Where's Johnny Appleseed when you need him?

There's something rotten in the state of Denmark.

I'm sure you know the reference, because you, dear reader, are a shiny-polished and genteel individual, with the courage and perseverance necessary to cleave to your education -- after all, you are reading this column, and that makes you aces in my book. But inasmuch as you are cognizant of the world around you, and far too experienced to give in to the temptations of blind optimism, I'm sure you know that there are many people, many millions of people in the US, who would not understand that reference.

So be it. Not everyone needs to be a literati (though literate would be nice) and not everyone needs to have the sort of mind that spits out such little chestnuts, nor the sort of memory that can recognize, categorize, and then interpret them. The problem, however -- and the reason I chose that particular Shakespearean chestnut out of the many thousands (I've wanted to make reference to the St. Crispin's Day speech ever since I saw it alluded to on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I just couldn't think of a way, damn it.) the Bard bequeathed to us -- is that there are many people, most likely millions of people in the US alone, that are currently reading Hamlet, the play that engendered that line, and they still wouldn't understand the reference. Considering the numbers and the law of averages, there are certainly people who read that scene within the last few days, maybe even discussed it -- because we English teachers do love our famous quotations, particularly Shakespeare's, and Hamlet is too full of them to ignore it -- and many of those people would also look blankly at the line at the head of this column and shrug their shoulders.

This is what's rotten in the state of Denmark. This is what's wrong with America, or at least one thing, because this -- really quite simple -- quotation is famous because it is an understatement, a mere hint of just how bad things are, and how many things are bad; in Hamlet, there are a great number of things that are rotten in the state of Denmark, so rotten that it is a miracle there is still a state at all (Let's hear it for the inertia of feudal society!). Just so with America, today. We have a failed economy, a doomed war, and a populace so opposed to the rigors and sacrifices of change that somebody like John McCain can choose somebody like Sarah Palin as a running mate, and the two of them can be seen as genuine contenders for the White House. Because they, like so many Republicans before them, will bring us back to the good ol' days, when life was simple and everybody was happy. The bygone days of innocence, which glow with a halcyon light from our current pit of despair.

For those who are paying attention to reality, I would like to look at the rot in our state. Here is where, if we insist on following our general modus operandi as Americans and start looking for the one to accuse, we begin to get into a tangled web of fault and blame, one which I would like to avoid. It is another thing that's rotten in our current state: we are still, still, clinging to the Puritan ethic that bad things only happen to bad people, and therefore there is always someone to blame. Let's try not to throw stones. To assign blame, to find who is at fault, implies intentionality, or at least identifies that one as a first cause, states that the person whose fault it is started the whole mess -- and that's a false premise in most cases, certainly in this one. Look at it this way: I am not a policeman, following a trail of clues back to their source, hoping and expecting that that source will be the guilty party I seek. You and I, we're digging through the rotten apples at the top of the barrel, and though there are rotten apples behind these rotten apples, the rotten apples below aren't at fault for the rotten apples above, and I'm not trying to accuse the once-removed rotten apples of anything. I do not wish to dig down to find the first and therefore most culpable rotten apple; I wish to dig down and find an apple that hasn't rotted, so that I can eat it. And spit the seeds at George Bush. Not because this is all his fault -- it isn't -- but just because I don't like him. He's rotten, too.

So which apples are rotten? How deep do we have to sink to find fresh apples? For my own self, I will speak of the rot that I know, the rot that I have to deal with on an almost-daily basis: the public education system. Because this society, with its abhorrence of age and its resulting preference for nursing homes over family, for youthful carpe diems over sage advice, relies -- too heavily, perhaps -- on the public education system to teach people everything they need to have a good life. And the public education system has failed.

Right or wrong, we trust our schools to teach our children how to live. Parents are always ready, in our idealized imaginations, with a helping hand, and with advice when asked for it, but generally speaking, we believe that you should learn everything you really need to know in kindergarten -- well, and the subsequent twelve years, though that isn't nearly as memorable a phrase. Naive or not, there is some rationale to this belief: thirteen years of compulsory schooling should be, and has in the past been, enough to teach people everything they need to know to maneuver through society. (Ignore the influence of parents, for the sake of the argument -- and because schools are intended to fill in all of the gaps parents leave in educating their children, and so in the worst case scenario, with a child who learns nothing from his or her parents, the school should fill in the entire picture for that child.)

We spend so much of our lives in school. We give schools so much power over us, over our children. After parents, the adult a child spends the most time with is not a grandparent or another relative, not a preacher or pastor or rabbi; it is a teacher. Hours a day, for five days a week, we hand our children over to the schools, and we tell those children they must do what they are told, they must listen to everything the teacher says and do whatever the teacher asks. And yet, with all that power, with all that time and influence, the schools have not succeeded in preparing people to handle the crises we face as a nation. Because even if we cannot lay blame for the failed economy, for the failed war, for the destruction of the environment and our international reputation and our very freedom and way of life, we have to recognize that we could fix these problems. The people of this nation have built this great society; there is no reason to think they could not rebuild the parts that are falling down. But the people have not done so, and at least one reason is that the schools, despite their power and influence, despite their prominence in our politics and our finances, despite their great potential, have failed to teach people to fix the problems of our society. But the failure of schools today, the failure of education to fix the current crises this country faces -- all of them, the economic crisis, the failed war, the vanishing ethics and compensatory draconian morals, the absurdities of the two-party political system, the dominance of the popular media, the shallow and self-destructive culture, the hard-clutched free market system that has been our downfall in so very many ways -- the failure to educate the people of the United States well enough to prevent, or at least diagnose and address, those problems is not due to the schools. The schools have failed; the schools are rotten. But the rot goes deeper.

The rot goes to the students, and it goes to the families of those students. Why are there so many people who could not identify and understand that Hamlet reference I opened with, despite, in many cases, having read it and discussed it within the last week? Because the best school in the world cannot teach someone who doesn't care. If you haven't learned that yet, then take my word for it. I have been a good student and a bad student, and I have been a successful teacher and I have been a failed teacher, and I know this to be true. The best schools are not successful because they have the best teachers or the best materials; they are successful because they have the best students. And the best students are not those who have the highest IQs or the highest bank balances: the best students are the ones who want to learn. That's it. Those who care about education, those who want to learn: they learn. And more importantly, they learn quickly. This leaves time to move on from the basics, easily mastered by someone paying attention and really trying to get the fundamentals down, to larger and more complex topics -- like what happens when a real estate bubble pops, or how to identify threats to national security, or the importance of maintaining good international relations.

There are still students who want to learn. But they are no longer the majority. The majority of students now, today, do not want to learn. What happens when you have a school full of people who do not want to learn? Come on down to my classroom and see. You end up with a class full of people trying to escape, and growing more desperate by the hour. You end up with a population that hates itself, and hates each other, because we blame each other for all of our miseries. You end up with a country on the brink of collapse, because the citizens of that country are too willing to ignore the world as long as they have a big screen TV. And just as the intelligent and responsible citizens of this country are left drowning in the sea of ignorance, trying desperately to shout out their solutions and their willingness to help, waving their arms over their heads but doomed never to be seen, never to be heard, never to be recognized, the intelligent and responsible students at a public school today are doomed to forever go unheard, and therefore untaught.

You can see it, every day, in a public school classroom: when the teacher asks a question, a thoughtful and intelligent student raises a hand, and the teacher cannot call on the student because he is too busy yelling at two other students who are throwing spitwads and calling each other "faggot." Then when the intelligent student speaks her thoughts, she cannot be heard because too many students are talking to each other, loudly, about who got in a fight at lunch and how much blood was spilled. Then when the teacher gets frustrated and yells at the class, the good student, frustrated as well, gives up and starts reading a book about a school full of witches and wizards who actually care about their schooling and thus learn many wonderful and magical things -- and don't think that idealized school wasn't a large part of the appeal of those books. Much of our favorite young adult fiction features good schooling. Because it's fiction. In the real school world, even the good ones get lost, forgotten in a class filled with loud, attention-craving fools. When there are too many apathetic idiots in the room, the intelligent, caring students do not learn what they need and want to learn, and so the school fails, even with the students who care.

But not every apple is rotten. Not yet. There are still students who want to learn, just as there are families who encourage learning and teachers who actually teach. There is still hope that we can recover what we have lost, or, more realistically, replace it with something fresher. We may be able to remove the rotten parts of our society before the whole barrel is lost.

I believe the place where the rot stops and the whole, healthy apples begin is here, at the love of learning. It is those who have a sense of curiosity, who wonder, who dream, that make education come alive and work for them, and in some rare instances, can even spread that sense of a vivacious, valuable, exciting pursuit of knowledge to others, who do not know how to feel that same passion by themselves. And these people are not yet rotten, because I see them, and on my better days, I am one of them. I do still love to learn, and the happiest moments in my job are when I can actually teach something of importance to somebody who smiles when they learn it. Those moments are rare, but they are not gone.

This is what we must preserve. Whatever else we must throw out -- and there's a whole lot of apples that have been lost to the rot, apples like nationalism and isolationism and the current electoral process and the idea of preemptive war and the pull-yourself-up-by-your-own-bootstraps ideal of self-improvement (How, how could that have become part of our ideology when it is physically impossible? Why didn't someone catch that, and extrapolate from the metaphor back to the ideal? I bet it was because of somebody throwing spitwads in class.) -- this is a good apple. Some of us love to learn. We need to plant that apple and grow a whole new tree, beginning there, with curiosity and with love.

Find something you are curious about, something that you love, and make that curiosity and that love grow. Learn about it, learn as much as you can. And whatever you do, whenever you can, throw some more apples into the barrel, would you? Some fresh ones, please. Because once we get rid of these rotten things, I have the feeling that this barrel's going to be mighty empty. But that's okay: because it gives us room to grow, and we need that, too. The current walls of the barrel that hold our growth in, the walls of popular opinion and tradition and expectation, walls called America and The Constitution and Capitalism and Pride -- they're too close, too confining, and we are smothering under the weight of the rotten things they contain. Those walls have stopped being protection, and become a cage. Let's plant some seeds in the cracks, and let the roots burst through the seams, and bring the walls crashing down, let the rotten apples fall away. Maybe one of them will even dissolve into the earth, and plant a seed.

But I'll bet it won't be George Bush.

And sure, he is an honourable man.

Last week my wife and I were watching Governor Sarah Palin's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, and something struck me. No, it wasn't the fact that Sarah Palin, though attractive and charming and a good public speaker, is letting herself be used as a human symbol, like a velvet sash around John McCain's shoulders that reads, "Good Old-Fashioned Family Values." It wasn't the fact that the speech sounded like a more sophisticated version of a schoolgirl crush-gushing -- "Oh, and Johnny's the handsomest, and the coolest, and the sweetest and nicest and strongest and bestest EVER!" -- and though it hurts me to so belittle a grown woman, the performance she gave was the source of that perception, one I would never have of Hillary Clinton making a similar speech. It wasn't the fact that her speech pandered to the audience , who laughed and hooted and chanted "USA" at all the right moments, who might as well have put their hands over their mouths and said, "Oh, sit! She jus' dissed him, yo!" every time Palin made a snide, sarcastic remark about Barack Obama's past "sins" including his statement that the working class clings to their God and their guns, a statement that, were it not for the right-wing's propensity for making mountains out of molehills and for beating dead horses into large wooden crosses to which they nail their opponents (Al Gore never said he created the Internet. Never. Think about that for a second.), would have been seen as what it was: the simple truth. The working class does cling to God and guns, and to heterosexuality and the miracle of life. The educated liberal elite clings to books and high ideals, to the ACLU and Woody Allen movies; what's the difference? It wasn't a terrible thing to say, it wasn't insensitive or evil or even terribly condescending. But it upset people, because Rush Limbaugh and his ilk immediately took it up as a cause celebre, and used it to upset people -- and yet their pandering to the lowest common denominator, their perversion and corruption of the freedom of the press and American democracy, and their underhanded and deceitful use of divisive partisan politics are never seen for the vile, condescending actions that they are.

None of that surprised me about Sarah Palin's speech; she called herself a pit bull with lipstick, and "embraced her role as John McCain's attack dog," as one article put it, and so I expected a lot of things that would irritate me. What surprised me about Sarah Palin's speech is -- I have heard it before.

The signal moment for me came here:

"I've noticed a pattern with our opponent. Maybe you have, too. We've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers. And there is much to like and admire about our opponent. But listening to him speak, it's easy to forget that this is a man who has authored two memoirs but not a single major law or reform - not even in the state senate.

This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting, and never use the word "victory" except when he's talking about his own campaign. But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed . . . when the roar of the crowd fades away . . . when the stadium lights go out, and those Styrofoam Greek columns are hauled back to some studio lot - what exactly is our opponent's plan? What does he actually seek to accomplish, after he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet? The answer is to make government bigger . . . take more of your money . . . give you more orders from Washington ... and to reduce the strength of America in a dangerous world."

It was the bit about "dramatic speeches before devoted followers." And I thought, But you're giving a dramatic, even a melodramatic speech, in front of the Republican National Convention. Then there was that comment about the cloud of rhetoric, as if rhetoric were anything more than a way to ensure that your audience hears what you want them to hear -- and if you want them to hear the truth, then rhetoric is your friend and your audience's friend -- and the dig about the styrofoam columns, which Palin said as she was standing in front of an enormous video screen showing a waving American flag in a blue sky (Yet her devoted followers cheered as though she had made a genuine point instead of a cheap and obviously hypocritical insult). And I thought, But you're using a cloud of rhetoric to obscure the actual issues, with these little digs and barbs instead of substantive criticisms of your opponent, and then accusing Obama of using rhetoric as though you would never stoop to his level.

That's when I remembered.

Good friends, sweet friends, let me not stir you up
To such a sudden flood of mutiny.
They that have done this deed are honourable:
What private griefs they have, alas, I know not,
That made them do it: they are wise and honourable,
And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you.
I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts:
I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man,
That love my friend; and that they know full well
That gave me public leave to speak of him:
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,
To stir men's blood: I only speak right on;
I tell you that which you yourselves do know;
Show you sweet Caesar's wounds, poor poor dumb mouths,
And bid them speak for me: but were I Brutus,
And Brutus Antony, there were an Antony
Would ruffle up your spirits and put a tongue
In every wound of Caesar that should move
The stones of Rome to rise and mutiny.
-- Julius Caesar, III:ii:211-231

See, I taught that play for six years; I have pointed out to hundreds of students that when Mark Antony says this to the Roman citizens -- his friends and countrymen, as he famously calls them at the beginning of the speech -- he is absolutely, unquestionably full of crap. The crowd of Romans have been manipulated, all right, but not by Brutus. The Stoic Brutus convinced the crowd using logic, not emotions. Mark Antony -- using all of the tricks of public speaking, including crocodile tears, visual aids, and simple repetition of a memorable statement (To show that this column, at least, can be non-partisan, Senator Joe Biden did the same thing as well in his acceptance speech the week before, when he got the audience chanting along with him, "That's not change, that's more of the same." But then, I seem to recall the line "I have a dream" appearing many times in a single speech. Can't remember who said it, though. Some reverend guy.) has swayed the crowd back the other way, has convinced them that Brutus and the conspirators were evil murderers, and Caesar was the greatest thing in Rome since the invention of the orgy. And no matter how simple-minded the crowd is -- and they are simple-minded; Shakespeare was no fan of the common man, and it shows in his depictions of them -- they have to realize that something's wrong when they get convinced, and then re-convinced, in the space of a quarter-hour. The easiest thing to believe is that someone is lying to you. Antony tells them all that Brutus was the one lying to them, the one using wit, words and the power of speech to stir men's blood, and they are happy to believe him. After all, he said that he's a plain, blunt man. Plain blunt men don't lie, so he must be the one telling the truth; which makes Brutus, then, the liar. The tricksy bastard.

I'm gratified, in a way, that at least the Republicans are reading their Shakespeare.

I've watched Barack Obama speak, as I assume most Americans have by now. He's a good speaker. He says lofty and idealistic things, and uses very poetic and stirring words, and yet he sounds as though he's simply having a conversation, as if this is just what he believes, and he's just laying it out there for the audience, take it or leave it. It's hard not to believe him. The most important reason it is hard is this: he's telling the truth. We really should keep corporate taxes high, and taxes on the richest 5% of the population; they get what amounts to a free ride in this country, and everybody else pays for it. Even if their taxes go up and they no longer get a free ride, they will still be willing to remain in the US because a cheap ride, while not a free ride, is better than an expensive ride -- and a cheap ride in the social equivalent of a Cadillac is pretty sweet, if you're only kicking in a few bucks for gas. We really should have affordable health care for every American, as a step to getting free health care for every American, and the only way to make that happen is through a government program. College really, really should be an affordable possibility for all Americans. The man's right, and he sounds right, and he sounds like he knows he's right. So we believe him.

But what to do, then, if you are on the other side? If you want to defeat Barack Obama even though he's right, how do you do it? (The real answer, by the way, is that you state very clearly that two people can have differing opinions and still be right, and you make sure that your positions are just as right as his, and then you present yourself as a reasonable alternative, and treat your opponent as another, and you let the people decide which reasonable, thoughtful set of positions and beliefs is right. But who the hell wants to do that.) It's easy -- you call him a liar, and you use every trick you can think of to make him out to be a liar, including false moral outrage, shoddy logic and sophisticated theatrics. And the most important thing you do is this: you make sure that everybody in the audience believes, absolutely, that politicians are all manipulative, deceiving, egomaniacal con men, and you give them the proof they need to accept it: you manipulate, you deceive, you act like an egomaniacal con man. And then, when everyone can see that you are the scum of the Earth, you point, and you say, "Look, he's even worse than me! Wouldn't you rather have the lesser evil?"

Then just keep smiling and waving at the camera. In front of a big, electronic American flag.