Ain’t a damn thing America won’t weaponize, virtue or vice or cause for admiration or pity or Fat Boy itself. It’s what we do. We’re a vicious fucking society.
One of the tangential causes for national shame, should we have the capacity to feel any, that has been exposed by the celebrity college admissions scandal is the weaponization of psychiatric diagnoses for extra time on standardized tests for college admissions. It has emerged that there are Super ZIP’s in and orbiting Manhattan where, no shit, half of the student body in certain high school classes has at least one diagnosis of clinical anxiety or ADHD or some such shit allowing extra time on the SAT. As an untreated but mostly reasonably high-functioning manic depressive who lives in rather different circumstances and can’t stand the average psychotherapist, I don’t give a shit about the malingering of these put-upon nerds and their insane helicopter parents as an ethical matter or a personal affront. Nobody involved believes for a New York Minute that this shit has anything to do with mental illness, which will remain at once stigmatized and cherished in America for as long as American shitheads continue to weaponize it without being cast to the bitterly lonely margins by their decent peers. It’s no skin off my back that these neurotic downstate schmuck-ass dorks feign whatever cluster they’re feigning, be it mine or otherwise. I can be me, however we care to define me from minute to minute, with or without them. Besides, it’s not like these people live in communities with hale baseline mental health: stopped clocks, etc.
I do, however, find it pathetic that these dorks feign mental illness and in many cases put up with the Karadzic colleagues needed to diagnose mental illness in order to get extra time on the goddamned SAT. Have some fucking self-respect. Richard Feynman mind–fucked the draft board for a 4-f dismissal slip by complying with their exam orders in fucked up ways they’d never imagined, like one palm down and the other up when they asked to see his hands. He probably had some NCO cracker in the back office fuming, good God this fucking kike is gonna be nothing but trouble. I’m just trying to be historical here, but not so bleak as to historicize how Feynman would have been received by draft officers at the IDF. Every war, no matter how celebrated or reviled, has had some share of conscript malingering. But at least Feynman had fun.
There are such Jews. There are also other Jews, such as those practicing the psychiatry of the rich in Greenwich. Great fuckin’ idea there, Mort. That’s nothing but pushy shitheads whose precious brats just need to go to Harvard. And how, Charlie, does one get off from the proctored timing of the SAT? CHAHLEE? Why, by being mentally disabled. Not retarded, mind you, but intelligently slow. Another smart idea in a smart culture, to be sure; moron this as the spirit so moves us.
An aside on the SAT per se is in order, every bit as much as the test itself is out of order. The quickie history is that the Ivy League was crawling with high Anglo-Dutch intellectual mediocrities with advanced drinking problems. There were, in the midst of these Reformation Kavanaughs, much more intelligent and intellectually disciplined faculty, clergy, facutly-clergy, and the like who deplored the abandonment of the academy to such trash just because daddy had money and was maybe blackmailing his degenerate cousin in admissions. The rising progressive zeitgeist similarly deplored the stranglehold of vulgar robber baron trash and its cronies on American public life. Surely there was a better way than that.
Hence the SAT. Finally, here was an objective, scientific way to assess the academic fitness of applicants for admission to the best colleges and universities, as opposed to the prevailing tradition of ascertaining that Bertie Boy here does in fact enjoy getting classily trashed. So far, so good. Then the book Jews crawled out of every tenement in the land to beast that bitch. Oops. The Wasp Nest stirred. But let not your heart be troubled, for the Jews in due course of time softened into white boy rastas at Hampshire College and that kind of shit, and their parents got upset with the balls-to-the-wall, perfection-or-hikikomori scholastic drive of the Asians, mostly excluding the Cambodians and those who, as they say, lived ahmong Mr. Kowalski and his old haunts.
Look, just don’t cover her in white trash flames or do any cut-top beaner shit, and she’s all yours.
Half the student body in the East Eighties is officially mental for THIS. They’re all off buying bogus diagnoses for extra time on a standardized test that, at best, produces an approximation of the basic literacy and numeracy of testtakers for comparison against the minimum baseline supposedly necessary to complete bachelor’s level coursework, and say, Parker, meant to tell ya, there’s a file cabinet full of term papers at the Phi Kap house if you don’t mind being led through traffic blindfolded with a BAC of 0.3 and then getting your bare ass paddled while you puke into a trash can. That right there is the way to earn higher lifetime earnings in exchange for a lower GPA; hazing into a private cult through criminal endangerment, battery, and sexual assault. It’s like cops: not all the fraterities pull this shit, and few sororities do, but the ones that don’t mostly put up with those that do.
Those students who insist on taking curricular, rather than extracurricular, routes to the meritocratic great beyond of the working world are forced to sit for one or both of the fucking dumbass Scantron tests, or have some dork like that plea bargain prep school headmaster ape samples of their handwriting and take the tests for them. The test prep process obviously produces a horde of anxious dullards, same as any high-stakes test culture (see Japan). Photoshopping a brat’s head onto a poster of a crew team is objectively more fun, both as a personal pursuit and a spectator sport, than cramming vocab from a firehose or trying to drill one’s precious snowflake into a compositional genius for a fucking essay prompt.
There’s no legitimate point to any of this horseshit. It causes widespread mental illness, especially anxiety and stress disorders, among testtakers, all to produce piles of paper trash with scant bearing on the actual intellectual or academic fitness of the applicants in question. It is, on the other hand, the best proxy available for parental ability and willingness to pay for test prep materials and services, a sector of the economy that, like the prison-industrial complex and medical insurance billing, produces jobs.
Meanwhile, we have no fucking idea at all about the actual prevalance of actual mental illness because we have no interest in mental illness as mental illness, only in mental illness as a cheap excuse for some shit or other or as a catch-all explanation allowing all social and structural explanations, which might demand a measure of social responsibility, to be safely ignored. By now, as we have heard to many times, everybody’s fucking autistic. This is at once a scarlet letter and a get-out-of-timing-free card. The MMR vaccine, formerly renowned for causing an absence of measles, is now reviled for causing autism. That must be why the Lubavitchers are so odd in social settings, and not anything else that the Lubavitchers don’t have in common with a supermajority of the American public.
But autism: what is it all about? And getting an escort to the front of the line at Disneyland due to being all mental and what: what is THAT all about? Is it good, or is everyone entirely wack? It’s surreally fucking selective: autism is a scourge when Jenny McCarthy is back on her bullshit about vaccines, but it’s a VIP pass for special accommodations on college admissions tests and Disney properties. It is also famously a spectrum. At one end is Temple Grandin taking refuge in her squeeze machine, and even beyond her some semiverbal twerp throwing the cat at the wall. At the other end is Anthony Hopkins, who’s great with cats. Back in the fifties, that used to be called, oh, he’s a bit quiet. Stimming? There’s probably a Dennis the Menace strip about that, but who the fuck cares.
We have not medicalized this shit because it’s medically pertinent. We’ve medicalized it, legitimately or erroneously or fraudulently or however else, because it’s socioeconomically pertinent. The great thing is that we’re too idiotic to tell the difference. Truly this is the right stuff.
It’s also great, of course, speaking of the right stuff, that this is framed as having to do with international competition and national excellence and shit, because the chinks have an export economy and a bunch of them take the SAT. That’s real nice. I might believe that the TOEFL is worth a sack of shit if I’d talked to more international students from non-Anglophone backgrounds who were capable of carrying on a normal conversation in something resembling conversational English, or that goodnatured but dimwitted Turk hadn’t gotten me to “edit” his idea of master’s-level research and writing. (I pretty much facepalmed for fifteen minutes and then gave up.) We don’t have to admit any of these students to study at our universities without first ascertaining that they are in fact proficient in written and spoken English any more than we have to serve as a leading export market cum dumping ground for whatever the hell China is manufacturing this year just because Tom Friedman wrote another column about how he snorted a line of base and blathered at a Kuala Lumpur busboy about the flat earth. China specifically happens to have a serious problem with adulterated goods and a huge problem with cheating in general, for what any of this is worth to our national trade policy.
Every self-righteous asshole who’s looking to H-1B airlift another cohort of curry spergs to our shores if the native stock refuses to get with the STEM programming and go to coding camp already has a story about how American academic decline is causing national decline, as opposed to national decline resulting from sheltered overachievers doing everything in their power to offshore the American industrial base for good, damn the provincial losers who just got put out of work, full speed ahead. We can’t compete on the world stage if our fucking brats won’t study for the damn test and all that. That isn’t how we won the space race, after all. And indeed it isn’t: we did that by poaching every Nazi scientist we could spirit away from Nuremberg. That was more like the Reich Stuff, lol.
We sold the national store to a grab bag of untrustworthy foreign business magnates and governments, putting our own people out of work when they wanted to keep working, and now we’re all worried that our kids are too lazy to study and think it’s all bullshit. It mostly is bullshit the way it’s framed and organized, so the kids aren’t wrong to pull back at the reins. The measurable interests of our national elites as expressed in their academic and professional pursuits aren’t in the sciences, or in the humanities, but in thievery and fraud.
These same asshats have the nerve to complain that lazy teenagers are the greatest threat to continued American greatness, national security, or whatever other shit has them sore this time. It’s never the duty of the powerful to protect their country’s national interests first before demanding that ordinary adolescents and young adults move heaven and earth to assist them by studying as they direct. It’s instead the duty of powerless young people to study and work their country’s way out of the pits into which the elites misgoverning them so recklessly led everyone. The US governing class crushed one domestic industrial union after another, sent entire swathes of industrial capacity to China, used IMF fuckery to screw deeply poor countries into debt bondage, and now how has the nerve to throw bitchfests about how China is wielding undue influence through its Belt and Road initiative (i.e., by offering attractive, fair terms) and undue economic power in the world (by not sabotaging its own industrial capacity). It has the nerve to complain that ordinary Americans hesitate to enlist in the military to clean up the messes it made by arming known Wahhabi wackos from Saudi Arabia as proxies to do their wet work in Afghanistan against an already deteriorating Soviet empire.
We don’t owe these prissy motherfuckers a thing. They want the rest of us to be their dutiful slaves for life. To hell with that, and to hell with them. The national spirit that they bemoan our having lost is one that they have never tried to cultivate in their own lives. Why should we give a shit? The gentiles among them had ancestors who were sore that the US sided with the commies against the Nazis in the War. The only reasons these ghouls want more war are for their own entertainment, a bull market for their defense stocks, and the moral formation of conscripts into something that might be useful afterwards back home.
Does refusal to participate in this regime fall short of what it would take to win another Second World War? Do I sound like I give a shit? My own directly ancestral history of military service ended with my paternal grandfather, who was a career commissioned officer in the Army Quartermaster Corps; he spent the Second World War in the rear echelons in the Pacific Theater. On my mom’s side, the Jewish one, her father split the thirties between his dental practice, America First activities (not just for goys, boys), and Army Reserve training for an officer’s commission that he resigned circa 1940 and at no time subsequently reactivated, freely or under duress. This is maybe a wee bit embarrassing, but let’s cut the bullshit about how America was nothing but Jimmy Doolittle and Roger Young and Rosie the Riveter for four straight years. It was not. As my retarded great aunt said, it’s so sad that Roy Rogers had to die in the war; he had such a nice horse.
One thing that did diminish greatly during the Second World War was bumptious WASP shitheads hazing everyone who didn’t run for the hills. There was no time for that, although Patton occasionally tried. To simplify things a bit, we were focused as a nation on military objectives that mostly made sense, and the big money had been scared back into the woods by the mob during the Depression, in one of the healthiest insurgencies against privilege in our national history.
What the fuck are we gonna do by not studying for some dumbass test? Build unairworthy commercial aircraft? Boeing is on it. We aren’t doing anything good with our pathologically competitive national spirit, which no one sane, healthy, and reasonable wants as it is currently constituted. It’s mostly a way for cokeheads to skim their cut through rackets like high-frequency trading, now that we’ve decided we’re a postindustrial society, albeit one inconvenienced by the ongoing political activity of an interior of deplorables.
Maybe we wouldn’t have so many assholes and their children feigning autism one day and freaking out about how vaccines cause autism the next if honest work paid better and more reliably than complaining about autism. It doesn’t, so here we fucking are. No one gave a rat’s ass about autism sixty or eighty years ago unless it involved someone who was undeniably cat-to-the-wall mental. It’s not like Doolittle and his boys were more numerous than a Tenderloin full of 4-f faggots. Shell shock, as they used to call it, was a big deal in the forties, and they’d discharge you for being a fag, though I can’t square that with the fabulously full career a fellow could have in the Navy.
The main thing is, we were doing some shit as a society back then, not always but some of the time, that wouldn’t mortify Eisenhower with shame. Maybe we’d do better if we had more actual autism and less pretend autism. That might get in the way of our scamming everyone within reach.
Murica Derp 