Last night the Dade County Board of Education finished murdering the Dade County Library.

            What the board did is slash all funding from the schools.  The school system is supposed to share the burden of the library with the county and city.  The library director says the library can muddle through another year on the lesser funds but at the end of that time the state will pull its own support because of its “maintenance of effort” requirement.     

            The only hope left for the library is that the county will take over the local funding, perhaps through dedicating a percentage of a millage rate point as suggested on a nonbinding straw poll question on the July 31 primary.

            I, like everybody else who cares about the library, have been living, breathing and vomiting the issue, and I wrote this “Radio-Free Robin” piece before I knew what the miserable outcome of last night’s board of ed meeting would be, urging readers to vote yes on the straw poll question.  

Counterrevolutionary Cookies:  A Recipe for Saving the Library

By Robin Ford Wallace

            A man I know recently entertained me with stories of a job he’d had during the Cold War

writing propaganda for Radio-Free Europe.  The program he worked on was a cooking show aimed at

converting housewives in Soviet satellite countries to American-style capitalism. 

            In a show about making cookies, for example, one of the radio hostesses might say, “Darn!  I’m out of sugar.  Excuse me while I buy more AT THE STORE RIGHT AROUND THE CORNER.  I’ll only be a minute.”

            The point was to demonstrate to the poor little Soviet mamas, who had to wait in long lines at centralized distribution centers for their groceries, how easy and quick it was to get anything you wanted in a free-market economy.  The radio show would resume with:

            “That looks heavy.  Let me help.  How much sugar did you get, anyway?”

            “Oh, it was so cheap I bought 50 pounds.  But meat was on sale too, so I stocked up.  At our house WE EAT MEAT THREE TIMES A DAY.”

I challenged my friend on the morality of selling a political system through hunger pangs.  Presumably these had been impoverished peasantries before Communism and it wasn’t likely they had eaten all that well while being chased by Cossacks up and down the frozen Steppes. 

My friend could have argued that BSing housewives was a more peaceful way to change society than, say, hydrogen bombs.  But whether he was wrong or right, or whether his counterrevolutionary cookies did any good in the world, is not the point. 

The point is, I’m jealous!  Why can’t I have a cool job like that? 

What my friend was writing was, essentially: come around to my way of thinking and you’ll eat more cookies.  I could do that.  I want to do good in the world, too, and I am crazy about chocolate chips. 

Instead I’m stuck with journalism, which confines a girl to the stark and cookieless truth.  I’ve got to sit here churning out articles about the county commission’s newest anti-tobacco-chewing ordinances when I’d much rather tell you the guys had been naked-wrestling in there.

Oh, I get accused from time to time of misquoting somebody or – and this is my fave – “twisting my words.”  At least one person who’s tried that one on was subsequently arrested, having presumably been misunderstood by the FBI as well; and I think the most recent one was just mad at me for revealing she didn’t know something she should have known if she’d been staying awake.  How far, after all, can you twist, “I have no clue?”      

Anyway, whatever detractors may say I have no experience writing lies beyond the weight I fill in on driver’s license applications.  But I bet you I could churn out propaganda just as thick as anything my friend wrote about cookies.

Say, for example, I wanted to promote yes votes for the straw poll question on July 31’s primary ballot, which asks if Dade County’s public library should be granted a secure funding source, here is the radio show I would write:

First a newspaper reporter, maybe a female one, maybe one with a breathy voice who says “you know” every third word, would say:  “What do you think of this straw poll question about giving the, you know, library a secure funding source, Mr. County Executive?”

Then a man with a friendly, folksy, Dade County kind of voice, the kind of voice that is always talking about two-headed calves, or offering you a bobby pin to get the wax out of your ear if you don’t hear good, would answer:  “Why would folks vote themselves what might turn out to be a tax increase?  Anyway, we don’t need that here in Dade County.”

He would go on to explain that we didn’t need that here in Dade County because since the dawn of time, funding Dade’s library has been the joint responsibility of the county, the city of Trenton and the school board.

The reporter would ask, “But what if one of them didn’t pay up?”

The county executive would repeat the word “responsibility,” then offer her a bobby pin to get the wax out of her ear since she doesn’t hear good.

Now:  Enter a new schools superintendent with an out-of-town accent so thick that when he talks about bullying in the schools, our girl reporter scratches her head and wonders, “What’s wrong with bowling in the schools?”

The out-of-town superintendent hires an out-of-town consultant and, together with an out-of-town attorney so clueless he once tried to reassign a polling station on Sand Mountain to a voting district on Lookout, they decide to save money by – guess what? –cutting off all funding to the Dade County library. 

Alarmed, our girl reporter scurries around questioning the board of education, most of the members of which say, “Libraries?  We don’t need no stinkin’ libraries,” and the chairperson of which says, “You twisted my words!”

            OK, OK.  I’d better stop here for fear of confusing the reader.  Campy and unbelievable as it sounds – and honey, if you want camp, you should have seen the sole anti-funding speaker at the public hearing capering for the cameras as she defended the right of her grandchildren to grow up in a county free of libraries – this is no radio play but what really is happening. 

As I write on Monday morning, I don’t know yet whether the Dade County Board of Education will kill the Dade County Public Library or not.  But whichever way it turns out, nobody could have written a better radio play to demonstrate that the library needs a secure funding source.

In conclusion, Gentle Reader, vote yes on the straw poll question, and I’ll give you this cookie.   

END

 

The Lawnmower Man (Including Some Comments on Public Education)

 

By Robin Ford Wallace

            I submitted this to the Dade County Sentinel as a “Radio-Free Robin” – which is to say a political sort of opinion piece.  I don’t know if they’ll print it or not.  I specifically didn’t ask.  It’s a little meaner and nastier than the Sentinel usually gets on public officials  You want to know, it’s a little meaner and nastier than I usually get my own self.  But anyway ...        

Last spring I took my lawnmower to a man who said he could fix it.  He didn’t own a shop, you just went to his house, but down in his carport he had all these other lawnmowers of every age and model, which for some reason made me think he knew what he was doing.  It was only later that I thought to ask myself:  But did any of them work?

A week later I checked with the man and he said the lawnmower wasn’t ready; he had had to order a part.  The next week he said the part had been out of stock.  The week after that he said it had come but it was the wrong part.

It went on like that week after week until he stopped answering my phone calls.  Then I would drive over to his house and he’d hide inside and pretend he wasn’t home.

As more weeks passed and the grass grew ever higher, so also mounted my hopelessness and rage.  I began to realize if I ever saw the Lawnmower Man again I would probably have to kill him.  Thus I persuaded my husband to drive over there and confront him as opposed to bringing me cakes in the Big House.

When my husband came home he didn’t have our machine but the Lawnmower Man had given him a loaner from his supply in the carport.  This one looked as if it came from the early days of mechanization.  It had big metal plates and levers that didn’t control anything, and rods and wires coming off it at random.  My husband, an animation artist by trade, speculated it was powered by mice running in circles inside the engine, moving the rotors with their little feet.

But he said this was not the oldest nor the weirdest machine in the carport.  He’d seen a James-Bond-movie lawnmower down there from the 1960s, with no wheels because it was a hovercraft meant to float a few inches above the grass on an air pocket.

It couldn’t possibly have worked but neither did the mouse-powered model.  It did crank up after a fashion and I followed it down the hill while it took a few sickly bites of grass, then gave a sad little cough and died underneath the willow tree where our old dogs are buried.

After that I think there was another loaner before we finally got our lawnmower back, and then I believe there was some difficulty about the bill; but even I get sick of hearing myself complain so I’ll cut to the chase:

Somewhere in there I started feeling less bitter toward the Lawnmower Man because I realized he had performed a useful function:  He had made me happier in my marriage.

My husband has piles of rotting lumber and scrap metal scattered here and there that would get us condemned if we lived within the city limits of any municipality with a speck of self-respect.  For 10 years he had a set of dismembered monkey bars rusting in our front yard.  Two men with a truck came and asked if they could have it.  I said yes, I thought God had sent them, but my husband chased them down shouting, “No!  No!  No!”

And forcing him to take things to the dump is a case of the rabbit and the briar patch.  He only brings home more.  

On the other hand, he doesn’t have a carport full of old hovercraft. 

Furthermore, my husband’s motto about procrastination is, “Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off indefinitely,” but he really will empty the kitchen trash the seventh or eighth time you ask him.  So the Lawnmower Man made him look good and I felt happy and blessed.

Why am I telling you this?  Not to beat up on the Lawnmower Man, whom I never saw again, but to draw a parallel between him and current leadership of the Dade County school system.  I was thinking that, like the Lawnmower Man, this administration makes me feel warm and fuzzy about every administration that came before.

The first time I saw Dade’s new superintendent of schools was last fall when he was menacing English teachers at a book-banning he’d arranged for a New York Times bestseller that had won the National Book Award.  The superintendent had triumphantly notated “bad” words and “offensive” parts that he thought proved the book was without merit.  He seemed genuinely puzzled anyone would anyone want to read a book like that.   

Now this same new superintendent is trying to make a name for himself as the man who killed the Dade County Public Library.  For decades, the B of E has funded the library jointly with the county and the city of Trenton.  Now times are tough, so the super is recommending not reducing library funding but dumping it altogether – and he fields public outrage with the same seeming blank incomprehension:  Libraries?  What do libraries have to do with education?

Does anybody else see a connection here?

I’ve heard this administration accused of nepotism, cronyism, bullying and incompetence.  My beef is more basic: that it has no reverence or respect for books and learning.

There’s a saying that chefs eat their mistakes and doctors bury them.  What boards of education seem to do is sit picking their noses as they watch theirs destroying civilization as we know it.  Try questioning board members about the super’s funding decision and they dive for cover like timid woodland creatures fleeing a forest fire. 

Or they do when I ask.  Ask them yourselves, Dade County!  And ask hard.  Do you really want education in Dade County in the hands of the Lawnmower Man?

           Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.  For the most part.