May 6, 2004

Editors' Note

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If anybody actually read this Editors’ Note last week, they bore witness to an amazing piece of philosophic writing. With this week being the second part of Robert James Dorgan’s “The Numbing and Dumbing Down of America,” we find Dorgan trasitioning flawlessly from discussions on the chemical makeup of diamonds to man’s percent usage of his brain. Incredible. Oh, and Friends is over. We think that this only supports Dorgan’s brilliant point.

To the child in all of us! (part 2):

Both are formed by fire and heat at much greater temperatures and at different periods of time in the earth’s history. Even the boys can skip rope; it’s not just a girl’s sport. so, if I skip around, it’s the ants in my pants that have been there since very early childhood.

My original intention for this paper was William Manchester’s A World Lit Only by Fire (The Dark Ages to the Renaissance). The “fire” of the Church and Christ is still burning in the minds of post-modern man: “The greatest offense against God is the expansion of the intellect.” Margret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa, Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, Franz Boaz, The Haida Indians, all at Ike’s Columbia University, and Dr. Albert Schwitzer all agreed in 1950 that the average human being is using a mere three to five percent of his intellectual potential to function for a lifetime.

This is the Year of Our Lord, 2004, and I can say quite authoritatively that the average human being is using between two percent of his powers to function for an extended (artificial) lifetime of general boredom. Margret Mead will haunt you in Coming of Age in Samoa with a recent photo in the National Geographic where the master of the prefabricated hut is watching TV and swigging on a classic brown bottle of Budweiser. Is this progress or is the numbing and dumbing down of America a universal disease?

Burried somewhere in the great pile of my letters that some period before I tak emy last breath, I’ll have the earth poised to enter into the Age of Crystal and far, far out of the Age of Plastic (Oil).

Robert James Dorgan

To be continued …

Archived article by Alex Linhardt and Zach Jones