Mr. Smiley, May Cowdung Be Rained on Your Head and May Your Fields Lie Fallow in Perpetuity

From: deepcover [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Thursday, November 27, 2008 10:53 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on The Police Report Has Arrived.

deepcover has left a new comment on your post "The Police Report Has Arrived":

Ron is the Area 5 ESE specialist, someone who should know and understand the entire situation. Someone who should be speaking OUT against what happened to Goader. He should know about these things.

Being in the office with the big wigs blinds the man to the front lines. There is however NO excuse for his behavior.



Posted by deepcover to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 9:00 AM

From: thomas Vaughan [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com]
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2008 8:49 PM
To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com
Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on Mr. Smiley, May Cowdung Be Rained on Your Head and....

thomas Vaughan has left a new comment on your post "Mr. Smiley, May Cowdung Be Rained on Your Head and...":

Way to go Lee!!!

If he was a supervisor, why didnt he supervise? Why didnt he help Steve?

There is something going on in the district. My principal let it slip in a conversation with me. At a meeting called a "brown bag" principals were told to hold teachers feet to the fire. There is a concerted effort to intimidate teachers and force them to cower.

I am certain of this. Why are they doing this? I am sure Goader is being singled out. I feel the same is true for me.

Make no mistake, they read these blogs.

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment.

Moderate comments for this blog.

Posted by thomas Vaughan to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 5:49 PM

A Judas Slithers into the Classrooms

Mr. Smiley:

Your name and address adorn the police report alleging child abuse against Steve Kemp, aka as Goader, who runs a blog on the schools. My inference is that if any teacher runs a blog that criticizes the administration and board, the Professional Standards gulag gets the nod from Ms. Elia to put his name on the "to trap” list in the Professional Standards cell-block archives. It is only a matter of time for the targeted teacher to stumble into some situation that qualifies as reason to strip him or her of his or her job.

The effect of this program is that teachers have hunkered down so as not to call attention to themselves and land on the Professional Standards Watch List. They are afraid to voice their opinions. Even blogs like the Wall do not reveal the real name of Suzy Creamcheese, its founder. When you shut down free speech this way, you are not living in a democracy. You live in a gulag. The answer, I suggest, is protest by anybody who feels the need to speak out. I suggest coming to board meetings and letting concerns come out in the open from teachers. I suggest writing emails to anybody a teacher believes can help the situation. I suggest letting the community know how badly the board performs.

Every board meeting is a lesson in hidden government. The decisions roll by unopened and undiscussed on the Consent Agenda Conveyor belt. The board rubberstamps the decisions made by Ms. Elia. Seldom does anything come out in the open for discussion. Besides, the board is not interested in the conveyor-belt consent-agenda decisions that run the schools. Board members are interested in their own theater as public performers who want to show how important they are in the community. Thus we had the last public discussion of the board’s concerning April Griffin’s desire to get an exception to the recently drawn-up rules for board travel because the newspapers finally published the fact that board members such as Susan Valdes had spent $50,000 in one year on so-called board business travel. All the board members spent piles of money that come out of the tax kitty for travel billed as business but was in fact was for fun and games for an IQ-lite board.

Because of the long-simmering hostility between Griffin and Board Chair Faliero, war broke out on the podium with Chair Faliero's threatening to have Griffin removed from the board dais and with Griffin's sputtering and cackling about her rights large and small since she is a Very Important Person. Homewrecker Pole Girl Faliero used her gavel with vigor. A good time was had by all. This much energy has not been expended on the entire board secret agenda for the two years that I have witnessed the board’s feeble participation in running the schools.

Meanwhile, the retaliation against teachers continues led by Home-ec Béarnaise Sauce Kipley. Goader Steve Kemp’s job has been jeopardized by an anonymous police report from one of the network of spies who serve Elia’s lust for no criticism and laudatory press even though her reign as superintendent is a horror.

Some anonymous fellow was kind enough to go to the Ybor police station and get the report and send it to me. I got the above email that says you, Mr. Smilely, are an Area 5 ESE specialist. I didn’t know what ESE meant and had to ask. Apparently it’s shorthand for a worker in the special-needs- children area. I infer that you have risen in the hierarchy that takes care of our society’s children who are not born with all their physical and mental faculties intact.

I saw these children when they were only a few days old when I worked as a nurse in hospital nurseries. When the nurses in the lounge for a break mentioned one of these special babies in the nursery, a mournful look came on their faces. We all knew that these special babies’ lives would not be easy, and we knew that the people who gave birth to them and the ones who cared for them in, for example, schools would not have an easy time of it either.

I noted when I worked in hospitals for fifteen years before changing my career from nursing to teaching literature that sometimes people with sadistic proclivities gravitate to the pediatric ward. I inferred they want power over some creatures less powerful than they.

I believe you, sir, fall into this category. Who but these special-needs children are vulnerable to those with power lust? What better field of endeavor than the care of these children for a power junkie just dying to exercise unchecked power to prove his superiority?

It makes sense that such a power glutton ends up in the special-needs department of the public schools and insinuates himself up the ladder of authority by informing in the ugly ritual of providing information for money or favors to higher-ups.

And you have, one infers from the allusion to your “being in the office with bigwigs” in the reader comment above, demonstrated the underbelly of the breed that lusts for power over the least powerful in our society: you became sycophant to those with power over you to aid your clamber up the ladder with the goal of gaining more power for yourself. You didn’t care that people below you whom you stepped on called you an asskisser and a bootlicker and other unlovely names. One day you, powerful Mr. Smiley, would show them who was in charge of their professional lives, whether they had a job or got canned.

I imagine this witches’ brew of sadism, power lust, and other scraps of the pot of motives that energize the informers of our society unfolded in the Goader situation.

After throwing Steve Kent into an area of behaviorally challenging special-needs children with his having no training from supervisors in the challenges of that duty, his co-worker(s) deserted him one day to make the best of it. So when two boys required simultaneous attention that he could give to only one at a time, he hooked the harness of one to a chair or desk or some stationary object. For this, he now stands to lose his job.

Not clear to me is what logic dictates that hooking the child to his seat on the bus is not child abuse but that hooking him to a chair in the classroom in such situation as described by Goader when he was trying to handle two obstreporous students is any different than the bus restraint.

In the periphery of this scene of Goader’s attempt to quell two cut-ups at once, you or one of your snitches observed. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a peep-hole for supervisory oversight. Then there was the race to report the sad tableaux in the worst light for Goader. You yourself thence scurried to the police station to file a charge for child abuse against teacher Goader.

One wonders why you—since you are apparently one of the overlords who didn’t give Goader training for such emergencies—didn’t walk into the area and say to Goader, “Hey, buddy, it looks like you could use a hand. Let me take care of this fellow while you take care of the one you are holding.”

Which response—a rush to report to the police or a move to lend a helping hand to somebody overwhelmed by the situation—better represents the ethos of Judeo-Christian ethics to which we are supposed to adhere? Everyone can answer that question. It reads, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Darwin says in The Ascent of Man that ethics arose when members of the primal horde began to want other tribe members to admire and approve of them. So they didn’t cold-cock each other with their clubs just as we today have evolved not to punch each other in the nose or rat out somebody because that gesture gives us a power rush and butters up the higher-ups who want to extirpate a teacher who has a Web site that criticizes the administration. We salivate to contemplate that ratting out Goader to the ROSSAC Big House could get us the reward of moving up the power ladder and coming to reside in the ROSSAC Big House ourselves.

I infer that’s how ROSSAC works. It has a power structure of the superintendent as chief of all the goodies like jobs, raises, and other perquisites. That means that all the tribe of informers quietly slither into the ranks of those who betray others for gain so that they will get the favored jobs, the raises, and the other perquisites that accompany finkdom sycophancy.

Two great instances of literary informers are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet and Iago in Macbeth. Hamlet’s hare-brained school buddies see Hamlet is no longer the winning party when they arrive at Ellsinore and go over to the side of King Claudius to act as snitches on their old school mate. These two make us all want to puke and say, “Get out of here, you brownnosing toadies.” If you want to insult somebody with a college education, call him either “Rosencrantz,” or “Guildenstern.” It’s the educated equivalent of “you’re one, you’re another one, and so’s your old lady.”

Iago chills and repels. He suffers from what Coleridge called “motiveless malignity.” People who are evil from causes we don’t know give us the creeps in literature and in life. If we know people’s motives for behaving badly right up to murder, we can see them as human beings like we are gone wrong. Rotten childhoods that beget pathology we all understand. We suffer from them ourselves. The psychiatric offices across the world are filled with people whose parents were child-abusing fiends. Parents get bad press on the couch.

Judas, the acme of informers, makes everybody recoil in horror at his betrayal of Christ. Informers whether for money or for psychological satisfaction don’t get good press. Nobody likes them—especially the people to whom they inform. The corrupters know that they have bought and paid for a person’s soul, and they intuitively recoil at the results of their catalyzing the perversion of a human being from his chance for nobility or even beatitude. Even the puppetmaster does not feel comfortable with his gutting the toady's soul and blighting the chance each human has on earth of reaching for moral nobility. And when your own toady story gets out, Smilely, the teaching primal horde back in Hillsborough County schools’ classrooms is not going to have benign feelings toward you, the snitch.

As Goader’s superior or even as just another human being, you should have helped him to handle a tough situation for his and the children’s sake. Is your motive for informing on Goader to the police that you have an aged parent with Alzheimer’s to support who requires round-the-clock nursing so that you need to become one of those golden ROSSAC administrators with salaries of $130,000 and up? That gloss would give the enemies of informers some pause. But one suspects your payoff for informing was the more usual one of your lust to become one of the big players in the ROSSAC redoubt of ninnies with early childhood, kindergarten, or home-ec degrees who feed at the public trough and pursue their tawdry little schemes of power and community éclat. So far as I am aware, there is no Nobel Laureate for ratting out another human being as you did Steve Goader Kemp. And there is no guarantee that you will ever hit the big time with your career of informing and enter the Elysian Fields of ROSSAC to feast on honey and mead dished out by keyboard cup maidens.

You may be stuck for the rest of your career amongst the people you betrayed. And let me tell you if you haven’t noticed, teachers can be as mean as junkyard dogs to people who betray the tribe of pedagogues to which they belong. You think you have contended with upleasant people before? Wait until you face the teachers whom you have betrayed with your Goader retaliation thrust. You will think that the most vicious of our ancestors of the Australopithecus species, clubs held high, canines gleaming, is a sweetheart in comparison to a teacher who abhors rat-outs in their midst.

Nobody, but nobody likes snitches. I infer that explains why the upper-left of your report to the Ybor City police bears the legend “unfounded.” It doesn’t say “unproved.” It says “unfounded.” That diction choice suggests that even the officer taking the report didn’t believe you and doesn't like informers.

Goader has been smart enough to get himself a lawyer. I hope the guy is sufficiently clever to make hay out of the “unfounded” comment. I could write a 600-page explication de texte on it.

Mr. Smiley, I shall inform on you to all the teachers. In this, I move into the snitch lowlife tribes of the world. But turn-about is fair play. So I shall send a copy of this exordium to as many teachers as I have in my files, a considerable number. I even have the principals’ list.

High-ho, Silver, away!

I wish you all the luck in the world in dealing with the universal scorn that snitches get when they are found out. And I predict that you have just dealt your ambitions to become a member of the ROSSAC elite thugs a considerable blow from your incontinent behavior in this matter. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving rat-fink.

Lee Drury De Cesare