Author: leeduigon(patty)

We have a wild rabbit who hangs out with us. Sometimes when we’re sitting in our lawn chairs, the bunny sits with us, nibbling the grass. One of the neighbors provides her (or him–we can’t tell) with sunflower seeds. Often if you whistle to the bunny, she’ll come bouncing across the yard to get closer to you.

Most years, we get baby bunnies. Once there were a couple of them frolicking in Patty’s garden. Another time I was standing in the parking lot and a few of the babies chased each other around and around me where I stood. Eventually the babies move away, but the big bunny stays.

All right, so I sound sappy–so what? We love these little beggars. They are a testimony that God’s stuff still works, even if man’s stuff doesn’t. The bunnies, the woodpeckers, the doves, and the squirrels around here just go about their business, even as our  civilization’s business melts into a corrupted mess.

We have our Lord’s promise that eventually He will put everything to rights, regenerate His whole creation. The date for that is already marked on His calendar. He will not fail to do it. Amen!

How’s this for a far-out crazy fantasy?

The governor of a state gets caught using the services of a prostitute and all sorts of details emerge: we learn the guy leaves his socks on during the act of hanky-panky. He resigns in disgrace, but shortly afterward resurfaces as the host of his own TV show.

Another governor is exposed as a sexual predator and a degenerate, who also surrounded himself with crooks who robbed the state blind. He, too, resigns in disgrace, but shortly afterward resurfaces as the subject of a TV movie and a moral guru of some kind.

A high-profile Congressman has to resign because he got caught emailing nude pictures of himself to women who really did not want to receive them, but shortly resurfaces as a candidate for mayor of New York City–and they don’t laugh him off the stage.

A U.S. Senator is sued by foreign prostitutes for non-payment for services rendered. He is also exposed using his position of trust to get special favors for campaign donors. Finally, his neighbor in D.C. complains about loud orgies at all hours of the night. And nothing happens.

All of these wretches belong to the same political party, whose members regularly lecture the American people on how to live their lives. And this is the party in power.

Aren’t you glad it’s only a fantasy?

Today a few voters in my home town will go to the polls to elect three local school board members and pass the school budget. Because the election is in April, the voter turnout will be but a trickle. To give you an idea of how the issue is handled, the lawn signs say “Vote Yes!” but they don’t tell you what you’re voting “yes” for.

This is a very small town, two miles across at its widest point. It has only four schools. The one-year budget to operate those four schools is just a shade under $31 million, an average of just over $7.5 million per school. I find it hard to believe it really costs that much. But then the great thumping lion’s share of the expense is for salaries and benefits.

Public school teachers and administrators and second-grade guidance counselors and gender coaches are public servants. They are rapidly becoming the public’s masters. Retire at 55 with a lavish pension, spend the next 25 or 30 years going on cruises or raising palominos on your own little horse farm–while the rest of us go on working till we drop.

Yes, we can always vote “No” on the school budget. But if it fails, the school board need merely to appeal to the State Commissioner of Education, who will restore all the cuts and turn the election into a total exercise in futility.

Ain’t democracy grand? Maybe we ought to try it sometime.

At Cedar Hills Elementary School, Duval County, Florida, a teacher recently dictated this sentence to her fourth-grade class, had them all write it down: “I am willing to give up some of my constitutional rights in order to be safer or more secure.”

 Not Lord Dunsany, not Tolkien, not C.S. Lewis, not even Fritz Leiber or Harry Turtledove, in their wildest flights of imagination, ever came up with anything so fantastic as the notion that public education is a worthwhile enterprise. Maybe Poe or H.P. Lovecraft could have generated dark fantasies to rival the reality of public schooling–but what could be more terrifying than to understand that we have sacrificed whole generations of our children to this idol?

Do these 10-year-olds in Cedar Hills even understand what a “constitutional right” is? Yeah, sure. Do they understand that, in the words of the Declaration of Independence, they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights? ROFL! Declaration of what? What does “inalienable” mean? Do we get our rights from space aliens in UFOs? Oh, what does it matter, as long as our glorious rulers make us safer?

I’m a fantasy writer. It’s my job to make up weird things. But I’ve never made up anything as weird, as creepy, as counter-functional, or as insulting to basic intelligence as public education.

When I was a kid, I had a stamp collection. When I went to college and became a genius, I forgot all about it. That’s how you wind up losing your stamp collection. In fact, that’s how you wind up losing a lot of things: you’re lucky if you don’t lose your soul.

Now I’m not talking about Green Stamps, which my generation’s parents used to collect and turn them in for all sorts of things, from wobbly bowling balls to a jack that might hold up your car long enough for you to change a tire. Nor am I talking about the most popular stamps collected these days–food stamps.

I mean postage stamps–and the older and the more exotic, the better.

My Aunt Gertie–who died some years ago at the age of 90, in the same room in which she was born–had a stamp collection that she started as a girl and continued into the 1970s. Oddly enough, although I often used to spend happy hours “helping” my grandpa, her father, with his really impressive stamp collection, nobody ever mentioned to me that Gertie had one, too. Not until a few days ago.

So yesterday I whiled away an afternoon exploring that collection. You know, stamps used to be quite fancy–real works of art, engraved and reproduced on tiny bits of paper. Stamps can tell a story. They preserve history. Aunt Gertie was especially proud of her complete set of 1911 stamps from Persia, marking the start of a new dynasty there. Portraits look out at you from the pages of the stamp album. Some of them I recognized–Eva Peron, Sun Yat-Sen, Franco, Trujillo, Queen Elizabeth II as a little girl. And about others I hadn’t a clue, although once upon a time they were all men and women who were famous.

Next thing I knew, it was almost time for supper: and my spirit was relaxed. Not that the 19th and 20th centuries were restful times, far from it. But there’s something about visiting them via a stamp album that makes them restful now–a reminder of grim days long since gone, and troubles overpast: the world and its history in God’s hands, not ours.

We would’ve dropped it long ago, and broken it.

I’m sitting here trying to write, and there’s the gavone with the leaf-blower right outside my window. Shutting the window does no good: the bloody machine is as big as a jet engine. And, oh–here comes another one! Twice as much noise!

I spent the whole morning at the eye doctor’s, and as they were extremely slow-moving today, I got to watch tons of TV. A hundred and fifty cable channels to choose from, and they’re showing “Ambush Makeovers”? So I picked up an issue of New York Magazine, in search of some distraction, only to discover–very quickly–that just about every article in the magazine, regardless of its purported subject matter, turned into a commercial for homosexuality. It must be a very big thing for New Yorkers.

Whatever pearls of wisdom I meant to deposit here today, they’ve been driven out of my head. Pffft–gone! I suppose I could write about our glorious U.S. Senate trying to get rid of the Second Amendment without going through the lawful process of amending the Constitution–but it’s a done deal, what could I possibly say that would make any difference? They’ll be whittling away the First Amendment next (you only need it if you’re a community organizer or some idiot who works for MSNBC).

Maybe tomorrow will be better.