Shaky commitments

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Shaky commitments				July 28, 2004

I don’t know about you, but after reading all the somber stuff that fills the first few pages of the paper, I’m always relieved to get to the section in the Gazette dealing with engagements and wedding announcements. There we find the beaming faces of those committed or soon-to-be committed, hoping against hope that they’ve not made a colossal commitment to a life of doom.

Yet, in these days of political hokum, hackery and commitments that will never be kept, it was reassuring to read a couple of weeks ago one of the most refreshing wedding announcements ever to appear in the Gazette. Judy Hummel, it seems, had married Thomas Shaver, and their wedding ceremony was, to put it mildly, unusual.

Eschewing the hooey of traditionalism and the ceremonial bunkum that attends most weddings, Hummel and Shaver were married by Shaver’s brother, who just happens to be a wizard. A double tattoo ceremony supplanted the more pedestrian double ring gig, and instead of the usual pimply plumpettes who pass for bridesmaids, Hummel was attended by “woodland fairies and other forest beings.” The groom was followed by “frolicking elves.” And they both were surrounded by a “cast of forest deities.”

While it may seem that all of this is straight out of the Land of Oz or the forests of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the point is that Hummel, Shaver and their followers of Pan hit upon a reality rarely reflected these days in wedding ceremonies. We are all creatures of the earth and the sooner we throw off our hidebound Puritanism and make peace with and commit ourselves to our fellow sprites and forest deities, the better off we’ll be.

Regretfully, Hummel and Shaver have left this country for the woodlands of Costa Rica and the forest deities down there. Godspeed to them, and may they reproduce profusely. We need more like them. Their commitment to each other and to the things of this earth is to be applauded.

There have been of late numerous other stories in the news dealing with commitment, but they are more political or social in nature and hence involve commitments broken or contracts breached. In these cases, the winsome seriousness of woodland deities and frolicking elves is replaced by the ethical insouciance of Iago and more than soupcons of Machiavellian morality.

Pulling off his own bit of wizardry, Patrick Pettitt, the consistent Democratic loser to Del. Melanie Rapp (R-96^th), has decided to hop on down the turncoat trail and break his former commitment to the hapless Democrats who supported him twice. Pettitt has obviously decided that it takes a Republican to beat a Republican and so will take on Rapp in what will certainly be a losing battle for the forces of moderation.

On the other hand, you have to admire the commitment of a guy who, like Captain Ahab, will forsake all else and, harpoon in hand, ride to his political death in pursuit of an indomitable prey. Godspeed, Patrick, and may Neptune’s naiads be with you.

No less contractually inconsistent and similarly lacking in commitment is what’s going on around here with the Williamsburg-James City School Board. Riding his own third high referendum bomb right into the ground, the Strangelovian School Board chairman, John Alewynse, last week suggested that parents upset about the invisible auxiliary gym at Jamestown High were dissimulating, naïve, ill-informed and “deliberately affecting an indignation that they could not possibly feel.”

Alewynse’s arrogance aside, what these dissimulating parents were naively wondering is this: If a bond referendum was approved by the voters in 1994 to construct, among other things, an auxiliary gym, where is it? That is, if referenda aren’t contracts with the voters, what, pray tell, are they? And if this is the cavalier manner in which the School Board’s rookery of relativists treats voter referenda, why approve them? Obviously the School Board has made its decision about the third high and will proceed as it wishes with or without voter approval, so what’s the point?

Something else the bleak-brained gargoyles of education seem to be endlessly tinkering with are the toothless turkeys known as SOLs. Now the state Board of Education has decided that slews of failing scores on social studies tests can be disregarded and tossed with the chicken bones and melon rinds onto the compost heap if they prevent schools from being accredited. And this for a test whose “passing” grade is already at a failing 51% level.

If tests are going to be so manipulated that passing is failing and failing doesn’t count for anything in terms of accountability, why not chuck this whole wonky system of pseudo-academics and let the teachers get back to doing what they do best – teaching their own material and constructing their own tests?

But this won’t happen. And it won’t happen because our commitment to education is in the hands of political bureaucratic bandits who sweat superficiality and pluck pat answers from desiccated fields long ago deserted by the goddess of academic fecundity.

When you come right down to it, the only real commitment to anything that I’ve seen around here lately just left to check things out in Costa Rica.