With Whom Shall I Not Mess, Again?

Memo to Texas: MAN, YOU DON'T FUCK AROUND WHEN IT COMES TO DUMB.

Dumb in the morning. Dumb in the evening. Dumb from Oklahoma to Mexico, and dumb from the deserts of New Mexico to the sweet sweet pig vaginas of Louisiana. So dumb they wouldn't be able to remember the Alamo if its name had a few more letters in it. So dumb that the residents of Austin must feel like a domed, time-traveling city of the future, stranded amidst the barbarous wasteland that lies just outside their borders. So dumb that making fun of Texas actually releases endorphins into my brain, resulting in at the very least a mild psychological addiction. So dumb they're ALMOST as dumb as Tennessee.

So, what's the latest word out of Texas, the unofficial capital of Jesusland?* Well, you know the Classic Red-State Trifecta of God, guns, and gays? How does two out of three strike ya?

In East Texas, in the Spurger school district, a longstanding Homecoming Week tradition is being cancelled because one redneck mom was convinced it would turn her nine-year old son into a homosexual.

The event, TWIRP Day, stands for "The Woman Is Requested to Pay". It apparently involves reversing the traditional gender roles most of us pretty much abandoned 20 years ago, like girls paying for sodas, and asking boys out on dates. As part of the admittedly quaint tradition, girls and boys also dress like their opposite gender for the day. Having been informed about the perfidious Homosexual Agenda, Delana Davies took a stand.

"It's like experimenting with drugs. You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary. ... If it's OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?" Davies, being an idiot, is incapable of discerning the difference between "wearing a frilly dress" and "hot anal sex". In a completely unrelated note, Mrs. Davies' husband stops at Laura Ashley about once every three weeks to get a present for his wife.

The school has replaced TWIRP day with "Camo Day", in which students are encouraged to dress like overweight armchair mercenary wannabes who subscribe to "Guns And Ammo" and play their paintball "for keeps". Mrs. Davies is fine with that, as it will let her son look like a brave American soldier and play "shoot the wounded Iraqi" with the other kids, and will make her four-year-old daughter look like a huge dyke.

In Texas' defense, this same issue has come up in two other schools - one in rural Illinois, which is like Texas except you can go into the city for deep dish pizza, and one in New York, where they felt it was offensive to the transgender community.

One hundred and fifty miles west of Spurger, where the pernicious agenda of Team Selfish Hedonism is being painstakingly eradicated, one elementary school student at a time, lies Houston, TX, the Bizarro to Austin's Superman. Like Austin, Houston has a burgeoning technology industry. Unlike Austin, where much of the tech industry is devoted to helping gamers pretend to shoot each other over the Internet, Houston's tech industry is working on letting people ACTUALLY shoot things over the Internet.

It's a heady idea, a surefire contender for the Worst Fucking Idea Ever award, and it's the asschild** of John Underwood, who by day works in an auto body shop, but is an idiot in his free time. The idea is to place a remote-controlled camera and gun on a ranch, and allow people to connect to that camera and gun over the Internet and shoot whatever deer, antelopes, moose, pets, children, airplanes, or space aliens appear on-screen. To give you an idea of the kind of mentality we are dealing with here, I'll allow Underwood to relate the tale of where his inspiration came from.

He and a friend were looking at a webcam set up in some woodlanda area that allowed you to take pictures of animals."We were looking at a beautiful white-tail buck and my friend said 'If you just had a gun for that.' A little light bulb went off in my head." Unfortunately, it wasn't a stroke. "Man, that's gorgeous. If only there were some way to KILL IT FROM MILES AWAY WITHOUT IT EVEN KNOWING."

Underwood was quick to conceal his bloodlust behind a veneer of charity, noting that his technology could be a boon to disabled hunters no longer able to hold a gun. In addition, once the animals are killed, they could be cut up and their meat could be donated to animal orphanages. I am not fucking kidding you here. A human attendant will retrieve any animal corpses, and Underwood would arrange for the taxidermy of the trophy and the dispensation of the flesh. That service will be offered as soon as they find someone who's tired of their dull job at the slaughterhouse and want to combine the fun of handling dead animals with the adrenaline rush of walking around in front of a remote controlled Internet gun. So, basically, as soon as Ted Nugent finishes his latest tour.

Ah, Texas. Don't ever change. And don't ever visit, either, now that I think of it. You're incredibly useful to me right where you are.

* If you don't know what I'm referring to here, then you need to turn in your Card-Carrying Internet Liberal card, and become, um, a non-card-carrying Internet Liberal.

** Normally, this sentence would call for the word "brainchild", but my fingers refused to type it, for obvious reasons.

The Wedgie Conundrum

Memo to the purveyors of "zero tolerance": YOU ARE DUMB.

For five years now, since Columbine, we've been arresting children for writing poetry. One of the first cases, in California, is set to go before the state Supreme Court. The most recent case happened right around here in Ramsey County. Students with criminal records because they wrote poems with dark or violent imagery, placed in police custody because of "vague, unspecific threats of violence".

ARRESTED. I mean, it's bad enough when the school system abuses its own disciplinary powers of suspension and expulsion to kick kids out of school for art supplies that exceed a certain sharpness, but bringing the criminal justice system into the picture over poetry?

I mean, yeah, we can all admit that high school poetry is a crime against aesthetics. Especially in these troubled times. Gone are the innocent days of yore when students would throw themselves into frenzies of gothy creation while listening to The Cure or Sisters of Mercy. Today's students are reaching back nostalgically for Creed's first album to fuel their adolescent angst. And that just ain't healthy. But it's also not a criminal offense. And if it were, shouldn't we be going after Scott Stapp?

OK, folks, let's try a little experiment in fake interactivity. Every single one of you reading this, raise your hand if, at any point during your school career, you did something, wrote something, or drew something that would have gotten your ass thrown in jail if it had been discovered today. OK. The three of you with your hands still down, WAIT SIX MONTHS.

Now, let's have everyone leave their hands up if they think that all this lockdown, metal detector, clear backpack, dress code, thought police bullshit has fundamentally improved the experience of being a high school student. No, just put your hands down. You don't need to run from the room screaming and setting random things on fire. You've made your point, and, in turn, made mine.

It's still Lord of the Flies in there, people. That hasn't changed. Hordes of little protobastards acting out their primal urges to gain and abuse whatever power they can manage while maintaining a B average. Hell, if the stories are true, the only thing getting our nation's students through each successive, relentless, horrible day is the non-stop oral sex.

Expecting kids to not have violent, dark thoughts anymore because you've placed an elaborate, authoritarian superstructure around them is patently insane. Doing so in the hopes that they'll just repress their violent, dark thoughts until graduation, letting you off the hook, just creates an entire generation of basket cases who'll keep the crime shows in new and interesting headlines for years to come.

And the worst part is, the absolute worst part, is that there's no single person or group of people to point to and say "it's your fault". Obviously, these policies come from the administration, from the system, but it's an administration that is terrified. Not just terrified of the kids, but terrified of what'll happen if some kid does show up, guns blazing, and it turns out he had a drawing of a tombstone in his Trapper Keeper. Ass-covering is Job One, and if that means criminalizing emotion while you extol the virtues of learning and knowledge, so be it.

Can't really blame the teachers. They're completely fucked. 'Cause the teachers are the idealists. They come into the schools full of inspiration, motivated to make a difference in the lives of their students, and once the system has inexorably crushed the last drop of that idealism out of them, they can finally move into administration. Until then, they're the ones that have to make the completely impossible call of predicting whether the snippet of free verse in the notebook means that Jimmy's already loaded the hunting rifle his dad bought him at Wal-Mart, or if it's just the inevitable venting caused by One Wedgie Too Many.

Parents don't want their kids to get shot in the face, and have an astonishingly difficult time seeing beyond "I don't want my kid shot in the face", and for the most part would rather see Jimmy of the Nth Wedgie thrown into jail if there's even the slightest chance he might do something. Which is a shame, but is, I suppose, understandable.

I could blame the media and the government, for, respectivly, sensationalizing and underfunding, but they're on the hook for so many other things right now that it almost doesn't seem fair.

It's almost enough to make you wish they'd blow the whole thing up and start over... hey, wait? What are you doing? I said "almost"! Somebody call the ACLU! Goddammit, that's what I get for watching that Smiths retrospective on VH1.

Rio Rancho

You know, sometimes, I feel that this is a thankless fucking job. It's bereft of any kind of traditional compensation whatsoever. I go out there and expose myself, as it were, to all kinds of short-bus escapades in order to keep you, the reader, well-stocked on daily time-killing comedy content. I listen to the complaints of some that cannot make it through a day's entry without the assistance of a lingualexicographical tome. And now, New Mexico has to go and fuck with me.

I mean, I went to all this trouble to make a comedy map on Monday. It went well, I thought. And being unable to think of anything specifically dumb about New Mexio, I lumped it in with Arizona as part of "Bleak Wasteland (Hot)". And a short time later, I learn of New Mexico's iniquity, forcing me to start over from scratch and remake the whole damn map.

Arizona, I'm keeping my eye on you. I don't trust you to just sit there and be barren and hot, so you're on probation.

So. New Mexico. This is how under the radar New Mexico is. All the crazy stuff I'm about to tell you happened last year, the lawsuit about it was filed in September, and I'm only telling you about it this week because a commentary about it by a friend of one of the victims is making its way around the Internet.

Oh my goodness, he said VICTIMS. Another school shooting? Stabbing? Pencil-to-the-eye? Do we need to expand our zero-tolerance policy to include writing implements? Actually, at Rio Rancho High in New Mexico, it seems like they already have. Writing implements lead to words, and words are exactly the kind of dangerous things we can't have floating around our nation's educational system.

Rio Rancho had a poetry club. The students would write poems, perform them in public venues, and even read them over the school's closed-circuit TV network. And while admittedly, one of my own personal rings of Hell would involve being forced to sit through any performance by a high school "Slam Poetry Team", anything that gets it out of their systems before they hit college, or HBO, is fine by me.

So a student writes a poem called "Revolution X". Which, in addition to being a poor title choice to anyone who remembers the Aerosmith arcade game, featured anti-war and anti-Dubya sentiments. And performs it on the closed-circuit TV. Can you, gentle reader, guess what happens next? If you picked "teacher fired, poetry club disbanded, lawsuit filed", you would be right, although you would be missing some of the fun details that make this extra-fucked.

Details like the fact that it was the school's military liaison that made the first complaint. The school has a MILITARY LIAISON. I hope it's some ROTC bullshit, but even so, the ROTC guy's job is to sit in his office and trick jocks into killing for their country. Anything outside those parameters, such as, say, writing your own poem telling pacifists to shut their faces, and reading that poem aloud while the principal hoists a battleship flag, is PROBABLY A BAD IDEA.

Oh, and the school wanted the poem. So they could check for obscenities and "inferences of inciting violence". I'm sure, as classically trained educators, they'd train a very narrow definition of THAT on the poem. And the student's mother, who is a teacher, was also fired. Why? Because she apparently refused the principal's request to destroy the poem.

It's also alleged that following this incident, art teachers were ordered to tear down any student-made posters with political (aka anti-Bush) content. Those that refused were not rehired for the next school year.

So congratulations, New Mexico! Thanks to Rio Rancho high school, you've managed to differentiate yourselves from the average fuckitude of even the American public school system. You've really put the little town of Rio Rancho on the map.