June 17, 2018 Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

June 17, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

RE: As usual, a target rich environment

MS O,

Ah, the vagaries of age have taken me away from the lists for far too long! One particular mini Op-Ed and a tangentially related news story have had a Finnegan’s Wake – yesterday was Bloomsday, remember? – effect on me. I am returning to the arena, avenging sword in hand, “not to rust unburnished, but to shine in use”, in defense of truth, justice, and the ‘permanent things’.

The first piñata is Donna Fusco, the big and I mean big as in the legendary “really big salad” big, Boss lady, il ducerina, if you will, of the Broward Teachers’ Union. [There is something distinctly uneuphonic, jarring as in tinkling brass, about saying, even writing, Teachers and union in the same sentence. FDR was right when he said public employee unions were a Logical impossibility. Whom do they negotiate with? Themselves?] Before I unleash my trusty poleax on her let me pay her a backhanded compliment.

Do you remember Bobby Jones? 

It being the last day of the US Open it is both fitting and proper to use the game of golf as a metaphor for life. It’s been almost a century since he and 3 other shooting stars lighted up the sky of American sport. His athletic feats are still legendary but his life lessons grow more important.

He once emerged from a bocage-like rough to announce that having touched his ball, however inadvertently, he was penalizing himself one stroke. He was told that it did not improve his lie and that no one had seen it. He responded, somewhat Socratically, that just because a man walks past a bank and doesn’t rob it, he hasn’t earned a medal.

I compliment the steatyaganous Boss Lady Fusco – Rubenesque fails ot describe her properly – for breaking the mold of South Florida teacher union head thugs in that she is neither a paedophile nor is she a pick pocket, nor a no hot stove is safe, grifter. 

Alas, no medal for her and that is the extent of my magnanimity.

She mentions the Florida Retirement System and its “appointed managing trustees”, and by stretching the envelope of confusingly conflating correlation and causation, she says that they and Governor Scott, by owning stock in companies that make guns, had a hand in the Parkland shooting.

If it weren’t for tautologies modern American Liberals wouldn’t have to think at all.

I shan’t confuse all by invoking Logic, the capstone of the Trivium, but that, Ms Fusco’s description of culpability, is so colossally dumb that I am rendered almost speechless, with almost being the key word. 

Deo gracias for my recuperative abilities but I have a solution. Let’s stop appointing trustees and elect some real people. How about Warren Buffett for some needed gravitas? How about Kim Kardashian for some new age accounting? How about a crack whore from Liberty City as a nod to diversity? [And speaking of diversity, why aren’t there any women caddies, particularly at chicks only tournaments?

But the story goes on and on.

The Sentinel believes, profoundly and deeply, that any social problem – say education – can be solved by raising taxes. A child born of modern American Liberal parents will not receive a silver spoon. What goes inside the swaddling clothes and then into the crib is a recycled, biodegradable tax rate CD with the words “raise it” and “more” etched into it in an environmentally sensitive manner.

You have a news story about a referendum in Palm Beach County to raise taxes just a teeny-weeny bit to “fund” better education. 

Don’t think ill of me for asking but why will paying teachers who can’t teach Johnny to read more money make them better teachers? If you tell me that higher salaries will attract better teachers what should we do with the older ones who have failed to teach Johnny to read?

Here’s a plan.

Hold them to same high standards to which football coaches are held. Also, and this may be a vocabulary quiz but let us defenestrate at random with decimation as our template, every self-proclaimed educational administrator who can be found. Put that $ into a slush fund for superior teachers.

THE REAL WORLD PAYS ON RESULTS, NOT EFFORT.

Look it up.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET