, PhD. My Husband name is Dr. Maurice Hilderbrandt, MD-he’s a Neuropsychiatrist and specializes in Electroconvulsive Therapy…”

“Nice to meet you, Dr. Hilderbrandt! I know your husband-I am currently one of his patients. And you must know my Psychologist, Dr. Edward Higgson, PhD…The Crossdressing man is my same-sex partner, William Mazek. My friends and neighbors, Gloria and Robert Bumgardner were kind enough to give me and Bill a ride here today-both because my car is being repaired and yesterday morning, your husband gave me my third ECT treatment…”

“I do know Dr. Higgson-he was one of my professors at Seton Hall when he was a priest! And I have worked with him and his wife Dr. Betty McCreary-still do!”

“I believe we should get down to the business here with exchanging insurance and license information, and I see the Garwood Police are here to grace our presence, Dr. Hilderbrandt...”

“Agree, Mr. Schweigermann!”

The police came and Gloria and Dr. Hilderbrandt exchanged information and called their respective insurance carriers. Mike called his friend and neighbor, Bob Marzo to come and give Gloria a tow and a crowbar to pry the trunk open to retrieve our groceries. Also called Enterprise Car Rental for a rental car for us. Once everything was done, we headed back to home. Once Gloria and Robert dropped Mike and Bill off and put everything away, Mike turned to Bill and asked, “Wanna go down to Point Pleasant Beach and have dinner at Red’s Lobster Pot and hang at Martells and the boardwalk for a while and maybe stop at Barbara Mullins in Freehold?”

“But the car is in the shop, Mick!” Bill exclaimed.

“Got a surprise in the garage downstairs…” Mike said.

“Meet you in front. Be Back, Bill!

Mike flew out the front door. Mike opened the garage and stood a fully restored, triple black 1971 Pontiac GTO-Bubblegum Pink Eyebrow Stripes, Ram Air, Honeycomb Mag Wheels and all-even a vintage Pioneer AM/FM/Cassette Stereo in the dash. Mike fired it up and drove it to the front of the courtyard of the apartment complex they lived in. Bill was waiting out front and could not believe it. Mike parked it on the street by their apt. Mike walked up to him and said, “Still want to go?”

“Are you feeling okay enough to drive?”

“Yes, I am. Let’s get cleaned up and go…”

An hour later, Mike and Bill climbed into the GTO and rode off to the legendary Jersey Shore.

(End of Chapter-Next… “BedPan Tostado!”)

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alisonfloresus · 7 years

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Education: There Are All Kinds of Lobotomies

This is a story about mad scientists. A true story.

In 1932, the Education Establishment forced a new, unproven reading method on American public schools (the method was known at the time as Look-say). The results were disastrous.

In 1936, an American doctor named Walter Freeman performed the first prefrontal lobotomy in the U.S. Ten years later Dr. Freeman created a more novel approach, which was called a transorbital lobotomy. He inserted a metal wire into the corner of each eye socket and swished the wire about until the prefrontal cortex was scrambled. Remarkably, this so-called “icepick lobotomy” could be done in a few minutes with local anesthesia. Freeman performed more than 3000 lobotomies, including one on Rosemary Kennedy, the president’s sister. Some patients improved; some stayed the same; some got worse or died.

The decades between the two World Wars were a time of feverish activity and experimentation in Psychology/Psychiatry and in what many took to be the related field of Education. It is not a caricature to say that the Men in White Lab Coats believed they had all the answers, and now it was time for them to take their proper place in the management of the world.

A famous Russian named Ivan Pavlov (died 1936) was in many ways the Godfather of all these developments. Most people know that he experimented on dogs. He showed that dogs could be made to connect various stimuli. What most people do not know is that Pavlov also experimented on children, doing the same things with them that he did with dogs. Later, he experimented on adults, with different goals. Much of this is shrouded in secrecy. His concern was shock and mental disorientation. The question was, what did you have to do to break a man’s spirit? How could you most quickly render a person insane? It should be noted that the Communist government was ideologically materialist. Humans were only flesh and nerves. The Russian government was eager to pursue ANY research that could find better ways to transform people or defeat them.

In general, the Russians wrote the book on psychological warfare and brainwashing. You can see the early results in various Moscow show trials (1936 and later), when Bolshevik heroes abjectly confessed to crimes against everything they believed in. The Russians had a vast prison system, known as the gulag, where scientists could conduct secret research on what would most quickly demoralize people. Hunger? Cold? Torture? Drugs? The Communists used all of their tricks and techniques on captured Americans in the Korean War, circa 1951-1953, and succeeded in turning more than a third into apologists and traitors.

John Watson, the American behaviorist, was famous for declaring (in 1930) that he could turn any child in anything you requested. It’s important to understand the arrogance and hubris of these people. They had their rats in mazes, their sweeping theories, and they were eager to jump from their theories to concrete activity.

Here is some interesting history from a doctoral dissertation by Benjamin Zajicek: “In 1935 fever therapy was eclipsed by the introduction of an important new method of biological treatment, shock therapy. The introduction of metrozol shock therapy in 1935 inaugurated an intense period of experimentation in European psychiatry, a period that lasted from roughly 1935 to 1952, when the first antipsychotic drugs were introduced. The term ‘shock therapy’ is really a misnomer. Metrazol was a drug similar to camphor that was injected into patients to produce convulsions similar to those seen in people with epilepsy…Italian psychiatrists began inducing seizures by applying electricity to the brain in 1938. Along the way, psychiatrists experimented with almost every other imaginable substance that could be injected into the body to induce seizures. (In the Soviet Union, for instance, psychiatrists sometimes intentionally injected their patients with blood of an incompatible type.) Finally, in the midst of this experimentation with shock therapy, Portuguese psychiatrist Egaz Moniz (1874-1955) announced that he had found a way to cure some forms of insanity by operating directly on the brain. The ‘prefrontal leucotomy’ and its more common American cousin, the lobotomy, arguably became the most notorious method of medical treatment in the twentieth century. Moniz went on to win the Nobel Prize in medicine for his achievement in 1949.”

I mention all these things to give you a feeling of the times, the zeitgeist, which was hyper-scientific, relentless, cold-blooded. Meanwhile, political extremism was the norm. Many agreed on one point: the ends, scientific or ideological, did justify the means. Just imagine all this aggressive research going on at hundreds of laboratories (and mental asylums) around the world. Everybody had a new theory to prove, everyone wanted to score a breakthrough that would forever change how we understood our species. The essential belief was that if you poked a person in just the right way, that person would exhibit a predicted response. This one-idea-will-explain-everything mentality naturally flowed into Education, which was very concerned, thanks to John Dewey’s influence, with socializing children, as opposed to educating them.

As I studied Look-say (later known as Whole Word, Sight Words, Whole Language, and many other names), I often had the sense that it was comparable to a lobotomy in disrupting normal cognitive development. This statement certainly cannot be considered rash given that our country has 50,000,000 functional illiterates!

Despite all the promises and claims, Whole Word never actually worked. That was obvious even by 1955, the year Rudolf Flesch wrote his famous book about why Johnny can’t read. So the practical results were dismal; Flesch explained why; but the elite educators still worshipped their failed god.

Just as shocking, the theoretical basis for this method was always very flimsy. In an odd way it was an offshoot of Pavlov’s work on conditioned reflexes. It was akin to John Watson and B. F. Skinner saying they can control everything by the conditioning a person receives. In some weird way, words on the page were to be the stimuli; when the child said, “See Dick run,” this was the response. There actually seemed to be the feeling that learning to read English would be an extended version of teaching chickens to press certain levers to get kernels of corn.

I remember thinking, when I first became aware of this theory, that for it to work there would have to be a reward after almost every word. Otherwise, you don’t have the reinforcement that textbook stimulus-response demands. Somehow there would be a dispenser that gives you a piece of candy when you read the sentence correctly. Isn’t this ludicrous on the face of it?

So Dr. Pavlov — and remember this man was a brilliant surgeon who inserted tubes into the mouths of dogs (and children) so that he could measure their saliva — is really the guiding spirit behind stimulus-response and Look-say. (It seems to me clear that any animal above a shrimp can connect various stimuli, so I think Pavlov’s results were vastly exaggerated.) Even if his discoveries were valuable, a scientific lab is very small and constrained; you wouldn’t think that anybody would try to extrapolate from that tiny controlled arena to the vast cosmos of language. But our Education Establishment surely tried.

That’s the thing we see, as we watch Dr. Freeman stick an ice pick into a person’s eye socket: these scientists were willing to take great leaps of experimental faith. The creed, spoken or unspoken, is always this: we must take bold steps if we are to bring science and reason to this benighted planet. So we see that Dr. Freeman, like Pavlov, is a blood brother to the high priests of Look-say. (By the way, the Russians knew from their own bitter experience with Whole Word, roughly 1920-1931, that it didn’t work at all. If those clever schemers pushed this hoax on us, it wouldn’t surprise me. Then these “high priests” were not so much dunces as traitors.)

Is it fair to mention lobotomy and Whole Word in the same sentence? Well, first of all, let us note that the brain is exceedingly complex; and when you poke it, you can’t be sure what you will get, as Dr. Freeman found out again and again. In the case of Look-say, its effect on many people would seem to be simple illiteracy, almost as if they were simply never taught anything. But at a deeper level, their brains have been successfully inoculated against language. Decades later, these victims still marvel that other people can read books for pleasure. These illiterates, stuck with a holistic (whole-word) reflect, assume that reading is an odd gift, much like perfect pitch. Some have it, some don’t; there’s nothing you can do. So yes, these people have been “lobotomized” in a non-surgical way that makes reading impossible.

There’s a second set of victims, who wind up with results that are even more dramatic. This condition is called dyslexia. Here you find very elaborate confusion, where the words appear backward or they seem to move on the page. Encountering what dyslexics say about learning to read is a twilight-zone experience. A young woman wrote this to me: “Then he pointed to another word, and asked me if I knew that word, but I didn’t. I could not tell what letters they were, and then there was no sound or meaning in the word. It was an empty word then…but he showed me, he wrote it on a paper, and I knew the word then. I know it well… When I say that the font changes are very difficult for me, I mean that strictly in a visual way. Not from sight words, but because the letters do move, or turn, and if they are touching, or close to touching…then I cannot see them clearly, to find their sound.” Possibly she was born with a defect; more probably, according to every phonics expert, Whole Word is the culprit.

Furthermore, when children reach roughly age seven and realize that they can’t read, that they’re falling behind their friends, and that they are defective in some way, they begin to exhibit many unfortunate behaviors. The psychiatric community is only too eager to treat these behaviors with powerful psychiatric drugs. And so you find another kind of lobotomy, that caused by too many years of Ritalin.

My own sense is that Whole Word and Ritalin are not cures, but causes of more problems. At the very least, children should be given a steady diet of phonics and exercise. First, find out if these work. Phonics tutors always report renewed self-confidence, with a dramatic drop in undesirable behaviors.

In the 1950s Dr. Freeman was forced to abandon his approach. Look-say (now known by a half-dozen names) survived as the dominant method until almost the end of the century, and even now survives in what our Education Establishment calls Balanced Literacy. My sense is there is nothing balanced about it at all. If you mix dirty water with clean water, you don’t call the mixture a balanced beverage. This so-called Balanced Literacy is a strategic ploy for retaining some of the worst aspects of Look-say, namely, that little children are forced to memorize graphic designs (i.e., sight-words) as a passport into reading. As many children can never memorize more than 100 or 200 sight-words, in fact, reading is forever forbidden to them. Brain-warping effects are what they get instead.

The 1930s, unfortunately for all of us, were a maelstrom of reckless, unabashed scientism, and an equally reckless ideology in politics and education. I suspect that one of the mutants bred from these excesses was Whole Word.

(For related analysis, Google “27: Ivan Pavlov–Education Goes To The Dogs.”)

from JournalsLINE http://journalsline.com/2017/06/26/education-there-are-all-kinds-of-lobotomies/ from Journals LINE https://journalsline.tumblr.com/post/162262009220

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