Spampaign Backfires

Doc's DIS-patch
Texas: The Education (Police) State
Student Gets Perfect Grade, Jail for Halloween Essay
by Dave "Doctor" Gonzo

November 4, 1999--NEW YORK--First, hats off to a couple of our readers for their recent emails concerning GOP presidential wanna-be George DumbBellYou.

Ms. E. Taylor observed in an email to our own Mac MacArthur that

...my theory on why Bush is avoiding debates [is that] once he opens his mouth, people will discover he's a tall Ross Perot!

And reader "Jangellamf" brought to our attention the following Shrubya quote and comment:

"The American people is supportive of me."
--Governor George W. Bush during interview [11/2] with CBS's Jane Clayson
Later in the day, the governor would sound the alarms about the nation's education system.
Hmm, what we have here is (are?) a "Quayle-ure" to communicate, eh?

YessireeBob -- sounds like the Dumbya we're all coming to know and love, staking out education as his first "big ishya" while allowing Texas to become a police state.

In fact, these two wonderful Bush-über-Texas attributes collided late last week.

According to a story in the Dallas Morning News, a 13-year-old seventh-grader from Ponder, Texas named Christopher Beamon received a score of 100% -- plus extra credit for reading the essay in class -- from a teacher last Thursday for the following creative writing assignment on a "Halloween horror" theme.

My flashlight went out and I heard someone right behind me and I turned in a very slowly scared way and boom the lights came on and the door bell rang. I walked very slowly and creepy and turned the knob ding dong the door bell went again. I said just a minute and I will be right there and I looked through the little hole in the door and Robin said Boo. I told him to come in and have a seat and we both wated and wated for Ismael because he was supposed to bring the ounce so we could get high but half an hour later still no Ismael so I got the idea of freeon and we grabbed a bag and a knife and ran out back to the airconditionar. We througth the bag over the nostle and covered it tightly and used the knife to press the volv. We started to hear something after we got high so we ditched everything we quickly run to the door to see who it was and there wasn't anybody there then we heard someone at the back door to see who it was I thought it was a crook so I busted out with a 12 guage and Ismael busted out with 9 mm and we step off the porch and this bloody body droped down in front of us and scared us half to death and about 20 kids started cracking up and pissed me off so I shot Matt, Jake, and Ben started laughing so hard that I acssedently shot Mrs. Henry. Ismael saw somebody steeling antifreeze so Ismael shot over ther near the airconditonar and hit somebody [indecipherable word] also scattered out and went home and my mom drove up and everything was back to normal but they didn't have any heads.

BOO! Christopher Beamon -- a "terroristic threat" or just a budding Stephen King (above)? The Texas authorities label the young author a menace to society.
Hmmm... "wated," "freeon," "throught..." The misspellings go on and on. Now, he is in seventh grade, so I'll cut him a little slack concerning his faulty form and syntax, but I'm going to have to apply the same standards to which I was expected to conform in middle school: one point off for misspellings, a couple points each for run-on sentences or poor sentence construction. This effort would've rated a seventh-grade Gonzo no better than a C-, and that's a best-case scenario.

But The Doc will add four points for the bit about "everything was back to normal but they didn't have any heads" -- an apt description for the majority of GOP voters in Texas.

Master Beamon's effort therefore gets a gentleman's C in The Doc's eyes. But 100%?? Talk about grade inflation! Now, don't get The Doc wrong... Master Beamon's not exactly Clive Barker or or Jim Carroll quite yet, but he does show potential -- and at least has intelligence enough to use the creative art of prose as an outlet for his rage.

And no, I do not digress.

Turns out that the essay scored young Master Beaman not only a 100% grade -- his literary efforts were also awarded a five-day trip to the Texas Hoosegow!

It seems that parents of some students named in the essay decided to call Ponder High School principal Chance Allen and claimed that Master Beaman (who it turns out has a somewhat chequered disciplinary record) just might harm their kids.

We've rarely known Texans -- let alone pre-pubescent Texans -- to be so thin-skinned.

To make matters worse, the same teacher who had so generously awarded a perfect score to Master Beaman had also alerted Allen to the content and nature of the story.

So last Thursday, law enforcement authorities took young Master Beaman into custody at the school on "suspicion" of making "terroristic threats."

Important safety tip to Stephen King: you might want to avoid promotional appearances in Texas. Your novels and short stories are chock-full of "terrorism."

The authorirtes held him in juvenile detention from until Tuesday -- when they beat an embarrassed and hasty retreat after the story went public. That day, Denton County District Attorney Bruce Isaacks announced that he had no intention to prosecute Master Beamon: "It looks like to me the child was doing what the teacher told him to do, which was to write a scary story.... but this child does appear to be a persistent discipline problem for this school, and the administrators there were legitimately concerned."

About what? That he might write a story about how angry and alienated he feels? Crikey -- talk about overkill.

A more accurate -- and authoritarian -- assessment of the incident comes from Dr. Byron Welch, Ponder school district superintendent: "Seeing a child in a jail setting is disturbing for everybody, but we are concerned with the safety and security of everyone, and the balance point is, when someone feels threatened, we had to step in and do something."

Right. Like throw the kid in jail, force his parents to pay thousands in legal fees, and quash his freedom of expression. Maybe this school district should hire Ken Starr as superintendant!

And Master Beamon sounded pretty confident that he was not at fault: "I was supposed to write a horror story. I don't think I did anything wrong," said the boy. ""It seems like a year ago, a big ol' long year. I sat in my cell and read my Bible."

"Now don't y'all go bein' creative! It's BAD! it's BAD!!"
Ah-HA! No wonder he writes such lurid prose -- the Old Testament is chock-full of violence, rage, bloodletting, and murder! At least that pornographic Song of Solomon hasn't turned young Master Beaman into a pervert... yet!

At any rate, his parents have decided to extract young Beaman from the House of Horrors known as the Texas public education "excellence" system and enroll him in a private school.

Chalk yet another "vote of confidence" in George W. "The Education Governor" Bush's great Police State of Texas.

'Nuff said!