Conservatives’ worst nightmare realized

I’ve decided to return to teaching for a while, taking my Commie, pinko, liberal, Marxist-Leninist, socialistic, anarcho-syndicalist, pro-union and anti-vivisectionist ideas with me back to the classroom, where I can take up corrupting the youth of this great nation all over again, indoctrinating them in hatred of capitalism, undermining their faith in a supreme being, enlisting them in every kind of movement to destroy all that is good and decent about this nation.` On some days, I might even mock the Rotary Club. It’s gonna be hellzapoppin’, and that’s for sure.

I really can’t wait. It’s been four years since I’ve taught a class, and those kids turning up as college freshmen this fall were in eighth grade when I retired. They’re ripe for a little mind manipulation and leftist propaganda, and they haven’t heard near enough about the evils of the free-enterprise system and how much better off they’d be under a Stalinist system right here at home.

When I engaged in such subversion in the past, it was a career. Now it’s just sort of a hobby. A chance to pick up a few bucks while eating away at the fabric of society and overturning all that is good and God-fearing in the hearts of yet another handful of easily manipulated young people who would mostly worry about acne or personal attractiveness unless guys like me began burrowing into their psyches and turning them into raging Commies and threats to the Republic, stains on the nation’s heritage, and affronts to God, all rolled into one big ball of bad.

So I’ve gotten my old Che Guevara T-shirt out of mothballs, and I’ve dusted off my copy of the Communist Manifesto, which will be required reading in the remedial-writing class I’ll be teaching. But, of course, when it comes to corrupting youth, it’s best to be a little subtle, so I’ll be couching all this subversion in the jargon of English grammar and remedial-writing instruction.

When I talk about the punctuation error known as a comma splice, for instance, that’s just Commie code for race mixing, the splicing together of people of different colors to hasten the mongrelization of society and the dictatorship of the proletariat. And when I talk about sentence fragments, that’s just a way to bring up the fragmentation of the working classes that has helped hold the workers down. When I talk about paragraph coherence, that’s just a path to talking about how we all must pull together, how we must unify and become one, at the expense of the individual.

When I tell remedial-writing students about formulating a clear thesis, that’s just a way to get them to arrive at the primary idea every Marxist school teacher is trying to impose on them, the idea that money is the root of all evil, a notion Marxists managed to plant in the Christian Bible retroactively. And when I talk about paragraph unity, that will, of course, be code for one big union, the ultimate triumph of the workers over the capitalist masters who have enslaved them for so long.

I will, of course, begin once more to extol the joys of unprotected sex and free love, reminding students that if they should become pregnant they can always have abortions. And, in that Dionysian vein, I will remind them that all work and no play isn’t a healthy lifestyle, and that it’s good to take a break from reality periodically with the aid of drugs and alcohol. There’s really no sense of liberation quite like driving drunk, and if the cops weren’t so uptight, they wouldn’t be hassling people for simply enjoying their freedoms as Americans. Furthermore, if all that partying should put them behind in their homework, I will tell them about their easy access to meth here in Butte County, the perfect pick-me-up for students in need of a little more energy and time.

Should they ignore the indoctrination I provide about abortion and insist on having children, anyway, I will counsel them on the wisdom of leaving their kids untended, instilling in those babies the sense of fierce independence so dear to the American heart.

Clearly, it’s a challenge, subverting America’s youth. As most parents know, telling a teenager anything at all is tantamount to reasoning with a Republican, and, since one of my objectives is to get young people to question authority, I’m essentially at war with my own message. My white beard and my role as a teacher combine to put me in the authority-figure camp, but inasmuch as young people don’t listen much to older people anyway, there’s always a chance they’ll resist that particular message about authority figures and allow my other subversive notions to get through.

Whatever way you look at it, I’ve got my work cut out for me, but that’s why us teachers get the big bucks. If you’re going to turn a classroom filled with American kids raised on consumerism and refined white sugar into Communists in just a few months, you’ve got to hustle.

Fortunately for all, the students come to college from high school knowing very little of history, or the American Constitution, or much of anything else beyond the names of a few pop stars, so it’s fairly easy to tell ’em most anything and have ’em believe it. Hell, lots of their parents believe that President Obama ain’t a citizen of this country, and a recent Republican VP candidate warns them that the Democratic Party health-care reform package includes death panels that will decide whether their grandparents will be allowed to live, so selling these kids on the joys of Communism may not be as difficult as it first appears.

Compared to teaching an American kid how to write a grammatical sentence, it should be a piece of cake.