the Wakefield Doctrine

(With apologies to: David Bowie, Jim McKay,Vinko Bogataj, agonosis and the thrill of Victory.)

Alright folks, here we go!  The closing hours of the first annual Tag a scott Week!  This is clark and I being your host, your histiss, your true and Humble Narrator.  And for a special treat, I have the roger with me, yeah! Up in the booth, the Progenitor himself will be joining us as we take a look at a week that truly flown by.
Let’s have a reserved but warm and enthusiastic round of applause for the man…roger!

Welcome, my roger, welcome!
…the clark, yeah ‘thanks?’ for having me here?  Where do you want me to sit?  Is this the headset I get to use?  Is this it for a set up?  I don’t know..seems a little un-organised if you ask me.  And why am I writing in blue?
I did?  No I didn’t…. yeah alright I guess I did do that but it was a whole different context.

OK! …Before we start, a little backstory for those just joining us here at the Doctrine.  (I’m talking to you, European Union! Shout outs to our new friends from Bosnia, Herzegovina and Israel.  Sloveniaaa! is in da house.) Let’s take the time for a little ‘setpiece’ first, it will make the most of this as a learning opportunity.
Last week we announced the first annual tag a scott Week.  There was a lot a buzz about the announcement, not surprisingly most of it was along the lines of, “uh do you really think this is such a good idea?” and “er clark? perhaps a more graduated approach would be better, like say call it take a scott to lunch or maybe flowers for your predator week?  You know something a little less, whats the word? ‘scottian‘”
But, for better or for worse, tag a scott Week it was.

And what a week it has been.  We have been getting reports in from the field from all three groups.  At first, the Week got off to a slow start, but by Friday, going into the weekend, we started to hear from alot of the taggers and taggees.

The rogers were slow to catch on but once they saw other people participate, you couldn’t hold them back.  Don’t want to use the term ‘stampede’ but how would you describe it roger?
We rogers prefer the term ‘(making) a demonstrative change of direction’, thank you.  But my people, while slow to accept and embrace new ideas are warming to this Doctrine thing.  And even though scotts give us the ‘love-escape’ syndrome’, you do what you can with what you got.  It’s a start…

The clarks caught on right away, (no shit), but you know with those little misanthropes you can never be sure that they are doing what they are told or doing what they think they are being told.  As a matter of fact, we had more than one roger call in and insist that a clark was helping a scott get out of a trap, and was that against the rules!
Boy did we get an earful!  Hey roger, your people, do like they rules, neh?
Here’s the thing about rules, they are good, natural, necessary and, most of all they are  pleasing.  It’s not what you clarks think; we build and form rules because that is what is natural.  We build a place for our children and descendents to be able to enjoy and they will remember us with respect and be inspired to continue the forming of a more perfect place. 

Hey roger we got a caller on the line!  She wants to know what you did with her branding iron?
okay…! I think I will let roger take that one.  (for you in the audience just joining us… take a read of the Aug 7 entry on this Page or better yet this Page (think in terms as this caller is kinda Hillary calling Bill…)
I’ll take that call.  (“yes, I know, I know I was supposed to drop it off at your office, I’m sure its in the car.  I’m kind of in the middle of something….no!  I didn’t mean it that way.  OK see you at dinner..”)  Sorry. Where were we?

So, back to the Week.  No major upsets, no massive body counts, no complaints from the MADD (Mothers Against Deliberate Dementia), (who, btw you do not want to screw with!).  Just a week of good clean, wholesome fun. Unless…

…you were the scott, caught off guard by a herd of well-dressed, middle-management credentialed rogers who, with a co-ordination and timing possible only to their type managed to trap the scott in the middle of the herd.  Unable to spring back in time and in too close quarters to get the teeth to do any good, this scott was reported to have been  ground down into a compliant, toothless Wiley Coyote-looking lifeform, reduced to muttering,  (and we quote here), about how he was ‘gonna murdalize ya all’

…you were the clark, caught ‘showing emotion’ and immediately set upon by a small pack of young female scotts.  Made hungry by a chance encounter with a herd of high school English teaching rogers, the pack thought they had stumbled on a Hungry Man Dinner sent down by jethro for their refreshment.  Boy, when clarks get genuinely pissed-off and indulge in anger, it is not a pretty sight.  (Party of 5 for the next Carnivoreville Cruise to the Island of Lesbos, please.)

Well, roger that about wraps it up for us. The final hours have ticked down and peace will reign once again in Shellyville.  So I want to thank the Progenitor for stopping in, (hey, great Post ‘Various and Sundry Arcanities’, good read, as usual.)  Anything you want to say to our readers before we pull the plug on this thing, roger?
Well, it was interesting.  I’m maybe if you organised it a little clearer and maybe gave me a little more advanced notice.  But I am learning that here in the blog world as it was back in the day of nightclub rock bands, all you could do was write the set list, do the set up, wait around and play Pac Man and go on stage when the house lights came down, ‘dit…dit…dit’

Well, its been interesting…

This is clark sayin goodnight!!  Solveniaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!

From the Roger;

     Yeah, that’s right. Blue. Who says Rogers don’t live dangerously??Woohoo!!!

     I am posting this front-page style on the presumption that it would end up here anyway; although I never see my stuff as being post-worthy. Mine always reads like a big, long…really long…self-indulgent pile of the metaphysical November leaves of my brain. Now there’s a country song title for you. But what rhymes with “metaphysical”? Hmm…reciprocal…despicable…inimicable…how about silly pop song style? “Let’s Get Metaphysical”?  “Let’s Get Despicable”?

     Having taken note of several synchronicital oddities that have recently appeared in my sub/semi-conscious, I feel drawn to share them with my virtual brethren.

     The blog seems to be going very nicely, save for the abhorrent hip-hop references. I am sadly left with an image of a smiling Fred MacMurray, complete with pipe and buttoned sweater…in long shorts and Timberlands. How much metaphor-mixing can one indulge in without permanent scarring? And I suspect that Fred may not have the street cred that he’d like me to believe.

     I’ve also enjoyed the interactions between the Clark and the linked sites. There seems to be a shared similarity, a kind of determined individuality seasoned with a mildly begrudged respect.  Bloggers of a feather…

     My particular offering today addresses the notion of comfort. Comfort zones, comfort food, etc, and how we all ( CSR’s of course) use comfort to our respective advantage. We all have a pretty clearly defined comfort zone; but Clarks are the only ones who will purposely drive themselves well beyond its boundaries purely in the interests of science. As a motivational tool. It’s a convoluted Clarkian science, yes, but it is quite similar to Carlos Castanada in spirit. And not Carlos, actually. He’s more of a Roger who gets pummeled by forces beyond his understanding. It’s really Don Juan, the teacher, who is more to the point. ( And none of those books actually have anything to do with drug use. Don Juan initially let Carlos take a lot of hallucinogens because Carlos thought he was supposed to. It took the fool over ten years to realize that it wasn’t necessary. At any rate, Clark/Scott/Roger is quite similar in this sense; it’s initially about who’s who and which of us you seem to be the most alike with. That’s just the start. When you become somewhat comfortable in your CSR skin, then the challenge becomes to find ways to pry yourself out of your comfortable frame of reference. Which leads to a bit of metaphysical angst. Which in turn leads to even more of the same, but scarier. Which ultimately leads to change. You might just retreat headlong into old habits that you’ve always used as defense mechanisms. But every now and then… you just may take a few steps in the new direction. And that would be a good thing. We are all taught one way or another in life to always race towards a goal with all haste, that time is of the absolute essence; only to find out that the real teaching was in the journey. So, yes, of course, we are all meant to ” find ourselves.” But, once found, try to have the courage to dismantle yourself with the same enthusiasm. And then you’ll find yourself…. wait..what??

     Damn… getting pretty Baptist preacher there. Well it’s true. Most people are not at all comfortable with that concept, but it’s still true at the end of the day. Just check John 10:17. And before I go totally Charles Stanley on you guys , I will bid you all adieu. ( Hmm…I didn’t know that my internal Baptist preacher was French…)

I have said in previous Posts that I can’t write (a Post) until I come up with a subtitle that ‘feels right’.  It is a funny thing, but then again, everything that is happening here at the Doctrine these days are ‘funny things’.  Of course, I don’t mean ‘ha ha’ funny things, no I mean the increasingly common feeling I get that makes me think: ‘jeez why would it occur to me to write that?’ (you need go no further than this Post, to get what I am talking about).  But its happening more and more.

I read other blogs as much as I can.  Some for the intellectual workout such as Oscar’s (“I’ve been meaning to tell you“) or Jason’s (Project:Enlightenment), others for the pleasure of reading, Mel’s (Spatula in the Wilderness) or even our own Roger ( a history) and  still others I read for the sheer guilty pleasure, like ronins (The Life and Times…) 

But there have been no blogs that I don’t get something out of, even if it is nothing more than making me think, ‘nice lick!  ‘yeah, I want to be able to do that’!

Perhaps that is what is driving this Post today, a sense of  ‘hey this blogging thing is not what I thought it would be.  Don’t ask me what I thought it would be, because that would require me to put myself in a mental place before I did this and how can that be a valid…‘ (ok,  kids step away from the clarklike answer, leave it be.  We’ll leave, so it can pull itself into the metaphysical forest and die (or maybe  be alright.)  That’s how Jethro intended things to be kids!  Natural reality is beautiful and perfect.)
Never mind the Ed Sullivan-ing¹ that we get when we see/read a perfectly well-intentioned effort to reach out to a cold universe that is met with a rolled-up newspaper swatting by a misanthropic, mass-culture-based diety…(it’s back! I told you to let it go and be by itself, kids.  Now I have to put it out of it’s misery myself.) 
(No matter how much we want to believe to the contrary, the statement: ‘this is going to hurt me more than it hurts you’ is actually true.)

Stop, clark, stop right now.  Teach us something new.  Leave the emotional sharing to the rogers who know how to do it.

(Whew! Thank you ma’am, I reckin I needed that).

So, todays ‘Lesson From the Doctrine’ is: we can see ourselves in everyone and everything we encounter during the day. The core of the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers is predicated upon the truth of this: that we all have the potential strengths of all three forms.
For various reasons (which will be explored when somebody f*ckin asks), we become one of the three.  But until the day we die we can see through the eyes of the others because that capacity is and always has been within us.

(Hey Hey A big shoutout to Slovena!! Yeah!  They be joinin our european contingency!  Rock that international shit, yo.  Watchin the West Coast too! We don’t be havin no tupac/biggie shit round here.  Glad to have you, far out man/manette)
(Got that little map widget lower left, show where readers have come from. Way cool.)

1) Ed Sullivaned for those too young to get the reference, Ed Sullivan was an ex-newspaper guy who got a variety show in the early days of TV.  All he would do is introduce acts and sometimes do a really strained interact with a guest.  Ed looked a lot like Richard Nixon doing entertainment.  Anyway, the term Ed Sullivaning refers to the vicarious embarrassment that is sometimes the result of watching live acts screw up.  The show was on live and it had juggling acts, (a lot of juggling acts).  And when the guy up on stage with the plates spinning on a stick (?!) would have them drop, some of us watching would feel embarrassed sitting safely in our homes.)

The hunt is on! Scotts beware! There are encouraged clarks and excited rogers out today and they (think) they know what they are getting themselves into!

With the first ‘tag a scott’ Week officially under weigh this might be a good time to sit back and talk a little. Comfortable?

Apropos of nothing, one of my favorite sayings is ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’. If this internet, and by extension the blogosphere is not the perfect proof of the truth of this statement, then I am going to sit here and wait for roger to get it into his head to write some more Comments. Because even though the Wakefield Doctrine itself has not changed, if anything the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers has become even more ‘real’, the writing and therefore the writers have been changing.

So what? I’ll tell you so what!
I am writing this prima facie that there is a reader. You, in fact, are that person. (You read therefore I have written). Without this assumption there would be no reason to write. Independent of the practical value of the Wakefield Doctrine in terms of understanding those around us, the drive here is to be heard  [read:read  ha, ha]

So if we are writing this on the assumption there is a reader, then whats the river shit all about? Huh?

(I said ‘apropos of nothing’ didn’t I?) But since you asked, the point I guess is to get a sense of the fundamental impermanence of reality. The fact that there is nothing of the past that immutably connects to the present. Only our willingness to assume that we all keep to our scripts.

I think that noise you hear is the baleful mewling of a herd of rogers. Rogers, as we should all know by now are the guardians of continuity. By maintaining the past through rules and science, laws and traditions rogers let us learn! More so rogers are the reason we are self aware. Scotts are pure energy, here and now, no past no future, no much to build a civilization on. By keeping the belief that the world is by nature a quantifiable place, rogers allow us to stop and reflect on what was. Myths and legends are as important a contribution from the rogerian faction as is the science and engineering that they also have given us.

(Quick break.) (Hey clark, easy up on the metaphysics there, pal! The rogers are getting glassy eyed and the scotts are starting to gnaw on the furniture)

(OK, I get.  Anyone for Bullet Points? (Everyone loves Bullet Points!)

• rogers are your engineers, accountants, doctors (but not surgeons)
• rogers are your carpenters and craftsmen, (but not your General Contractors)
• rogers are your teachers (at least the ones that end up becoming school adminstrators)
• scotts are your performers, your front men/women
• there are three occupations in the world: salesmen, scientist and machine operator
• scotts are your salesmen, not necessarily literally, just the person who is driven to make others conform to their Will
• clarks are your scientists, the creative one of the three, looking for what isn’t, not at all concerned with practical application
• rogers are your machine operators, not just engineers, but musicians, any one who needs to follow the rules

OK.

Time to get back to the show!
When we last left her, roger was sidling up to the scottian executive. Thinking that the wind was to her back she would be safe. But in walks a clark, making a fearsome racket of ‘why is this?’ and ‘what is that?’. Drat! the scott has caught a scent.
Run away! Run away!

Congratulations to all of you who participated in our first   ‘find the clark‘  Day!  From what I am hearing, everyone had a very good time, (except the clarks, ;0)

Interesting feedback most of it positive; although some of you rogers have commented that when you thought your herd had a clark  ‘encircled’, the little scamp managed to slip between you somehow and  made it into the underbrush.   (“Can’t go there boss! nosir! theys scotts in dem woods!”)
Not to worry, roger, they’ll be back.  It’s in the nature of clarks to be trusting, especially to those that seem so friendly.  It’s been said that if you gain the trust of one of these mysterious beings, they will always be around…somewhere nearby.  Always.

Anyway, ‘find the clark‘  Day was just practice,  a little warmup if you will for the main event:  ‘tag a scott’ Week!
Yes, you read that correctly, it is a whole week of fun.

‘Tag a scott’ Week is 7 days because this little ‘walk on the wild side’  is meant to help us better understand not only the wily scott but also rogers. (Wait, did he just say’…also rogers?’)
(No way! OMG! we don’t have to go out there and look for scotts by ourselves do we?) (Yes roger, yes you do)

So, a brief overview, quick Q&A and off you go…

The quarry: scott

(A group of scotts is a pack, the ways of a pack speaks volumes to the nature of it’s members.
The pack will function as a group only for relatively narrowly defined goals/purposes. Securing food and defending  territory.)

The scottian individual will, (upon entering any social environment), push everyone on the shoulder (figuratively or literally).  This is done to elicit a reaction/response and thereby allowing (the scott) to establish ranking.  Does the other person push back or not? If they do not, they are prey, if they do push back, then a quick struggle and the ranking in the pack  determined.  Scotts will ‘work the room’, never staying in one group for too long.

This behavior is perceived as being very social, Scotts are always the life of the party; but their actual purpose is to locate the other scotts, establish ranking and territory and then to the primary purpose of coming out:  find the food.

The reason for this is that in the wild there are more rogers than scotts (or clarks, for that matter), so if we are looking for a scott, the easiest thing to do is identify their food source and go there.  In the social wild, scotts will be found always on the move.  You will rarely see more than two scotts in the same social setting, at least for any extended period of time.  As has been said, scotts are the hunters, the predators.

 So you say, “What are we to learn about rogers during tag a scott Week?”

Real simple.  scotts like rogers, they like them anytime.  Lunch time, Dinner time, Snack time.  For the more in-depth explanation of the relationship between scotts and rogers, you are going to have to ask (read all the pages first).  So for the purposes of this little event, if you are tracking the wily scott, do what any hunter will do, go to where the food is, learn the routines, and wait patiently.

Just so no one out there thinks we at the Doctrine are denigrating rogers, let me remind you that we all have the qualities of all three forms, (clarks, scotts and rogers) and it is simply a predominance of one over the other that makes us what we are.  There are not good or better types, each has its strengths and its weaknesses.  In fact, the secret goal of the Wakefield Doctrine is, in fact, to find ways to develope full all three aspects.  So let’s hear it for the girls…

 Rogers are not hunters, they are group/herd/social beings. Rogers exist in the context of the group, the herd.  Rogers are the reason we have stable civilizations throughout history. They are the bookkeepers and the doctors, rogers are the engineers and the judges, without them we would not have rules of behavior, etiquette or polite behavior.  Without rogers, scotts would be baying at the moon in a pre-historic environment.

So, go out there this week (starting Monday the 9th at 11:00 am (scotts hate the mornings) and ending at midnight Monday the 16th.

The rules are simple: identify the scott and come back with something they own.

(Without getting eaten)