There’s an old saying: what begins as a ten minute, two character comedy ends as farce.
A couple of weeks ago, I put up a post that described an interesting moral quandary posed to me by the State of Texas and its education contractor, Pearson, Inc, what I had decided to do about it, and why. Go read it, if you haven’t, I’ll wait.
Hey, welcome back, we missed you. Okay, well just a few days after putting that up I was creamed by a car while out for a morning twenty mile ride (turned out to be ten miles on the bike, two in the ambulance, about 600 feet on the wheeled bed) and while I was sitting in the hospital, enjoying legal opiates, I got an email from Aman Batheja, of the Dallas Ft. Worth Star Telegram, saying he had seen my post, wanted to write a story about it, and had contacted the Texas Education Agency to get their comment.
I figured this was something actually better dealt with on morphine, so I gave him a call from my hospital room. As he told me, and as he eventually wrote, the TEA had no idea I had blogged about it (I’m betting they had no idea the play had even been selected for the testing program) and told Aman that since I had gone and blabbed about it, now they couldn’t use the play after all. Because it’s no longer a “secure testing item.” The presumption: ambitious/dishonest Texas highschoolers, knowing my play might be on their final exam, will order it up from Samuel French, read it, study it, maybe even stage a performance or two to mine its subtleties and thus do better on their test than they deserved to. I would argue that any high school student who puts that much effort into acing a test should probably be appointed to the State Board of Ed, but nobody asked me.
So, it all ends with a humorless bureaucratic bleat. No play on the test, no $2000 to donate to a Still Unnamed Recipient (although the article gives the surprise away.) Much ado about nothing, to mention another play that — heavens forfend– also has the word God in it. A couple of ironies to note:
All my public agonizing over it turns to naught because… I publicly agonized about it. It honestly never occured to me to keep it secret, and I read over the original letter from Pearson (the testing company) and there’s nothing about confidentiality in it. (Bet there will be from now on.) Who that makes the stupid one in this case, I don’t know.
And, while I’m sure the content of year end tests need to be highly confidential, harumph harumph, I would also bet a mixed meat platter at Iron Works BBQ in Austin that the good people at the Texas Education Agency were motivated to pull the play partially because I had gone and complained about the whole thing on a blog. Now that it’s in the newspaper, though, it will liveontheInternetforever, adding to the legend of Texas: the only place in the Union where whey worship a God Who Must Not Be Named.
And let’s not hear any more blue-state grumbling about those dumb Texans. I know Texans, I have dated a Texan, some of my best friends (really!) are Texans, my own father is a graduate of Highland Park (Dallas) High School. In fact, to those of you who are irritated, enraged, amused or otherwise inclined to wring something positive from this whole kerfuffle, I highly suggest a donation to the Texas Freedom Network, Texans of good heart and true who are fighting to keep reason, science, and historical accuracy in Texas classrooms. I just chipped in a bit myself. I mean, the whole thing shouldn’t be a total loss, for God’s sake.
In the next post: what I was going to do with all that Texas moolah, at last.
Just got back from a five day trip with the family to the Internetless wilds of Door County, Wisconsin, which, in case you didn’t know, is where doors come from. I did my best to relax rest and recuperate — honest to God, or as Texas would prefer I say, honest to Pete — but those who know me could have guessed that it’s not the easiest thing for me to adjust to being less than well. Turns out: breaking two bones in your lower back really slows you down, whether you want to or not.
Turns out it was a pretty bad week to check out, blog-topics wise. There’s much to discuss, and what I was going to do with that money from Texas, and why I won’t be getting that money from Texas, and why the place I was going to send the money is going to get money anyway, and I’ll get to that, I swear, but first, thank you all, all hundred plus of you, strangers and listeners and friends new and old and near and far (How’s Gitmo, Jackie?) for all your well wishes and kind words and cheerful imprecations aimed at the person who hit me. (Let us cease with that, and instead agree that nobody involved had a very good day.) There is some debate in the comment threads below as to how “lucky” I am — we agree it would have been truly lucky not to have been injured — but let us agree I am blessed, to have so many people tell me how happy they are I’m still around. Can I say “blessed” in Texas?
Four days after my accident, I’m back home, with a nice sackful of pain meds. Wiser folks than me — especially my brother, a lawyer — advise me that it’s not maybe the smartest thing to blab in public about what might turn into a legal case, but the fact is, being able to write about the incident here, and mostly to hear all of your comments, good wishes, and yes, even well-meaning criticisms, has been a great help to me. Stuck in a hospital miles from home, surrounded by very well meaning and caring strangers, can be a lonely place, even with my good friend morphine. So it’s meant a lot to me to hear from all of you.
And since one of the things I learned years ago was never to leave an audience hanging… here’s the rest of the story:
About a month ago, I received a letter forwarded to me from Samuel French. A company called Pearson, which contracts with the State of Texas to provide education and testing materials, wanted to use a very short play I wrote some years ago called Game Theory (published in Ten Minute Plays from Actors Theater of Louisville, Vol. 6) as part of a test called “End-of-Course English III Assessment.” For ten years to come, high school students taking this exam would read my play, and then have to answer questions about it. Neat.
But… they wanted to make a change in the text. They wanted to cut the phrase “From God’s sake” from one of the lines.
I emailed a very nice person at Pearson and confirmed that they wanted the play, and what they wanted it for. I was assured they would use the whole play — it’s so short an excerpt wouldn’t be of much use — and that they would pay me for its use. (I’m a big proponent of writers getting paid for their work, even when that writer isn’t me.) I asked about the requested change, and was told, “It is the Texas Education Agency’s policy to keep anything that could possibly be offensive out of its assessment tests. Apparently “for God’s sake” falls into that category.”
What I decided to do about it, and why, is after the jump.
In tribute to the late Daryl Gates, former LAPD Chief, I am reposting a story I told last year as part of a Chicago Public Radio event. I apologize again for the typos, etc… this is my rough notes for the story I told out loud that night.
I also want to recommend the LA Times obit of Chief Gates, linked above. He was an fascinating figure in Los Angeles’ history, and the country’s. He was an incredibly polarizing figure, especially along racial lines, but he would have denied, quite sincerely and fervently, being a racist. In my view, he had a very simple view of the world: there were good guys, and bad guys, and his job was to protect the first group and aggressively pursue, arrest, and if need be kill the second. That the second group seemed to be mostly Latino and African American was an accident of history or sociology or maybe personal choice, who knows. In fact, he probably bristled at the people who pointed out that the wrath of the LAPD seemed to fall so often on minorities… they were the bad guys; what did race have to do with it? Why, he was proud to serve with many fine Black and Latino officers…
I lived in the city he helped to burn and I knew people who feared Gates’ officers because of the color of their own skin so I can’t help but think the city and the country is far better off now that he and his generation have left positions of power, particularly positions wielding deadly force. But it’s worth a moment to consider, at his passing, how he looked at the world, and how, at some deep level, he simply could not understand why people were so mad at him.
You can find it here. A commenter has already taken me to task for not mentioning Diane Johnson, the co-screenwriter of The Shining. It is true, and I’m slightly ashamed, as a writer myself. That said, Kubrick was known for running roughshod over his writers, and I don’t think anyone would deny that what you end up with is, almost purely, his vision. And I wonder what Ms. Johnson thinks about the finished film… if anybody knows, say so in comments.
My latest column addresses and rights an injustice that happened only in my own mind. Scary.
By the way, one of the commenters asked me what I thought about the sequel, presumably, “Hannibal.” For the record, I thought the book was hateful and awful, dripping with contempt for the reader and its own characters, and I refused to see the movie. So there.
A column about the movie Pitch Black, but what I’m really interested in, of course, is speculative evolutionary biology. Please chime in with your thoughts here or there.
I have been interested, to the point recently of somewhere between deep concern and obsession, with the nature of the political divide. We don’t disagree anymore, we loathe. Maybe it was always thus, but it sure has been that way for a long time now. I heard Republican representatives talk today about “taking our country back.” Which was what Howard Dean was saying in 2004. Clearly, although the two sides think differently, they feel the same.
I am aware that many people today hate President Obama to the same extent, or even more, than other people hated President Bush. And one could argue that this equivalency — and there is equivalence, at least in the vehemence of feeling - is in itself sufficient explanation. That is, it’s not who we’re hating, it’s the hating itself: our essential, tribal nature drives us to seek an Opponent and affix to him (or her) all Blame and Responsibility for That Which Is Wrong, and we shall Cure Our Ills by Fighting that Individual. Fine, and I think that’s true, to a shocking extent. We are all far less rational than it is comforting to believe.
But… I watched the President’s speech today in front of the House Democrats. It is entirely impromptu, no prepared texts. And I can understand entirely why people might disagree with him. His central argument that we in America should be “neighborly” and “look out for each other, ” with the unstated implication that this should be done via the power of the state, strikes intelligent people as wrong and dangerous, and as an affront to liberty and responsibility. I totally dig that, and in certain circumstances, usually when paying my taxes, find myself, if not in complete agreement, then certainly sympathetic.
But, how in the world can people look at this well-spoken, articulate, sincere man, who is at least as honest in his goals and his ideology as his opponents are in theirs, and hate him? Loathe him? I honestly don’t get it. Any explanation would be welcome.
(To anticipate one: his opponents to a great degree deny that he is sincere. They believe he is “deceptive,” and is hiding his true nature, which is far more cynical/ideological/ambitious than he allows himself to appear. Thus they can ascribe to him all kinds of unpleasant characteristics for which there is no apparent evidence. But I don’t really understand where the initial assumption of his deception comes from, either.)
(To anticipate another: yes, some of his opponents hate him because he is black. But I am not interested in that, because it is not interesting, nor is it sufficient.)
