Saturday, May 05, 2007

Ed Burke visit - addendum

There was a big post about the visit of Ed Burke, Mike's fellow Tai Chi student awhile back. Refer back to it if you are interested in what was said.

There was something else needed to be added to the entry to complete the picture of the people involved and the visit.

Mike was sneaky, dishonest and manipulative. That is odd because he always talked in class about dignity, pride and family. Before we actually met Ed Burke the day he came to visit, George came over to give us a message from Mike.

As in Mike kept Ed occupied, while George moseyed over and spoke to us real casual like.

It may have been discussed before George moseyed over and George was coming by to remind us of the message. Or it may have been the first time the message was delivered.

The message was "Don't tell Ed Burke we do Tai Chi".

Just writing that down makes me shrug my shoulders and spread my hands in confusion. Why would Mike tell us not to tell his fellow Tai Chi student, Ed Burke, who had travelled across the country to visit Mike, that we practiced Tai Chi?

Not only was it a false and dishonest statement to make coming from a man always pushing dignity and pride, but to treat a man who had travelled across the country to visit Mike and was described as a friend with dishonesty......it boggled my mind.

There was only one reason that I could think of that Mike would not want Ed to know that we practiced Tai Chi.

Shame.

As I have previously described, Mike never worked with the men on Tai Chi. We all did the Tai Chi form during the entire group practice at the beginning of class. That was it. Mike would spend a lot of time teaching the women Tai Chi, and basically refused to teach us or to answer questions.

I never questioned it at the time, but now, combined with describing how he was dishonest with Ed, I think Mike must have been hiding his Tai Chi from his own students. With the women, Mike would not feel threatened. He knew the power of the penis would keep them in line.

But if he taught the men the real Tai Chi that he knew, they might be competition for him. It is all so cave man like as to be repulsive and embarrassing.

Mike's attitude of course rubbed off on the sycophants. If one of the newer students asked Lonnie or Jeff about Tai Chi, they would almost always be patronized, or receive some kind of brush off.

Maybe it was just me that received that type of behavior? I was the only one being excluded? I don't think so. Neither George, Steve, James, Daniel, Tom, Arol or Tim ever showed anything that looked like Tai Chi skill. They might be able to verbally lie to my face, but they could not hide their bodies from me. None of them had any real Tai Chi skill.

Lonnie and Jeff on the other hand both knew the Tai Chi form well. Lonnie had practiced Tai Chi before he met Jeff so he had basic knowledge of the form that he could add Mike's lessons to. Jeff of course received everything as he did in Ba Gua as the favored student and as the man most able to properly perform Tai Chi or Ba Gua.

.....

As you might imagine, if any of us other than Jeff or Lonnie were to do the Tai Chi form, we would have looked very bad. If we had put on a bad performance in front of Ed Burke, the Ed would look at Mike with questioning eyes?

Was Mike a terrible teacher and he had terrible students? Was Mike a decision maker and chose students who were not very good? Were all of Mike's students fakers? People pretending to be able to do Tai Chi, but really doing not much more than aerobics by waving their arms in the air?

That is the only explanation I can think of for Mike to ask us to lie to his friend Ed Burke. To ask us to hide the fact that Mike claimed to be teaching us Tai Chi.

Mike knew that none of us could do Tai Chi and he did not want Ed to see it. And maybe, just maybe, so we would not see Ed's reaction ourselves.

What would we do if we realized that Ed thought our Tai Chi was terrible? Would we then go to Mike and express our dissatisfaction with him? It is impossible to hide reactions like that. If Ed thought we were clowns performing Tai Chi, all of us would have been able to see that in his body language.

Hmmmmmmmm. I was always certain Mike had us lie to Ed because he did not want to be shamed by our poor performance. Now I wonder if there is the equal possibility that Mike had us lie to Ed so Ed would not let us know that our Tai Chi was awful.

We all thought we were doing OK. ;)

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home