News From A Parallel World

Assess this you dumb fuckers.

Yes, I have an attitude problem today. Good time for you to close the page and move on to other, more acceptable sites. There are clowns on bicycles on YouTube. Of course, living as I do in Fairfax, Marin County, there are clowns on bicycles right down the hill from me.

It’s other sorts of clowns who elicit feelings of homicide in me today.

Two items:

The local high school has sent warning letters to parents this week. If your child has missed any classes, or been “tardy” more than once to any class, or to all classes combined, since the school year began in August, you, the parent, may be reported for possible prosecution under section of the

I am not making this up. Not only that, your child’s problem absenteeism or habitual ‘tardiness’ may be used to delay him or her from obtaining a driver’s license, presumably under the theory that a child who is late to class may be late going through an intersection.

The second item, in the Chronicle: “State’s math scores near bottom.” Must be the ‘tardiness’ problem. More on this hilarious circumstance in a minute; I haven’t finished the tirade I’ve been working up to.

The letter from Drake High, allegedly written by an assistant principal, is a stunner. It is written in the classic edu-speak style, the use of words to conceal and manipulate. Just reading it was sort of an exercise in nostalgia for me, because I once served a three-year sentence on the board of trustees of the very Tamalpais Union High School District in which Drake is located –– the original term was four years but I busted out, and because the nausea it induced had that too-familiar quality.

God, those people were assholes.

Back to the letter. Here it is, with translation for humans:

“The...high school staff wants to foster communication between families and the school. This letter represents one of the ways we can communicate with you about *’s attendance.” [We want to let you know that we can cause trouble for you and your child].

“This letter has been sent to you because our records indicate that * has at least two unexcused absences or tardies in one or more classes this semester, as shown below, and that he has been identified as truant according to Education Code 48260.” [We are not kidding. There’s a law that we can use against you].

Thereupon, the ‘record’ is printed. In *’s case, he is said to have ZERO absences or ‘tardies’ in the following periods: 0, 1st, 2nd, AT, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, AFT, IS, and N. No, I do not know what the acronyms mean and am sure I don’t wish to know.

* apparently has TWO such absences or ‘tardies’ in 3rd period. That’s it. Two, since August.

Now comes more specific threats:

“In addition, it is important for you to know that the state’s education policy (Education Code 48260.5) requires the parent/guardian to compel the student to attend school. Parents/guardians who fail to meet this obligation may be guilty of an infraction and subject to prosecution pursuant to Article 6 of Chapter 2 of part 27. Your truant student may also be subject to arrest under Education Code 48264, and can be subject to suspension, restriction, or delay of his driving privilege pursuant to Vehicle Code 13202.7.” [If your child is late to class more than once, we can have you arrrested, and the kid, too].

Now, that’s how to “foster communication.”

There follows a couple of paragraphs about how you have no chance of changing what “the records show” and that you had better read the school’s voluminous Parent/Student Handbook for details on how absences or ‘tardies’ automatically reduce a student’s grade, just in case the other threats haven’t scared the shit out of you.

The parent/guardian is then advised to “Contact his assistant principal to discuss strategies to improve his attendance and/or alternative educational programs... We want to work with you to make sure your child attends regularly and benefits from the rich and educational (sic) opportunities at Sir Francis Drake High School.” [I think we already know the nature of such a “discussion.” We may push your child out of Drake].

Most parents are not conversant with the California Education Code. Perhaps their child has been late to a single class twice in the first six weeks. They are suddenly at risk of arrest, and their child is at risk of suspension.

You may well ask yourself, what the fuck is going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on. Under the blantant falsehoods of “communication” and “rich educational opportunities” the educrats of the Tam District are throwing a grenade through your front door and pretending it’s a bouquet. I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but I find this form of fascism to be the worst, the guy smiling as he sticks in the knife.

I’ll tell you what’s going on. For at least forty years, the schools have been filling up with students who are quite at home in the electric age. They/we are emphatically post-industrial people. But the education system has –– after a brief flirtation with reality in the 1960s and 1970s –– has become more and more industrial in design and function. It should surprise no one that the system doesn’t work anymore. But that has not prevented its increasingly harsh imposition.

Back East, a six-year-old was suspended for bringing a ‘spork’ to school. Another child was expelled for bringing a serrated knife along with a birthday cake. Childhood is over. The education system does not want students to have them.

The “rich opportunities” students enjoy, in grades one through twelve, include more than an entire month of standardized testing. There are ordinary tests, of course, and AP tests in high school, and federal tests for the “National Assessment” program, the ‘STAR’ tests in California, and numerous others, including an ‘Exit Exam’ which by definition prevents some students who otherwise passed every high school class from graduating.

All of these tests are “snapshots” in the words of the idiot who ran the curriculum in the Tam District when I was there. The more, the merrier. We have embraced a mania for measurement as a substitute for real learning. One cannot measure learning; one can instead measure memorization. And because the public (and the real estate lobby) are demanding “results,” those void of imagination have built a system which punishes it.

The Chron story on California’s math scores is, like all such stories, loaded with comments from bewildered educrats and utterly bereft of even a pass at explanation. Across every race and ethnicity, English-language-speakers and non-speakers, low income and high, California’s fourth and eighth graders –– the groups tested –– scored below the national average. In fact, California’s scores exceed those of only two states: Alabama and Mississippi.

Yea! We’re number forty-eight!

High school students in the Tam District are routinely facing four hours of homework every night. That’s about eleven hours of compulsory work a day. Including weekends and most holidays –– when students ‘catch up’ with their work –– people between the ages of eight and eighteen (although you can legally leave school at 16) spend around seventy hours each week performing school-related tasks.

It’s easy to see where this is going. When I was on the Tam board, one counselor told me that she believed half of the students were ‘clinically depressed.’ There was widespread incidence of self-destructive behavior, including cutting, eating disorders, and attempted suicides. The district didn’t want to deal with it; the board refused to hold a hearing. When perhaps seventy-five students sacrificed their homework time in order to attend a board meeting to ‘testify’ about conditions in their schools, the board used a two-minute egg timer to cut people off in mid-sentence.

At least two of those creeps are still on the board, having nothing else to do with their lives and deeply dependent upon the interconnection between self worth and being introduced at basketball games.

The language of the threatening letter to the Drake parent brought back the crippling reality of edu-speak. With a smile, they will say they wish to ‘communicate’ with you when clearly this ‘communication’ consists of their orders and your obedience to same. We are working hard for your kids, and in the event that they are late to class a few times, we can suspend them and arrest you.

It would surprise me greatly if American high school campuses don;t become, within a relatively short period of time, staging areas for massive civil disobedience. Even though many teenagers are being kept relatively docile by way of moronic mass media, constant academic pressure, and pharmaceuticals for their depression and anger, that kind of shit won’t work forever. Kids have a desire to learn, and it’s an ignorant system which thinks it can stifle that. And they have iPhones and PDAs galore.

And not only that. Because what is being done now to children, elementary school through high school, is not only antithetical to learning but antithetical to the sensory reality of an electric age generation. It is therefore historically doomed. The only real question is how much crockery will be broken in the process.

I haven’t seen a pro football game in maybe twenty years, so out of touch that I was surprised to learn recently that there are teams I’d never heard of, lots of them. And although I don’t plan on watching any games now, I’ve become a big, big fan of the Indianapolis Colts.

The Colts are owned by a fellow named Irsay, a family deal that goes back to before they left Baltimore.

When it was announced that a group of prospective buyers for the Cleveland franchise included Rush Limbaugh, Irsay declared that he would do whatever was necessary to derail the sale. Limbaugh, Irsay said, was not the kind of person who ought to own a football team.

If you share my view that life affords us all interesting opportunities to overcome our own character faults, then the decision by the ownership group to dump Limbaugh was another in his thusfar unlearned lesson, which is that we’re all human, including people we don’t agree with, and that when you treat people unfairly you can expect the same in kind.

Remember his drug bust? He had somebody carry bagloads of oxycontin for him, obtained through another name. He had a serious addiction and got caught breaking the law. Had this happened to any other public figure on the other end of the political spectrum, Rush would’ve been calling for his head. It would seem that a major course in Irony, maybe Irony 101, is on his curriculum, but he is not doing his homework.

Now the free market he pretends to worship has shown him a dark side. Hey, if you want to exclude people from opportunity because you don’t like them, that’s the American Way. Isn’t it? Will he get it this time?

Here’s what fascinates me about Rush. He’s being given a grand cosmic education, some of it in full view thanks to his love of publicity, his arrogance, and his unwillingness to look deeply into the mirror, and we all get to watch his progress or, sadly, lack of same.

It will almost certainly get to him if this keeps up. Everything he does, seemingly, coming back on him, and eventually he will just stop coming up with excuses. Or, as John Lennon said, ‘sitting in an English garden waiting for the sun. If the sun don’t some we’ll get a tan by standing in the English rain...’

Ah, Willie Brown. In the words of the great country standard, how can we miss you if you won’t go away?

I suppose it’s kind of petty of me to complain. I live in one of the great magic places on the planet, and if we have to suffer the intrusive presence of the sort of public personage who makes Donald Trump look dignified, that’s a rather small price to pay.

Plus, I can always stop reading the newspaper and watching television, and given the fare available with each of these I’m likely to be better off. Still...

I remember Willie from a long time back, the early sixties, in fact, when he and the notorious Burton brothers ran the statewide Young Democrats out of San Francisco and my friends and I tagged along as the Marin County contingent. We learned plenty, watching those guys operate, and it was a pleasure. They were good.

I once saw Willie raise cash from a large audience of party faithful by calling on people by name and turning them upside down until all the money fell out. It was the most impressive fund-raising evening I’ve ever witnessed.

In the early eighties, I’d just opened a law office when the phone rang from Willie’s chief of staff: the Speaker wanted me to run for the Assembly again and could send a quarter of a million smackers my way to smooth the road to Sacramento. I had to turn him down for a variety of sound reasons, but I retain a fondness for the generous offer.

I do not have a great ideological beef here. There are, as many have noted, lots worse guys running around. True, Willie’s great causes have morphed over time from the poor and dispossessed to the rich and possessed, but he’s got expensive tastes in clothes, cars, and female companions and its takes a whopping bank account for that sort of frivolity.

I’d prang the sucker for peddling his talent to the highest bidders except that these days even that doesn’t raise anybody’s hackles. Jesse Colin Young’s recording of Chet Powers’ “Get Together” is being used to sell disposable diapers, John Lennon’s work is promoting telephones and PDAs, and Bob Dylan has turned his catalogue over to, well, evidently every commercial enterprise he once made fun of. I suppose I’d sell out, too, but nobody’s offered me enough.

No, Willie’s become unbearable because he cannot permit his public persona to fade away. He’s doing sports commentary for Comcast, God help us. He shows up everywhere, invited or not. And he writes a Chronicle column called, swear to God, “Willie’s World.”

In “Willie’s World” everything is, naturally, about Willie. In Sunday’s column, he led with the observation that Barack Obama will receive the Nobel Prize for one thing only: being black. Then he wrote:

“I expect an Oscar, a Tony, and a Pulitzer will all follow, and all will be equally deserved. The Nobel is great news for Obama and for America, but bad news for the Rev. Al (Sharpton), Jesse (Jackson), and me, as the prize committees have now met their quota.”

Whew. Willie, I can smell it from here.

When somebody gets famous, especially over a long journey, there is the risk that he or she will begin to leak resentment. Note that Sharpton and Jackson, both black, both ministers, ran for President. Brown never ran, but he was Assembly Speaker of California and Mayor of San Francisco. The presidency certainly ran through his mind once or twice.

Willie is still running for something, for the confirmation that he is important. How sad that a man this talented and carrying undoubted past accomplishments now so publicly bemoans his falling status and so reflexively grasps at whatever flies by. The world is in some sense no longer Willie’s, and he is afraid he will disappear.

Hey, Willie, I share your pain. We’re hitting the last decades, you and I, too old to be king no matter how deserving and increasingly aware of our own mortality. We had aspirations, and then shit happened. Someone in your circumstance, you might wonder whether anyone really loved you or it was only the power and your ability to command it. That’s a bad thought at three a.m., no matter how much your wardrobe cost.

Recently, Bay Area Democrats held a meeting at the Fairmont Hotel in the City. If you live out here, or are onto the politics of Governor Schwarzenegger, you know there are extreme tensions in state government. California, as most others, is facing budgetary holes it can’t fill without either increasing taxes or gutting programs.

Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has refused to sign any legislation whatever –– on any subject –– until Democrats give him what he wants on a water bill. Really. If you want to know why a governor would freeze the entire state government over water, see “Chinatown” again. He ‘unfroze’ himself only today, but hadn’t at the time of the gathering at the Fairmont, and anyway extortion doesn’t sit well with some people.

Into the Democratic dinner, the aforementioned Willie Brown ‘introduced’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. This was and is the equivalent of bringing Dick Cheney to a meeting of the ACLU steering committee. You can imagine what then transpired.

But in “Willie’s World,” the discourtesy with which the Governor was received (there was considerable booing, and Assemblyman Tom Ammiano invited him to “kiss my gay ass”) was equivalent to the interruption of President Obama’s State of the Union address by whacko Joe Wilson. Seriously.

Then he writes, “After the dinner I went to the bar and got a tap on the shoulder. It was Arnold, insisting that I join him. He was completely unfazed... The only reference he made was to ask me jokingly, ‘Hey, what are you doing with all those crazies?’”

A better question would be, what are all those crazies doing with Willie Brown?

My guess is that Willie never developed any healthy hobbies. This has left him bored now that the power has passed, and desperate to keep his dick swinging. That he has been thereby rendered easy pickings for a marginally-clever manipulator like Arnold Schwarzenegger has not dawned on him.

Of course, in the grander scheme of things, we ought to share the responsibility for this parody of Willie Brown. For reasons likely discovered by opening up the... uh... darker psychology of the modern American, we shower ridiculous praise on celebrities; and the celebrities nearly always thereupon turn into false gods, worthy only in delusion, and in the approval of total strangers.

Welcome home, Roman Polanski.

We’re glad to have you back. We know it’s been a tough thirty years or so, what with the travel restrictions and this thing hanging over you here in California, U.S.A. Hey, look, if she’d been a couple of years older you’d be in the Senate by now, instead of being flown-in courtesy of the government, but it’s better late than never.

We show your movies all the time on American television. Chinatown, of course, and those Oscars. By the way, do you still have the statuettes? The Academy asked me to ask you.

If you’d been in Tennessee and she’d been your cousin, you could’ve married her and everything would’ve been cool; just ask Jerry Lee Lewis.

We don’t want you to think we’ve ignored you. I know it probably seemed that way pretty often, since the U.S. government didn’t make much fuss over you through six administrations, if you count Ford, but we’ve gotten a progressive into the White House, change we can believe in, and one of the changes is that we take care of old business.

Actually, you might feel honored that you’ve been invited back. After all, we’re now “turning the page” on every criminal enterprise from illegal wiretapping to torture, but we think enough of you to make an exception. No more turning the page so far as you’re concerned.

A cynic could believe that this is simply a great way to sell ugly cars and cowpiss beer to the viewers on F*X, that sex plays, as they say, especially the kind that Republican members of Congress fantasize about when they’re ostensibly reading the bailout legislation.

But don’t you believe it. We’re bringing you home because we’re a nation of grace and forgiveness, a beacon of justice and the rule of law in the world.

So I was standing there on the court floor of the Marin County Hall of Justice, holding up my pants with one hand while trying to slip my belt back through the loops, and thinking about the state of things, which is personally fine these days but collectively dismal if it’s the country I am thinking about.

People adapt. This is both our blessing and our curse. If the human race did not adapt to its earthly environment it could not make it, yet it is our collective ability to adapt to craziness which, eventually, can sink us. This is what philosphers think of as ironic and what I think of as God’s sense of humor.

In this particular lifetime I have seen us adapt to the metric system, Sammy Davis, Jr., fast food, and the nuclear arms race. Politically, what used to be a lie is now “spin.”

They have a metal detector, along with security personnel, waiting for everyone who seeks admission or has been summoned to the courtrooms at the civic center. John Mitchell, Nixon’s disgraced Attorney General, once observed, “this country is going to go so far to the right you will not even recognize it.”

We’ve adapted to metal detectors everywhere, especially in public buildings or places where masses of people congregate. We’ve been told that ‘heightened security’ is necessary to protect us from vague but powerful forces known as ‘terrorists.’ We are surrendering freedom in increments. We will, if we fail to change course, one day awaken in a country which no longer has a meaningful Bill of Rights.

I’m all in favor of adapting to the natural environment. The human race has no practical alternative if it wishes to survive. But what exactly such adaptation consists of is a dangerous question and we don’t seem to have an answer just yet.

People lie to us about public matters. They wish to scare us into buying whatever it is that they’re selling, and it works. When it’s pop music or television shows, the damage is not so great; there are alternatives. Genius often rises anyhow. But when it’s public policy, when it’s wars or economic measures, the penalties are more severe and harder to reverse.

When I was a kid, there were strawberries. Today, except at farmers markets and the occasional health food emporium, there are these things they call strawberries but aren’t. They appear to be strawberries. However, beneath the gassed-to-red skin the flesh is white, watery, faintly metallic.

Retaining the terms, eviscerating the meaning, what we’ve got left is not what we thought we had and not what we’d been promised, once upon another time. It’s something to consider when you find yourself standing there next to a metal detector and holding up your pants with one hand because somebody said we had to adapt to a fictitious, post-something world.

Notes from a reunion...

To veterans of the San Rafael High School experience, circa 1964-5, a few notes of interest or disinterest, depending, on the class of ‘64 reunion held Friday and Saturday, those who have survived the years and had the inclination and circumstance to attend the festivities.

Friday evening was originally a no-host bar –– one pays for one’s own intoxicants –– at San Rafael Joe’s, but this was changed last minute because it turned out a class of escapees from Marin Catholic had actually booked the same place and time. SRHS backed down from this potentially horrific confrontation, which at first struck me as unnecessary given that among our returnees were pretty much the entire offensive line of the Bulldogs’ fall ‘63 MCAL champions, including the Ahern boys, not to mention JBD, who in my opinion is still looking to knock an MC linebacker on his ass, but I changed my views upon the news that we’d switched to a place now called the ‘Peddler’s something-or-other’ which, in golden days, had been Dominic’s Restaurant.

Dominic’s was the site of the ‘64 senior ball, an event which evokes few specific memories from anyone, in my opinion largely due to the combination of that evening’s inebriated madness and the present day’s deterioration of what Poirot fondly calls the ‘little grey cells’. But it was also a signpost, one of those distinct moments in time shared by many, and the specifics, though few could be conjured (or invented) by the survivors, retained a special sort of electricity.

And so, being there on the water, with the ghost of SRHS hovering over the canal, northeast and lit by a full moon in Aries, there was a gathering, upstairs where we would not startle otherwise unsuspecting restaurant patrons trying to swallow lobster and farm animal on the main floor.

There are the people who aren’t there, the ones we’ve temporarily lost due to their evacuating the corporeal form and the ones we’ve lost because they’ve evacuated the area and maybe that part of their histories. We’d talk about them sometimes. What ever happened to.....

I’ve got a lot of sensory data in my cranium right now from the Friday evening event and from another the following day, a barbeque deep into Sleepy Hollow. It’s hard to know about my class; a reunion is a sort of odd selective grouping, and conversation, though often fun and occasionally illuminating, cannot go on and on, which it needs to do to offer much revelation. Some things are things people need to get around to, and there isn’t that kind of time.

Time, yes, it was there, perched just beyond the pool at the Colson manse. I believe I saw it wink once.