Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers talks of the need to devote 10,000 hours to any activity to become really good at it. He’s talking, of course, about violinists and chess masters, people who stand out, but it struck me the other day, looking back over my life since 1988, that I have 10,000 hours of reading in the bank, or an average of an hour a day during that time. That does not count the hours spent writing on this blog these last eight years, a form of self-guided learning. That’s more time than I spent studying in college.

It does not begin to equate to the number of hours I spent in classrooms, however. Most of that classroom time was spent absorbing material that I would later have to recite back on a test before permanently forgetting it. How that qualifies as “education” – I haven’t a clue.

Looking back at my graduation from college, I am embarrassed at how little I learned. True, I passed the CPA exam, but on-the-job training is where that expertise comes from. I could have skipped most of college. Everything I know I learned since. There was very little learned in school that was truly useful later on.

My wife’s son runs a small business with quite a few employees. I asked him about the value of a college degree in his hiring practices. He didn’t think there was much value except for this: A person with a college degree can undertake a large project and see it through to the end. But honestly, there’s got to be better, cheaper ways of attaining that end than those thousands of hours wasted in classrooms. Can we not find a more visionary rite of passage into adult life?

It is our self-guided learning that matters most, because it is driven by interest. We tend to remember it. In my case, The lessons I had absorbed in sixteen years of classroom learning were those most Americans learn: Religious faith, false history, some numbers, some literature … drawing a blank here. What did I do all those years?

Let’s see: In college I studied …

• statistics for three semesters. I cannot tell you a thing about it.
• I studied marketing, but didn’t learn how it is really done, as no one will ever admit they deceive for a living.
• I studied governmental accounting, and during that semester fell for a really hot girl. What I remember from that class: Betsy.
• From my college history courses I remember some tidbits, like the type of landing craft used on D-Day, the first American victory in World War II at Al Alamein.
• Dr. Aaron Small and Shorty Alterowitz, two professors at Eastern Montana College, left a positive lasting impression. They were really smart guys who seemed to like students – they brought some passion to the game.
• A non-teacher came in and taught a course on insurance and investments, and his stuff stuck with me because it was counter-intuitive. He taught me the life insurance game, indeed a con game. That was a really useful information when I later encountered “experts.” That’s how I learned about snake oil.
• Real estate – again, non-teachers taught the course, and they were all about closing deals, getting people to commit to borrowing large amounts of cash and thereby turning six percent over to them. The teacher, J. Cody Montalban, was a rich and eccentric character. He did not play it straight, and I really liked him. He died young.

That paragraph above, 233 words, is all that comes to mind as I think back on four years of post-secondary education. There’s more, but I’d have to work at it. Oh yeah: Randy Howard, accounting professor, was considered an excellent teacher because he laid out information in such an organized manner that you could remember it when tested. Mostly, though, here merely brought some humor to the dreary profession. He made a risqué joke one day about early withdrawals. I remember that.

Born in 1950, entered school in 1956, but it was not until 1988 that I started my own education, the self-guided type, following my real interests. It wasn’t an organized program of learning. I did not know the final objective. But I was interested. That year was the 25th anniversary of the death of JFK. I thought I might just solve that crime. I had done well in school, so thought I was able. So I asked the question.

Here’s what it has taken 10,000 hours and 25 years to understand: All of our glorified institutions, including our courts, law enforcement and news media, formed a circle around the criminals who committed the murder of JFK, and protected them. They are still doing so to this day. They do so in an instinctual manner, fulfilling their true function.

Every institution in our land has both a stated function and a real function. The real function is usually so seedy that it is not discussed, even privately. For example, the FBI acts as political police, CIA as professional murderers. Both are charged with watching the population, ferreting out and undermining democratic movements, murdering the leaders if necessary. It’s not just that one murder that one day. Thousands of people have been killed in every way imaginable, from poison to heart attacks to cancer to downed planes to car wrecks to gunshots in an open plaza … god it’s disgusting. Murder, murder everywhere, Michael Hastings recently, for example. And just as with JFK, people know instinctively not to ask questions. Another cover-up.

If it were that one crime … but and it crosses all affairs of our glorious state. Everything about us is a lie.

Nothing changed on that day, 11/22/63. Had the crime been carried out as planned, had Lee Harvey Oswald been murdered by JD Tippet so that he never have uttered those four words “I’m just a patsy”, had not John Connally also been shot, we would not know as much as we do about that day. They bungled the job. The cleanup and coverup have been operations of brute force. Part of our patriotism now demands that we believe the impossible, the Magic Bullet, 2+2=5. Our leaders and institutions were left naked before us that day … for eyes that can see.

JFK does not matter. No matter his glorious intent, one way or another he would have been thwarted. He was just a man, and a deeply flawed one at that. But asking the question – who killed him – leads to other questions leads to answers and more questions, and finally, enlightenment.

Since I know that no others are going to take my journey, I’ll slip you the answer: The United States of America is a totalitarian state hidden behind the thinnest veil of democracy imaginable. In order to maintain the illusion of democracy, the bulk of the population has to be kept in a state of unenlightened patriotism, or deep indoctrination.

That’s what formal education does for us; that is its primary function. It keeps us willfully blind an unknowingly stupid. News and entertainment follow up in our post-education years to reinforce the blindness and stupidity. Teachers, journalists, cops, judges … all of them have to buy into the system and be as stupid and blind as the rest of us. Any who are enlightened are soon jettisoned. Or disgraced. Or murdered.

When I left college with a decent GPA and hours of study and classrooms behind me, the best words that described me were blind and stupid. Formal education had worked its magic on me.

Twenty-five years, 10,000 hours made me an outlier. I overcame my education; I learned things. I asked the question.

The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. (James Baldwin)

The above quote came to me via Joseph McBride, and reminded me of something George Carlin use to say in his act. He, like me and McBride, was a product of Catholic schools, but Carlin’s education was progressive. He was not taught to be a Catholic. The assumption was that he would come around on his own by his own internal light as he grew in ability.

…somehow we got lucky, y’know. Got into a school where the pastor was kinda into John Dewey and progressive education and he talked the parish…talked the diocese, rather, into experimenting in our parish with progressive education and whipping the religion on us anyway and see what would happen with the two of them there. And [it] worked out kinda nice; there was a lot of classroom freedom. There was no…for instance, there were no grades or marks, … no report cards to sweat out or any of that. There were no uniforms. …there was no sexual segregation; boy and girls together. And the desks weren’t all nailed down in a row, y’know. There were movable desks and you had new friends every month. It was nice; like I say, a lot of classroom freedom…in fact there was so much freedom that by eighth grade, many of us had lost the faith. ‘Cause they made questioners out of us and … they really didn’t have any answers …

While the world is crawling with ex-Catholics like Carlin, McBride and myself, Catholic education these days does not mess around. They go for the mind, take ownership, and leave no doubt that Catholic is the righteous path.

I am reading McBride’s Into the Nightmare. It is about his growing up and coming of age after the Kennedy assassination. He and I have much in common, being about the same age, taking the same publications in our homes as youths, twelve years of Catholic schooling, and having the assassination as the lever by which were launched into the grown-up world.

JFK was just a man who tripped over real power. I seriously doubt he could have changed very much, as the office of president, while powerful, is not the center of power in this land. But the assassination is a focal point. If we examine it closely, we can come to grips with that power, educate ourselves, and free our minds of the deep indoctrination that is American education. It is a lever by which we learn to view the world with unfiltered eyes. It can help us grow up.

If was often said over the years that Europeans were not surprised at how JFK was murdered, that such intrigue is common and accepted over there. Americans still cling to childish beliefs about leaders and countries and systems of government. I know I did, so that finally coming to realize that JFK was murdered by Americans, and that the whole of our collective institutional structures formed a circle around the murderers was deeply shocking. I had to throw out my education and beliefs and start over from scratch. I realized that I had grown up in a whore house. (This is, I suspect, the underlying message of the TV series Mad Men, as Don Draper comes to grips with his life and real identity. The TV series is smuggling some truth to to us.)

The Saker wrote a nice short piece on this country called “Hillary, Jeb, Rand – does it make a difference anyway?”

[I] see the USA as run by a tiny elite which is good at “pretend democracy” but which makes darn sure that the people vote the “correct” way. I consider the primaries, conventions, caucuses, and elections themselves as a mix between a farce, a form of entertainment, a re-legitimization of a system and a secular liturgical act (a form of public self-worship). There is no “democracy” in the US and there probably never was. However, if the regime does not change, the specific clans within the 1% do fight each other and struggle for control of the regime.

Second, there are different clans, interest groups, factions who fight *within* the top 1% and they can, and do, make use of the electoral process not as a means of popular expression, but as a way to impose their agenda and interests. I often speak of the “old Anglo guard” (best represented by the Bush clan before Dubya) and the “Neocons”, but there are many more interest group[s] (oil, banking, military, drug warriors, big pharma, etc.) who all participate in the internal struggle for power.

Thus, there is no real difference between the Republicrats and the Demoblicans, they are all part of the same elite, but there are differences between different political figures who are more, or less, aligned with any specific interest group. Thus Greenwald is correct when he identifies the various groups who would support a Hillary Presidency. This has nothing to do with democracy, the political parties or even her own views and everything to do with which interest groups she sold out to.

The Saker, as a legal alien educated elsewhere, came to this country with a fully formed cerebral cortex. Unlike products of our own education system, he is a grown-up. Later in his short essay he says that given a choice we might be better off “having a generally mentally sane Jeb Bush (and his staff) … than a clearly rabid Hillary (and her staff).” This feeds my own sensibilities, affirms my own judgment to a degree.

My impressions of people that we only know via media and print is flawed, of course. Over the years I have come to view George H.W. Bush as a dangerous psychopath, for example, and Ronald Reagan as a dunce and the mere vehicle by which (the unelectable) Bush was handed the presidency (on March 30,1981). George’s son George W. is a ninny. Richard Nixon was a complex and intelligent man who, like JFK, thought the power of the office of president could be exercised roughshod over the other factions within the 1% who have different objectives. He failed to grasp the nature of the makeup of our oligarchical structure. Fortunately for him, his removal from office was bloodless.

And yes, Hillary, like George H.W. Bush, scares the crap out of me. She’s unprincipled and ruthless, and smart only to the degree that she can see up to, but not around the bend. Having no emotions or concerns about human suffering, she might indeed think war with Russia is a smart move, for example.

Why do only the good ones get taken down? Where are those damned hidden gunmen when we really need them?