Those of you familiar with (or who read our
consideration of) Mark Steyn's flair for the dramatic will appreciate
this Daily Caller headline:
Steyn declares America ‘doomed’ in wake of Pop Tart gun suspension
The transcript (they have audio but Jesus, who'd submit himself to that? Unless Steyn
accompanied himself with some lovely Richard Rodgers melodies) has lots about the boys who stormed Normandy and such like, but this is my favorite bit:
"You’re doomed, America,” Steyn said. “You’re done for. No society can survive this level of stupidity..."
To paraphrase
Groundhog Day, this is America he's talking about, right?
Welp. That's it. Pack it in. It's been a nice experiment...but Mark Steyn lost his boner for us. This is the end.
ReplyDelete"No society can survive this level of stupidity..."
ReplyDelete"... and yet you let me traipse right in. Mua-HA-ha-ha-haaaaaaaa!"
If you see Virgil Starkwell bring a Pop-Tart onto a plane, you no something is going down. I've seen what he can do with a bar of soap, I can only imagine how good he is with a Pop-Tart.
ReplyDeleteYou know, there's the germ of a very important topic there, in which it's acknowledged that the pursuit of safety for our children (especially at school, which as a general institution seems to be seen as almost as dangerous as prison) is being used as an excuse to drill them in blind deference to, and total compliance with, authority, no matter how senseless or extreme. Why, one might even make a connection between "zero tolerance" as it's sold--as a sometimes-harsh but necessary way of drawing the line against violence--and "zero tolerance" as drug-war propaganda.
ReplyDeleteIn fact--and I know this sounds crazy, but bear with me--the sort of person who spends most of their adolescence trying to avoid outsized punishment for minor infractions might indeed be the sort of person who can be persuaded to charge up a beach because an authority figure told them to. Let's see if Steyn really follows through on his easy antiauthoritarianism to some logical conclusions, or if he, say, just uses this as another excuse to beat up on teachers. Any bets?
And Now. . .Pastries Of War.
ReplyDeletePS: is he mad because Tim Horton's won't carry PopTarts?
I was under the impression that America's greatness was built on a foundation of universal and universally rule-anal K-12 education. Perhaps they do it different in Canadia.
ReplyDeleteThis is literally the first time in history a kid has gotten in trouble for imitating a gun at school.
ReplyDeleteWhich, assuming he pointed the gun at another kid, isn't even something I object to. We should be teaching kids that guns are dangerous weapons and not funny toys. But you do that with a reprimand, not a suspension.
ReplyDeleteI can't be bothered to get out of the boat - what is a "Pop Tart gun suspension?"
ReplyDeleteWe can survive this level of stupidity and more; we've survived Mark Steyn's inane babbling, haven't we?
ReplyDeleteNow, put down those Pop Tarts, kids and suit up for Afghanistan!
A kid in Anne Arundel was suspended for two days for chewing his Pop-Tart-like breakfast pastry into the shape of a gun, allegedly pointing it at another student, and making "pew-pew" noises. This is actually one area where I'm willing to compromise on my generally draconian attitudes towards gun control: people should be allowed to have as many Pop-Tart-like breakfast pastries that they have chewed into the shape of a gun as they like, with no background checks or criminal penalties whatsoever.
ReplyDeleteDid he say the same thing about mandatory drug sentencing? The issue isn't the object of the ban (guns, gun substitutes, drugs) its the rigidity of the punishment regime being forced on subjects (citizens, children, prisoners) and on their controllers (police, judges, guards, parents). Its not just children in this scenario who are being hurt and having their agency stripped from them-its the teachers and admin staff too.
ReplyDeleteLook: I'm right in the think of this now. I've been primarily child rearing for the last sixteen years. Children need guidance. They need safe places to explore and make mistakes. One of our prime imperatives as parents and as a society is to create gun free zones in which children can roam and play and make mistakes that aren't fatal. Its why we created playgrounds that are car free and treat parental admonitions to "go out and play in traffic" as a joke, not a plan.
But everything else in a child's life needs to be flexible. They need to make mistakes and learn the reasons why it was a mistake. Even very young children can learn why it is not ok to threaten or pretend to threaten class mates. Its ok, the skies won't fall and the school won't crumble if one kid, or even lots of kids, goes through a phase of playacting violence and gets corrected (gently), reminded (gently). That's what education is: exploration, error, forward movement through repetition of experiment and explanation.
Zero tolerance for real guns: necessary. Zero tolerance for play guns or discussions of guns? As perverse and wrong as zero tolerance for acknowledgement of sexuality. But it doesn't come from liberalism/nanny statism run amuck. Zero tolerance policies come from a disgust with teachers and children, a distrust of public spaces like schools, a hatred of an imagined underclass of unteachable/violent/immigrant/non white/lower class children.
"What we need is *more* Pop-Tart guns in schools", says Pop-Tarts Owners of America spokesman John Kellogg. "How else are we going to protect our children, deliciously, as part of a balanced breakfast?"
ReplyDeletebrb, gonna create a bunch of sockpuppets so I can like this comment over and over
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, not all that long ago, a kid was shot by cops because the silvery candy-bar wrapper he was holding looked like a gun. I'm sure, however, that an inadvertent gun-like confection is a legitimate target for authorities.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if we can guess accurately as to the relative levels of blackness between Pop Tart Kid and Candy Wrapper Kid.
ReplyDelete"These small things are not small. They tell you a lot about the institutionalized stupidity of our institutions.”
ReplyDeleteWait, I got lost. Are we talking about overdoing the punishment for a silly infraction in a school, or the abysmal quality of right-wing commentary, with its glib doom-saying, operatic hypocrisy, complete historical amnesia, and inflated sense of self-importance?
Why thank you, sharculese. Since posting my post here I've been reading at a link provided by Atrios to a running total of gun deaths in the US since Newtowne. Its grotesque to read the cases of toddlers who shot themselves to death because their parents or relatives were keeping loaded guns in easily accessible places. The Gun Lobby's refusal to allow doctors and teachers to discuss guns at all with parents has led to a situation in which a large number of gun owners seem entirely unaware of their responsibility to create a safe space for children who are exploring their home environment. And then the responsibility for teaching children that guns are not to be touched, that play violence can have consequences, is shoved onto the school/administrators/teachers.
ReplyDeleteCan you imagine the pushback from parents and the NRA if schools took it upon themselves to inquire into whether families are keeping guns in the home which may find their way into schools? Can you imagine the shrieks of rage if schools had parent/teacher nights to lecture parents on gun safety and proper care and rearing of children? Can you imagine the protests if schools had the right to exclude children from families that own guns but are not entitled to or who have demonstrated bad judgment with respect to violence and guns in the past? What is left to the schools but to use zero tolerance and suspending children as a blunt instrument to try to force parents to deal with violence and guns and the toxic mix of those two things in their homes and communities?
Happiness is a warm gun
ReplyDelete(munch munch chew chew)
It's when Mark Steyn takes a dump on your chest after fucking you in the ass.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry. I'm confusing pop tart gun suspensions with Mark Steyn columns. My apologies.
The reaction to a horrible gun massacre of kindergarteners being a nationwide call for more guns in the hands of anybody and everybody - instead of sensible gun control measures to prevent future massacres - is the very kind of behavior that destabilizes societies altogether. It shows a shift in our culture from the ability to take reasonable measures and make compromises to ensure public safety - to a critical mass of people indulging a blind, inchoate rage which elevates petty personal desires and vindictiveness above the common good, consequences be damned.
ReplyDeleteIf anything, I would have thought that a cultural shift of such biblical magnitude towards a hatred of govenment, civic values, and one's neighbor spelled the end of America.
And here I find it it's an overzealous administrator in a primary school instead, making a poor judgment call about a gesture with a pop tart.
My bad.
i clicked the link. The father of the family of "three boys who will be boys" has a beef because he is a "strong gun rights supporter" whose own father "is an avid hunter." In other words: a gun is not just a gun in that household but also a political statement of freedom and masculinity. He's rightly puzzled about how he can manage to repress, at a distance, behaviors in his child which he feels entitled to encourage at home. He is also primarily (and rightly) concerned about his child's "permanent record" and the possibility that a "gun related incident" for his seven year old could prevent the child from getting a job when he is twenty.
ReplyDeleteIn this fear he isn't wrong: its as possible that your child's school record of "gun violence" can be used to eliminate him from active consideration for presumably scarce jobs as his taking ritalin or having an IEP. In other words he rightly assumes his child will be applying for jobs and working as a corporate drone and that the draconian anti gun/anti drug/anti troublemaker attitudes of those corporations might interfere with little boy gun enthusiast's future.
I feel sorry for parents caught up in a bureaucracy whose record keeping is becoming more extensive just at the moment that the intrusive corporate state is becoming more able to access and misuse those records. Perhaps if he shifted his attention from the Second Amendment to all the others in the Bill of Rights or realized the enemy is corporations not the school he might have better luck?
This can only be adjudicated using the Twinkie defense.
ReplyDeleteA Toronto Steamer.
ReplyDeleteLook--or rather, don't look--at the twitter feeds that blow up every time Gabby Giffords or Mark Kelly try to do something about gun violence in this society? The all or nothing attitude: the sheer bile that is poured out on these two is staggering. I actually saw a number of commenters telling Mark Kelly and his "brain dead wife" to go fuck themselves.
ReplyDeleteI was thinking that if this situation had played out a little differently -- with a black kid in a poor neighborhood, and cops instead of schools doing the enforcement -- we'd have a dead kid instead of a suspended one.
ReplyDeleteJesus Christ, Steyn, not everything is about your failed attempts at masculinity.
ReplyDeleteOf course a toaster lover like yourself would have something to say about Pop Tarts
ReplyDeleteIt is true that schools have gone crazy. I got out just in time (1990) -- 3 years later, a friend of my younger brother was suspended because they found Tylenol in his locker. That violated the new "zero tolerance" policy for drugs. Huh?? "It's out of our hands" was the administrators' cover story then. But it's not out of your hands -- Zounds! Just think, people. That's all. Just think.
ReplyDeleteSo whatever Steyn is blathering about -- pretty sure he's blathering about unthinking zero tolerance policies and the rigid/cowardly bureaucracy that creates/enforces them? -- has been underway since 1993 at least. Which was around the same time "three strikes" became a thing, too. See a pattern? Suddenly (20 years later) he thinks we're doomed because it's guns, not aspirin. But overreacting to aspirin is much, much worse, if you think about it. Which he hasn't. Because the boys at Normandy didn't need aspirin I guess? Who the hell knows. "Something something guns something no homo something we're doomed" -- Steyn.
It's the title of 1961 Allen Ginsberg poem.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, our fear and overprotectiveness have basically turned schools into prisons. I graduated high school seven years ago, so I have a first-hand perspective of post-9/11 (*kicks self*) schooling. From all I've heard it's only gotten worse since I got out.
ReplyDeleteIt's very much a guilty-until-proven-innocent environment, one where it's assumed that children don't have the same Constitutional rights as adults (despite the courts overruling such notions numerous times in the past).
And the extent to which rightbloggers have repeatedly demonstrated that they're AOK with dead black kids makes me want to throw up.
ReplyDeleteNo doubt the rightbloggers are all convinced that these zero-tolerance policies are socialism incarnate, but they're actually the logical extension of the general conservative reaction against hippie-dippie gentle-handed parenting.
ReplyDeleteThe schools have taken in loco parentis to an absurd extreme these days, perhaps due in part to their students' parents both having to work two minimum-wage jobs, but being largely faceless institutions, they can only emulate the sterner side of parenting. Teachers do their damnedest to provide the gentler, more constructive side, but they're overworked and underpaid. Shit's fucked up.
You'll get my gun when you pry it from my warm, icing-covered hands.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing that will stop a bad kid with Pop Tart gun is a good kid with a Pop Tart gun.
ReplyDeleteThat or dumb policy.
Feels weird upvoting this.
ReplyDeleteMark Steyn: I'm just not that into you anymore, America.
ReplyDeleteAmerica: Yeah, we're ok with that.
Last one, I swear.
ReplyDeleteJesus Christ, Steyn, not everything is about your failed attempts at masculinity.
ReplyDeleteIf you'd seen what Steyn's neckbeard has seen, you wouldn't be saying that.
I thought its view was obscured by all the Cheeto crumbs.
ReplyDeleteIt's just outrageous, isn't it? Not only do these people have no empathy for the life-changing, critical injury Gabby Giffords experienced - they want to finish her off!
ReplyDeleteUgh, social media. One unintended consequence is it that it has pulled back the curtain for the umpteenth time in American history and revealed the moral decrepitude cutting a great swath through American society. Used to be you had to go to all the way to a civil rights march to harass women and minorities. Now you can do it from the comfort of your own home!
Mark Steyn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXU8w336oGs
ReplyDeleteI'm thinking that suspending the pop tart shooter is a bit over the top but I don't live in a society where 20 kids and some teachers got shot quite recently. I can see that I might feel differently iffen I was a teacher in Gunnutland.
ReplyDeleteFuturama clips=automatic up vote.
ReplyDeleteI saw some of that by proxy; in the mid-aughts I dated a woman with a middle-school-age son. Diagnosed with ADHD from a very early age, despite being medicated he'd still often say whatever popped into his head without filtering it first, and go to school dressed to varying degrees of outlandishness depending on how he felt that day. He was suspended several times purely on the say-so of more mundane kids.
ReplyDeleteUmm, no, it's not the first time. A previous instance was even crazier.
ReplyDeleteYeah, it's not children getting gunned down in the classroom that's dooming America, it's people overreacting a bit to children being gunned down in the classroom that's going to destroy us.
ReplyDeleteAre these people allergic to perspective or something?
Thing is, incidents like the pop tart massacre rarely are without context (which is never provided).
ReplyDeleteBy way of example, I placed a shiny bright red apple on my seventh grade math teacher's desk one moring, and then sat down and smiled at him. He got up from his desk, walked over to me, grabbed me by the collar, and dragged me out of the class and down the hall to the top of a flight of stairs, and said "I'm this close to throwing you down these stairs, do you understand, THIS CLOSE!"
The missing context was that he was a bullying authoritarian asshole, who was having pissing contests with twelve-year-olds, so I'd spent the entire term locating and pushing his buttons, and the previous day he'd told me, "I've had it with your smart mouth, Vosburg. Just one more, damn it, just one more-- and I'll kick the shit out of you."
So putting an apple on his desk the following day was simply-- and may I say magnificently-- pushing his final button. I transferred out. He taught another year before being sacked, so apparently there was an even better button pusher in the next class.
Despite the fact that they call it a "menu", nothing at that bath house had anything to do with food.
ReplyDelete*sigh* the pitfalls of trying to do sarcasm by text
ReplyDeleteMaybe it needed just one more adverb to make your intent clear. I wasn't sure.
ReplyDeleteOr, he's worried that the kid will never be able to get a concealed-carry license....
ReplyDeleteThe "zero tolerance" philosophy has done a lot of harm, especially to kids.
ReplyDeleteThis happened in Newtown's backyard yesterday. You know, for Freedumb! http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2013/03/11/news/local/709350.txt
ReplyDeleteThis, many times over. Interesting that Steyn finds an admittedly absurd reaction to a school-kid's gunplay-acting to be the end of America but called the reaction of normal people to the actual gun death of the unarmed Trayvon Martin "a very unattractive descent into tribalism."
ReplyDeleteRoy's link to Steyn's musical pursuits is frightening. Not so much for the truly awful white bread muzak but in trying to imagine who on earth likes this shit enough to pay for it, and the thought that they may have driver's licenses, or even administer schools that suspend children who gunify Pop-Tarts.
America--and right-wing America in particular--is in the grip of a kind
ReplyDeleteof insanity, that of treating symptoms of problems as the problem
itself.
Zero-tolerance policies are the very definition of a
failure to understand kids, or the principle of proportionality, for
that matter. The correlate in foreign policy is "wave your fist at our
drones and we send a Hellfire missile after you."
The worry is
that we'll end up with generations of kids afraid of everything,
including themselves, domestic policy that certifies the assassination
of jaywalkers and a foreign policy that delivers nuclear weapons to
every nation that is insufficiently loyal to our multinational
corporations.
But, if Steyn thinks this policy is the result of a
liberal nanny-state, instead of rank authoritarianism gone viral, he's
got his head up his ass.
And Now. . .Pastries Of War.
ReplyDeleteNapoleon please.
Cheeto dust, man. It's worse'n the brown-outs the choppers stir up in the 'Stan. This really happened, no shit - there I was at my keyboard...
ReplyDeleteI'd fist-bump this comment, but you know, I don't want to be mistaken for a terrorist by some right-wing loon.
ReplyDeleteI had to go in to defend my 13-year-old son on charges of drawing daggers, rocket planes, and explosions on his notebook. I asked the teacher, Don't you know anything at all about 13-year-old boys?" I am glad to say she was baffled and trailed off into some incoherent BS about deportment or something. Of course, that was long ago. We'd probably both end up in the calaboose now.
ReplyDeleteThere have been several high profile cases recently that describes the real effect and goal of "zero tolerance" for minority communities: a system that literally pipelines young children from school to reform school to prison for incredibly minor infractions like farting, wearing the wrong socks, etc... Mark Steyn doesn't notice because when "boys will be boys" is young black children he thinks the oppressive power of the state is not nearly severe enough to bring them into line. Its only because the fetish object "gun" was invoked and the child in question was white that he sees the punishment as disproportionate.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, the recent news out of Mississippi being a case in point. You're quite right--institutional racism is never far from the surface in such matters.
ReplyDeleteI would stay after class and clean the blackboard for this comment.
ReplyDeleteAs I say, incidents like this usually involve context, and since you've not provided it, would you please do so now. Or at the least a link.
ReplyDeleteI did.
ReplyDeleteI was every teacher's nightmare, and hereby apologize to every one of them. I am so sorry. Despite the story I've told, I think the world of them, and acknowledge that it it the most thankless task in the world.
When later living across the street from the elementary school in which I'd delivered so much pain to well-meaning people who didn't deserve it, I would wander over in the late summer to ask teachers setting up their classrooms if I could lend a hand-- haul the textbooks from the library, put up the stuff n the wall, etc.
One of them finally asked why are you doing this, and the answer was simple.
"Penance."
O God. I googled this and found nothing more than a Nation editorial making the claim. Please tell me you got more than the US equivalent of the brit tabloid batboy press.
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