We had a problem with math this year, and wound up in summer school. Kate Bond Elementary is the only site within a half hour of our house, so we went there.
The first week, a girl larger than my granddaughter tried to intimidate her by getting in her face and putting her finger in my granddaughter's face. We have taught our children, from oldest to youngest, that we do not accept bullying and intimidation, so my granddaughter pushed her hand away. The girl then hit her in the chest. When I met with her teachers, Stewart of Cordova Elementary and McGee from parts unknown, they saw it as an equal offense situation, and told me that my granddaughter must not put her hands on other students.
Last week, at lunch, a boy called my granddaughter a "dumb bitch." Earlier this week, the same boy asked her, "Are you a whore?" She is ten years old. I spoke with Stewart about this matter yesterday, and she ducked, passing me off to McGee. McGee, obviously a saintly person as she wouldn't say "whore," rather spelled it out to me: "H-O-R-E." This person is an English teacher.
She told me that it was a "he said-she said" situation, so no disciplinary action would be taken toward the boy. This response was, obviously, completely unacceptable.
Today, I went to school and met with the principal, Crutcher. She is not the person listed as principal on Kate Bond's website, so I don't know if that is her school, or she's just assigned there for the summer. Crutcher's position is that the real problem is that my granddaughter discussed what was said to her with a couple of the other children in the room. What I know is that my granddaughter came home and asked what "whore" means. She didn't know that word. She was trying to find that out in the classroom.
This elementary school victim of physical intimidation, bullying, assault, and sexual harassment was blamed by those in power for each of these incidents.
We are no longer in summer school. It is an unacceptable environment for a ten year old girl.
And we wonder how we wind up with a president who dismisses the 20th sexual assault/rape allegation against him by explaining, "she's not my type." And gets away with all of it.
We are training our bullies and future rapists and woman abusers in our public schools, and pardoning their behavior when someone makes an attempt to call them on it.
This country has already gone to hell in a handbasket.
Wednesday, June 26, 2019
Sunday, June 23, 2019
A Season of Seasons, or, More Religionist Bullshit
Religionists may always be counted on to find a way to use the language to make sure that everyone within earshot knows that they are smarter than you, and think on A Seriously Profound Level far beyond your poor capabilities. What you should know about that absurdity is that it's precisely the bullshit that it sounds like it is.
The latest of these pseudo-intellectual pretensions is the use of the word "season." Not in reference to the portions of the year that we designate as winter, spring, summer and fall. Certainly not in reference to the period of games in whatever sport is ongoing at the moment. But, perhaps in some tip of the miter to the section in the old testament book of ecclesiastes that Pete Seeger used to prove that he could make something wonderful even out of the fairy tales book commonly called the bible, before Roger McGuinn and the boys turned Seeger's song into Turn! Turn! Turn!, a hit record for the Byrds in the mid-1960s. (McGuinn is also a story of a religionist nut, but that's for another day.)
I heard this abuse of season clomping into common usage like a Star Wars At At Walker tromping across the frozen tundra of some remote planet even before I grew up and got out of the church. It was tossed around, first, by The Ambitious, those that lacked the TV evangelist looks to get noticed, the work ethic of the true believers, or the depth of the able and well-educated. But, hey, as Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra tell the young Gypsy Rose Lee, "You gotta get a gimmick!" Intellectual Poseur is the only path to Religionist Leader that a certain percentage can come up with. So, go with what you know, and whatever your limited ability and con artist soul give you to work with!
Seasons has become ubiquitous. I ran into it again today. It was in a blog linked on a friend's page, written by someone I do not know. Truth is, his (I'm guessing...) blog is so well arranged that I can't even find a name on it. Anyway, he went to lengths to describe our current National Policy of locking up children, women, and men legally pursuing political asylum in concentration camps as "our current season of civic, social, and political madness." He had done a pretty good job of tracing the history of concentration camps, and tying in some work on Germany's descent into Nazism. But we are, according to him, simply in a "season" of this behavior in America.
Bullshit.
Whenever I hear this inanity, I am invariably taken back to Jerzy Kosinski's brilliant 1970 novel, Being There, which was spectacularly adapted into a 1979 film, by Hal Ashby from Kosinski's screenplay, starring Peter Sellers in his best film performance (along with Dr. Strangelove). This film presaged the rise of Ronald Reagan, and our political existence of the last 40 years.
Chance was a gardner. He seems to have been a bit slow, and Chance had been taken into the home of The Old Man (his illegitimate child?), the wealthy owner of the home and grounds where Chance lives, and works the gardens. The Old Man has died as the story opens, and the necessary steps are taken to close the house, which includes The Old Man's attorneys interviewing Chance about his intentions to file any sort of claim against the estate. Chance has no clue what they are talking about. He works in the garden, watches television, and eats the meals prepared for him by Louise, the maid. This is the only life Chance has ever known.
The attorneys tell him he must leave, so he dutifully packs his trunk and leaves. He walks out into a world he does not know and cannot understand. He finds himself mildly struck by a car belonging to one of the richest and most influential industrialists in America, and is then taken back to this old man's mansion to see after his injury, and prevent a lawsuit.
Over the course of just a couple of days, Chance becomes an Influential American himself, through a comedy of errors that includes his name being misunderstood (upon being asked his name he responds, honestly, "Chance, the gardner," but he groans in the middle of saying it as the doctor examines his leg, and he is misunderstood to have said, "Chancey Gardener," which then becomes his name), and, most significantly for my purposes here, his habit of answering any question that he is asked, but cannot understand, by immediately reverting to talking about his garden, and its seasons. These responses are taken as profound metaphor by Important People Dealing With Important Issues, and wind up being quoted by the President of the United States as an adviser's economic forecast for the nation. Kosinski uses "seasons" in Chance's mouth to demonstrate the idiocy of people who cannot recognize their own pretensions, their own arrogance, and their own stupidity. At the end of the film, as Chauncey Gardener walks across the lake behind the rich man's mansion, as any good savior would, the Important People Dealing With Important Issues are heard talking about him in reverentially whispered tones, at the funeral for the second dead old man, about the possibility of persuading such a popular, accomplished, and knowledgeable person as Mr. Chauncey Gardener to run for president as their next candidate.
Which perfectly summarizes the crisis in leadership from which religionists suffer today.
The latest of these pseudo-intellectual pretensions is the use of the word "season." Not in reference to the portions of the year that we designate as winter, spring, summer and fall. Certainly not in reference to the period of games in whatever sport is ongoing at the moment. But, perhaps in some tip of the miter to the section in the old testament book of ecclesiastes that Pete Seeger used to prove that he could make something wonderful even out of the fairy tales book commonly called the bible, before Roger McGuinn and the boys turned Seeger's song into Turn! Turn! Turn!, a hit record for the Byrds in the mid-1960s. (McGuinn is also a story of a religionist nut, but that's for another day.)
I heard this abuse of season clomping into common usage like a Star Wars At At Walker tromping across the frozen tundra of some remote planet even before I grew up and got out of the church. It was tossed around, first, by The Ambitious, those that lacked the TV evangelist looks to get noticed, the work ethic of the true believers, or the depth of the able and well-educated. But, hey, as Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra tell the young Gypsy Rose Lee, "You gotta get a gimmick!" Intellectual Poseur is the only path to Religionist Leader that a certain percentage can come up with. So, go with what you know, and whatever your limited ability and con artist soul give you to work with!
Seasons has become ubiquitous. I ran into it again today. It was in a blog linked on a friend's page, written by someone I do not know. Truth is, his (I'm guessing...) blog is so well arranged that I can't even find a name on it. Anyway, he went to lengths to describe our current National Policy of locking up children, women, and men legally pursuing political asylum in concentration camps as "our current season of civic, social, and political madness." He had done a pretty good job of tracing the history of concentration camps, and tying in some work on Germany's descent into Nazism. But we are, according to him, simply in a "season" of this behavior in America.
Bullshit.
Whenever I hear this inanity, I am invariably taken back to Jerzy Kosinski's brilliant 1970 novel, Being There, which was spectacularly adapted into a 1979 film, by Hal Ashby from Kosinski's screenplay, starring Peter Sellers in his best film performance (along with Dr. Strangelove). This film presaged the rise of Ronald Reagan, and our political existence of the last 40 years.
Chance was a gardner. He seems to have been a bit slow, and Chance had been taken into the home of The Old Man (his illegitimate child?), the wealthy owner of the home and grounds where Chance lives, and works the gardens. The Old Man has died as the story opens, and the necessary steps are taken to close the house, which includes The Old Man's attorneys interviewing Chance about his intentions to file any sort of claim against the estate. Chance has no clue what they are talking about. He works in the garden, watches television, and eats the meals prepared for him by Louise, the maid. This is the only life Chance has ever known.
The attorneys tell him he must leave, so he dutifully packs his trunk and leaves. He walks out into a world he does not know and cannot understand. He finds himself mildly struck by a car belonging to one of the richest and most influential industrialists in America, and is then taken back to this old man's mansion to see after his injury, and prevent a lawsuit.
Over the course of just a couple of days, Chance becomes an Influential American himself, through a comedy of errors that includes his name being misunderstood (upon being asked his name he responds, honestly, "Chance, the gardner," but he groans in the middle of saying it as the doctor examines his leg, and he is misunderstood to have said, "Chancey Gardener," which then becomes his name), and, most significantly for my purposes here, his habit of answering any question that he is asked, but cannot understand, by immediately reverting to talking about his garden, and its seasons. These responses are taken as profound metaphor by Important People Dealing With Important Issues, and wind up being quoted by the President of the United States as an adviser's economic forecast for the nation. Kosinski uses "seasons" in Chance's mouth to demonstrate the idiocy of people who cannot recognize their own pretensions, their own arrogance, and their own stupidity. At the end of the film, as Chauncey Gardener walks across the lake behind the rich man's mansion, as any good savior would, the Important People Dealing With Important Issues are heard talking about him in reverentially whispered tones, at the funeral for the second dead old man, about the possibility of persuading such a popular, accomplished, and knowledgeable person as Mr. Chauncey Gardener to run for president as their next candidate.
Which perfectly summarizes the crisis in leadership from which religionists suffer today.
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