Stage Fright
My friends over here on the Far Left Wing of the blogosphere have all completely come unglued at the news that the Republican House of Representatives has altered it's own rules to keep jackass Majority Leader Tom DeLay in his leadership position even though he's under indictment for several politics-related crimes. The irony of it, apparently, is that the rules against indicted House members in leadership positions was passed by Republicans during the Clinton era in order to deprive certain similarly-embattled Democrats from positions of authority and prominence.

The reactions to such utterly predictable news have ranged everywhere from purple-faced, stuttering apoplexy to sighing, slow-head-shaking I-knew-it-ness.

My personal reaction can be summed up in one sentence: my kid has to perform a skit today.

What? That wasn't... man. OK, I might be too preoccupied to blather on and on about the Tom DeLay thing. Suffice it to say the man is a douchebag and we can move on.

My kid has to perform in some kind of horrific skit thing this afternoon and it's got all me tied up in knots. He's only been in school since the very end of August and already this is the third major public presentation he's had to make.

Either he's getting a really good, well rounded education or his teacher is some kind of crazy sadist who enjoys causing children to suffer public humiliation. Granted, that type of a propensity has to be on-board already in order for someone to go into Kindergarten Teaching anyway, but this is some kind of specialized mutated strain of the dysfunction.

I guess this is what we're paying for by sending him to Catholic school: chance after chance to experience excruciating personal embarrassment. If he missed it the first time (and he did by performing flawlessly) there's always another chance just around the corner to earn the scorn and contempt of your classmates. And if they really fuck it up, there's the outside chance of earning from their peers a derogatory nickname that rhymes or--the Holy Grail of Playground Ostracization--one that fits into a punchy three-to-four-line song.

So far this is nothing like my experience in school, but then I went to public school. I don't think I did three presentations my whole thirteen years in institutionalized learning, which stood me in really good stead when I got to college and later grad school, let me tell you. Your Tax Dollars At Work, people.

Actually, the only time I remember being asked to present anything out-loud was when I accidentally won the annual Red Ribbon Week essay contest. I was supposed to read the thing in front of a gathering at City Hall. I told my mother I didn't want to go. She said, "OK". Way to push me, mom. And then she and I split a brick of hash we smoked by rolling it up in red ribbons.

As most of you know, in public school you get ignored if you show any kind of academic competence on any level. Unless you're "gifted" in which case they make you take classes that require work and are hard. My primary goal in high school was to escape saying as few words out loud as possible. I cannot be anything but pleased with the results.

And this is why I went to junior college.

I guess I can comfort myself knowing that public school for my son would include a whole slate of other personal and social disappointments, so I can rest easy. At least I know that, when all is said and done, he'll have a first-rate private school education and as an added bonus a lifelong hostility to all forms of organized religion and further a strong resentment of his mother and myself for making him get Catholicized.

So screw "free" public education. Those are the types of things only money can buy.


This post on the Narcissus Scale: 7.0


Pops


PS: For those of you who are interested, my son will be playing the immortal role of "Tom Turkey". I think Olivier created the role originally with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

- posted by Pops @ 9:19 AM