| inbluevt | Date: Monday, 2013/04/08, 4:12 PM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
|
|
Private
Group: Blocked
Messages: 1024
|
It's always good to take a look at what the Corrections Corporation of America has been doing when jailing people makes no financial sense.
Sometimes, I think our society is becoming more and more Dickensian. But sadly, I don’t mean Dickensian in the sense of the big happy family
gathering around the hearth for a jolly Christmas feast, or the
flinty-hearted miser experiencing a life-altering event that, at long
last, causes him to rediscover his humanity and become a benefactor to
all mankind. No, what I’m referring to is the dark side of Dickens — and
the man had a very dark side indeed. Take, for example, Thomas Gradgrind, Dickens’ fictional schoolmaster in Hard Times, who espouses the kind of fanatically utilitarian
educational philosophy that would warm the heart of Michelle Rhee.
“Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts,” Gradgrind proclaims.
“Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else.” Hard Times is set a mill town, Coketown, full of
factories that poison its workers as surely as, for example, the North
Carolina glue factory recently profiled in this harrowing New York Times article poisons theirs — and in spite of OSHA regulations that are supposed to protect
workers from such horrific consequences. The corrupt financier class,
embodied in Dickens characters like Little Dorrit’s Mr. Merdle (Dickens
always gave his villains the most brilliantly repulsive names) —
clearly, they’re even more deeply embedded in our society than they were
in his.
read the entire article
Message edited by inbluevt - Monday, 2013/04/08, 4:21 PM |
|
|
| |
Main 
