Oct 16, 2000: Grizzly Al, with Al and George

An often cited bit of presidential debate trivia concerns the Nixon / Kennedy debates, which were the first to be televised. They say that people listening on the radio considered Nixon the winner, while those watching on TV thought Kennedy won. Clearly, the ability to visually focus on something provides a different slant on reality. I watched the first two debates on Television, and while I didn't come away with a clear winner, an obvious loser emerged. Unfortunately, the loser was us. Scripted and packaged beyond belief, the debates had all the spontaneity and charm of a Soviet State Funeral. It was almost as if the candidates had agreed to bore the entire nation to death and fight over the corpse like jackals.

But A wise man once told me that only the boring are bored, and that any situation could be livened up with creativity. Then it struck me: Like Nixon / Kennedy, these debates were also something of a milestone in the interfacing of politics and technology. While the Internet has been around for a few years now, this was the first presidential election where the bandwidth was enough to listener to the debates through the web. And since I was already online, I figured I might as well surf the masturbation superhighway for media of a different kind, hoping that perhaps this might give me a new visual context in which to understand the vacuous droning of two political dingoes.

A major topic of discussion was education. People who merely watched the debates on TV might have been a bit perplexed at the amount of time spent on the subject of education. After all, Education certainly isn't one of the most pressing problems facing the nation, especially when looked at next to issues such as massive ozone depletion, the mass extinction of 25% of the planets species, a growing prison population, the failed war on drugs, the still looming threat of nuclear war, and about a hundred other worries.

But the candidates wanted to discuss education, so while they droned on through RealAudio, I surfed over to www.sexyteachers.com. Let me tell you, this site really opened my eyes up to the problems facing our public schools. The picture on the welcome page showed a comely young woman bent over a wooden desk, being spanked by an extremely stern looking, lady. At first I thought it must be a fake, what with all the talk of lax school discipline I'd been hearing. But then I realized that the picture had to be real. After all, the woman being spanked was a clearly a student, because she was wearing a plaid parochial school skirt. And the lady wielding the ruler had to be an overworked teacher of some sort: No one but a prim school-marm would wear their hair tied in such a tight bun.

Seeing this scandalous photo really helped me to understand why the candidates are so concerned with the state of education in America. Frankly, I was shocked. to "While the student undergoing the paddling didn't seem to be in any pain (in fact, she looked downright enrapt), the return to corporal punishment (even in private schools) is disturbing. More disturbing still was that she had to be at least 22. Clearly, any system that would allow a student to fall so far behind in her studies is in bad need of an overhaul.

The condition of the classroom where this scene took place was no less deplorable. There was hardly any furniture at all in this classroom, outside of an antiquated wooden desk and an antiquated chalkboard. There were no computers, no modern electronic learning aids. It was as if the fruits of today's much touted "digital revolution" had totally passed this school by. Even the ruler being used was a sign of how far behind our once great nation has fallen - Despite the international acceptance of the metric system as a scale of measurement, the poor girl was being spanked with an old fashioned yardstick. I realized that I had been wrong to deride the candidates seeming obsession with this issue as mere political posturing.

Anyway, this education related web site raised several other pressing concerns, hard issues that made full concentration on the debates difficult. By the time that I was done exploring the issue of student discipline, the candidates had moved onto another issue - namely, that of the seeming apathy of college students to the political process. Certainly, the issue of K-12 education is pretty far off the radar screen of interest for most college students. Perhaps a visit to www.sexyteachers.com would help pique their interest in the subject.

Joshua Samuel Brown is a freelance satirist, and not in any way connected with www.sexyteachers.com. He can be reached at phibes@ficnet.net

copyright 2000 Joshua Samuel Brown

comments? Email me at "josambro at josambro dot com"
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