[Newspoetry] Imperfect Starts

[emerick at chorus.net]

from the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/02/education/02RESI.html?th
Some School Districts Challenge Bush's Signature Education Law
By SAM DILLON

Published: January 2, 2004
...

"When the law was passed it looked positive and bipartisan," Dr. Jefferson said. "But as these regulations have become known there's a growing sense of outrage."

Two groups sent letters to Congress this fall urging lawmakers to stand fast against criticism of the law. The Business Roundtable, an organization of corporate chief executives, expressed "strong support for this landmark reform effort" and cautioned that "there are voices calling for measures that would take us backwards."

Joseph M. Tucci, president of the EMC Corporation and chairman of the group's education task force, said in an interview: "The law is about raising standards and closing achievement gaps. Is it perfect? No. But we've got to start somewhere."
...

And what did the executives of AARP and of other corporate allies say, of the medicare (sic!) bill Bush pushed?

It isn't perfect, but it's a start...

A start of what?  A start of dummying down everything, of cheapening and gutting public programs, while elevating rhetoric redounds ("Leave no child behind?  Of course not: we'll hold them all in one place, by turning them loose to private authoritarian "religious" institutions, who will teach them the meaning of fearing God -- or at least of fearing God's self-anointed sanctimonious cretins of the veiled cloth of the great cover-up ---

How else would a peasant child, who was against greed and power and institutionalizations, so much that they allegedly killed him (death by mistrial), have become the very icon which the greedy, the wealthy, and the powerful hold up as the principal backer of their regime, as if their Jesus were only interested in sanctimonious piety -- an empty form of a pleasing show that is devoid of any substantive good deeds -- a litmus test that is easily fooled?  These are the inversions of which deconstruction is a diagnostic...

It isn't perfect...

so, then, when would we ever know that we could do any better, or that we are mostly, almost completely failing?  "It isn't perfect" makes the "is" the enemy of progress -- makes the status quo, whatever and however deplorable it might be -- acceptable....


The only reason one ever has to change anything is that one believes it would be better to expend the effort on this task rather than on some other proposed task of comparison...  One never has, in the alternative view of things (where anticipated resources to be invested stand against projected returns), to worry about the do-nothing status quo arguments of "good-enough" which would shield all the sorts of lesser evils that gop to make up big evil.

Satan always masquerades as a Compassionate Conservative, pretending to protect, in the name of a nausea [viz. nostalgea], the allegedly good things of a truly bad past from the putatively better things of an imagined future.