David Triguiero's Idaho

Life's No Pop Quiz

The Republicans are once again in opposition and working hard to destroy everything on the Democratic agenda including health care and education reform – the very issues they struggled to resolve during their eight years in power. Apparently, the only thing worse than not resolving a vital issue is for the Democrats to resolve it.

That’s party politics as the say; or is it? In the old days the Democrats worked within the Taft-Hartley Act passed soon after the war even though it gutted the power of unions, one of their base constituencies. The Republicans accepted Medicare and continued it despite their yells of “socialism” when a Democratic Congress and president passed it in the 1960s.

So, when did the Republicans become the negative party of permanent opposition. I don’t know, but soon before George W. Bush became president, a Republican pollster said the party’s objective was to “sow doubt.” Keep the public thinking that there is constant danger lurking on the horizon. There are always terrorist plotting to blow Americans up, tax and spend liberals courting national bankruptcy and American students who “can’t read and write.”

Ignoring the fact that the U.S. leads the world in all fields of education, especially creative technology, the Republicans and their cohort traditionalists harp continuously that American students in general lag behind other countries on geography, math and history tests. It’s pretty hard to argue with them if you believe the purpose of education is to prepare contestants for Jeopardy.

However, life is not a pop quiz, even in today’s modern high-tech world. Knowing how to use information is far more important than the information itself. This requires thinking and reasoning, neither of which are measurable in the back-to-basics quizzes that are the foundation of traditionalist theory.

No one is certain how people acquire the ability to think rationally, probably it is a byproduct of students’ relationships with committed teachers, many of whom may not know how to parse a sentence or spell chrysanthemum, but do know how to learn and to teach. This much is certain: this relationship cannot be achieved when one teacher is thrown in front of a classroom with 35 or 40 small children. More important, children in overcrowded situations do not learn the social skills, which, in today’s complex society, are more important than ever in building a successful life.

The Republican traditionalists say there is no evidence correlating student performance with class size and I can’t argue with them. They also say teachers’ salaries and working conditions have no effect on how students do on tests. Maybe they are right, but that is not the point. The point is there is a lot more to school and education than getting all the answers right.

Dream Teaching

            This fall’s catalogue from Treasure Valley Community College contains an extension class titled Introduction to Conscious Dreaming. The course costs $89 and promises you will “acquire the skills for working with dreams to increase and deepen self-understanding…and effectiveness in life’s journey.”

            Why didn’t I think of that. I graduated high school with a 4.0 in daydreaming. At $89 a pop, I could teach anyone to do it even those go-getters who filled up the front seats of the classroom and instantly stabbed the air with their hands whenever the teacher looked like asking a question.

 Daydreaming is not as easy as it looks. You should never gaze out the window, never put your head down on your desk and, of course, you can’t go to sleep. If you do, you are no longer daydreaming, you are real dreaming and certain to get caught.

            Some teachers are easier to daydream on than others. In high school we had a history teacher named Lawrence Duclos whom everyone called Sominex (“Take Sominex tonight and sleep, sleep, sleep…”) because of his soft voice and droning delivery. He hardly ever randomly asked questions to ensure you were paying attention. The difficulty in his class was staying awake.

I perfected a method of sitting upright with my arms flat on the desk and fixing my eyes on his bow tie while my mind traveled the world. Mark Constance tried placing his elbow on his desk and resting his chin in the palm of his hand, a good enough method with less droning lecturers, but fatal in Sominex’s class. Before long his head slid from his upright palm into the elbow of his other arm and he was gone. Mr. Duclos told Dennis Adams and another keener actually taking notes to carry his desk into the hall where he could sleep in peace.

Lois Stout, the math teacher, was another matter. She often started the class with worksheets then walked up and down the ails between the desks with her ham-hock arms crossed across her more than amble chest and stomach checking your work. This also made it nearly impossible to cheat on tests, although I did develop a quick glance method of jumping from Miss Stout to Glen Reeves’s paper that helped me pass geometry.

The only way to get some daydreaming time was to ask Miss Stout a question about a problem before she got to the worksheets. She would turn to the blackboard and work out the entire problem, ham-hocks swinging as she wrote, while we stared out the window into a land far, far away. The keeners sometimes helped by asking more questions.

I pretty much quit daydreaming in college where you don’t have a class every hour of every day. If they had offered any courses in the subject, I certainly would of taken them. I don’t know where the guy teaching the course at Treasure Valley Community College got the masters degree listed after his name, but then a lot has changed in the last 40 years. Imagine, a masters degree in daydreaming. They probably offer a PhD, too. I could be teaching at Stanford.

Wrong From The Right

 

 

             Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was incorrect when she called gangs of gun toting Tea Partiers disrupting town hall meetings “brown shirts.” But she wasn’t wrong.  They were there to prevent Democratic Congressmen from explaining proposed health care reform legislation to their constituents in the same way fascist brown shirts broke up political meetings in Italy and Germany in the 1930s.

            But Tea Partiers are not fascists; at least they don’t fit the textbook definition of the term. Fascists are opposed to democracy in every sense of the word; for them, it is the bedrock of evil, according to Walter Laqueur in his definitive book on the subject, Fascism, Past, Present, Future.  Tea Partiers believe passionately in voting; but believe anyone who doesn’t vote as they do is evil.

Fascists infuse their politics with a religious zeal devised to justify their racial and ethnic prejudices. Evangelical Republicans, like so many Christians in the past, start with Christianity and manipulate it to justify their deep fears of change brought on by “liberals” in control of “the government”. Like Generalissimo Francisco Franco of Spain, they are “religious authoritarians” rather than fascists, according to Laqueur.

The balance of Tea Partiers is made up of fanatical libertarians allied with Evangelicals for the same reason the US and Great Britain allied with Stalin in WW II. They believe it is the lesser of two evils. As a result most of Eastern Europe endured 70 years more of jackboot tyranny. If the Republican Party becomes the Tea Party, the libbers may well find themselves in the same situation.

Tea Partiers, of course, do not wear uniform-like brown shirts as did their fascist counterparts of old. Most appeared at the warm weather protests in golf shirts, with the relatively small number of libbers in attendance wearing camouflage tees. When she referred to them as “brown shirts” Pelosi over-generalized and probably harmed the health care cause.

Had the Speaker called them “Republican golf shirts” she might have coined a new political aphorism. But hindsight is 20/20.

Like fascist officialdom, Republican Party officials eschew any connection with Tea Partiers, thereby providing themselves deniability should things get out of hand. If, for example, one of the gun toting partiers decided to blow someone away with the semi-automatic assault rifles and 44 magnums they carried to the town hall meetings “for protection”.

Hate-mouth radio blat jockey Rush Limbaugh and failed Republican Vice Presidential candidate, the dingbat Sarah Pallin, both dedicated toters and shooters, have assumed the “unofficial” leadership of the movement. This is all well and good for the Democratic Party, so long as President Barack Obama’s stimulus package and health care plan show real progress in the coming year.

 If not, the electorate will start looking for more radical solutions, just as they did in 1931 when  Hoover’s progressive approach to stimulating the economy failed. We have come to look at Hoover as an ultra-conservative on the order of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush; but a prescient article in Harper’s magazine points out that he was anything but. A close friend of Teddy Roosevelt, he was a “progressive” Republican who believed in government oversight and regulation of the economy.

The progressives were decimated by President William Howard Taft’s theft of the 1912 Republican presidential nomination and America’s entry into World War I, according to William Allen White, a Kansas newspaper publisher and editor who emerged as the national spokesman for progressive Republicanism. Hoover re-energized the party’s progressive wing with his outstanding organization of world hunger relief following the war and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1928.

The Harper’s article notes that Hoover used every method in the progressive arsenal to stimulate the economy, including bailing out banks. He encountered considerable opposition within his own party, as has Obama. Hoover’s secretary of state, whom he fired, welcomed the Great Depression declaring it would clear out bureaucratic dead wood, get the government out of business regulation, take care of the unions once and for all and put the country back on sound financial footing. 

Sound familiar? Well, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought the radical solution needed in 1933 from the left of the progressive political spectrum. The center had failed. From what direction will the radical solution come this time? Sarah Pallin is counting on it coming from the far right; so are her Republican golf shirts. They offer freedom; so did Generalissimo Franco.

 

 

Weiser's Wasteland Bar

 

 

            Every time one of those soft porn beer commercials comes on TV, women see red. That’s what the feminist leadership says, anyway, and I see no reason to disagree with them. Nobody likes being portrayed sitting around a bar with feature-perfect erogenous droids appraising each other like over-priced designer goods churned off an assembly line somewhere in southern California.

            Men should see red too, and they do; although no masculine leadership has yet emerged to declare their indignation. They also turn enviously green because every man, even those who know better, likes to hope there really are bars where one sip of beer turns women into Katie Holmes and the men into Tom Cruise.

            It was this impossible quest that took me to the Silver Bullet while vacationing in my hometown of Weiser some years back. Ron Yankey was disgusted when I suggested it instead of The Crescent for our reunion beer.  “It’s not like the one on those TV ads,” he assured me with the patient indulgence of a father lecturing his five-year-old son. “They have Coors on tap. You know, it’s Mina’s old place, we don’t want to go to a dump like that.” (Neither of us would drink non-union Coors.)

            Indeed I did know, but I wanted to go anyway. Mina was a classmate of ours and Weiser’s first and, to the best of my knowledge, last stripper. In school she had been the designated fat girl – the one you accused your buddies of carrying a torch for when you wanted to provoke them.

            Mina’s family left Weiser in our sophomore year of high school and nothing was heard of her for 10 or 15 years. Novelty strippers were all the rage and an advertisement in the Idaho Daily Statesman for the Tops Down Club in Boise included a picture of its featured performer, Big Tiny Little. It was Mina.

            Several years later she came back to Weiser and took over the old Stockman’s Bar premises, which had gone through a succession of owners and names. Mina renamed it Big Tiny Little’s and enjoyed a brief period of celebrity, with her clothes on, before going broke. She left town again and has not been heard from since.

            I could see some vestiges of Mina’s occupancy as I sat at the Silver Bullet bar with Ron sipping a bottle of Budweiser. We were the only ones in the place and it was Saturday night. Maybe, the gang from the ski slopes hadn’t arrived yet. I knew they never would, of course. There are about as many skiers as polo players in Weiser. I just wanted to sit there and revel in nostalgia looking over the manifestations of past trends in the tavern, still evident beneath the slap dash redecorating of each successive owner.

Above the kitchen you could still make out the faint outline of Ye Olde Pizza Shoppe from the pizza parlor incarnation. Hanging on the wall near the men’s room were two dust covered dartboards and a faded sign absolving the Tally-Ho Pub of an responsibility for injuries resulting from the misuse of its darts.

The only thing that stirred any memories in me or Ron, though was the faint outline of the name Stockman’s on the door leading into the back alley. When we were just kids and Weiser was the bustling commercial center for surrounding farms, mines and logging operations, the Smoke House, along with The Crescent, just acorss the street, was a favorite lunch spot for local businessmen.

In front, opening on to the street was a café. It was there that I had my first cheeseburger, sharing the counter with such eminent citizens as Sam Emerich, owner of Globe Furniture, and Lou Farber of Farber’s Ladies Wear. It was a heady experience, my first taste of the sophisticated world of business.

Thinking back to that congenial time while sitting in the wasteland of the Silver Bullet, I couldn’t help blame television for all the bleakness of modern culture. Those people didn’t try to construct their lives in response to characters created in some never-never land behind the TV screen. The just lived them. If life was pretty much the same in Lovelock, Nevada as it was in Weiser, Idaho it was because the people had a common heritage and faced similar challenges.

The sameness induced by universal television seems to sap enterprise, dull the intellect and reduce life to the lowest common denominator. All of which is clearly evident in any beer commercial.