My Deeply Held Beliefs, vol. 1

by Adam Kotsko

Throughout the almost annoyingly frequent theological debates that took place among my fellow students at Oxford, I made a conscious decision not to express my opinions in a direct way. My Evangelical Christian friends were not accustomed to being told that they were wrong, as sometimes evidenced by their style of "discussion," and at one point, one of my fellow students asked, with some annoyance, "What do you believe, Adam?" I'm not sure if I answered his question adequately at the time, but I hope to make it up to him now in the form of an exhaustive list of aphorisms.

• When people say that they don't enjoy classical music, that makes me sad for them.
• Although shaving downward does not produce as clean a shave as going upward, I'm willing to pay the price of a sloppier look in order to avoid a rash at the bottom of my neck.
• Unless it's dangerously hot, air conditioning, especially central air, is wasteful.
• Walking a considerable distance for purely utilitarian purposes is completely un-American.
• The immorality of democracy comes in its effort to convince us that the actions of the inevitably arbitrary powers that govern us are our own dumb fault, when in reality something that is "everyone's fault" can just as easily be called "no one's fault."
• Microsoft may have made computers more aesthetically pleasing to use, but no tool is easy to use if it arbitrarily stops working at crucial times.
• Raise your children without television until they're old enough to assess it objectively and realize that it's largely a waste of time.
• Total Request Live is in the process of consolidating the complete destruction of the music industry's credibility.
• The only art worth studying and enjoying is the kind that the creator secretly hopes no one will ever study and enjoy.
• Life must be difficult for those pastors who must preach to congregations full of people who possess intimate and detailed knowledge about literally everything, from the creation of the world to its ultimate destruction, from the innermost secrets of the human heart to the mysteries of God.
• On language usage:
  • The verb form of "procession" or "processional" is proceed, NOT pro-CESS.
  • Those who whine about the "limitations" of the system of grammatical gender in English should learn a language with a neuter pronoun, move to a country where it is spoken, and leave the rest of us alone.
  • Any political movement that encourages people to write and speak in an unnecessarily wordy manner in order to avoid offending people should be ignored.
  • The fact that the spelling English words is often related more to the history of that word than to actual pronunciation does not excuse people from the responsibility spell words according to accepted usage.
• On high school education:
  • Graduates from high school should be able to read comfortably and comprehendingly anything written in English since the publication of the King James Bible.
  • Graduates from high school should be able to recognize glaring errors in their writing on a quick glance through a first draft.
  • Graduates from high school should think of books as one of their primary means of enjoyment and of personal growth and should read them with alacrity and zeal at every opportunity.
  • Graduates from high school know that only in very exceptional circumstances is a "group project" anything more than a collection of people who are fortunate enough to get the same grade, after no work, as one hard-working person does, after too much work.
  • Graduates from high school know that one of the primary goals of our great institutions is to keep everyone as busy as possible, whether or not the activity leads to anything worthwhile in itself.
• Christian pop culture is a waste of time.
• Contrary to the arguments of patriots, most people who live in countries other than the United States love their homes and have no desire to emigrate.
• Every child, by the age of ten, should be able to set up and administer a large-scale corporate intranet, so that the United States can remain competetive in the world market.

I hope I have made myself clear. Any confusion resulting from this list can certainly be cleared up by a brief postscript.