The Education President

Dear Former President George H.W. Bush,

Hello. How are you doing? It’s been a long time since we talked, but I figured that it might be nice to get reacquainted. A lot of stuff has happened since the last time you and I spoke.

Well, maybe “spoke” is the wrong word. I should probably rephrase that. You spoke a lot. I mostly listened. I guess you could say that what we shared wasn’t exactly a dialogue, so much as a speech. That being said, I don’t think I’m to blame. After all, I was only 14 at the time and if I had tried to engage you in civilized discourse, your Secret Service probably would have had me removed the premises. Oh, did I mention that when we met, it was a campaign speech and that I was in the audience? That probably goes a long way to explaining why you might not remember me. Don’t feel bad. I wasn’t particularly noticeable, except for the fact that I was carrying a trumpet at the time.

You see, I was in the school band that played for your arrival during the 1992 presidential campaign, so I suppose that even that trumpet in my hands probably didn’t distinguish me too much from the twenty-some odd other kids who had a trumpet just like mine. And that’s to say nothing about the drummers. It was a fairly inauspicious beginning for me, at least politically speaking. But I promise you that I had already gone a long way to mastering my musical talents at that time and played “Anchors Away” and “Hail to the Chief” along with the best of them that day.

Anyway, getting back to the point, a lot has happened in the world since that fall day in 1992. I’ve been through a lot, and while you’ve mostly stayed out of the major world news, with the exception of that sky-diving escapade on your 80^th birthday, I have a feeling that life is a lot different for you now too. I graduated high school, went to college, worked, went to grad school, worked, went back to grad school, voted for the first time, traveled around the world some, and just generally languished about a lot. You’ve seen the construction of your presidential library in College Station, Texas, had an aircraft carrier and an airport named after you, co-authored a couple of books, hit the lecture circuit, worked for the multi-national conglomerate The Carlyle Group, and of course watched your son become President of the United States. All in all, I’d say it’s been a pretty eventful 12 years or so for the both of us.

Now, Mr. President, I’m going to let you in on something that isn’t exactly a secret, but I don’t think its anything that you and I have ever talked about before. The thing is I’m a Democrat. I’m going to be honest with you right now and say that in 1992, my vote would have gone to Mr. Clinton if I had been old enough to actually cast a ballot. In fact, when he ran for reelection in 1996, the year I turned 18, I did vote for him. That being said, I really want to tell you how sincerely sorry I am that you lost that election. Seriously. There’s no liberal propaganda trickery in that statement. I really felt for you when it was announced that the no-name governor from Arkansas had somehow managed to beat a sitting President, especially one who had such high approval ratings during the Gulf War. I remember sitting in civics class and wondering what you were going to do with the two months that you had left in the White House. It seemed like such a loss to be given that time but not really have anything to do. Sad, really. I know that seems strange that I would feel that way, given that I just told you I would have been one of the people voting you out if I’d had the chance, but that’s the duality of life I suppose. And you’re an intelligent man. I’m sure you understand that people can behave in one way but feel contrary to their actions.

But let’s be honest with each other, we both kinda knew it was coming. I mean, there was the whole recession thing. Although, to be fair, you had very little to do with that and your predecessor is really the one who should have stepped up to the plate to address that issue. Again, I’m sorry that the candidate that I liked used that against you. As if that wasn’t enough, my guy was willing to go on MTV and talk about issues of faux intimacy. (Though, I have to admit that it was weirdly prophetic hearing the man-who-would-be-president admit to preferring boxers over briefs considering that it certainly wasn’t going to be the last we would hear about his…ahem…personal business.) And for every time you got to call yourself the “Education President”, he got to say “It’s the economy, stupid!” And really, which one of those is the better rallying cry?

Speaking of quotations from which there is no return, let’s talk about that “read my lips” thing. I’ve got to say, I’m on your side on this one all the way. Yeah, it was a mistake to say that in public. No one likes to hear a president going back on a comment made about taxes. You really should have just kept your mouth shut and maybe things would have been better, but Mr. President you had no choice. Quite frankly, I’m getting a little sick of the heat you’re taking for making that comment. You had a hard choice to make. You were stuck between a rock and Congress when it came to coming up with a budget for the country and after a long battle you had to admit that your most memorable campaign slogan was about to become as irrelevant as your vice president.

So yes, you went back on your word. But here’s my thing: So what? Being president is about making hard choices. And unfortunately, it sometimes means that the promises that are made in one year are no longer valid later on. It is foolish to assume that the world should change while campaign promises remain the same. And while my party rejoiced when you did that and your party groaned and tried to hide behind their Wall Street Journals, I’d just like to say that I respect you for doing what you understood was right. Yes, people criticized and a whole lot of pundits fell back on that fateful phrase when the fledgling all-news-all-the-time networks began to proselytize how your downfall began. But I like to think that in a moment of honesty, you did what you had to do, despite what people would think

I understand that I’ve got some contrition to do for this too. I admit, I laughed at Dana Carvey and his Saturday Night Live impressions of you. What can I say? I was a young teenager and a funny voice coupled with a strange, squinty-eyed look was all the biting political commentary that I could fathom at the time. I’d like to say I’ve moved beyond that phase of my life completely, but in the spirit of a frank and open discussion I’ll admit that to this day I still find myself muttering that that fake nasal, west-Texas accent “Not gonna do it, wouldn’t be prudent” at strange moments.

My point, Mr. President, is that hard choices need to be made. It takes a certain kind to have the strength to run the country and the political graveyard is full of wishy-washy wannabes that made some strong and not-so-strong (are you listening, Senator Lieberman?) arguments about why they should be that person. What isn’t widely understood in our post-modern political discourse is that strength doesn’t just mean having strong convictions. The strongest people waver, not because they’re weak but because they have an inherent need to understand the world. And let’s face it; the world is a confusing place. The more we learn about it, the more we realize that fast and dirty dualism just doesn’t cut it in a world of more than two people. The truly strong are the ones who can go against what they’ve said earlier, not because they’re caught making promises they can’t keep, but because the world around them is not what it was before.

So, why am I bringing this to your doorstep? Why am I asking you to answer this call to arms that I’ve issued? Yes, it is partially because you used to be the president, but that’s not the whole reason. It’s because I think that when push comes to shove you are a better man than you were an elected official. Some may disagree with me. They’ll point to the scandals that you and your family members have been involved in as illustrations of your failings as a parent. But I’m not going to get into the issues about the choices that your children have made with their lives, without saying that I do believe that if you had truly shown them the world rather than just handed it to them, maybe a lot of people would be better off now, but that’s not what strength is about. Make mistakes. It’s okay. We all make them. But learn from them and teach those lessons to others. You called yourself the “Education President.” If you seize this opportunity, you may finally be able to live up to that claim. It could finally be the rallying cry you hoped it was 12 years ago.

Good luck with it, Mr. President. I look forward to seeing what happens.

Sincerely,

Clovis

Eight Little Letters That Are More Trouble Than They're Worth

Here's my thing: I don’t really like equality.

For my money, equality has gotten America into way more trouble than it’s worth for eight little letters, just over half of which can be considered vowels under the right circumstances. We’ve established doctrines because of it, we’ve made speeches, we’ve sang songs, and we’ve probably engraved it in stone a lot into the nation's public buildings.

Equality isn’t all it's cracked up to be. It’s not the end-all-be-all of social justice. Want proof? How about “Separate, But Equal”? There’s a reason we’re not clamoring to be back into that territory.

Equality is when everyone is on equal footing, something that is unrealistic for this country because in case people haven’t noticed, we’re so not. Yeah, we sort of get it. We understand that there are those worse off, people in need, lost sheep, et cetera. And sometimes (maybe one or two days out of the year) we volunteer our time at soup kitchens or the like to remind ourselves of how not-equal we are.

The problem is while we recognize that not everyone is on the same level, we allow ourselves to cultivate this image that the people who are on the top of the social food chain, the “haves”, somehow got that way by virtue of themselves alone. (I should also probably take this very special time to talk about how much I don’t like the idea of rugged individualism, but one issue at a time…) Don’t get me wrong, some of them did get there independently. We’re nothing if not industrial. Remember the labor movement? How about women’s suffrage? And that’s not just to talk about socially progressive movements. Microsoft and Apple are two über For-Profit companies that completely germinated out of the Protestant work-ethic mainstay. Say what you like about Americans, we are definitely not afraid of the hard work. But that hard work that we’re so proud of in ourselves becomes our undoing when we use it as a justification.

What we should really be striving for isn’t equality, but equity. The difference is that equity is equality but with something nice to say. It places a higher value on what’s right, rather than what’s fair. Inherent in equity is a sense of connection to other people, an acknowledgement that we are all in this together, living together as brothers or perishing together as fools, to paraphrase. It recognizes that those who are underprivileged don’t need the same access to things as everyone else, they need more.

Equality is saying that everyone gets the same sized piece of pie after dinner. Equity says maybe we should skip the pie and take it down to the homeless shelter and give it to people who it would really make their day to have it. After all, we’ve still got cake.

I know, I know. This whole idea flies in the face of American history. I’ve even got what are perhaps the most beautiful words in the pantheon of American voice on the subject inscribed at the top of this page. Who am I to fly in the face of these venerated men who did so much for our fledgling country?

I have a friend who is a high school history and economics teacher in a suburban school district. She told me a couple of years back that for kicks she trained all of her tenth grade history students to automatically chant “dead, fat white guys” whenever someone said the phrase “our Founding Fathers”. Irreverent? Yes, but it makes a point. I don’t think the men who drafted the foundations of our country intended this equality thing to end where it did. They knew there was more to the whole deal, or else why would they have seen to it that the constitution could still be amended after they thought it was done?

Gavin Moony has to my mind the best definition of equity: he calls it “equal access to equal care for equal need.” Do you get it? Equality is Equity Lite. It is pervasive within the concept of equity, but the difference is that equity is what equality becomes once it has evolved. The Founding Fathers, dead, fat white guys that they may be, understood that America had a long way to go. It wasn’t ready for equity yet. It had just won the right to stand on its own under the ideal that no one would ever be able to dictate to it again. The people who won the war couldn’t have taken it if instead of being rewarded for all their hard work they were told, “Sorry, but you’re going to have to share that pitchfork with farmer Ben down the way come harvest time next year, just because it’s the right thing to do.” (Seamlessly segueing into my conversation about communism, also at a later date…)

The point is we are not those people anymore. We can put away the notion of equality where everyone gets the same as everyone else. We can start looking at the reasons why we should be more concerned with everyone getting what they have to have instead of what they ought to have. Equity is a lot like forgiveness. It isn’t given because people deserve it; it’s given because they need it.

Inauguration Day

These ramblings began at 10.14pm on Thursday, December 2, 2004 when I really should have been writing an Epidemiology paper.