Soon after winning Darren the DARE. Lion for being the best
DARE student in the 5th grade, I discovered that if you lift up his
shirt, disembowel his back with scissors, and replace the shirt, Darren is
transformed into an effective and amusingly ironic contraption for the transport
of drugs and/or paraphernalia. For those of you who don’t know, DARE is a
program in which a cop comes to your middle school, reflects fondly on his
youthful days when he’d plant candy and cheat sheets in kids’ desks before
beating them with a yardstick, and then tells students things about drugs that
not only pique their interest but also provide practical information about where
to find such products. He also takes questions such as “Is that gun real?” “Can
I hold your gun?” “Did you shoot anyone today?” and “Are you going to shoot me?”
As far as DARE students go, I was the stickiest chronic,
which is why I won Darren the Drug Mule. The number one lesson I learned from
this oh-so-effective War on Drugs operation was always seek help for a
friend with a problem. So, if my friend is killing himself and invoking Satan
by getting high, it is my duty to inform a helpful authority figure – like a
policeman. This is great advice, on par with saying “if you are having impure,
homosexual thoughts, talk to a priest.” In both cases, I’m sorry to say –
you’re fucked.
In high school, we were bestowed with the “Honor Code,” a
holy tome that should have been carved on two tablets (by “tablet” I mean a
“slab of stone,” I don’t mean the kind that is easy to swallow). This document
taught us that if we witness “dishonorable” behavior and we do not report it to
the friendly authorities, we are as guilty as the perpetrator. This of course
was enforced by the “Honor Board,” a committee of your peers.
Unfortunately, my school had no good programs that offered
a combination of snitching, authoritarianism, and obesity. School officials in
Rome, Georgia, however, have this taken care of. By selling candy and soda,
Model High School has raised money to use as rewards for students who rat out
their classmates for various offenses. A student can get $10 for reporting
theft, $50 for reporting drug use, and a seat on the state legislature for
reporting the teaching of evolution.
When did high school students stop dreaming of being rock
and roll stars and start planning for a career in the DEA? Children, in case
you didn’t know, are our future – our cutthroat, back-stabbing, greedy,
ambitious, despicable future. Throughout America, kids aren’t getting high in
the attic and listening to Pearl Jam’s “Ten.” No, they’re in the foyer
listening to the soul-crushing sounds of Matchbox Twenty and planning how to get
into Yale, how to make the most money, and how to sell out their best friend for
their own gain.
Ah, youth: sex, drugs, rock and roll, anarchy, Kiss
posters, Sex Pistols quotes, terrible poetry, smash the state, kill your
television, don’t trust anyone over thirty, Stalinism. Uh, I hope I didn’t lose
you with that last one. Maybe the Stalinism part is of a younger generation.
Recently, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation spent one million dollars
researching the future of the First Amendment by surveying students. Let’s see
what these young rebel rabble-rousers had to say: over a third of high-schoolers
think the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees; half believe
the government can censor the Internet; almost a third believe that people
should not be allowed to voice unpopular opinions; and 75% believe that flag
burning is illegal. Way to stick it to The Man, you yuppie-spawn neocons-in-training.
The vast majority of those reading this column are aware of
the plight of public education, as schools, especially in inner cities, are
plagued by scarce resources, overcrowding, and violence. It would be wrong,
though, to think that these are the only schools with problems. The American
educational system targets children at a young age to turn schools into a caste
system, to identify positive or negative traits within future workers, and to
create a cyclical, dependent relationship between the job market and schooling
that ensures the system a mechanism for capitalist reproduction. In simpler
terms, ya know in The Wall when those kids go through the meat straining
machine thing? Yeah, it’s like that.
The Patriot Act Generation (I hope this catches on) is the
result of schools with absurd priorities, an inept and dishonest media, surging
corporate influence, an imperialist administration that manufactures consent
through repression and intimidation, and the break-up of Rage Against the
Machine. We’ve had Generation X; we’ve had Generation Y; now we see the birth
of Generation W: Generation Whore – the Generation that sold out before it even
had anything to sell.
Yesterday it was reported that a high school boy in San
Bernadino, CA was suspended for a week because he wore make-up to his public
school. It’s a good bet that most of his classmates didn’t care. When you’ve
graduated from DARE, when you’ve been exposed to the pedagogical version of the
TIPS Program; when you’ve had the COINTELPRO style of schooling; your first
thought is “one less kid applying to my first-choice college.” The suspended
student shouldn’t be the only one whose face is red.
Darren the DARE Lion is the king of this dismal jungle. If
he’s not dethroned and strategically disemboweled, if our schools are not freed
of his reign, if the future generations do not avoid the grave mistakes of the
past, than this jungle is our future – ruled by Darren, populated by rats.