gat

American Protestantism, once our national genius, left its pulpit behind, began to barter and trade
in the marketplace, refashioning God and gospel to sustain a social service vision of life. In doing
so it ruined itself while betraying us all, Protestants and non-Protestants alike. A legacy of this is
the fiefdom of Hawaii, saddest American territory of all, an occupied nation we pretend is an
American state, its land area and economy owned to an astonishing degree by the descendants of
a few missionary families, managed by government agencies. The original population has been
wiped away. Under the veneer of a vacation paradise, which wears thin almost at once, one finds
the saddest congregations on earth, parishioners held prisoner by barren ministers without any
rejuvenating sermons to preach. Hawaiian society is the Chautauqua forced schooling aims
toward.
The privileges of leadership shouldn’t rest on the shaky foundation of wealth, property, and armed
guards but on the allegiance, respect, and love of those led. Leadership involves providing some
purpose for getting out of bed in the morning, some reason to lay about with the claymore or
drop seeds in the dirt. Wealth is a fair trade to grant to leaders in exchange for a purpose, but the
leaders’ end of the bargain and must be kept. In the United States the pledge has been broken, and
the break flaunted for an entire century through the mass schooling institution.
Here is the crux of the dilemma: modern schooling has no lasting value to exchange for the
spectacular chunk of living time it wastes or the possibilities it destroys. The kids know it, their
parents know it, you know it, I know it, and the folks who administer the medicine know it.
School is a fool’s bargain, we are fools for accepting its dry beans in exchange for our children.
Roland Legiardi-Laura
In 1966 I taught the novel Moby-Dick, film theory, and versification to a thirteen-year-old kid
named Roland Legiardi-Laura, at JHS 44 in Manhattan. Roland was memorable in many ways,
but two I remember best were him reeking of garlic at nine in the morning, every morning, and
his determination never to work at a "job" but to be a poet. Before he had even graduated from
college, both his parents died, leaving him nearly penniless. Forced to become completely
self-supporting, he still remained focused on poetry, and a little over a decade later, while living
on a shoestring, organized a mobile band of poet-terrorists who raced around the state in a
candy-striped truck, delivering poetry spontaneously in bars and on street corners. Shortly
afterwards, while living in a building without secure stairs or an intact roof, he flew to
Nicaragua where poetry is the national sport and convinced the government to allow him to
make a poetry documentary. When I advanced him $50 out of the 300 grand he would need, I
told him he was nuts. But somehow he raised the money, made the film, and won nine
international film awards. Meanwhile he had learned to support himself doing carpentry and
odd jobs, the oddest of which was to help to rehabilitate a shambles of a building near Hell’s
Angels headquarters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and convert it into a poetry nightclub,
where he would later become the director and an impresario. Who would go to a poetry
nightclub? It turns out a lot of people, and as the Nuyorican Poets Cafe expanded to include
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