One of the drawbacks of swimming at the gym now is that the flatscreen TV in the locker room is tuned to Fox News, and I never thought I would see the day when I hoped that sports would be on the tube.

Today I heard yet another presser hosted by Melissa McCarthy Sean Spicer and watched in disbelief as one reporter, referring to the Current Occupant’s statement yesterday that terrorist massacres were being “under-reported” by the “very very dishonest press,” fumbled his question.  Spicer skittered away across the surface of the pond, untouched by any attempt to get some hard truth from him.

Sweet Jebus, White House Press Corps, do yourself a favor and head straight to the nearest elementary school. Sign in, and ask to be assigned to a kindergarten class.  Take notes.

BECAUSE KINDERGARTEN TEACHERS CAN GET BETTER ANSWERS OUT OF SEAN SPICER THAN YOU CAN.

Here’s the deal: Never never ever ask a kid a yes/no question about some misbehavior.

TEACHER: Did you hit Suzie?

SEAN: No, I was just blah blah blah.

No.  Watch and learn.

TEACHER: Tell me what happened here.  Sean, you go first.

SEAN: Well, Suzie called me a doopyface so I hit her.

And scene.

How does this work for you guys?

Instant replay:

REPORTER: Yesterday, when the President said that terror attacks were being under-reported, did he mean blah blah blah?

SPICER: —::deny:: — ::pivot:: — ::spin:: — [runs away laughing, possibly shouting “nanny-nanny-boo-boo”]

That’s not how you do it.  Watch and learn:

REPORTER: Yesterday, the President said about terrorist attacks, and I quote, “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”  What did he mean by that?

SPICER: Um… I thought Melissa McCarthy was funny, but she chewed too much gum.  No more questions.

So there go you.  Hie thee to an elementary school and pick up some skills.  I imagine you could even learn this in Betsy Fupping Devos’ new string of for-profit Talibaptist madrassas.  Well, if any of the people being paid minimum wage to ride herd on students there are in fact teachers.

The plural of anecdote is not data, but I have a little story to share with you that illustrates some of where we are in the United States.

Many years ago, I was a wee media specialist at East Coweta High School.  You have to understand that I grew up in the city and attended Newnan High School in town, and that when I transferred as a teacher out to East Coweta, it was a definite culture shock.

This school was literally in the middle of the cotton field.  It was across the highway from a dirt track racing establishment.  And the students were rural.

The “upper class” of the school lived in the minuscule towns of Senoia and Sharpsburg; the rest lived out in the country, along roads which may or may not have been paved.  They lived among family and friends, and they always had.

The faculty knew all the students—the school was only 800 students, 6-12—and more than that, we knew who they were.  We knew their mama ‘n’ ’em, and nobody so much as sneezed without everyone else knowing about it.  We taught whole families, sometimes in generations.

This was in the 80s, and this close-knit community was the water in which all my students swam.

Cut to twenty years later.  I was then the media specialist at Newnan Crossing Elementary School, and I was doing a lesson on the atlas for second graders.^[1] I showed them the different sections, how the maps were laid out and numbered, and how the index worked.  They were fascinated, I’m sure.

We looked up a couple of things to start with, probably Atlanta and New York City and Washington, DC.  Then I asked them to look up where they were born.

Out of a class of about 24 7-year-olds, half of them were not even born in North America.^[2]  That’s right: half a second grade class in Newnan, GA, were born on other continents, and I mean all of them except Antarctica.  We had Asians, Indians, Africans, South and Central Americans, and even Europeans.

It was an eye-opener for me, to be sure.  I felt as if I were not in Kansas any more.

And trust me, Kansas knows it, too.  All those people with unpronounceable last names, whose grandfather was not on the school board or attended any of the churches hereabouts.  Their funny food, their funny accents, their funny clothes sometime.  And so many of them!  Look at all the stores springing up that either have names we don’t understand, or a definitely not-from-around-here person and their seemingly endless children behind the counter as we buy our Slim Jims.

It’s no defense, of course, for anti-immigrant behavior or voting for a man who promises to toss out millions of people just because they don’t look like you.  But it is an explanation: most of the students I taught (and the world they lived in) were kind-hearted, but they didn’t like new and they didn’t like change.

The U.S. has changed and is changing.  They have fought back in regrettable ways.

——–—
^[1] This was not because my second graders needed to know how to pull a book off the shelf and look up a country, but because of course it was on one or more of the standardized tests which so improve our students’ achievement.

^[2] And less than a quarter of the class was even born in Coweta County.

A friend rather foolishly clicked on a link in a spam email yesterday.

Fortunately,^[1] it just leads to a webpage that first asks you to make sure you have your sound on, and then proceeds to auto-play a slideshow that is nothing but text, which the narrator then reads out loud to us.  Oy.  It also says that it’s only six minutes long, but as I type this it’s been way over fifteen and it’s still going.

I will now pause to let you guess what the presentation is actually about.

The presentation is about _____
A) a quasi-military organization plotting a coup, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
B) a super-secret cabal which will engineer the president-elect’s impeachment before the inauguration, thereby enabling Clinton’s accession to the presidency
C) an ad for a “free” book on secret cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, arthritis, etc.

If you guessed C, congratulations.

Yes, it’s true, boys and girls.^[2] Hillary Clinton conspired twenty-three years ago to kill off 31,000 patriots a year with the pharmaceutical cartel.  Their plot was to put her in the White House, where she would allow them “access to the power and money” of the U.S. government something something drugs.

How exactly this is different from our current healthcare situation is unclear, but IT’S SCARY, KENNETH!  Hillary Clinton!  Cartel!  There is so much ooga-booga in the first five minutes of this thing that I cannot remember it all—and I’m not going back to listen to it again.  It hits all the notes: Clinton, conspiracy, patriotism, threat of death, etc.  There is no documentation or proof, just blunt assertions about “knowing” stuff that NO ONE ELSE KNOWS, KENNETH!

[The presentation is still running in another browser window.  Six minutes my ass.]

The speaker finally reveals his affiliation: HSI, Health Science Institute.  A more wretched hive of scum and villainy, etc., etc.

Why do I say that?  The target audience for this pitch is those of us over 55, who combine the traits the HSI values: intractable health issues, not-very-solid reasoning capacities, distrust of institutional healthcare, and increasing fear of death.  (And a whole bunch of us have an irrational fear/hatred of Hillary Clinton, so that’s a bonus.)  The pitch is deliberately crafted to engage the amygdala and its irrational fears—and create a sense of panic and urgency so that the poor senior citizen clicks on that link to receive the “free” booklet.

I’m guessing that in order to receive your free book, you have to give the HSI not only your mailing address, but also your email address and probably your phone number.  You will then receive pitch after pitch for their products WHICH WILL CURE YOUR CANCER THE NATURAL WAY WITHOUT SIDE EFFECTS, KENNETH!  These people are evil.

The only way to make sure is to click on that link.  Which I’m not going to do.^[3]

—————

^[1] For differing values of “fortunate.”

^[2] It’s not true.

^[3] I have written this entire blog post and the presentation is still running and still has not given me the information to receive my free book.  We’re now into the second free gift.

I have been reading Mirrors, by Eduardo Galeano.  I have come to believe that there is a thread of evil running through human history that will not die but must be fought against without stint or let.

In the middle of a series of disquisitions about slavery and its never-ending end in the 18th and 19th centuries, I came across this:

When Iqbal Maiz was four, his parents sold him for fifteen dollars.

He was bought by a rug maker.  He worked chained to the loom fourteen hours a day. At the age of ten, Iqbal was a hunchback with the lungs of an old man.

Then he escaped and became the spokesman for Pakistan’s child slaves.

In 1995, when he was twelve years old, a fatal bullet knocked him from his bicycle.
[pp. 190-191]

In 1995.

Evil.

Evil is not having sex with someone to whom you are not married or is the same gender as you.  Evil is not realizing your brain is not the same gender as your body.  Evil is not praying to some other deity than you and your neighbors.

Evil is cruelty to anyone with less power than you.

Period.

Not in my name, not in my country.  Speak up.