All Politics Are Vocal

Arizona – for a state with so much sunshine, there’s precious little light.

Once again, in the name of keeping the public safe from consideration of its own interest, a bill is before the state legislature that would impose a 500-dollar fine on any schoolteacher who airs her political views in the classroom. To the legislature’s credit this bill, sponsored by state congressman Thayer Verschoor of Gilbert, appears dead in the water. The summer heat has apparently not baked the sense out of everyone.

The law is as bizarrely impractical as it is incendiary. Even Fox faux liberal Alan Combs, on whose radio show Rep. Verschoor recently appeared, observed that enforcing this law would prove problematic. He asked if Verschoor proposed planting some sort of marshal in every classroom to audit teachers’ lessons, writing citations whenever anything with a whiff of polemic issues from them. Verschoor agreed that such an enforcement measure is nigh on impossible. Which leaves just one other mode of implementation: encouraging students to denounce teachers to their superiors.

I hope you can appreciate what sort of nightmare would ensue were such a Stalin-era measure actually implemented. Can K-through-12ers really be counted on to sift fairly any passing remark a teacher might make on contemporary politics or the current administration? Doesn’t this create what in economics are known as “perverse incentives” – students discovering that threatening denouncement is an effective way of leveraging grades, or of ridding the classroom of unpopular authority? Most adult Americans don’t know that Dick Cheney is vice president or that 9/11 happened in 2001. How much awareness of political reality can we credit American adolescents with, then? This seems a crucial thing to consider if Verschoor does in fact intend to deputize them as enforcers of his asinine bill. Hell, I can tell you from personal experience that most American eighteen-year-olds can’t keep the facts straight; their minds warp them to suit whatever little officious impulse they feel at the time. My last year as a University of Arizona instructor, a student of mine, whom I one day informed that Hinduism historically antedates Christianity, reported me to her mother, who in turn gave my name to some ultra-right watchdog group. Mother and daughter’s grounds for doing so: that in hatred and defiance of Gospel truth I proclaimed Hinduism superior to Christianity. The student conveniently left out of her account to her mother, who kindly e-mailed me a maundering, ungrammatical j’accuse, my telling her that I myself am Roman Catholic.

But who am I kidding? Slavering Pentecostals like my former student and her mother probably don’t recognize Catholics as fellow Christians.

Besides the fact that you cannot trust non-denominational charismatics – for they speak in tongues, all of which are forked – I learned from the whole affair that you cannot credit Americans with discretion or discernment, especially young ones, for the simple reason that whatever words of yours manage to slip past their iPod earbuds just gets swept up in the cognitive slurry of their labile minds. I make this assessment based on instructor training I received at UA, during which I was told to keep activities short and animated to accommodate the average freshman’s seven-second attention span, and to change the activities every ten minutes so the class might more closely resemble a television show. Ask anyone who taught composition at UA, and they’ll tell you the same. Many students had learning disabilities – euphemistically called “different skill sets” by Writing program mandarins, though how the inability to write a coherent paragraph actually points to an ability in some as yet undiscovered area, I remain unsure – and nearly as many were on some sort of medication, usually Adderall, an SSRI, or some combination of the two. This suggested to me that, wherever their skill sets lie, they’re not in the area of reason or ethics.

To encourage students to police their teachers’ utterances is to let the inmates run the asylum, a state of affairs it seems we’ve been moving toward, anyway. The whole business of “student-center learning,” for instance, is really little more than a programmatic undermining of the educator’s authority in favor of some Deweyesque notion of self-discovery that, while it might defenestrate quality, certainly promotes retention, and therefore increased tuition revenue – Apollo crucified on a cross of gold. These charming Rousseauvean subjects, quivering in anticipation of an opportunity to denounce someone to the State, installed over teachers can only mean bad things in the future. Opponents of Verschoor's bill must recognize this. I believe the initiative a nonstarter, riddled as it is with ambiguity. After all, what are the juridical criteria for finable political speech? If a history teacher teaches her students about Athenian democracy or the Roman republic, is she out of bounds? What about the founding of the United States?

I have to say, I wonder about Verschoor’s constituency broiling under the angry sun in Gilbert. Why is a teacher who, in a moment of indiscretion, expresses sympathy for Chairman Mao so terrifying? Is the fundie-conservative catechism so fragile that it cannot withstand contrary opinion? By voting into office a politician who floats a bill of such unfathomable idiocy as Verschoor’s, conservative Arizonans tacitly admit that the only discourse favoring their cause is the discourse that silences further discourse; but only by parsing the double-speak window dressing – promotion of freedom of thought in the classroom, preservation of the “marketplace of ideas” – can you find this substratum of their political praxis.

Insisting that political speech be barred from the classroom also presupposes that speech, and the ideas it contains, fall easily under distinct categories. My friend Rob mused upon this on his ‘blog, and how (if I read him rightly) a notion of “inorganic democracy” emerges that progressives must constantly combat before even being to table their own proposals. I personally believe those who hoe a narrow row should reap its meager fruit, but the problem is one of collateral damage. Latitudinarians unable to escape to friendlier environs are condemned to suffer the stupidity of the credulous, bovine majority over them. In other words, if I get behind some America-n’-apple-pie demagogue whose blandishments ultimately fuck up my life, they not only fuck up my life, but the life of my liberal neighbor’s as well. Dumbshits should always expect pushback from people smarter than them, and not because these smarter folks are a compulsively overweening lot who relish any opportunity to micromanage other people’s lives, but because they cherish the very liberty that fundie-cons believe themselves the exclusive champions of, and will move to secure those liberties by their own lights.

Unfortunately, too many parties crying, “Don’t tread on me!” brings everyone to a halt. This is why I hold out no real hope for Arizona – or for the United States. Verschoor and his ilk will continue their ill-fated provocations, and thoughtful people will continue to think them asses for doing so. But such partisan inertia plays into the right wing’s strategy of constantly provoking skirmishes to forestall the war (Does anyone remember the swift boats and matrimony-minded gays of 2004?). The Manichaean struggle will thus go on, as will the Iraq War, as will the erosion of educational standards, as will the decline in living standards, as will the ramping-up of a surveillance state . . .

George Bush Sr.’s famous “thousand points of light” meme may just mean a thousand fires lit to rob the inevitable conflagration of fuel.