On the way home from picking up my wife at the airport this early morning, we drove past El Rincon School.
I was not sure whether to laugh or cry.
Repeating scenes played out at campuses across Culver City and the state, I saw clusters of guileless, pure-hearted grammar school children, instantly converted into pliable human steering wheels by their kind-hearted adult masters.
Aww, wasn’t it as sweet as an old-fashioned family portrait?
Da widdle childrens, ordered around like robots borrowed from a moonscape, pranced over to their display spaces at the intersection of Overland and Sawtelle. They adjusted their scripted little faces while bearing signs protesting cuts to the state education budget.
Having been out of the country for a fortnight, my wife asked the occasion of the demonstration. I explained that it was Manipulation Day, a California protest that leaked into almost three dozen states.
The so-clever organizers winced when I called it Manipulation Day.
They said it was a “Day of Action.”
How beautifully bureaucratic.
How typically undescriptive, uninformative and misleading.
What can you expect from union organizers?
Their breed prefers speaking in sentences where the longest words pack one syllable or less.
Surely Manipulation Day was the most foolish, puerile way to spend a school day that has been dreamed up in years.
Why not organize a friendly neighborhood group tomorrow to protest the fact your can ran out of gas after being driven several hundred miles.
Don’t blame Manipulation Day on the innocent. The children don’t know any better.
Evidently, their kind-hearted adult masters don’t, either.
As we drove by El Rincon, I might have reached into my own heart and tapped a slender slice of sympathy for the pathetic pint-sized pawns of their kind-hearted adult masters if not for several impediments.
Weren’t those kind-hearted adult masters the same loons who had spent the past week hooking their thumbs into their ears, beefing obscenely about how uncaring Sen. Jim Bunning was acting toward hard-working unemployed Democratic Americans?
Hearing liberals mock serious people grows so tiresome.
Surely some among them are capable of offering vaguely more cerebral rejoinders.
Did they know why the eminently commendable Mr. Bunning took his heroically principled stand?
There isn’t any money to pay for the proposed bill, boys and girls? To which runt rascals like U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman and Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid said, in well-practiced unison, “We will print more.”
Didn’t public school teachers learn the rudiments of fiscal responsibility back in their Teachers College days?
Take a memo, Murgatroyd:
Dear Teachers:
Since even Sacramento cannot spend what it does not have, unless you do away with vast social welfare programs for illegal immigrants and for permanently unemployed legal Americans, unless you stop sending the most liberal boys and girls on the Election Day ballot to the Legislature, there never will be enough money for schools.
As a mature gentleman whose tastes favor the simple and uncomplicated, surely responsible teachers and responsible parents, working collaboratively, can design an intelligent fiscal scheme with which to confront the Legislature. Those are not Mensa boys in Sacramento.
Returning to Manipulation Day:
Standing on a street corner, barking like dogs suffering from distemper, is an undignified, crayon-level gimmick that insults the intelligence of sober grownups interested in reaching a palatable solution.
Next year on Manipulation Day, perhaps the kind-hearted organizers will herd all of their mind-numbed puerile pawns into the Culver City Dog Park. Then we can shoot a group picture instead of traipsing from campus to campus spewing those darned pesky greenhouse gas emissions.
