A Candidate’s Progress (7): Professor Frump will play the company way.

It's a little known fact that my first and only high school musical performance came as a member of the besuited male chorus in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying." 34 years later, it has become a campaign issue in irony-free New Albanee.

On Tuesday, I posted this comment on my Facebook wall. I didn't even use spray paint. Perhaps that was a mistake.

School budget guttings? When Job One is preserving the wealth of monied oligarchies and privileges elites at the expense of everyone else in the country, the GOP implements a governing order that really and truly trickles down to all of us, mostly in the form of raw sewage. Expect more of the same.

My secret desire was to incite the semi-pro apologists at the Clere Channel Network to a new, frenzied fete of fervent fluffing, just the sort of hero worship guaranteed to entertain me much in the same way as watching squirrels frolic in the back yard just before the condors move in for the picnicking.

Boy, was I ever mistaken. Instead of a chat about ideological sewage deployed by over-reaching Republicans as odiferous napalm against local government's work, I found myself embroiled in a spread sheet gang bang.

My fundamental point about "government as business" handily ignored, the conversation indeed took a turn, although little did I know that in the aftermath of the battle royale stemming from this most unexpected of unintended provocations, I'd manage to annoy certain northside NA collegiate academia to such a degree of agitation that my name subsequently would be openly mentioned in front of an undergraduate business class as an example of abhorrent dissidence that cannot go unpunished by respectable elements in society, like the ones who persist in believing that One Southern Indiana represents the very acme of human aspiration (and dress codes).

Whoa, and what the hey?

I'm just a little ol' kitchen table philosophy major who's never forgotten how much sheer joy can be had in questioning straight-laced and -jacketed orthodoxies, especially when they're housed in small ponds like the Open Air Museum's tiny swimming hole.

Judge for yourself. Here's the Facebook thread in question, during which my original campaign essay here at NAC was introduced. Given the way these musings pulled successive IUS business department instructors into the fray, forgive me for wondering if they were doing some tweeting of their own? Not that I mind. After all, I'm an untutored exhibitionist.

(While it is humbling to know that my testimonies can elicit such labored breathing, it's a shame they never seemed to do the trick in an earlier life when I truly was "on the market" and available to the lowest female bidder. Capitalism failed me then, and I've never forgiven it.)

Surely the business education team at IUS recalls the first lesson at beer entrepreneur's school: Any publicity is good publicity. Accordingly, in spite of seldom (perhaps never), using the following modern Internet shorthand here at this longer-form blog, it is highly merited in this instance.

LMAO

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All right. In response to the expected rebukes, I'll be "serious," but only for a moment.

The unrepentent class clown has important things to do today, like trying to dope out how Wal-Mart/Sam's Club can be the main sponsor of the Small Business Administration's "Small Business Week," without each and every one of us ingesting voluminous quantities of hallucinogenic compounds.

I happily attended classes at IUS, and was awarded a BA in 1982. I have many friends and customers in the School of Business at IUS, and they know that in my own hyperbole-ridden, barnstorming way, admittedly one not always capable of being quantified by money, I've supported the university ever since graduation, primarily by never wavering in vigorously defending its quality against the wailings of the Open Air Museum's resident dullards, those who've never comprehended the value of a university education, and quickly demean as irrelevant IUS and other educational institutions which have the misfortune of NOT boasting a Division 1 NCAA basketball program to divert short attention spans for a few weeks every spring.

What's more, for the the past few years, I've taught a beer class for IUS's continuing education department. It isn't rocket science, but I do a good job, and students enjoy the experience. For the fourth time in the past decade, I'm preparing to help with the Ogle Center's Bier Prost fundraiser at Horseshoe. The list goes on, and on.

I engage in public discussions all the time. I make no effort to hide my identity, and I accept the consequences as periodically assisted by my outspoken nature. Nothing much is required in return, although a sense of fair play would be pleasant enough. I've been told that both my name and elements of the discussion thread were mentioned aloud in a class, and this is flattering even if presented in a disparaging manner. Just know that I'm available for equal time, to address the students in that class, and offer one contrarian business owner's side of the story.

It might just be instructive.

I can talk about what I've learned in the sacred pursuit of bizness, and the presiding instructor can freely take me down a few notches in person by explaining the unlikelihood of my having learned any of it by reading books written by mere thinkers ... those misguided novelists, historians and theorists who never attended business school, and did not receive the proper vocational education.

Until then, I'll have to settle for spitwads, passion, jousting, dust-ups and frequent dosages of wisdom from the closest available Progressive Pint. I don't recommend these to everyone, even if they've always worked for me.