01-Oct-2006
Iron Filings
I’ve pretty much verified that the following quote is accurate, and I think it’s a hoot. I offer it so that at least one of my readers will be greatly annoyed:
Whatever women do, they
Must do twice as well as men
To be thought half as good.
Luckily, this is not difficult.
Charlotte Wilton
Mayor of Ottawa, 1963
* * *
You need to know the name of Leslie Pinney, a school board member of Arlington Heights Township High School District 214 in Illinois. Ms. Pinney recently came up with a list of nine books that should be banned from the high schoolers reading lists because they contain explicit sexual images, graphic violence, and vulgar language. The books are Beloved, by Toni Morrison; Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien; The Awakening, by Kate Chopin; Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner; The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan; The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky; Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers, and How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez.
Somebody needs to say it so I will. These are good books that can enlighten, annoy, amuse, befuddle, and challenge any young person reading them. They will gain intellectual heft and emotional depth and perhaps even the sort of fearless outlook on the world that tolerates the differences among us all. Ms. Pinney, thus, is evil.
* * *
I put book banners right in there with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, and Dick Rumsfeld – true terrorists threatening this country.
* * *
I noticed in the news not long ago that former President George H.W. Bush and his wife Barbara attended the funeral of Enron executive Ken Lay. Maybe it’s just me, but I think paying homage to convicted felons ought to be left to the immediate family.
* * *
A gang murder took place in our neighboring town (four miles away) recently. Four guns were observed at the scene, three of which were toy guns. Either gangs aren’t what they used to be or else someone needs to do something about the educational level of these gangsters. I remember that old saying: Toy guns don’t kill people; people kill people.
* * *
Ubiquitous video cameras will begin to change us. To know I could be watched in all I do is to believe I am being watched, that some poorly-paid, poorly-educated clerk is following my every move: that I blew my nose near the White Hen, that I removed my shoes and walked barefoot on Park Avenue, that I farted near the river, that I rested in my walk today more than yesterday, that I sat on the toilet at Target and picked my nose, that I stepped into an alley and peed, that I picked a flower from my neighbor’s flowerbed, that I lured a child into an old factory and beheaded her, that I did indeed insert my fraudulent tax return into the mail, that I picked up a morning paper off of the street and threw it onto the recipient’s porch. If you’re doing nothing wrong, why should it matter if you are seen? Right and wrong, though – that’s a drop of mercury rolling around on a Slinky toy.
* * *
In a related annoyance – another episode in my ongoing crusade to prevent the imprisonment without trial of our high schoolers – I note that DeKalb High School (six miles from my home here in northern Illinois) just approved a plan to install sixty-two security cameras throughout the high school.
* * *
I’ve received a fictional request from a fictional man in Iraq named Mustafa and his American-born fictional wife, Julie, to tell them what life in America is like these days. If you don’t think that’s hard duty, you should try it sometime. Here’s how I began:
Compared with life in Antarctica, it’s warmer. Compared with life in a microwave, it’s cooler. Pre-packaged peanut butter sandwiches with the bread crusts removed are available. Our ability to communicate with telephones, cellphones, computers, postal services, package services, GPS locaters, and handheld computers has far exceeded anything we might have to say. Ninety-two percent of us [I’m not making this up.] believe in God and practice some ritualistic modeling of that belief. Compared with fucking, it’s less intense. We commute great distances to work. We have in our hands the world’s healthiest diet, yet consume great quantities of nutritionally-challenged food. We believe everything in life must be paid for by the individual. We also believe that natural disasters must be paid for by the government. Our leaders tend to reflect a low common denominator.
* * *
Sometimes all I really want out of my government is that it not regard me as the enemy, that it stop snooping in my emails, suborning my phone companies, and telling me that in a time of a manufactured war I have no rights.
* * *
What I’d really like is for the government to tell me this: “These are perilous times. You need protection more than ever now. So here’s a copy of the Constitution. Read it, study it, understand it, and, if we start trashing it, kill us.”
G. K. Wuori © 2006
Photoillustration by the author; quote from John Le Carré in “Congo Journey,” The Nation, Volume 283, Number 10, October 2, 2006
