In Vino Veritas: Wine and Reading Comprehension

A Work of Fiction: Installment I

Imagine you are an immodest reading scientist, Dr. Swift 2.0, in 2029. Your ancestors descend from a long line of Swifts, tracing back to the infamous Irish Catholic cleric who modestly proposed something quite satirically horrific having to do with butchering children in 1729. Imagine a role for you as a participant, a fly on the wall in a tale which unfolds the day after tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

You live in a bifurcated American future, two thousand and twenty-nine, the pre-2024 USA, when the legal system was stressed to the break point, post-2024 USA, when the legal system broke. A former President, who by the way narrowly escaped criminal prosecution for acts against the Constitution of the United States, was allowed to return to office in 2025.

The Supreme Court, unfairly constituted during his first term before Mitch McConnell’s demise, decided in 2028 to reverse the two-term rule required by Amendment XXII on a technicality for this President in this case only. His first election in 2016 was number one. Because his second election had been stolen from him, so he said, the country owed him the second one. He refused to count 2024 because it was rigged, too. So what if he still won? He deserved a freeby because the Democrats tried, they tried. Though he was old and frail, the formerly indicted fat President still died his hair orange, opted for a third term in 2028 and won.

In 2025 his first executive order was the game changer. He not only reinstated slavery, but mandated it, a peculiarly medieval brand of slavery before the kind of racism of the antebellum South, a dystopian MAGAmism that (in)discriminated: Any newborn citizen could be enslaved in this brave new ameritocracy no matter what flavor.

As a fly on the wall, you learn that babies are now assessed on their first birthday to determine their status. Using socioneurogenicbiolosophically engineered preschool aptitude tests, genomic metrics, and magnetic resonance imaging, infants are sorted blindly into either the S (slave) track or the NS (non slave) track with separate sets of rights and privileges. The assessments are done before language acquisition surfaces so that the government can’t be accused of cultural or linguistic bias.

Cut scores—the score it takes to get into the NS category where the sky’s the limit—vary year to year. During brief annual periods of “structured discursive protocols” known quaintly as “voting,” local governments give NS citizens a chance to vote for a cut score, the point where S infants end and NS infants begin. There is no more voting for representatives, though the small NS population is polled.

Emancipated infants (NS) born in one given year might be required to score at the 89th percentile or above, the next year the 91st, for example, depending on political persuasion from the President in his annual State of the Economy address. The NS population has rich incentives to do the President’s bidding.

The White House Secretary of Human and AI Labor predicts annually what proportion of the citizenry will be needed for pick, shovel, and grunt work twenty years out. If a major infrastructure project is scheduled for 2049, the cut score would channel more infants for enslavement in 2029. There would be a calling for heavy equipment operators when the cohort matured.

Incentives for immersion preschool programs in mathematics and the physical sciences would be embedded in legislative strings tied to private school vouchers available to non-slave 2029 model infants. Heavy equipment operators can’t operate in the absence of scientists to direct them.

Dr. Swift 2.0 is appalled by it all. Watching the new order unfold, he argued quietly that enslaved masses needed high-quality, scientifically-based reading instruction more acutely than ever. Living life as a legally-owned laborer of the subsistence class meant living without books, but not without reading, some of his colleagues rebutted. President Kookoo Bird Cocopuff spoke about this freedom from the burden of books in his third inaugural address. After taking the oath of office administered by Chief Justice Samuel Foresuch, the third-term President addressed the biggest crowd ever assembled on the Mall in Washington DC.

“I ran on this promise, and you can count on it. No more nonsense. No more being forced to take on more than you can. No one needs books anymore. But everyone needs to be able to read directions. Reading directions, that’s the ticket. You have me. I give directions. I promised you I’d be a dictator again, and I will—for one day, just one day, not every day, sometimes just in the morning in my magnificent third term. And they said it couldn’t be done… This time Mexico WILL pay for it, believe me, I got my fingers wrapped so tight around their balls they can’t piss.

That day has come, America, we are back in business—the economy is going to be like a rocket, I always say, like a frigging rocket. Oh, yeah, Rocket Man. Fuck Rocket Man—I can say that, right? I mean hell, yes, I’m the fricking President—my first executive order I’m going to sign today… my first executive order…

Sweet, baby, sweet. Revenge is like ice cream, sweet when it’s cold. Does that make sense?

Well, we’re long done with woke. Woke is dead. I remember when it happened. Wake up, Sir, it’s 2025. Uh, Sir, you’re Mr. President again. You aren’t going to jail. I’m not? Hell yes, I said. Woke is dead. We are going back to sleep again. I told you what I was gonna do.

Say it with me: SOCIAL SECURITY, SOCIAL SECURITY! And I DID. I brought it back from the grave. From the cradle to the grave… cradle to the grave. Everyone who scores below a certain point on a cognitive test, a fair test, a test the scientists say is fair, well, we did what the Founders intended to do, we made the slow-witted, the dumbshits, the libtards and their poets and saints into slaves again.

We are all human beings, we are the WORLD, and we’re teaching them stuff, too, the slaves, those beautiful people with big hands, not too hard, not too much stuff, useful stuff, how much do they need to know? I never knew too much myself, you know, a man like me just knows things, no matter what color they are or who they love.

We feed them on veggie burgers and salads, you know, the newly enfranchised slaves, healthy stuff, stuff Michelle likes, we provide them with houses with metal roofs that can take it if a plane accidentally falls from the sky, we give them clothes, stylish stuff, let them take them off and go in the nude if they want—maybe even let them get MARRIED this term, maybe wait til the next!

Wouldn’t that be a nice Christmas present this year? No, I’m kidding…”

By 2029 the public school system is decimated in most states, collaborating with the new Department of Child Labor, which manages placement services for seasonal child employment, or highly regimented and code bound in the remaining states, where slave learners are tracked using old fashioned IQ tests.

People can be sued for insubordination if they are heard talking about the old motto, the college or career readiness slogan. Children, even those destined for slavery, need some schooling, but nothing like a career or a degree. At the end of each grade, a standardized test determines eligibility to matriculate to the next grade.

Only 7% of students in a first grade cohort survives to graduate high school. NAEP has been completely dismantled. Its undoing began when the leadership knuckled under to hard right conservatives who hijacked the committee assembled to redesign the reading comprehension test and disallowed any consideration of prior knowledge in the final score. Ridiculous it seemed to them to measure prior knowledge. Who cares about prior knowledge? The Federal Department of Education has been renamed the Department of Educational Vouchers available to non-enslaved infants.

As one of the few remaining tenured professors in a 2029 School of Education where tenure couldn’t be abolished for technical reasons, Dr. Swift 2.0 feels obligated to do something. He thinks he may have stumbled upon a silver bullet, a cure for dyslexia or his preferred term, garden variety poor readers, a way to improve those awful racial gaps in reading test scores, which had dogged the field since 1966, which widened dangerously after the election in 2024 when all standardized testing ceased.

Nobody knows how bad things are as the winter of public schooling deepens into 2029. Nobody even seems to care about measuring anything. The population of public school students is a bit smaller post-2024 since around 10% of children have been selected for private school, but public school resources have dwindled to crisis levels.

++++++++

As we rewind the tape to an episode some time earlier when Dr. Swift 2.0 was ending his annual summer respite before the opening of the Fall Semester, please shapeshift from being the Dr. to becoming a fly on the wall depending on the form your consciousness has been assuming.

*****

The idea behind the potential cure for dyslexia came to Dr. Swift 2.0 fortuitously last summer while he was on vacation in the Napa Valley where heaven exists in a grape. Leaning against a darkly wood-paneled wall in a ritzy winery, a fly buzzing around his head, then another, and another, he was eavesdropping on a private conversation between two women, an older one wearing a scarlet dress, a younger one in blue jeans and a tied-died top, sitting at a bistro table.

He’d watched them bump into one another, do a surprised stutter step, the dawning of mutual recognition, two people startled to connect here in this winery. It was a very odd meeting, clearly a case of lingering animosity. They may never have expected to have to deal with each other again when they last parted.

He began watching, expecting a soap opera to unfold.

“So what is Jerome doing nowadays?” asked the young hippy. He had no idea how much courage it took for her to broach the topic of Jerome, a boy she’d dated briefly in high school. Later, he would surmise that Jerome and his friend Brett had attempted to rape her at a drunken party one weekend when his Jerome’s parents were away from the mansion on a business trip to Italy.

“My son?” Jerome’s mother said. She sipped her water.

“Yes. I can face my demons. I heard he’s moved to Europe.”

What had she done to the gods to make them bring this woman of all people to this winery at this hour on this day? mused Jerome’s mother. Why was she keeping tabs on her son?

“He has.”

“You must be very proud of him. He graduated from UC Irvine an engineer, I heard,” the hippy replied. “I didn’t think he would make it into a UC.”

“What are you insinuating?”

“I’m not insinuating anything. He has dyslexia for Godssake. He told me.”

Dr. Swift’s ears pricked up. What were the odds? It’s not often that a reading scientist is treated to a true story about dyslexia. In the past, the word was used either in a highly technical study or in a sappy online story about how horrible the people who teach in school are at teaching reading.

The well-dressed mother of Jerome took obvious offense. She stiffened, tossed her head to ward off a few flies which had taken a liking to her hair, and reared her head like a horse straining to see over a fence.

“He does not! How dare you. He’s cured. If you know he once had dyslexia, you know he was cured.”

“But that’s not something that can be cured. It’s biological.”

“That’s a lie. We wasted thousands of dollars on therapy, thousands of doses of instruction, nothing worked—the psychologists all said it is incurable. But then—it was I, me, myself, who cured him. I had the power to do it all along. I’d have done it before he reached the middle grades if I’d only known to do it.”

“You prayed and it was all better? Are you still among the faithful?”

“I’m not sure I follow you, dear,” Jerome’s mother said. “No matter. I never understand half of what you said when you accused him of raping you.”

“Oh, not a problem,” the hippy laughed. “I understood nothing of you” She adjusted her posture and made eye contact with the guy leaning against the wall. “Who is this man listening to us talk? Why is he attracting flies on the wall?”

Discovered as the intruder Dr. Swift 2.0 hoped not to be, annoyed at the houseflies buzzing him, he walked to the bistro table and revealed his interest in the matter.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help it. I’m a professor at a university. May I ask you a question?”

“I don’t know,” said Jerome’s mother. “What is this about?”

“My specialty is the field of reading, and I heard your conversation about your son, a dyslexic now with a degree in engineering. I’m very interested in dyslexia. What did you do to help him? Cure him, you said.”

The story unfolded like manna from heaven falling to the Earth below. It turned out that here at this winery, his mother once met the elegant, gracious grandmother of the family who founded the winery, a vibrant French woman with a gypsy flair who loved to chat with winery guests. Naturally, this grandmother and Jerome’s mother began to share stories about their children.

Come to find out the grandmother’s family had been blesscursed with the dyslexic gene as well. After coming to the Napa Valley from the wine region of France back in time, the grandmother of the winery family began bearing her children, all eight of them. Her first son started school and, like babies born earlier in France to her sisters, could not learn to read. Grandma followed the advice of her French mother and grandmother: Give him a half-glass of wine every morning before he goes to school. This she did with each of her sons, gave every child a half-glass of wine religiously every morning before school, and they all read like whippoorwills.

“Did she specify what type of wine?” Dr. Swift 2.0 asked. “Was it red or white?”

“Jerome liked Pinot Noir so that’s what I gave him.”

Swift began to add things up. Red wine is heart healthy, healing; heart health means fully oxygenated blood in circulation; optimum oxygen and glucose in the brain means neuron’s metabolically active and synaptic links juiced up—my God, a theoretical framework. But giving young children alcohol?

Could red wine be the silver bullet? Could an ingredient in it be isolated?

+++++++

You sense yourself shapeshifting again from a fly on the wall, dear reader, becoming merged again Dr. Swift 2.0, driving down Napa’s Highway 29 in real time last summer toward the Jefferson Street exit, looking forward to a chocolate eclair at the Buttercream Bakery. Being able to read his thoughts, you can access his memory of the sweet, creamy custard he’d enjoyed a day earlier. The two of you are eager to return to your room at your bed and breakfast. He is so preoccupied with the possibilities of a cure he misses his exit.

*****

This is silly, Dr. Swift thinks back in his room, you inside his head. Wine? He doesn’t believe in the scientific fact of dyslexia anyway, at least not in the way the elite do, as though only the greats get it, Albert Einstein, Tom Cruise, Abraham Lincoln. There’s something there, some predilection, but nothing predetermined in the brain, at least nothing definitive. Crème de La crème of learning disabilities, that has been his Bakhtinian definition of the term.

The thought of giving wine to young people is so troublesome he decides to walk to a family-owned restaurant nearby for an order of chicken nachos hold the hot peppers to dine on.

What if wine works?

Back in his room again, he goes go online and accesses a librarian working with the Department of Child Labor to help help him track down any information linking diet or foods to dyslexia. He has used DCL databases before. To contact a human librarian, researchers first must supply their credentials, a serial number, and then explain their purpose to a bot. The bot decides access. So you begin a chat.

User: This is Dr. John Swift 2.0, serial number 008UC382. Is it reasonable to hypothesize that a half-glass of good wine consumed in the morning by a seventh grader can cure dyslexia or at least help with learning to read more effectively?

Smith17.2: No, it is not reasonable to hypothesize that consuming wine, regardless of its quality, would cure dyslexia or assist a seventh grader with learning to read more effectively. Dyslexia is a neurological condition that affects the way the brain processes language, particularly during reading. It is a recognized learning disability, and there is no scientific evidence to support the idea that consuming alcohol could cure or treat dyslexia.

Moreover, giving alcohol to a minor, especially a seventh grader, is not only illegal in many jurisdictions but also potentially harmful to their developing brain. Alcohol can have significant negative effects on the brain development of children and adolescents, which could compound learning difficulties and other cognitive functions.

*

User: But red wine is supposed to be heart healthy and supply the brain with oxygen. It’s a very small amount.

Smith17.2: While moderate red wine consumption in adults has been associated with certain health benefits due to its content of antioxidants like resveratrol, these potential benefits do not extend to treating or curing dyslexia, nor do they justify giving alcohol to minors. The brain benefits from oxygen, but supplying the brain with oxygen is primarily about maintaining healthy circulation through exercise, a balanced diet, and avoiding smoking — not through the consumption of wine. It is essential to promote alcohol-free interventions to support cognitive development and dyslexia-related learning challenges.

*

User: Give me an estimated cost to help a child with severe dyslexia living in poverty in Chicago.

Smith17.2: The estimation of the cost for supporting a child with severe dyslexia living in poverty in a city like Chicago can vary widely based on a number of individual factors including the severity of the dyslexia, the resources available in the local school district, and what types of interventions and support are required. However, I can provide you with an outline of potential costs and considerations:

Professional evaluations by psychologists could cost hundreds to over a thousand dollars if not covered by insurance or offered by the school district. Tutoring with specialists in dyslexia can range from $30 to $100 or more per hour. Assistive technology, such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text software, might have initial costs and potential subscription fees. Speech therapy, occupational therapy, or other related services, potentially costing between $100-$200 per session without insurance. Specialized programs outside of school can vary widely in cost.

*

User: What is the likelihood that a child living in poverty in Chicago will receive these services?

Smith17.2: The child's parents or guardians must first be aware of the child's learning difficulties and understand that these might be due to dyslexia. They would need to know to seek an evaluation and services. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has protocols to identify and assist children with special needs, which includes learning disabilities like dyslexia. If the child is within the CPS system and the disability is recognized, they are legally entitled to receive appropriate interventions and services.

The extent of services received can sometimes depend on the level of advocacy by the parents or guardians. Those who are informed and persistent may be more successful in navigating the system to obtain the necessary support. Some programs have limited capacity and resources, and there might be waiting lists for certain services. The availability of specialized educators and therapists is also a factor.

Non-profit organizations and community-based programs in Chicago may provide additional support, but access to these can vary depending on the child's location and the organization's capacity. There are state and federal programs designed to provide support to children living in poverty. The child's ability to access such programs can significantly influence the likelihood of receiving services.

Under federal laws like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), children with disabilities are entitled to a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). However, getting the needed services often requires proper identification and classification of dyslexia, which can be an obstacle. For children living in poverty, health insurance through Medicaid or other public assistance programs may cover some therapeutic services, but this often depends on the specific insurance plan and state.

You, dear reader, feel smothered in Dr. Swift’s consciousness and choose to become a spectator. Being a fly was trying as well. You simply watch and listen with your inner organs.

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. He is just about to log off the site when your cell phone rings.

“Is this Dr. Swift 2.0?”

“Yes. Speaking.”

“Please hold for the President of the United States.”

The line clicked, went briefly dead, and then Kookoo Bird Cocopuff’s unmistakable gravel of voice echoed in his ear.

“Hello, Dr. Swift. This is your favorite President calling. Do you have a few minutes to talk to me?”

“Yes, Mr. President. Take all the time you need.”

“Well, I like what I just heard about you. My daughter has been tapped into the chat you just had. You know, sometimes I think you guys are whackos, nut jobs, you scientists, but your idea has merit. I’d like to help you. Do you really believe a half-glass of red wine in the morning can make kids read better? I don’t like alcohol, but, hey, if it helps with reading I’m all for it.”

“I have no idea if there’s any connection at all, Sir. You like to be called Sir right?”

“I don’t really give a shit what you call me as long as you tell me you can prove red wine improves reading scores. Its brilliant. A helluva cheap way to show we care about these slave children, don’t you think? Worth thinking about. Reminds me of Warp Speed. You remember that? I hopped right on that one and got full credit for the COVID vaccine.”

Dr. Swift feels his heart rate increasing.

“I can’t prove anything, Mr. President. I’m certain the Institutional Review Board would deny my petition to—“

“Fuck the Institutional Review Board, whoever they are. I can cut their funding if I have to. You let me worry about that. Here’s what I want from you. I want you to go back and talk to your people and figure out how you get a study like this off the ground. I’ll find out about this Review Board. I’ll call you back in one week. We’ll go from there. All right, Dr. Swift 2.0. I like that name though not too much right now unless you want to work with me. I mean I’m not going to threaten you because, well, because you seem like a reasonable man. I just want to find, uh, one scientific study that makes me look like I love teaching kids to read. Ok?”

End of Installment I