Episode 75: Lower Education

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)

Lewis Powell, Jr. was adamant that his United States and its enterprise system, business culture, capitalism, call it what you will, was under assault. He was most explicit, though, about the primary source of that assault: academia. I explore a portion of what he recommended—and what was done in his name—in this Episode 75: Lower Education.

In this episode, I read a bit from The Memorandum and extensively from Jane Mayer's Dark Money. D. L. Myers also reads from The Memo. I play Ga'an's "Vultures of the Horn," and "Part III" from Jahzzar's album, Moonxine. A new Henry Giroux/KMFDM intro opens the show. Mistle Thrush closes it.

Addendum: In this episode, there is a brief stretch where I pull out the dictionary, it would seem, and run through a bunch of big words like "obfuscatory" and "chicanery." I'd like here to defend myself. I was talking about how the Distortion Factories, well, distort. And one of the best ways to distort is to sound like you are an expert in the topic, and to prove it you use big words like "obfuscatory." I was quite deliberately trying to sound like they sound, these producers of university-bound curricula designed to warp young minds positively in the direction of Big Business.

This is something you can do as well!

One of the words I think everyone should know, and one that I used, was:

Sesquipedalian: long words.

That is a brilliant word from the 17th century, reportedly made up by some college wit long forgotten. Break down the Latin, and it literally means "words a foot-and-a-half long:" Sesqui = "one and a half," like sesquicentential, or the one hundred fiftieth anniversary; pedal, meaning foot. In context, I referred to "sesquipedalian chicanery;" chicanes are curves and obstacles in road race courses. Therefore, the term refers to phrases using big words to obstruct understanding of what is actually being said! It is literal irony, in that the accuser blasts the accused of using big words ... by using big words!

Episode 74: Bunkum

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(This episode is part of the series The Powell Movement.)

One bit of claptrap, as I pointed out in my last episode, can be called gobbledygook. The same can be said for one bit of bunk, true; but I'd like to expand the meaning of the word just a bit to refer to the coordinated fraud in its entirety that takes place in perpetrating falsehood for profit in this Episode 74: Bunkum.

In this episode, you'll hear me reading from a Wikipedia article on bunkum; from Upton Sinclair's books The Goose Step and The World's End Vol. 1; and from Joshua Green's October 8, 2015 Bloomberg article called "This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America". I excerpted Mr. Green talking about his article from his On The Media interview with BG Brooke; and a bit from a December, 1953 radio episode of Dragnet called "The Big Pick." I once again got voice help from D. L. Myers reading Mr. Powell's Memo.

Musically, I played Jahzzar doing "Trap" and Podington Bear doing "Dark Water." I opened with KMFDM and Henry Giroux, and closed with Mistle Thrush's "It's All Like Today."

I'm releasing this, as well as all of my episodes, under a Creative Commons 4.0 attribution, share-alike and non-commercial license.