Business curriculum for the Post-American Century

I saw one my business school professors
While idling in Starbucks today
I was reading the Saturday New York Times
I wanted asked him
What are you now teaching your students?

Today, the Times' business section read like
The script of a big budget disaster movie
Banks closing, people unemployed.
The Lions of Wall Street being sent off to jail
Or even worse getting rich and getting off scot-free.
But he left with his latte before I could ask

So I asked myself what would I teach?
History first, modern and ancient
Modern: how the Frat –Boy from Crawford
Helmed the American ship of state on to rocks
As big as his ego and like the Exxon Valdez
Out flowed from the hull breach
Barrels blood and treasure for the chimera of cheap Iraqi oil
On the widening stain of blood his partner in Crime
The War Criminal from Wyoming, the Senator from Halliburton
Lit a Cuban cigar with a hundred dollar bill
And tossed the now worthless greenback along with $10 trillion others
onto the bloodstained water

Ancient history next, a course of foreign study
A semester abroad
My students would explore the streets
Of the capitals of long-dead empires
Venice, Florence, Ravenna, London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and Madrid
Buy Chinese-made souvenirs in shops
Lining streets where the long dead legions of conquest
Once marched in triumph their carts filled with the plunder
Stripped from the slaughtered
Their generals puffed with false glory, like an analysts
from The American Enterprise Institute
The legions are dead, the plunder has been squandered and the glory is forgotten
And only the street names remain to mark the location
Of a well forgotten past.

Having learned the soon-forgotten-history lesson
Natural history would be next Darwin, of course
Nature and time heals all wounds
That the stain of blood cast wide across the world’s waters
Would in time disappear
The pine cone must be burned by fire
to release it seeds
But what once was wounded is never again the same
That our task during that time would not be
Mint money from the world’s suffering
But help the healing, tend the seedlings,
and make the world a that can be passed on
to our children's grand children
Perhaps by healing the world, we might heal ourselves
Over time we might become better
In healing there is hope

Capitano Tedeschi

30

copyright 2009 Jamie Jacks