Books, Blacks and Blondie

by David Benjamin

MADISON, Wis. — So, it’s 1965 or ’66 and I’m between classes in high school. I encounter a singularly yummy girl named Sherry, who has a reputation. Gently, she pins me against the lockers and goes into a sort of Mae West “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime?” routine. Yes, I’m flustered but — to my credit — I play along because I know Sherry well enough to grasp that all this innuendo is in good fun.

But, although it took me years to recognize it, something else was happening to me. In the middle of the B Wing, as a thousand students streamed obliviously past, I was sensing an epiphany about me and girls. While I had found myself, more and more, drawn to girls, I was ’til then reconciled to the reality that they, as a group, didn’t feel much of anything toward me, except perhaps mild amusement. But that day, in that unlikely setting, as she leaned in, talking softly and running her finger along the edge of my hairless face, Sherry conveyed to me the promise, previously inconceivable, that some day, somewhere — don’t know where, don’t know when — I just might, after all, get laid.

I was — as Sam Cooke might say — only fifteen. But I knew about getting laid. Among my sources were novels, not included in the curriculum, that covered the subject thoroughly and descriptively.

My thrill with Sherry lasted maybe thirty seconds, but today, five-odd decades later, I remember where we stood, how we spoke, what I felt and the twinkle in Sherry’s mischievous eyes. What I don’t remember is what class I was coming from and where I was going, nor anything else that happened that day, or all that week.

This incident, besides being incongruously sexy, epitomizes school. We forget almost everything, and the stuff we remember has little to do with what teachers are trying to drum into our hermetic heads. I recall absolutely nothing of my four tortured semesters of algebra and geometry. The impression that lingers from all my world and U.S. history classes is the mind-numbing banality of our textbooks.

My most memorable class was probably driver’s ed with Dave Maas, which conveyed lessons I apply every time I take the wheel and hit the road. There is power in practical education.

However, Mr. Maas is the exception who proves the rule. Despite the best intentions and cleverest devices of educators, it’s the nature of students, especially in high school, to ignore their teachers, forget most of what they’ve “learned” in class and to actively reject lessons that trouble, offend, challenge or annoy them.

I spent my sophomore year, for example, waging war with a teacher I will not name (because she didn’t deserve my childish contempt). I scorned her reading choices, disdained her style and wasted a year of Honors English, earning B’s and C’s instead of the A’s of which I was capable. Meanwhile, out of her reach (although she would have smiled to know), I staged a sort of autodidactic protest. I read Huxley and Rabelais, Updike, Pynchon, Bradbury, Steinbeck, Keats and Gregory Corso, William Goldman (I was the first in my school to discover The Princess Bride) and Letters from the Earth.

In the end, my rebellion against that teacher (and others), was a more instructive protest against the curriculum than those photogenic throngs of book-spooked parents who now and then storm school boards demanding that Huck Finn be purged from the library, and an effigy of Mark Twain burned in the quad at Homecoming.

The event that somehow reminded me of Sherry, Mr. Maas and sophomore English was Terry McAuliffe’s defeat in Virginia, who was — according to the media — undone by militant parents haranguing school boards. McAuliffe lost — for many excellent reasons — to a dog-whistling nebbish, but his coup de grace was a statement captured on video. He said, offhand, with eminent common sense, that parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what to teach.

For anyone who regards a teacher as an educated professional in a specialized field — like, for example, an attorney or a master plumber — this statement in entirely reasonable. Indeed, one of the clichés of every TV legal drama is a judge warning a defiant defendant that if he represents himself, he has “a fool for a client.” And how many times have we seen Blondie warn Dagwood to leave the plumbing to the pro, only to watch him snap the pipes and flood the kitchen?

This logic, however, escapes parents who harbor the myth that they have power to mold their kids’ minds. This fallacy leads countless deluded moms and dads to also imagine that teachers — each of whom has perhaps two hours a week with their child — possess even more magical mind-molding powers.

Anyone who’s ever stood in front of thirty catatonic eleventh-graders — as they slouch and sprawl, doze, flirt, spit, chew, fuss with their hair, thumb their phones and scratch themselves obscenely beneath their desks — knows better.

The naiveté of such parents is, in a way, cute. During an era when every kid’s smartphone provides free access to hundreds of hours of laborious hardcore orgasms and thousands of miles of disturbingly violent film footage — blood, gore, guts and severed heads bouncing off naked women — there are earnest moms and dads poring through Toni Morrison and D.H. Lawrence, blushing and fuming as they highlight words like “dick,” “pussy,” “goddamn,” and “slave.”

They know these “bad” words by heart because we all learn them, on the street, in the supermarket, on Thanksgiving from Uncle Herb, before we’re sent to kindergarten. Some we even understand. Our parents did not, could not, shield us from all those richards and kittens. Nor can today’s parents protect their kids from words that literally circulate in the air and metastasize on the internet.

The latest crop of militant parents have forgotten almost everything they were supposed to learn in school. They’ve forgotten how fiercely they ignored almost every word their teachers uttered, and how stubbornly they resisted their own education. Their kids are mounting the same sullen, teenage blockade. They ignore and they forget. Today’s kids are safe from indoctrination because — like yesterday’s kids — they can’t tell an adjective from an adverb or mitosis from osmosis. Nor would they, out of spite, if they could.

Getting a classroom full of normal American kids to embrace — or even sit still and listen to — critical race theory, or any theory more complicated than natural selection, is a fool’s errand that no competent teacher would suggest and no principal would endorse.

So, if all the rage directed at McAuliffe by these parents isn’t really a crusade for curriculum reform, what’s it all about?

Put simply, blacks and books.

Ever since Plessy v. Ferguson and Lady Chatterley, two symbiotic fears — race and sex — have motivated grownups to meddle in the public schools. In the Virginia gubernatorial race, these fearsome threats against pale pupil purity melded into Siamese twins. The white moms and dads of Virginia discovered a schoolbook — assigned reading! — authored by a Black person, who’s a woman — a girl! (with a dirty mouth) — who had written out “explicit” scenes of fornication and violence right there in black ink on snowy pages, exposing their little ones, for the first time in their sheltered Shirley Temple lives (or so mom and dad pretended), with dicks and pussies, whips and slavery, masters and niggers.

“I am shocked,” says Renault, “shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

Your winnings, Gov. Youngkin.