Board of Education Layeth the Smacketh Down
Although they were generally good guys, I don’t recall my high school history teachers making a big impression on me. Of course, they couldn’t piledrive me into my desk. My old high school, Benjamin N. Cardozo, apparently corrected that shortcoming by hiring professional wrestler Matthew Kaye (a.k.a. Matt Striker, Matt Martel, Hydro, or Hot Stuff) to teach European history.
Unfortunately, he has resigned after getting caught wrestling in Japan while calling in sick. After copping to the “mistake,” he’s offering to pay back the days and is hoping to get another job in city schools, which an investigator has recommended against.
“I would have been better off beating a kid, because those teachers always seem to keep their jobs,” Kaye told the Daily News. (Those teachers, I would venture, don’t document their malfeasance on the web). I don’t think the Board of Education should give up on hiring professional wrestlers. Next time, I recommend hiring Dr. Cube for the Science department. He has a PhD…in Evil.
School Days Mixtape
It’s only a few more weeks until I go to school. I’ve started burning mix CDs for the road trip to Amherst. For a bit of fun, I’ve compiled some of the better school-themed songs.
“Fuck School” by the Replacements. The Mats picked up the speed and dumbed down the jokes on their 1982 e.p. “Stink.” Whereas a song like “Goddamn Job” has a certain pathos, “Fuck School” is impotent, class-dropping anger.
“School” by Nirvana. From the heavy metal guitar feedback to the lyrical refrain “No recess!” this is early Nirvana at their most obvious. Eh. Everybody’s gotta start somewhere.
“College Man” by Bill Justis. Justis is best known for the instrumental hit, “Raunchy,” the twangy guitar and sax ramble that was pure sex on the airwaves in the 1950’s (Bit of trivia: George Harrison had to prove that he could master this song in order to join the Beatles). “College Man” was a lesser hit, a cocksure strut through the halls of campus driven by a wailing sax. Hail to dear old alma mater.
“High School Confidential” by Jerry Lee Lewis. Justis’ Sun Records labelmate, the Killer loves to shake it at the high school hop, although Jerry Lee probably should stay away from teenage girls. Speaking of which…
“Pussy Walk” by Iggy Pop. Mr. Ostenberg understandably gets a little randy when thinking about pussy, but when he confesses impure thoughts touring the “high schools and junior high schools and other centers of learning in this wonderful land,” well, I get a little squeamish. The high schools I can understand, Iggy, but the junior high schools?! You naughty little doggie.
“Modern World” by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Cousin Jonathan’s classic first record is all about college girls; the pretty, intellectual, artistic goddesses who attend Massachusetts’ post-secondary educational institutions and date pot-smoking hippie losers instead of taking guys like me and my cousin to the Museum of Fine Arts and explaining what it all represents. This is one of his more Mass-centric songs, with its exhortation to “Drop out of B.U.!” and all that driving past Stop-and-Shops. The Modern World is not so bad…not like the students say.
“School Days” by Chuck Berry. The true king of rock-n-roll, Berry not only wrote the guitar riffs that new players cut their teeth on, he laid down the basic lyrical themes of rock: girls, school, cars and dancing. Hail, hail rock-n-roll!
“Straight A’s In Love” by Johnny Cash. Schoolyard romance is out of character for the man in black, but at least he’s rebellious enough to flunk out of school while getting all that action.
“Straight A’s” by the Dead Kennedys. The reverse of JC’s song, this self-loathing student gets the grades but not the girls. “Girls, they kick me in the eye / Want answers to the tests / When they get them they drive off / And leave me home to rest.”
“Life Sentence” by the Dead Kennedys. A more relevent DK song for grad school is the one that warns “You stayed too long in school.”
“Be True To Your School” by the Beach Boys. They were probably thinking of homecoming and state championships. I think of protesting CUNY budget cuts.
“UMass” by the Pixies. I can’t think of a song about CUNY, but at least my new school, in the sleepy west of the woody east, was feted by the mighty Pixies. It’s educational!
“We Rule the School” by Belle and Sebastian. A graffiti boast from the album that Stuart Murdoch recorded for a Business course in college. LIke most of their stuff, it’s twee and bittersweet.
“Rock ‘n’ Roll High School” by the Ramones. The Ramones tore a page from the Chuck Berry songwriting textbook for their movie theme song. Don’t wanna be taught to be no fool.
That’s just scratching the surface. I’ve skipped the Mekons, the Talking Heads’ taunting dismissal of college and night school and a certain ubiquitous Alice Cooper song. It’s a work in progress. Make your own suggestions.
Register for Selective Service Under Protest
With no end in sight to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and military recruitment on the decline, a resumption of the military draft looms as a frightening possibility for young people. While many activists have been turning their attention towards anti-recruitment work, resistance to Selective Service registration has taken a back seat.
A cursory search on Google reveals advice that is ridiculously simple-minded. It is unreasonable to ask a young man not to register for Selective Service if he wants to go to college. Anyone who wants to go to college, but cant afford to pay tuition out of pocket, has to resort to student loans. Anyone who applies for student loans must first file a Federal Application for Financial Student Aid. Under federal law, all men between the ages of 18 and 26 are ineligible for FAFSA unless they register for Selective Service. The simple math for this is: Working Class Male Student – Selective Service Registration = No College.
The solution is to register under protest. I realize that this column is a little too late for this year’s batch of graduating high school seniors. After being solicited for some advice by a young comrade in Florida, and looking through my own, old paperwork, I decided to post this information online. I hope it will help tomorrow’s seniors who find it through Google. Perhaps it can help those young people who have already registered for Selective Service, but want to take action anyway.
Just before the war with the eskimos, in 1997, I was a graduating high school senior faced with this dilemma. The advice I received at the time, from the War Resisters League and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors was to register under protest for Selective Service. In order to do this, you should do the following.
You should actively register for Selective Service. Do not merely check that box on your FAFSA that registers you for the SS. Go to your local post office, pick up a SS registration form and mail it in before you apply for financial aid. Include with the registration form a letter from you explaining that you are registering under protest. Here is my own letter from 1997:
As an editor, I may quibble with this young writer’s precise wording, but the essence is there. I am a conscientious objector. If drafted, I will not serve. Those are crucial statements. If I were writing this letter today, I might add, “I am registering under protest in order to apply for federal student financial aid. I have no intention to cooperate with the Selective Service Administration” and “I oppose the war in Afghanistan, the War in Iraq, and all wars.”
Now, here’s the crucial bit: carbon copy yourself on this letter. Send both copies of the letter, the one to the SS and the one to yourself, via certified mail. Keep all receipts and stubs in a safe place.
Keep the letter that you mailed to yourself sealed and in the same safe place.
The reason that you mail yourself a copy is to save your own skin. What you have in your hands is government certified proof that you were a conscientious objector way back when you were 18-years-old, should you ever be called before a draft board (which was a remote possibility eight years ago, but is not now).
Saving your own skin, as a form of activism, is not particularly satisfying, but you do achieve a secondary goal by sending a direct message to the war machine that you are an active opponent of their scheme. Believe me, they keep track of this stuff. Their statisticians undoubtedly will credit you for representing another ten or fifteen cohorts who didn’t have the nerve to speak up. The more young people who file letters such as these, the more the war machine gets the message that they will have a real problem on their hands should they seek a return of the draft.
When I did this, before our government declared permanent war against invisible enemies, a funny thing happened: the Selective Service Administration wrote me back!
By acknowledging and rejecting my claim of conscientious objector status, the Selective Service Administration provided even more evidence (should I ever need it) that I was a pacifist in 1997, long before the wars and the draft. They also directly acknowledged that they are aware when young people resist compulsory military service (and, again, are almost assuredly keeping statistics on these letters).
I would be curious is a young man who filed a similar letter in 2005 would receive the same kind of response. Please let me know how your own letter is received.
Finally, if you’ve already registered for Selective Service, and filed your FAFSA, you can still take action. In fact, you’re in better shape, since your loans are cleared up, and the SS never rescinds a registration anyway. Send them a certified mailing expressing your desire to rescind your Selective Service registration. Use the same language as I recommended: “I am a conscientious objector,” “I registered under duress in order to qualify for college, “I do not support this or any war.” Your objection will be noted by the statisticians, and hopefully you’ll receive back from the SS a dated letter rejecting your claim of objector status (thereby proving that you were an objector way back when).
Lawnguyland
Long Island is full of surprises. I’ve been doing house visits for a certain union on Long Island. I’ve been working in Lindenhurst, a town that is mostly known to me from those hypnotic station announcements on the Long Island Railroad (“Making station stops at…Wantaugh, Seaford, Massapequa, Massapequa Park, Amityville, Copiague, Lindenhurst and Babylon; Change at Babylon for the train to Montauk…”), which are stored in the same place in my brain as parts of the Nicene Creed and the pledge of allegiance. I’m not in the habit of spending time in Suffolk county, and it’s easy to forget that we live on an actual island that’s surrounded by water and docks. Lindenhurst feels like one of Maine’s lobster towns, but without all that pesky tourism.
When you get far enough south, these modest, working class houses have dock slips for backyards. When I don’t get an answer at the front door, I nervously look around back to be sure that no one’s escaping by sea. After all, in my rolled-up shirt-sleeves and tie I look a fair bit like a Jehovah’s Witness, and who wouldn’t take the opportunity to put some ocean between themselves and evangelicals at the door?
The great thing about working in a seaport town is the ready availability of fresh, delicious seafood. I finally satisfied my summertime hankering for fried clam strips at Southside Fish and Clam on the Montauk Highway. I momentarily disregarded concerns about a “red tide” and enjoyed the thick, meaty and delicious strips found there. I also enjoyed the terrific, honest-to-goodness oldies radio station heard there. B-103 is now the last oldies station in the New York Metro region after CBS101 was switched to the hated “Jack” format by its evil corporate parent. Unfortunately, its signal won’t even reach to Queens.
What I’ve noticed most often are the strange living situations that Long Islanders are forced into by low wages and high housing costs. Brothers, sisters, cousins, great aunts, grandmas and in-laws all under the same roofs (actually, some are in the garage, others the basement; more, I bet, are living on those boats in the backyard). Most of the Islanders that I meet who are in their 20’s plan to leave New York entirely. This jives with the experience of most of the people I grew up with on the edge of the world, and other people I’ve met along the way.
Long Island, as a housing development and a society, is scarcely 50 years old. Any society that cannot provide jobs, homes and schools for its young is a failed society. If only narrow-minded voters realize this as they vote down school budgets and lobby against apartment developments.