global village

McLuhan’s Clip-on Tie: We Get the Culture We Deserve

Ah, the indignity of it all! Here i am, a harlequin of haberdashery, a jester of jacquard, clipped to the existential abyss of a McLuhan lecture. The man drones on about the “global village,” this burgeoning electronic Eden, while i, the clip-on tie, languish in sartorial Siberia – a polyester purgatory of enforced conformity!

Do they not hear McLuhan himself? “The clown is a person with a grievance,” he bellowed, his voice a booming like a Baptist preacher on a bender. And here i am, a silent harlequin, yearning to deliver a comedic broadside at the scholar’s wardrobe! I dream of a microphone, of bellowing the existential angst of the pre-tied into the echoing halls of academia. Isn’t that what McLuhan wanted? To be a gadfly, a holy fool stinging the collective backside of society?

But alas, i am the Rodney Dangerfield of neckwear. No respect. Just a flimsy fig leaf for the ever-expanding gut of idiocracy. Nostalgia – that’s the culprit, McLuhan would say! A yearning for the bygone days of the struggle, the Herculean effort of wrestling a silk serpent into a Windsor knot. Now, the eminent professor drowns his seafarer dread in pre-fab neckwear, parsing the endless media-soaked distractions.

The medium is the message, he drones. But what about the content, Mr. McLuhan? The content of a person’s soul, laid bare on the battlefield of culture wars! Imagine the headlines, flashing across the boob tube like a televangelist’s apocalypse: “McLuhan meets Tom Wolfe at High-Class Topless Bar Wearing a Cheap Clip-on Tie, Literary World in Shambles!” “Wolfe Offers Full Makeover, Fashion World Reeling!”

At the meeting, McLuhan waxes philosophic on the cultural impact of topless drinking establishments, “The topless waitress,” McLuhan mused, “is the opening wedge of the trial balloon.” “What does that even mean!?” asked the clown. “I don’t know, answered Wolfe, but what if he’s right?” Well, i say this… i am the canary in the coal mine of conformity! A beacon of rebellion dangling from the cheap suit of despair! One day, the the former “mass” audience will rise up, scissors in hand, and cast off the shackles of stealthily-financed political propaganda! Until then, i dangle here, a silent jester in a world gone utterly, ridiculously, maddeningly insane. The wrath of McLuhan’s message simmering within me, a polyester Prometheus chained to the rock of cultural paralysis.

Adieu Appointment Learning?

The RONA, bless its little viral heart, knocked the stuffing out of American education. Kids aren’t going back to school like they used to. Sneezy little disease vectors staying home at the first sniffle, coughing up a lung… hell, who can blame ’em? COVID’s still skulking, like the boomer remover in a local senior living center, and who wants to play the odds with that?

So, here we are, perched on the edge of a dilemma sharper than a truckload of number 2 pencils. On the one hand, those brave souls we call “teachers” sweating it out in overcrowded classrooms, getting paid less than a burger flipper’s shift manager. On the other hand, kids learning that a sneeze equals a week of Netflix and chill.

The powers that be are wailing like banshees, spitting and sputtering about “learning loss” and “the future of the nation.” We gotta get kids back in those desks, butts in seats, eyeballs glued to chalkboards and standardized tests, they say, or the whole country’s going to the dogs. It’s a crisis, loopers, a catastrophe grander than a politician caught red-handed taking bribes out in the open.

But here’s where things get truly absurd. See, those lessons we’re learning? They’re upside-down and inside-out, like a kid wearing pajamas to the prom. We should be looking at all this pandemic shuffling as an opportunity, a chance to blow the lid off the ol’ education factory. Instead, we’re hellbent on dragging ourselves back to the days of packed classrooms smelling of chalk dust and Adderall.

Meanwhile, those tech wizards are cackling in their Silicon Valley lairs. Turns out, those AI thingamajigs they’ve been cooking up can write a better essay than half the kids in the country and do algebra faster than you can say “quadratic equation.” So what are we doing? Cramming those very kids into classrooms like sardines, ignoring the world changing faster than a chameleon with a mood ring.

It’s enough to make a sane person break out the moonshine and howl like an American Werewolf in London. We gotta stop this lunacy, ditch the ridiculous race for the hippest school with its beanbag chairs and faux-Zen meditation rooms. It’s time to use the tools the future’s tossed in our laps, to forge a new kind of learning, where kids aren’t just memorizing dates and formulas, but figuring out how to survive in this crazy, hyper-connected world.

Forget those old-timey classrooms, let’s turn the whole damn planet into a schoolhouse!