Snappy

 Al Jaffee gives snappy answers to the stupid question: Is Al Jaffee dead?

No, he's just really, really tired.

No, but he's taking this coffin for a test ride.

No, he's just taking his retirement to a whole new level.

No, he's just waiting for the next season of MadTV to start.

No, he's just getting a start on that hole to China.

No, but he's hoping to spend the rest of his life as "extra crispy."

No, he has a bunch of pet worms that he's hoping to spend more time with.

No, somebody sutured his eyes closed.

No, "organ failure" just means he can't play Red River Valley at the talent show.

No, after he reached one hundred years old, he decided to turn around and go backward.

No, he just wanted to take a dirt nap. 

No, he wants to see what the Today show will do for him if he reaches two hundred. 

No, but he might be bored to death by all these questions.

Yes. Al Jaffee, who had only recently retired from his career as cartoonist and yukmaster extraordinaire made his final fold-in at the ripe old age of one hundred and two years old. He leaves behind a volume of work that will often be referred to (see this blog) but never duplicated. Some might say he outlived his most recognized home of Mad Magazine, since Al was there for decades through countless staff rearrangements and shufflings. Al Jaffee was always there. 

And now he's not. He stomped on the back pages of Mad Magazine as well as the Terra. He will be missed.

Risky Business

 At Risk. These are the words we use to describe a large number of the kids who go to the school where I teach. At risk of being hungry. At risk of being homeless. At risk of being below grade level in reading. At risk of being below grade level in math. At risk of having to repeat a grade. At risk of being left behind. 

At Risk. 

Swallowed up by a city and a state and a country and a world because for whatever reason they have been bumped out of line or pushed aside in favor for those kids who have two parents. A home where warm meals are available morning, noon and night. A safe place to leave their backpacks and a grownup who will check to see if there is homework or a note from the teacher inside. A neighborhood without sporadic gunfire. With apologies to Charles Elliot Cheese, a place where a kid can be a kid.  

It should come as no surprise when kids scream at us. It is the favored tenor of conversation in many homes of the students I teach. Sometimes the parents drop by the school to scream at us. Because they are at risk too. It is quite often the case that they grew up in a household not unlike the one they described above, with the added complications of the stress compounded by generational risk. They are at risk of losing their homes. Their jobs. Their kids. Their minds. 

Into this trauma influenced reality we are going to try and inject a little reading. Some writing. And some basic arithmetic. And we are going to try to get those standards met while pouring in a heaping helping of social emotional learning. If we can get all of our kids to a place where they can learn by giving them the skills they need to be able to shut out some of the noise, we will have succeeded. The primary focus of this task is introducing them to empathy. "I care for others. I care for myself." Giving them all a chance to breathe and look around in a place where the threats have been removed, so that they can do the things they came to do at school. 

And meanwhile, those of us who are running this enterprise need to keep those words in mind as well. Why can't Johnny read? He's hungry. He's tired. He's homeless. He's trying to figure out how to keep himself going in a world that just might not care enough about him. Those of us show up to the school with a good night's sleep and a home to which we can return run the risk of taking that for granted. 

It's not easy. 

Once Again

 Back in the salt mines we call primary education, we have just moved into the countdown phase of the school year. I did not take my cue from the multitude of children around me. This came as part of our principal's weekly newsletter. We began the week just thirty-four days left. That means that we will be gathered together for less than five weeks with two major sign posts on the horizon: State testing and fifth grade promotion. Both of these rites stand as reminders of how nominally fortunate we are to have lived past the big swinging ax of school closure. The goodbyes that we had anticipated a year ago are now reserved for the departing and incipient middle schoolers. And the staff members who will be looking for new paths and challenges outside our little slice of heaven. 

It's been a tough year. The first half was all about legitimizing our continued existence, and the second found us scrambling to catch up with all those schools who had been quietly preparing for 2023-24 while we were just hanging on. Oh, and there was that part where we were teaching a school full of kids whose awareness of where they are on the one hundred eighty instructional day calendar is vague at best. 

Sometimes I shame myself a little for the way I keep track of the time passing. The day of the week. The time of day. Working for Friday afternoon when I know exactly what the turnaround to Monday morning is. When I look back at twenty-six years of waiting for the weekend, I wonder how sincere my commitment to my students can be. I'll be there early. I'll stay late. I'll take work home with me. I'll go to meetings. I'll do all that with that clock ticking in my head. 

It's the same clock I hear when I'm on Spring Break, or over your standard weekend. It's just a little more pleasant sound when I'm not working. The hope is that I will take my relaxation as seriously as I take my work. One serves the other. I suspect that as the years have passed, I am at once more comfortable with the rhythms of a school year and also more anxious for the bell to ring. 

Not for the first time. And happily, not for the last time. There's always next year. Once again. 

Caller Unavailable

 There was this tense exchange between my wife and I a few mornings back. It centered around the pervasive use of cell phones. I admit to being a bit defensive, since I feel as though I make an effort to put my phone away for chunks of time during the day. My phone is not welcome in my bedroom. This was my conscious choice some years back. I have a long and storied history with sleep challenges and I continue to feel that inviting a device with games and Internet connection into that hallowed space would be a mistake of unspeakable proportions. 

For me. 

That said, I cannot qualify myself as some sort of Luddite who eschews the use of cell phones except for emergency calls. I once stood on the ramparts of the no cell phones on campus battle and watched as we were overrun. Over the past few years, I have become part of a text thread within the walls of my elementary school that acts as both a means of dispatching help to classrooms that need it and a series of snarky comments that we would never say out loud in front of children. I am also available for the occasional call or text from home, when my wife needs to check in with me about some home emergency or other. My phone is set to vibrate, so I can peek at the relevance of whatever notification has been allowed to break my cone of silence. I try not to respond unless something is on fire. 

This puts me directly at odds with the prohibition we have put in place for kids at our school who will insist that their parents told them directly that they needed to carry their personal connection machine in their pocket at all times. Mister Caven does. 

Sigh. 

It's different when you're nine. The distractions with which I struggle as an adult are not likely to be ignored by someone who is still figuring out how to time their restroom breaks. Which is where most of the cell phone action takes place at our school these days. I'm tempted to sign up for TikTok first to see how many videos get posted using the Horace Mann bathrooms for a backdrop, and second to tell kids that I'm on TikTok. That should kill off any interest quicker than any kind of administrative mandate. 

And while I'm riding the hypocrisy roller coaster, I can still recall fondly when I was unavailable. I remember what being away was like: Three months every summer for the bulk of my youth, no phone, no electricity, no running water. Just the sky above and the earth below. My mother used to say that if we tried to do that with kids today, they'd call Child Protective Services. 

Things have changed a lot since then. 

For me. 

Kangaroo Court

 Apparently, Tennessee was tired of losing their share of the bad choices spotlight to Florida. I am currently of the belief that if Ron DeSantis wants to keep his state in the front of the fear and hate pack, he's going to have to really dig in and make some really ugly stuff happen. Strike that. Uglier stuff. 

Last week, the supermajority of Republicans in the Tennessee state legislature voted to expel two of its members. There were three members on the docket, but they didn't expel the white woman. They voted out the two young black men. And what brought on this extreme reaction? The three had been accused by Republicans of “knowingly and intentionally” bringing “disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives” after they led a gun control protest on the House floor last month without being recognized. This is a pretty high bar, considering the work this body has churned out over the past few months. Most notably perhaps is the anti-drag bill that was signed into law just a month ago. Back in 2021, they passed a bill that allows all its state citizens to carry a handgun without a permit. That should give you a sense of where their collective head is, and maybe why they didn't take kindly to a few members of that body supporting and encouraging the protest that was brought to the state capital in the wake of the mass murder just a couple weeks ago. 

Representatives Justin Jones and Justin Pearson were given the boot because they believed, like the crowd that assembled outside the chamber, that it was past time for lawmakers to do something about the death of their constituents. Justin Jones was elected to serve the residents of District 52 by winning all votes cast there. All of them. Justin Pearson won his race with ninety-eight percent of the vote in District 86. To look at these districts and not see a racial component to all this "disorder and dishonor" would be ridiculous in the extreme. The expulsion of two of Tennessee's black lawmakers further limits the tiny percentage of seats held by anyone who wasn't white. 

It also further limits the number of lawmakers willing to fight against the status quo of Republicans boosted by the National Rifle Association. Rather than fine or censure these young men, the powers that be in Nashville chose to do something they had only done twice before in one hundred fifty-seven years. in 1980, a representative was found guilty of accepting a bribe while in office, and the most recent before the Justins came in 2016 when another member was expelled over allegations of sexual harassment. Mister Jones and Mister Pearson didn't take a bribe, nor were they accused of sexual harassment. They were guilty of speaking up for a marginalized group while being part of a marginalized group. 

We have not heard the last of these two young men. They will keep fighting. We all will. 

Bud Wiser

 Robert Klein used to do a bit about Budweiser's ad campaign: "This Bud's for anyone who's got a job or goes to school or has a neck." Back in the day, this was an illustration of just how pervasive that particular brand of beer was. As I grew into manhood, I came to understand that this was workingman's beer. One of the dads down the street kept cases stacked in his garage like some people keep firewood. I should pause here to point out that this particular workingman worked for IBM. But, a job's a job and a beer's a beer. 

I can also make mention of the fact that while I used to swill cheap beer (Miller Lite) as a general avocation over a period of years, I did not sully my palate with any of that horrid Budweiser. Growing up in Colorado, I also avoided Coors, in part because of the fascist stigma it held and also because even drunks like me needed to have standards. 

All of this is exposition to the new beer wars. Not the one fought in the eighties about the best tasting lite beer. Not the one being waged between IPAs and pale ales and the rest of the mysteries I missed out on by retiring from the beer game before the turn of the century. I am talking here about what Kid Rock did with a machine gun and four cases of Bud Light. In response to Anheuser Bush to choosing a trans spokesperson, Dylan Mulvaney, he seems to be calling for a boycott of not just the blue cans of Bud Light but all their products. Travis Tritt, the somewhat noted country star, chose to hop on the bigot bandwagon and declared that "I will be deleting all Anheuser-Busch products from my tour hospitality rider. I know many other artists who are doing the same."

That shudder you probably could not detect was the one that wasn't running through the hallways of the Anheuser Busch breweries. It's almost as if they had made a conscious choice to expand their demographic outside of those who listen to Kid Rock and Travis Tritt and decided there was a world outside the knuckle-dragging everyman. Or the myth associated with the knuckle-dragging everyman. They sell Becks and Stella Artois to a planet of thirsty humans. I'm sure losing the Tritt-Rock sliver of their market will impact them, but the rest of the beer-drinking planet will be okay without their anger and fear.

For the record, Miller Brewing did not go under when I stopped swilling their brew, and I don't imagine that this transphobic tantrum will amount to anything but a surge in business for Anheuser Busch. See, they're a big corporation and endeavors like hooking up with the LGBTQ+ community wasn't done on a whim. Bud Light has been associated with the queer beer drinker since 1977 when Coors decided they were going to require all its employees to declare their sexuality via a polygraph test. A burgeoning gay pride movement took them at their word and supported the boycott and adopted Bud as their cheap beer alternative.

So, Kid Rock wants to buy a few cases and show off his mediocre marksmanship? Good for him. Thanks for supporting the cause, Mister Rock.

Right To Life

 Okay. The Tennessee legislature is keeping themselves very busy protecting children safe from drag shows. This is going on in spite of the fact that drag shows have not killed a single child in Tennessee. Not one. Ever. Guns, on the other hand, have just recently killed three nine year olds inside their private Christian School. That school had "a few staff members" carrying weapons. Nobody shot back until the police showed up and shot the murderer of those three children and three adult staff members. As yet, there has been no mention as to whether any of those staff members were the ones packing heat. 

Of course, it only took a few moments for the pointy heads on the right to latch on to the news that the shooter was trans, having recently adopted he/him pronouns. Abruptly, it was apparent for these pinheads that trans people were sick and murderous. Never mind the overwhelming majority of cis white males doing the killing in virtually every other school shooting, at last there was a thread that could be traced back to something that was not guns as the source of the problem. 

See, men dressed as women reading to kids is just a hop skip and a jump away from a person with a truckload of mental issues including gender dysphoria shooting up a school. And there 's probably no reason to bring up the fact that Governor Bill Lee just banned gender affirming care in his state for anyone under eighteen. And you don't have to have any kind of permit to carry a handgun in Tennessee. Authorities report that all the weapons used by the shooter at Covenant School were purchased legally. 

But the problem isn't the guns or the rules surrounding them. It's men dressing as women. The problem isn't the AR-15. It's men dressing as women. Rather than respond with any sort of legislation that might make such a horrible tragedy less likely to occur, the Tennessee legislature is looking to expel three of its members for taking the side of hundreds of protestors who came to the capitol in Nashville to demand a change. You may have already surmised that the three lawmakers are members of the Democratic Party. The resolution reads that these three “did knowingly and intentionally bring disorder and dishonor to the House of Representatives.”

By contrast, State Representative William Lamberth chose to engage with the protestors by asking them rhetorically, “If there is a firearm out there that you’re comfortable being shot with, please show me which one it is.” He went on to say, “So you’re not going to like my answer, and, look, I’m going to say that straight up. It’s not about this one gun.”

Well, of course not. It's about men dressed as women. 

Disorder and dishonor, indeed.