Postcards from the Edge

Gentle Readers: Here is another anti-lee specimen that makes AntiGrammargrinch look like one of the seraphim. I attract the strangest people. lee

-----Original Message----- From: John__D [mailto:noreply-comment@blogger.com] Sent: Sunday, June 14, 2009 8:58 AM To: tdecesar@tampabay.rr.com Subject: [Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch] New comment on I Nevcr Take the Fifth. John__D has left a new comment on your post "I Nevcr Take the Fifth": >

I know in all senses that the three administrators named allowed, even promoted, child abuse of the severely retarded children.< ____________________________________________________- John D wades in:

This is a strong call about what you know. As for my protecting child abusers, you infer too much. I think you're doing Steve Kemp more harm than good. You write that his was "an innocent mistake by [what I presume is] an uninformed teacher" and also that the three administrators were guilty of abuse by putting disabled children in a room with junk lining the walls. Good. You got angled parentheses around an editorial comment in a quote right.

All Steve has to do is tell me so, and I will stop. I think keeping his case in the limelight has made the ROSSAC thugs deal with it a fairer way than they would have had nobody knew about it and had everything gone on behind closed doors as is the usual mode.

I believe that if Steve's case had not been publicized, he would be fired by now and trying to scare up a way to make a living to feed himself and keep a roof over his head.

Lack of attention to the thuggeries of ROSSAC when it wants to get rid of somebody was Mr. Erwin's problem. Nobody knew his case was going on and how the administration and board colluded to shut him up about crime on school grounds that various higher ups probably profited from and shut him down by firing him and depriving him of his pension.

I wish I had been doing Mr. E's PR. People would have known what a dirty deal the administration and board were pulling off in plain view with no audience but poor Mr. Erwin, the victim. I am glad he finally gave up on the system and took the ROSSAC thugs and the board to court and won his Whistleblower suit because the jury did not believe the board's and administration's lies. Nobody would if they heard them. The taxpayers paid $165,000 for board and administration crime.

That "innocent mistake" was abuse, wasn't it? I'll be honest and admit that all I know is what I've read on blogs - but if someone specifically trained for the job had done the same thing that Steve Kemp had innocently done, they Pronoun-antecedent disagreement would have been child abusers in your eyes, wouldn't they?

It's a contingency question. I would need to know all the data. One could say that this is another instance of the administration's and board's dopey management skills. It is OK for the boys to be restrained on the bus but not in the classroom. I'd like somebody to try to justify that disparity.

And one of these "boys," the one Goader was chasing while he hooked the lighter one to a chair while he chased the big fellow to try to keep him from escaping into the hall, weighed 175 pounds.

The administrators left the disabled children in a junk-filled room? So did Steve Kemp, didn't he?

No, he stayed in there with the retarded children and tried to keep them from pulling the stuff down on their or other people's heads and tried to conduct a class in whatever the retarded children do in class.

I don't believe that this fact is disputed by any party, is it?

I don't dispute it, but I would insist on giving it context.

It's a despicable situation, but Steve Kemp was there doing his best as a teacher while letting disabled children stay in that junk-filled room and, by your standards, abusing them.

Steve is not litigious. I am. I would have screamed bloody murder and perhaps called the cops if I had thought of it.

Now, you've written that any citizen can file a complaint if they (he or she knows) know of abuse, (no comma: You separate coordinate subordinate "that' noun clauses.) and also that most child abuse is inferred (comma for contrasting element) not known.

That's right. I got an email recently from a fellow who says an administrator in one of the schools lures boys into his office to have them take off their shoes so that he can play with their feet. He asked me what to tell the mother to do, that he is afraid the administration would cover it up if he told her to bring it to ROSSAC. They would: the guy is percipient. I told him to help the mother bring this issue straight to the State Education Committee's Professional Standards and Ethics Committees. I told the fellow (a teacher) to stick with the mother to buck her up and not to let her waiver.

This foot-fetish administrator is not a genital pedophile, but he may be working up to it. How do I know? I infer it. I am a nurse and have read a bazillion psychiatric case histories and every word Freud has written on pedophilic fetishes among all the other pathologies people suffer. I am afraid this guy will get away with this preliminary activity with the boys' feet and amp up his pedophilia.

Look what hideous things happened to the children in the Irish schools for poor children run by Christian Brothers and Sisters of Mercy. The Christian Brothers taught my husband in high school. The Sisters of Mercy ran the hospital where I trained as a nurse.

Foot fetishism has a long sexist history. The foot-binding practices of the Orient come under this fetish. The men didn't want the women to be able to run away if they wanted to rape them. Answer: bind the girls' feet when they are babies so that the foot doesn't grow normally and cripple the girls' locomotion.

Don't try to pull another Sgt. Joe Friday again on me and grill me. I will post your emails but will not answer them. I won't answer you or anybody on this foot case.

Would you therefore support someone who saw Kemp keeping those retarded children in a junk-filled room, inferred from the available evidence that abuse was occurring, and filed a complaint?

I would not. Steve had the situation thrust upon him; he did not create it. The ones who put the classroom for the retarded children in a dangerous, junk-filled room are guilty of directed child abuse.

I welcome feedback on these comments from you or your readers. I will stand corrected on anything I have misconstrued, but I think (know?) that I'm on the money. If you want administrators' heads to roll, Steve Kemp as the actual doer of the action will have to watch his head roll too if you get your way.

No, he won't, sugarbritches. Not as long as I can stand on a podium and squawk and pull myself up to a CRT screen and compose stirring defenses of him to the state bureaucracy. I shall flail away until Steve says he no longer wants my help.

Your case is one of hunger for attention. I infer--bordering on knowing--that you did not get enough attention as a child. So you want Granny Lee's attention now. Do I know this for sure? No, but I am betting on my intuition.

I will bet my three best pairs of Manola Blahniks that I am onto your personality disorder. Don't disesteem intuition. It is the inchoate intelligence we all have but can't attach analytic terms to. It's the gut feelings of our innards telling us what's really going on outside. Women have intuitive skills more than men because women are lucky enough not to take themselves as seriously as guys do, and women take care of people all their lives from babies to dying parents and grandparents. Women are at home in emotion mine fields.

I want as many people as possible to have blogs about the school system--especially teacher blogs because teachers see the schools from the inside. The schools are now run by a bunch of thugs and need as much attention trained on the thugs as possible.

You should have your own blog and come to the school board meetings and watch the board, ask for public-information documents from the Public Affairs Office, and speak out. Don't try to make me your Charlie McCarthy. I won't play that role again. lee

Publish this comment.

Reject this comment. Moderate comments for this blog. Posted by John__D to Lee Drury De Cesare's Casting-Room Couch at 5:57 AM

Mr. Scott @NYT:

I am printing out your column on "The Taking of Pelham" because it sounds like my husband's kind of movie.

I shall give him your review and hope for a movie date.

I think this column is the best writing I have seen you do. The pace and tone and diction are suave. All capture the NYC smart-ass ethos to a T.

In addition, one has the sense that here is a guy who knows movies backwards and forwards.

I regret to report one set of comma errors:

...habits and the durability of a native ethical instinct, embodied in the flawed, diffident Walter Garber, that somehow survives...

The past participial phrase is restrictive. It modifies "a...instinct."

But this retired English teacher awards the composition an A minus, which means you can attach it to the fridge with the rest of the children's star performances.

Lee Drury De Cesare

Madeira Beach, FL