Are you stuck in the regular classroom where the teacher pontificates and tells you to sit down and shut up, while far away, the Taggers (Talented And Gifted) get to design their own curriculum, pursuing in-depth any whim in the wide world where their mind wanders…in a similar fashion to the way you and I pretty much are just stuck paying our taxes and don’t bother to pay accountants to look for non-existent loopholes, while the rich get to design their own programs of “voluntary compliance” and “self-regulation” that create some of the most exotic sounding tax shelters that they dare the IRS to try to untangle, or, alternatively, they will rent the IRS a derivatives decoder for the low price of only $50,000/hr? Yes, the rich understand the concept of leverage, and, no, thank you very much, no one needs to lower their leverage, particularly with the IRS.
Take heart: for every Tagger in the world, there are at least 10,000 Gatters. GAT= Gawd Awful Talker.
The Taggers of today’s elementary schools are the Very Serious People of tomorrow’s Krugman columns. Whereas the Gatters of today will be the Gatters of tomorrow, doing nothing very serious except spouting off, and not particularly effecting any extraordinary changes in the world. Given the amount of damage the Very Serious People are doing, this may not turn out to be a huge liability.
Now, while there are tremendous, high-pressure criteria to be a Tagger, the Gatters are one of those super-cool groups open to all that get to exist in the world of dual meanings–kinda like how, in the 60’s, “bad” was re-defined to mean “super-cool, way good, ” as in, “waaaaaaaay baaaaaad!” But there were also still many truly bad things in the 60s which were in no way the good kinda bad. Gatters can be so truly chalk-gratingly awful that they stand as a Gat, as is, no explanation needed…or they can actually be a super cool person who adopts or is awarded the label Gatter to distinguish that they are not a Tagger, because the existence of Taggers implies there is a non-Tagger category to whom everyone else belongs.
So, everyone stuck, and everyone not stuck, in the regular classroom can nominate any person, event or place for a Gat award, conferring automatic status into the world of gatters, which is unofficial into perpetuity. Items that come to mind for potential nominations this week are Donald Trump’s press conference and The Royal Wedding. Unnamed columnists.
The beauty and purpose of it is to let your mind run wild. You needn’t tell the person. But if you are stuck in a room and can’t get out, possibly for many hours, just keep saying to yourself, “You are an official Gatter. In fact, I am going to nominate you into the Gatter Hall of Fame…”
The Taggers might be spinning cocoons all around us Gatters, herding us this way and that with their earth-shaking Plans and Designs for Humanity. But I think, in the end, they’ll realize we Gatters were having a whole lot more fun, since we simply admitted we were Gatters: there’s nothing wrong you can say if you admit everything you say is wrong…reveling in being wrong, we’ll let the rest of the world be right, and enjoy the rich consequences of being of no consequence.
Shelved in Cyberspace 
