Chapter 30 Blame It on Count Chocula
By
the 1990’s, whining had become one of America’s chief pastimes. Even
while grocery shopping, I was unceasingly annoyed by the more and more
familiar sound of childish whimpering in places like the cereal aisle,
where a kid would moan demands, like “Awww, Mommy, I want this cereal,
pleeease!”
“No,” would come the first response. “Chocolate Rasberry Sugar Bombs are not good for you.”
“Awwww,
that’s not fair, Mommy!” was often the comeback, which would usually
only prolong the debate until the mother would at last give in by
saying, “Oh, all right, but only for small portions. I don’t want to pay
for any dental implants until you’re at least twelve.”
These
collective grocery store experiences became, over time, the basis of my
theory that many of our social ills can be traced back to the cereal
aisles of grocery stores across the country, among all those hundreds of
brands of tooth-rotting breakfast fare, with colorful and humorous
logos on the boxes, reinforced on Saturday morning television
commercials, mesmerizing children into believing that all that sugar was
as vital as the air they breathed.
Finally, it was almost as
though these children from all across America had banded together at
secret meeting sites, when their parents thought their kids were really
playing on monkey bars, riding their bikes, or skate boarding. This
facade covered the fact that the kids were actually meeting to share
their new national message of, “WHINING WORKS!” Playgrounds everywhere
became convention centers to spread the word that, not only could
grocery store griping and sniveling bring results, but such intense
complaining could also bring rewards in other sectors of society. Thus,
whining made its way into public schools, where its effect on scholastic
standards may still be seen in the demands placed upon classes of our
public schools, which I believe sometime during the past twenty years
managed to merge with the entertainment industry.
Another result
of this huge bellyaching business has been that certain teachers across
the land have banded together in a counter-movement, the crux of which
is that homework requirements should remain stringent, and that all
teachers for all grades in public schools must join together in building
a mass immunity to the lamentations of those students, who have honed
complaining down to an art form, which has seeped into factories,
courthouses, the auto and garment industries, food production, and to
every other conveyor belt, literal and figurative, that produces
shoddiness as its chief product, rather than standing up to the laziness
of moaning shirkers of duty in living up to higher, albeit more
difficult, expectation.
The more I encountered the tired old
phrase from my students of “That’s not fair,” the more I became resolved
to live up to a teacher headline I longed to see on the front pages of
newspapers across the country, TEACHERS FIGHT BACK WITH MASS WHINING OF
THEIR OWN! Of course, that story never actually hit the news stands, but
its significance became my focus in the attempt to help squelch the
national whining fest, that had already been going on for years.
I
began practicing an irritatingly nasal tone of voice in my use of
important whining terminology as in, “Awww, you guys can read all twenty
pages in one night. Breaking them up into little baby assignments would
just be silly, and that’s not fair!” If students persisted, I would
plug my ears with my forefingers and walk around the classroom singing,
“Alouette.” After a while, perhaps to avoid the torture of my
increasingly professional whining skills, they stopped arguing and just
did the assignments. This technique was far more successful than my
earlier one, which was doubling an assignment (with an attempted
straight face) and then cutting it in half to make it seem they were
getting away with something. That method was not only devious, but my
acting was never quite good enough to pull it off, because apparently,
despite my best efforts, there always remained the hint of a smirk on my
face and just enough inauthenticity in my voice, that even the slowest
kid in the class was on to me.
So, the next time you want to know
what’s wrong with America, in terms of our shrinking standards of
quality, go to your nearest super market, get a shopping cart, and mosey
on over to the cereal aisle, that wonderland of sugar-impregnated
breakfast vittles with about as much nutritional value as bubblegum, and
observe the children there and the interaction with their parents, the
outcome of which will almost assuredly be a mother caving in to her
child’s demand for a marshmallow cereal with soda pop overtones, in
order to avoid the screeching, high-pitched and embarrassing hint of
abuse that might carry over into the soup and condiments aisle. This,
dear friends, is really the source of all irrational and unmerited sense
of entitlement in our country, the only remedy to which may be a good
dose of homework. If all else fails, then just blame everything on Count
Chocula and that awful sugar rush our kids have come to require.
