Gary Stein The Sun Sentinel

June 10, 2012
Gary Stein
The Sun Sentinel

RE: The continuing education of Little Stein – Does he like Dante? Swift? Has he come to grips with Antigone?

Big Stein,

When Little Stein was 9 did he become interested in music because of a dedicated, selfless, perpetually underpaid Broward County school teacher, doubtless a full blown “I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill” union member, who still cries when somebody mentions the Triangle Shirt barbecue or was there encouragement at home?

See? I’m making you feel good about yourself with only one sentence.

My musical training took a different path.

My 9 week piano lesson semester consisted of me paying the nun at St. Mary’s in Bayonne, N.J. $1 once. I pocketed the next $8 telling the good sister that my father was sick and out of work. When the nun told my mother that the whole convent was praying for my father’s quick recovery my lessons ended. I tried the same thing with hair cut money but that too did not end well.

Anthropology suffers with the mark of Cain. It was inflicted by one of the 3 great female fakers of the 20th century. Margaret Mead spent her research time in Samoa doing the horizontal tango with the chief’s son. All the chief’s sons. In fact, all the chiefs’ sons, nephews, uncles, and 1/32 [a la Elizabeth Warren] English mutineers lined up to take a shot at her. Funny thing about looking like Yogi Berra but lacking his verbal skills. If you want your dance card to be filled you have to travel 10,000 miles. She would come back to America to write a book about noble savages that the John Dewey devotees adored. Whenever she wanted to turn her brown eyes blue she booked passage on the nearest tramp steamer.

Anthropology is an academic discipline that has no sharp edges. It lacks right angles. As such, it becomes subjective. Speaking of subjective, my plan to increase FCAT scores in Geometry and boost student self-esteem never could gain traction. All we had to do was change pi from 3.1416 to 3.0 and students would start to feel better about themselves. When the bridges start to fall down we would have a built in Summer Recovery Stimulus Plan. The brouhaha about same sex marriages and the continuing contretemps about Obamacare never would have started. Alas, I was too early.

But there is still hope for Little Stein.

I know a guy who drilled more than 100 oil and gas wells, owned and operated 7 coal mines in Kentucky, had 5 coal mines in West Virginia, and was an officer and director of a public company that owned a 100 car coal load-out facility. The best part of it was that the coal went to Turkey and Italy. None of it was burned here. A win/win, no?

His major was History.

I know a guy who reorganized a bankrupt company. The bond holders and the stock holders, unlike General Motors and Chrysler, were made 100% whole. In the process he became an expert witness on mortgages at the Federal Court level.

One of his minors was Philosophy.

I know a guy who bought a 47 film library from the BBC for American distribution. He also produced a series of tapes on basketball. He also knows that “Triumph and Disaster are 2 imposters”.

English was another one of his minors.

I know a guy who ran 2 nursing homes. He once was paid $5,000 just to have lunch. He flew the Concorde. He had a matter decided by the Supreme Court of the United States. He was in a gunfight and he testified at a murder trial. He also told his children that he would not pay for any undergraduate credits in business, save for accounting. [The MBA is an honorable degree. It is diminished by having an undergraduate degree in marketing or some such nonsense.]

I know a guy who was CFO – that’s business shorthand for Chief Financial Officer – of a public company. That means he gets to sign the annual reports and the 10Ks. [10K? SASE]

His 3rd minor was Spanish.

Since I believe that “Modesty is a very overrated virtue” I must confess that the “guy I know” is me.

Traveling with this guy is a musical grab bag.

Of course his vehicle of choice is a gas guzzling, polar bear drowning, 7 league boot carbon footprint SUV. [Since I still produce far more energy than I consume I have a pass to have my house cold enough to hang meat or warm enough to melt cheese.] I travel with everything, and I mean everything, that Mozart ever wrote. Wolfie, David Alan Coe, Rodgers & Hart, and some steel drum tunes can get me to the state line. Then I tell myself the Iliad and the Odyssey. The best one sentence definition of the Odyssey was given to me by a captive audience member at an alternative high school.

The alternative was quite simple: Listen to this curmudgeonly White guy or go to jail. “Ain’t the Odyssey the story of the dude who took 10 years to get back to his old lady”? If that’s not genius I don’t know what is. If only he had had some dedicated, selfless, underpaid Broward County Look for the Union label teacher sparking an interest in castanets he might have missed the opportunity to hear me. The other observation was how did he wind up there. The modern American Liberal answer is obvious. If only the rich had paid their “fair share” he might have become a dedicated, selfless Broward County music teacher.

Students of the Trivium know that sometimes the wheel is with you and sometimes the wheel is against you. They also know that defying the Gods is, at best, risky and, at worst, fatal.

Tell Little Stein that “Honor and shame from no condition rise”. Tell him to “Act well his part; there all honor lies”.




Kevin Smith
WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET



PS – I bet you thought I wasn’t going to tell you who the other 2 great female charlatans in the 20th Century were. Wrong! Margaret Sanger was one of Hitler’s favorite Americans. As much of a Nazi lover as Joe Kennedy was he never contributed to Hitler’s Nuremberg Race Laws. She did. The other one was Rachel Carson. Because her scientifically baseless claims about DDT were accepted the deaths of 2,000,000 sub Saharan Black babies every year continues. You don’t find that out in Engineering school.