The reason they call it the Web is that it catches more
flies-by-night than the aluminum siding business. Some image,
poignant in its charisma or its grotesquerie, captivates the
public imagination and suddenly millions of otherwise productive
citizens must stop whatever they are doing and see the kitty
trampoline unto the roof or the pea which sprouted in a man’s
lung. Some of these buzz arts are followed by buzzards, as
30-year careers are crushed by 30 seconds of crassness. This
week’s target was Sarah Palin, the former governess of Alaska, if
that’s the correct way to say female governor.
What Palin did to cash in the wroth ire of retiring
liberals nationwide was to roll her eyes. It wasn’t what she
said, it wasn’t even how she said it, it was that she turned and
gave a knowing look that amounted to a rolling of the eyes. Well,
in the 1990s Bill Clinton promised us a revolution in optics and
I guess we finally got one.
The story, in case you have been occupying yourself with
more momentous matters like Wall Street and Tiger Woods going
down, is as follows. A lady, if that’s the word I’m looking for,
was protesting the filming of Sarah’s documentary series. Her
idea of a political banner was a horizontal horror about 100 feet
wide (serving as a new sort of picket fence) bearing the legend:
WORST GOVERNOR EVER. Sarah respectfully asked for a breakdown on
the forensic method used to calibrate the degrees of worseness in
the gubernatorial sweepstakes. The woman responded: “You walked
out on your responsibility to serve your term when cash was waved
in front of your face, and you left to become a
celebrity.”
Quoth Sarah in an excellent comeback, both witty riposte
and logical rejoinder: “Oh, you wanted me to be your governor!
I’m honored! Thank you!” That is as quick-on-your-political-feet
as anyone this side of Dennis Miller, although Democrats dismiss
it as a dumb broadside.
Then she asked Our Lady of the Presumption what she did for
a livelihood when she wasn’t stirring up a lively ‘hood.
“A teacher.”
At this point, Sarah makes a turn-to-the-right to glance
toward someone off-camera. The left wing of the blogosphere has
been
ululating in outrage over the perception that her turn was
not dexterous but sinister. She rolled her eyes at a teacher! At
the whole teaching profession! What if she becomes a roll model?!
Why, the optic nerve of that woman! It’s bad enough that she
turns heads, now she’s rolling eyes!
Sarah herself lost no time twittering back to these twits
with the standard line about how my grandparents were
teachers, my father was a teacher, ladidah. (Well, my grandfather
was an eye-roller, so there. He used to roll those eyes up a hill
one by one in 100-degree weather back during the Depression.) I
would have just answered that all this cash-waving made my eyes
roll as I tried to keep them on the prize. And immediately
started selling T-shirts: “Eye roll my own!” “Eye roll with the
punches!”
TRUTH BE TOLD, if truth is a meaningful element in such
discussions, I join Sarah in rolling my eyes at teachers. The
profession of teaching is an honorable one, but the leftist
teachers who dominate schools today are dishonoring it by much of
what they profess. Look at this woman herself. First, her
conclusion that Sarah left office just to cash in her celebrity
sounds like one she reached via a long jump, hardly the stuff of
judicious analysis. Second, her bestowal of the Worst Governor
Ever lifetime achievement award based on that critique smacks of
the hyperbolic rhetoric students are supposed to unlearn in
school.
My own children, despite attending Jewish parochial
schools, are constantly subjected to this brand of haranguing by
the teachers in the secular department. One daughter had an
entire test in science period devoted to global warming. A class
play about forests (in 3rd grade!) included speaking birds who
advocated for killing the woodchopper for his desecration of
trees.
A different daughter, as a junior in high school, had to
write a report on an angry novel about Southern racism in the
early 20th Century, where blacks had to wait for whites to go
first over the bridge and a host of similar indignities. In her
essay, she wrote that such atrocities are a thing of the past. In
the margin the teacher commented: “Who says?” In each case, I
considered unleashing angry missives but remembered that these
activists held my children’s grades hostage.
So when these teachers stop being so contentious and
tendentious we will begin again to eye them with respect. In the
meantime, they should not be surprised to see some rotation of
pupils.
