Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Ismism: A Bulletproof Edgamakation (1)


Do you live in fear that the next time one of your education facilitators diminishes one of your homies' self-esteem he's going to pull out a piece and hose down the schoolroom, perhaps hitting you in the back with a blast from his Mac10? Well, chill, dude. Get yourself a bulletproof backpack to save your fleeing butt. School, it's for learning to be smarter than your greased class-mates.

Imagine this likely scenario, one too many of us have been through over the years: "Just call me John" says to Ice-Groove, "Please give us five examples of trochaic pentameter, Mr. Groove." And you know I-G is going ballistic in a flash, pulling down the hammer on that geek. You got time to duck and cover? Like, no way. So you turn and take a spray across the back. Ha. If you can keep on breathing till the paramedics show up, you should get a gold star for that performance art. And now it's possible with a bulletproof pack. Don't be no fool, go to skool-- and be prepared. http://www.mychildspack.com/

3 comments:

truepeers said...

Don't forget the fine print: "Our goal is to provide a tool that will increase the user's chances of survival in an incident involving firearms. The term "bulletproof" is used by 3rd parties as a descriptive term and is not a representation made by this company. The terms bulletproof backpack and bulletproof bookbag are not endorsed by this company. All other child safety and school safety measures and training should be observed and followed."

So, in other words, responsible mothers are urged not to let their kids out of the house, at least not anywhere where toxic males may be present. Inevitably this is going to make for some confused and angry teenage males. So another selling point for this pack could be considered: when the student has yet to give in, psychologically, to the wonderfully new matriarchal demands for an end to "bionormativity", and when instead of pulling out his reading materials and getting to work on his essay praising the heroic progress against binary thinking (against binaries, against binaries, against the trochaic, archaic, phallacious) he might in some atavistic reversion go haywire and start shooting up his bookbag. But, no worries mom about having to pay the librarian for damaged books, if he's got the Ballistic Backpack. Those pissed at the restriction of reproductive activity to gamete donation and artificial womb-wifery can now go ballistic and the New Republic of Child Rearing and Educating Through a Progressive Hierarchy of Public Parenting may be preserved through thick and thin. Just get in the bag.

No more patriarchy. No more phallogocentric demands to write trochees over and over. Except, of course, when it comes to encouraging members of traditionally marginalized groups whose hip S & M hop rightfully appropriates the discipline.

Anonymous said...

With the recent school shootings (2 seperate schools in the last week) I think those guys at MJ SafetySolutions are on the right track with the My Child's Pack bulletproof backpack. I didn't realy think about it too much, but now I am changing my thinking. I hate to think about my kids having to have a bullet resistant shield, but it in this world, I think giving them some piece of mind, might be worth it.

Dag said...

I could weep.

A standard rule of journalistic thumbs is that satire is only funny till they discover the body.

I'm not removing this piece. I'm sickened and disgusted that this was humorous in a vague way in the abstract but is not now at all. So it stays, its main point not having changed at all but having become clearer by this example of a girl who committed random murder for no reason at all, regardless oft he excuses. That I wrote this in the first place shows it needed a place in our world, however obscure that place might be, and if for only a few once in a while, to show that we can see this kind of nihilistic evil and deal with it as such: by reclaiming our value, so long lost and forgotten. My silly and Eurocentric values, my bourgeois tendencies, my Rightwing religious bigotry, our values; my racist, sexist, homophobic, and now add also my Islamophobia to the list; my class privilege, color privilege, and sex privilege; yes, all my mother didn't teach me that I had to figure out anyway by observation and energetic learning: Middle-class Yankee Values. So? Who's alive and who's dead?

Cool is cool at 16, but cool at 20 is a man in prison or the morgue. Who can't figure that out? Can't ask them cause they're in prison or they're dead. No, there are also those who run the European Union, the United Nations, the Presbyterian Church.

Satire. Eat your children, suggested Swift. Who would have thought in our time it would happen? Yes, I could weep. I'm not that kind of man.