Two Horns and a Tail
This past spring there was a story in my hometown newspaper about the son of a former teacher that had advanced to the high school state debate tournament. After reading it, the second thing that occurred to me was that I AM REALLY OLD since I remember this teacher having two very young children. After that I started thinking about how this teacher was also a former debate coach, which probably provided her son with an unfair advantage over the kids that didn’t have former debate coach parents. And I say when in doubt, disqualify.
But for whatever reason, instead of thinking much about my former debate coach and her unfairly prepared kid, the first thing that popped into my head was the image of a friend of mine putting her oldest kid’s head in a urinal and flushing it repeatedly. Ah, good times. But wait, I’m going to get serious here in a minute. Why? Because as I sat with hand upon chin wistfully staring at the ceiling, I remembered something really strange. This teacher (who I liked then, and appreciate even more now) had a picture of her husband and kids on her desk that we would sometimes use to express ourselves artistically. Specifically, we would use a dry erase marker to draw horns and a tail on her husband. Because it was funny. Still is. And because this teacher was usually fun and easy going and we might have done something like that to anyone foolish enough to put out a personal photo.
Upon discovering our “artwork” this teacher made a comment about how we were terrible, but otherwise didn’t really seem upset. She was certainly not as upset as this one crazy old teacher at my school who had a bad case of shell shock that kicked into overdrive anytime he witnessed a particularly gruesome MURDER BY WATER GUN.
I wouldn’t have given the situation much more thought, but the next day the teacher showed up at school with a big stack of reports that detailed how Middle Eastern immigrants (like her husband) had a higher income and contributed more to society, etc. than the average person born in the United States. Now clearly a nice set of statistics makes me feel warm and fuzzy all over, but all of this from a set of horns and a tail? I mean it’s not like he was Irish and we drew a bottle of beer and made him look drunk. Is there some devil stereotype that I’m unaware of? Because if there is, it should really be used on the Dutch. Those bastards.
