HOW-OF-WHY

Ronald Reagan Elementary School

I am in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
In the very city, in one of the older neighborhoods, Bay View.
Not one of the metro area's many suburbs.
Milwaukee's once thriving economy has suffered over the years. Once a vital industrial, factory, manufacturing, machine shop, brewing, automobile, farm equipment and strong labor union town, as jobs diminished, and a divisive freeway system carved up the already divided by waterways neighborhoods into an often blighted urban cityscape, the inevitable "white flight" followed.

Funding for education shrank, two generations of young people were basically abandoned, and school buildings fell into disrepair. Building new schools was mostly out of the question.

Out west of the City that boarders the eastern shore of the lower coast of lake Michigan, some of the business leaders who led the urban flight have built a school and named it after their mythic hero, President Ronald Reagan.

What is telling is that the school project demonstrates how to get the rich right wing Rep0-Bli-Kanotz Big-Biz-Owners to loosen their double-knotted purse strings and $pend buck$ on new school buildings: Promise to Name the building after one of their Hideous Heros.

While Ronny R. did (by comparison) make Georgie WB look like an even worse version of a president, he was (long B-4 his Alzheimer's set in) a fine example of MIP (Morons In Power). His son, Ron, however is probably one of the sharpest, smartest, critical thinker and best news pundits around. He beats the pants off (not literally - a metaphor) most of the CNN, FOX or MS-NBC squawk-a-like-talkers.

Then again the white flight west-of-the actual city Rep0-Bli-kanotz Big-Biz-Owners only monied up a miserly $60,000 for a schoolhouse costing $18.7 million. That is a mere 0.0003209 of the total cost. So I guess the middle class & working poor get to pay the $18,640,000 balance.

Those tight fisted neo-conmen & neocon-wymyn sure are clever. Same way they got the public to pay for the Alien Space Craft like Miller Park and the Big Bread Slicer of an Arts Museum Addition.

Maybe they should sell the naming rights for every locker, desk, floor tile, urinal, toilet and vegetable - that is ketchup* - bottle. Then the school grads will somedays be able to brag how they sat their elementary school butts in a chair engraved with the face of Ayn Rand or took a doo-doo in the Irving Kristol memorial Commode. And when the catsup bottle needs a good whack to give up some condiment they can exclaim, "H. E Double Hockey sticks, why can't I get some friggin' red dyed processed corn syrup mixed with vinegar out of this piece of schmidt plastic Norman Podhoretz memorial condiment container! Does not anything work as intelligently designed in this over priced, over budget multi-purposeless room, named in honor of Herr Doktar Henry Kissinger? Mein Kampf, public/private hybrid of an institution sucks like School Choice!"


* "The source of our word ketchup may be the Malay word kēchap, possibly taken into Malay from the Cantonese dialect of Chinese.

"Ketchup was one of the earliest names given to this condiment, so spelled in Charles Lockyer’s book of 1711, An Account of the Trade in India: “Soy comes in Tubbs from Jappan, and the best Ketchup from Tonquin; yet good of both sorts are made and sold very cheap in China”. Nobody seems quite sure where it comes from, and I won’t bore you with a long disquisition concerning the scholarly debate on the matter, which is reflected in the varied origins given in major dictionaries. It’s likely to be from a Chinese dialect, imported into English through Malay. The original was a kind of fish sauce, though the modern Malay and Indonesian version, with the closely related name kecap, is a sweet soy sauce.