[Originally posted 6 February 2007]
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I
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see in the news that
Homeland Security has taken time out from its important mission of keeping
medicine out of the hands of old ladies to repel an invasion of Mooninites in
Boston. Orson Welles must be having a good laugh, wherever he is today. And somebody
or other has kidnapped an Iranian ambassador in Iraq using American equipment—shall
we start a pool now on who exactly is responsible? Is this payback for the
Iranians seizing American diplomats back in the bad old days before The Hidden
Hand took charge of everything?
Isn’t it high time that we disband the department of Homeland
Security? And who picked that appalling name, anyway? It sounds like something
out Orwell, or the Soviet Union, or the Third Reich. But, horrific names aside,
any outfit that can’t tell a bomb from a glowing advertisement is wasting the
money the citizens have been throwing at it.
We’ve seen its glorious triumphs in New Orleans, in Boston, in
the arrest of a (relatively) harmless lawyer here in Portland. We’re assured
that it’s accomplishing great things that we are not allowed to hear about, but
how the hell are we supposed to know that? When we do hear anything, it is
these mare’s nests and smoke-and-mirrors parlor tricks. Conspiracies of the
impotent, old people in need of medicine, foreign med students enjoying a quiet
lunch—these are worth going after? And to cap it off, now we learn that they
seriously regarded a cartoon villain—and at that the lesser Mooninite, one of
the least effective villains of all time—as a threat?
Gack. The world wonders. There is some good news out of New
Jersey, however. Coach David Paskiewicz, who took to preaching in a United
States History class, has been vindicated by his school board. Believe it or
not, the board decided to ban voice recorders in classrooms. It also concluded
that teachers should be instructed in the proper ways of smuggling religion
into the classroom, or, at any rate, that’s what I got out of it. They were to
be reminded of the distinction between church and state in America or something
like that. When I told that bit of news to my nephew Brandon, he asked, “Shouldn’t
they be teaching that to the students?”
Exactly. Of course all this has nothing to do with the coach’s real sin in all
this—his confusing the students in the class by misrepresenting the nature of
science. He blatantly lied to those who (it seems) trusted him by saying that
scientists say that “nothing somehow exploded”, that the age of the earth, and
of the universe, cannot be scientifically observed, and so on and so on. But
for the principal of his school, these are “high level” discussions that should
be encouraged. If filling the kids’ heads with religiously-inspired lies—and
that’s what his “high-level” discussion consisted of—is what passes as education
in New Jersey, and should be encouraged, then New Jersey is on a slide straight
to hell.
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