In stupid school they hated our guts and taught us the stupidest things they could think of. Geography had France located in Namibia and the Persian Gulf a subject of the Mississippi. It was good to learn false geography, they told us, so that later when we were traveling we would have the advantage of not knowing what country we were really in. This would make us much more employable. Falseness and confusion were my two great subjects — to make up the past each time anew. They spliced together old clips, dull montages, the worst in humour, failed jokes, commentaries for morons, and told us that this was history. I can’t tell you the tirades of ridicule they put us through. The taunts and insinuations that were hurled at us in the name of basic grammar. “You are scum. You were scum. You will be scum.” It was insulting. For a religious exercise each day we were forced to bow and salaam to our desks, the boards, the teacher’s hems, all the while chanting absurd prayers such as “Please let us go on being excrement. Please let us continue to be useless shit.” All to convince us that the world was stupid. That it was run by the stupid. That it was owned by the stupid and you would be best to make yourself as stupid as possible in order to be fully employable when you were older. The problem was our innate intelligence. Some of us couldn’t believe the facts put out by such schools. We tried and tried but we failed in our education. We could not get certificates which assured us we were stupid and so now no one will hire us. What a fate! While our more stupid friends secure jobs in offices and factories, we must stand idly by, too smart to do anything but collect the dole, the dole, the dole.