I never knew that Mr. Borba had taught at Corcoran High School, I only knew him as an English teacher at the College of Sequoias, you know one of them once in a life-time teachers who changes your life forever. He taught me the three-part divided thesis and showed us the movie It's a Wonderful Life, both things entered into my consciousness and fundamentally transformed me from the inside out. Both things showing me how to tame my wild thoughts and convert them into something beneficial to my well-being.
I was one of the many victims of the Sixties. I never knew that my family was working-class poor. I never knew that I was supposed to hate authority, distrust adults, and hate America until those journalists and creative types from the east coast at the behest for their corporate masters and maybe with some help from our own government started propagating the idea that everyone needed to be pessimistic about the post-war future. Now there's still a lot of people who will argue that it was the events themselves that caused the problems and divisions that plagued that troubled era. Walter Lippman had already published his ground-shaking Public Opinion in 1922 explaining how our rulers and their highly paid minions employ techniques to manufacture consent, "especially of the irrational and often self-serving social perceptions that influence individual behavior and prevent optimal societal cohesion." In other words he blew the whistle on how those who own this country create the illusion that the public arrives at these divisive opinions own their own when in fact the entire culture is often used to prevent us regular stiffs from not only arriving at our own opinions but to prevent us from working things out things on our own often added by conversations with our neighbors. It was a hallmark trait of the Sixties, it has since been systemically institutionalized into our social structure. There was also, of course, the ironic fact that my own cultural heroes of that time had been engaged in a great deal of self-enrichment while they led me and many of my friends Pied Piper-like away from the only path that would have led to the truth of things. Led Zeppelin, the greatest rock band of the early Seventies had the phrase "Do What Thy Wilt", the motto of Alister Crowley, engraved in the grooves of their albums, the Beatles had a picture of the satanist on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's album, arguably the most influential music album of all time. The Rolling Stones in the meanwhile sang about having Sympathy for the Devil as the narrator of the song (played by Mr. Jagger) gleefully states, And I was 'round when Jesus Christ Had his moment of doubt and pain Made damn sure that Pilate Washed his hands and sealed his fate Were we stupid then or just naive? I would say both and then add a lot of other adjectives like overwhelmed, confused, misguided, puzzled, curious and searching. The thing we didn't understand then though was that there were many people getting paid to tell me lies, so someone else could profit off of my gullibility and the gullibility of my well meaning parents who, coming out of the Dust Bowl, could easily spot a shyster car salesman at a hundred yards but never understood that the difference between that car salesmen and a lot of Baptist preachers was a matter of degree and the angle of the scam. My experiences with the hedonism of the Sixties led me out to the Tulare Lake Basin where I dug ditches for a living working out my sins in a purgatory of my own making. God suddenly said, "Enough's enough," and reached out for me one day after I had read, on my lunch break, in a Bible Concordat about Moses taking that first step into the Red Sea on faith. A flow of energy rushed through my body and in a matter of seconds I had found a path back to the surface of things. And that road led me to Mr. Borba's class where he gave me the anecdote to all the poison I had swallowed in my mispent youth in the form of hope represented by a smiling Jimmy Stewart. There are many in Hollywood who still hate Frank Capra because he gave names and verified the communist presence in the industry during that era. The fact is that many of the screenwriters caught up in the Black Listing were in fact being told what they could and couldn't write by none other than Stalin himself. I don't believe that's why they constantly smear Capra though; I believe it is actually because of the hope engendered by that image of of a smiling George Baily, smiling because he has just fully understood the natural goodness inherent in mankind. Mr. Borba died last year and I've heard lots of stories about how he impacted the lives of many people. I thought about starting this with the words, "Grown men cried on the day he died and he changed my life forever." I thought, damn man, that's more like a song lyric, and I was stunned by profoundness of the thought, "grown men cried on the day he died." Thank you, Mr. Borba. I don't know if you knew it on that day you showed that movie in class on last day of the fall semester that you were creating the wizened old man sitting in front of his lap-top writing about how the universe always provides the truth and wisdom to those with the eyes to see it. When I see that movie henceforth, and that bell rings, I'll think that James Stewart smiles because he knew you finally got your wings. Hell, they didn't even have lap-tops in those days. |
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