Fellow List Members,
This article is forwarded for those members of the forum who
are politically inclined, this may wet your voracious
appetite for American politics which is both substantiative
and homourous.
Have a pleasant moment.
Adios,
OB Silla
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CHATTERBOX
George W., Folklorist
Timothy Noah
Posted Thursday, Nov. 4, 1999, at 9:48 a.m.
George W. Bush gave a speech
[http://www.georgewbush.com/speeches/education/truegoals.asp] on
Nov. 2 advocating "moral education." Chatterbox agrees that
"values" should play a larger role in educating children,
which is why he supports well-regulated programs requiring
high-school kids to perform volunteer service of some kind. A
danger of injecting "values" more fully into school
curricula, however, is that if it isn't done thoughtfully, it
will end up presenting certain pious and erroneous sentiments
as fact. This is an oft-noted weakness of some of the liberal
"values" teaching that already goes on in schools--a lot of
silly misinformation about the environment and ancient
African civilizations, for example, routinely ends up being
passed along by bumfuzzled
[http://www.slate.com/Code/chatterbox/chatterbox.asp?Show=10/29/99&idMessage=3908]
elementary-school teachers. This drives conservatives (and
even many liberals) batty. Increasingly, something similar
seems to be happening when "conservative" values (like a
literal belief in the Bible) get taught at the expense of
evolutionary science. If moral lessons are to be taught more
forthrightly in schools, it's important that the distinction
between knowledge and folklore be maintained.
In his speech, though, Bush himself seems to have stumbled
over that distinction. In a litany of examples in which
teen-agers have shown "character and courage beyond measure,"
Bush cited the following:
When a gun is aimed at a seventeen-year-old in Colorado--and
she is shot for refusing to betray her Lord.
This refers to Cassie Bernall, one of the teen-agers shot by
their classmates Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at last
April's Columbine High School massacre. Shortly after the
shooting, the horrifying story spread that before she was
shot, one of the two killers asked her if she believed in
God. She said yes, and the gun was fired. The anecdote became
the basis for cover stories in the Weekly Standard and
Christianity Today and for a best-selling book, She Said Yes:
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall
[http://bn.bfast.com/booklink/click?sourceid=412995&ISBN= 874869870],
written by Cassie's mother, Misty Bernall. But as was
reported somewhat tentatively on Sept. 25 in Salon
[http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/09/23/columbine/index.html]
and subsequently confirmed elsewhere, the story almost
certainly isn't true. "We strongly doubt that conversation
ever occurred," Steve Davis, spokesman for the Jefferson
County, Colo., sheriff's office, told the Washington Post's
Hanna Rosin.
What investigators now believe really happened is that another
girl, Valeen Schnurr, was shot in both arms and then asked if
she believed in God. Schnurr said yes and, for whatever
reason, the assailant wandered off without harming her
further. (Schnurr recovered and is now a freshman at the
University of Northern Colorado.) She Said Yes acknowledges
this in a backhanded way, with the caveat that "the exact
details of Cassie's death ... may never be known." In the
Post piece, which appeared on Oct. 14, Rosin explained that
Schnurr is not going out of her way to tell her story,
because whenever she does it's interpreted as a betrayal of
Bernall. "You will never change the story of Cassie," the
Bernalls' pastor, Dave McPherson, told Rosin:
The church is going to stick to the martyr story. It's the
story they heard first, and circulated for six months
uncontested. You can say it didn't happen that way, but the
church won't accept it. To the church, Cassie will always say
yes, period.
What goes for the church apparently goes for George W. Bush
too. It's inconceivable that Bush and his staff don't know
the Bernall story has been discredited; Bush's speechwriter,
Mike Gerson, was until a few months ago a journalist, for
Pete's sake. (A very good one; Chatterbox used to work with
him at U.S. News.) At the risk of sounding judgmental--and
meaning, of course, no disrespect to Cassie Bernall and her
tragic murder--Chatterbox concludes that Bush's decision to
use the story anyway is something a little worse than
exploitative. It's immoral.
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TODAY IN SLATE
Jeffrey Goldberg Asks Jerry Falwell: Am I the Antichrist?
[http://www.slate.com/Features/anti/anti.asp]
Who's Afraid of Naomi Wolf?
[http://www.slate.com/framegame/entries/99-11-04_45523.asp]
George W. Exploits Teen-Age Girl
[http://www.slate.com/Code/chatterbox/chatterbox.asp?Show=11/4/99&idMessage=3954]
Twilight of the Tax-Cutters
[http://www.slate.com/Code/Moneybox/Moneybox.asp?Show=11/3/99&idMessage=3949]
[]
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