Arkansas Blog: Give me liberty or give me desk

With help from the New York Times and James Fallows of Atlantic, I've already worked over Mike Huckabee for trotting out again before a national TV audience last night a teacher's head-scratching metaphor about how veterans somehow "earned" desks for the kiddies at Joe T. school.

I had searched last without success for the words of the prophet, Bob Lancaster, who'd done a pretty good job previously on the subject. Because I can and because I liked it then and now, I offer Bob's take on the Huck nonsense again.

UPDATE: Huck's pal Colbert worked over the desk last night.

War and desks

     We learned from an article in the daily paper last week what it is that generations of U.S. soldiers have fought and died for. It’s for the right of our boys and girls to go to school, and for their right to sit at desks while they’re at school.
     That seemed to be the gist of the thing, and it came as a surprise to me. I think the world of our military, and would’ve thought when they went to give their last full measure that they would’ve had higher and more interesting freedoms in mind than those having to do with dibs on classroom desks.
     But apparently not.
     This article told of a suburban grade-school teacher hereabout who got miffed when some of her urchins didn’t show proper enthusiasm for reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. To teach them a lesson, she devised a classroom “experiment” that involved removing their desks and telling them they’d get the desks back only when they’d earned them back. The freedom to have a school desk isn’t free; like the other great freedoms, it has to be earned; it has to be paid for – and the only legal tender for such debts is the blood of patriots.
     It must’ve been hard for the youngsters to make the connection – I’m not sure I’ve got it straight myself -- but after considerable perplexity and, one assumes, hunkering, Teach relented and told them they didn’t have to earn the desks back, after all; that the desks had been pre-earned back by America’s combat veterans. They did it by putting their lives on the line to foil tyrants who hate all our precious freedoms, including the ones involving squatters’ rights on schoolroom desks.
     The local presidential candidate was said to have been so moved upon hearing of this patriotic exercise that he promised to give it a prominent place in his barnstorm. Maybe he made that promise and maybe he didn’t -- sure sounds like him, though.
     So anyway, we have American soldiers fighting and dying over desks for unappreciative little back-home ingrates, and who knows?—maybe the experiment did result in a few faint stirrings of gratitude and respect in a few would-be Beavises and Buttheads, at least through the Memorial weekend. A few of the erstwhile punks, taking the lesson to heart, might even have resolved to become respectable cannon fodder when they grow up.
     At the very least the experiment gave them something to think about when they’re not thinking about flogging an old bishop or punching each other on the arm or making surreptitious in-class digestive-trouble sounds. The article gave ol’ moi something to think about, too.
     For instance, if we’d lost the Vietnam War earlier than we did, before we’d thrown the lives of 58,000 of our young people into its maw, it’s perfectly plausible that Ho Chi Minh would’ve been over here afterward scarecrowing in schoolrooms nationwide, telling young people like my own two children in grade school at the time whether or not they could have desks.
     Yep, Sluggo, you get a desk. Nope, Snookums, you don’t. Lots more nopes than yeps, and, Uncle Ho not being omnipresent, some of the schools might’ve had to use cardboard cutouts, with moving mouths like on Conan O’Brien, to announce his desk decisions.
     In my own case, if we’d lost World War II, by the time I entered Mrs. Reid’s first-grade class, old Schickelgruber his own bad self surely would’ve zepped over here to designate which lucky ones in my genius class would get desks and which unlucky ones, because our country had lost all desk-claiming rights in losing the war, wouldn’t. The unlucky ones, I’m guessing, would’ve had to go off to some junior concentration camp where everybody had to stand up.
     A few grades later, if we’d lost the Cold War, it would’ve been Stalin doing the desk da’s and nyets.
     Losing World War I would’ve meant Dirty Kaiser Bill giving my mother and father, then adolescents, the good desk news (“Ja”) or the bad desk news (“Nein”), and probably then imperiously informing them that they’d thereafter be sprechen sie Deutsch.
     Desk czar if we’d lost the Spanish-American War would’ve been King Phillip II of Spain, the closest the world has come to having a genuine clinical imbecile as a wartime leader up to but not including the Iraq War. We went him one better there.
     We did lose the Civil War – those of us Caucasian and rebellious in this part of the country did – and years passed before our ancestral kin regained the right to attend school, and more passed before they regained full desk rights. They only got desks again, truth be told, because Northern benefactors finally warmed up to Cleveland and turned loose of some they had in storage.
     I’m not sure the British, even if they’d won the War of 1812, would’ve cruelly impressed our school desks the way they did our seamen. Good that it didn’t come to that. The Hessian oafs in the Revolutionary War would not only have confiscated all the colonial school desks, they would’ve chopped them up for firewood, that war being fought in the Little Ice Age.
     It was to those Hessians, you’ll recall, that Nathan Hale regretted he had but one desk to give for his country.

Comments

Stephen Colbert helped you out, Max. See his take on it on tonight's show.

Posted by: mag | September 5, 2008 01:04 AM

Very cogent. And it reminds me of a question I have been meaning to ax Max for a long time...When Old Bob goes on his well-earned vacations (probably to TImes Square to see the latest on Broadway) would it just kill ya to maybe run a Best o' Bob column instead of leaving the space blank so we can get to the classifieds quicker? Why, he could even pick the one to run.

ARK. BLOG: I'll ask Bob what he thinks. But ... in the 17 years I've been at AT, I don''t think we've ever had a columnist run a repeat. (Now I'll grant you several of us have worked over the same territory a few times. Like me and Huck.)

Posted by: Sanford | September 5, 2008 02:39 AM

But he is so proud of this fable. He thinks it should be in next year's Bible. So what if you have to be a card-carrying member of Densa to get it.

There should be an annual contest to add embellishments. Like adding in boxes of unbroken chalk and white bottles of edible paste for us oldsters. Flash drives or mp3 audio textbooks for the current kiddos. He should also have a motel/hotel version involving missing fluffy pillows or the universal remote control. A media version where there is no link to Lexus Nexus or Google on your workstations. Come on, let's get this brilliant parable translated into every career and life-stage before Huck starts running again.

Posted by: Sanford | September 5, 2008 03:24 AM

Good modernizing of the parable Sanford but think how universal childrens' school desks are. Huck just cannot deliver the smoothness due to his lack of appreciation of brevity. He enjoys the long-winded story too much.

Posted by: eLwood | September 5, 2008 05:33 AM

Speaking of school desks, did anyone else do a double take when McCain said something like the following last night?

"Education is the civil rights issue of this century."

What on earth (either the flat or the round one) does that mean?

Posted by: Eureka Springs, AR | September 5, 2008 08:28 AM

Pathological lying is such an ingrained habit for Huckabee that he can't be satisfied with a brief, true, story. He simply HAS to embroider it with a tissue of lies until it becomes a 15-minute whopper.

Posted by: Maj. T.J. 'King' Kong | September 5, 2008 08:34 AM

After reading these posts, I wonder where everyone here got the "Education" to be able to write their opinions? Education is the base for any and all societies needs to progress, especially in todays workforce. As an ex ISS Officer I saw what the "lack" of willingness by the highschool students did to their chances for economic survival. Don't get me wrong with anything towards a statement of it is all kids who do this, it is just a few. A few who for some reason just cannot get it through their thick skulls that they really need to learn as much as they can while the learning is "free" in the public school system. Intelligence is only gained through effort in learning. Huckabee is not wrong in stating that education is a freedom worth fighting for, it is one of the most important issues in todays society, and education, for all you who did not care to even try to learn while in school, is the basis of our existance in a free society. I agree with Huckabee that it is an important enough issue to call it out as one of our most important freedoms, and it is one that I would fight for.

"Knoweledge is like a river with many depths and currents. To be able to traverse its course we must first learn to swim through correctly. Each day we have the option to apply our abilities and efforts to learning, and in so doing, become able to swim steady and strong. Or by thinking we already know it all, we deny ourselves the endless opportunities of intelligence gained, allowing us to drown in our own ignorence." JNYJ 03/02/04 (Ely; Invoking the muse)

If you think the ability to become educated is not an important freedom, move to a country that does not allow its people to learn because they are afraid the people will learn they are being cheated out of a good life. Poverty is the poor mans plague that can only be cured with knoweledge and understanding.

Posted by: JNYJ | September 5, 2008 11:43 AM

This desk parable could be expanded in so many directions! The teacher could have had the classroom filled with Native American desks and then had the children watch as soldiers and people dressed like settlers & buffalo hunters came and took all the desks.

Or how about 2 class rooms with no wall between them. As the children watched a group of men could go from classroom A to classroom B and start stealing desks. Men from classroom B could start killing the desk stealers from A and then a bunch of men from A would blow the living shit out of classroom B. To make it more exciting and meaningful have a bunch of foreigners with an American flag would come give A lots of money and weapons and turn its back as thugs from A slaughtered most of the deskholders in classroom B. Make the children watch for 60 years as both groups kill the women and children and old people hiding under all the desks. Let's call classroom A Israel.

Or this: when men with box cutters in their desks in classroom B suddenly attack the desks in classroom A one morning, have the desk owners in A bomb and occupy the cafeteria for 5 plus years!

Yeah...I see why Huckabee likes this desk game. But as a recovering Baptist I know ya can't bring no one to the Lawd unless you can break them emotionally sorta like they do at Marine boot camps all over the country. So if Huck hadn't developed the skill of making folks cry, he'd still be a DJ in Hope and no one would have heard of him. I know I know...it's a cheap shot to cause a whole group of people to start crying when you talk about dead puppies, Grandma's last words, our soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima...but if men like Huck didn't go for the easy kill they'd only be 5 Baptist in the world.

And if the truth isn't good enough, they'll make the rest of it up. I remember being surprised at being brought up in the middle of a sermon at church camp one time when I was about 10 years old. Ma had given me too much money to take to camp and one afternoonI bought 6 or 7 candy bars and was under a tree with chocolate from ear to ear. Brother Neil came up and told me I better watch out or I'd get sick and then he walked off.

That night he started talking about this little kid with too much candy sitting under a tree.....now that part was correct. Then he spun off into make believe bullshit that never happened....that was my first clue that preachers WILL lie if it makes a better story. Which explains the whoppers Huck told when he was in the Governor's chair. If you get used to lying.....you can't stop. It's better to keep preachers out of politics and US government. Fantasy has no place in government.

Posted by: Deathbyinches | September 5, 2008 11:58 AM

Has Huck fallen off the wagon? It appeared from the sideview we were given on the Daily Show that he is back to digging with a fork.

We may be able to settle the surgery or not question about weight loss pretty soon.

Posted by: Citizen home | September 5, 2008 12:17 PM

As someone pointed out,JYNJ, even nazis and communist china and the old USSR and tojo's Japan had desks! and schools! and the case can be made that all those countries have more challenging curricula than even the eSkool! Granted, many of those folks did not have the freedom to do whatever they wanted with their education, but the education itself is not a Democracy-only commodity. One could even make the case that we have exercised our educational freedoms to be more stoopid than other countries. Our rocket program would never have got off the ground without Germans. Our atomic bomb would not have burst onto the scene without the same.

Posted by: Sanford | September 5, 2008 04:50 PM

It galls me to agree with you lefties, but I was disappointed in Huckabee's speech. If Palin's was a home run, as even some Dems agreed, his was a double at best. The "Lava Soap" and school desk stories were retreads from his campaign. The convention was time to trot out new anecdotes.

Posted by: FromThePines | September 5, 2008 07:43 PM

Arkansas Blog

Give me liberty or give me desk

Comments

Post a comment