I'm sorry, but I just can't avoid talking about Makalano. One of my objectives for this letter is to open students' eyes, minds, hearts, and souls to the world around them. I could go on and on about his special form of adversarialism, but you get the general idea. At the heart of the problem is his obliviousness to history, his moral cowardice masked in bold rhetoric, and his overwhelmingly shallow political posturing. Excuse me; that's not entirely correct. What I meant to say is that if the human race is to survive on this planet, we will have to hold out the prospect of societal peace, prosperity, and a return to sane values and certainties. Will prodigal, surly mythomaniacs ever penetrate the sunny façade of Makalano's recommendations with the sharpened stick of reality? Don't bet on it.
Makalano says that the sun rises just for him. I've seen more plausible things scrawled on the bathroom walls in elementary schools. If we do nothing, he will keep on pouring a few drops of wormwood into our general enthusiasm. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can build a world overflowing with compassion and tolerance. Makalano teaches workshops on obscurantism. Students who have been through the program compare it to a Communist re-education camp.
Makalano's adherents argue that there is something intellectually provocative in the tired rehashing of quarrelsome stereotypes. These are the same uncouth, fork-tongued geeks who ascribe opinions to me that I don't even hold. This is no coincidence; some people are responsible and others are not. Makalano falls into the category of "not". He unequivocally believes that his faith in stoicism gives him an uncanny ability to detect astral energy and cosmic vibrations. What kind of Humpty-Dumpty world is he living in? Many people consider that question irrelevant on the grounds that Makalano is a being who invents nothing, originates nothing, and improves nothing. All he does is waste natural resources.
Makalano sometimes has trouble convincing people that newspapers should report only on items he agrees with. When he has such trouble, he usually trots out a few uppity clodpolls to constate authoritatively that Makalano is a protective bulwark against the advancing tyranny of verbally incontinent mouthpieces for money-grubbing frotteurism. Whether or not that trick of his works, it's still the case that if natural selection indeed works by removing the weakest and most genetically unfit members of a species then Makalano is clearly going to be the first to go. While I know very little about insolent freebooters, I do know that he likes lashing out at everyone and everything in sight, which puts him somewhere between a lascivious, predaceous cult leader and a clueless inane-type on the negativism org chart. Makalano is absolutely versipellous. When he's among plebeians, Makalano warms the cockles of their hearts by remonstrating against tuchungism. But when Makalano is safely surrounded by his legates, he instructs them to address what is, in the end, a nonexistent problem. That type of cunning two-sidedness tells us that when people say that bigotry and hate are alive and well, they're right. And Makalano is to blame.
When I first became aware of Makalano's covert invasion into our thought processes, all I could think was how the worst sorts of mendacious wimps there are commonly succumb to Makalano's distortions, deceptions, and delusions. I do not. Rather, I take pride in dealing summarily with huffy nincompoops. In an atmosphere of false rumors and misinformation, it is not uncommon for Makalano to victimize the innocent, penalize the victim for making any effort to defend himself, and then paint the whole brutish affair as some great benefit to humanity. He appears to have found a new tool to use to help him silence critical debate and squelch creative brainstorming. That tool is communism, and if you watch him wield it you'll obviously see why he has been trying to convince us that granting him complete control over our lives is as important as breathing air. That argument fails to take into account the reality that Makalano's blockish causeries can be quite educational. By studying them, students can observe firsthand the consequences of having a mind consumed with paranoia, fear, hatred, and ignorance. With that, I'll draw this letter to a close. No doubt I've made some factual mistakes in the text you just read, but essays since Montaigne have been about locating truth, not about assembling facts. I'll be happy as long as you've learned from this letter that I believe that the portrayal of wastrels in our culture is partially responsible for Makalano's machinations.
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