Par for the course

Chip Mosher

"YOU'RE HITTING THE WALL, AREN'T YOU?" my cat, Mr. Henry Miller, said after lighting a cigarette. He's the happiest (and talkiest! and smokiest!) cat alive.

"Pretty much," I answered, staring at a blank page, trying to grind out this week's column. My dog, a black lab who never speaks, was lying in the corner, sleeping, quiet as a mouse.

"Thomas Mann said that a writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," Mr. Miller said, puffing away.

"What're you writing about?"

"The governor and his State of the State speech and stuff," I said.

"You mean the governor's state of the village idiot speech?" he asked. "You know, Polly Jean says that Jim Gibbons is George W. Bush lite."

Polly Jean, from a prominent Nevada family, is a clever and beautiful 24-year-old woman who occasionally hangs out in our home. She has an interspecies lesbian love bond with my female black lab. She also likes to come over and watch my condo neighbor, who hits golf balls in the nude during full moons on the golf course outside my living room window. He's Bulgarian, with a cultured accent. He took up this naked hobby shortly after the sudden death of his wife. Polly Jean calls him "fun Eddie." And the cat, Mr. Miller, likes snuggling between Polly Jean's breasts while watching my nude neighbor hit golf balls, too. Like I say, the happiest cat alive.

All that aside, Mr. Miller is right: I have smacked into a wall, attempting to write about the governor's recent State of the State speech. How does one sort through such crap?

Well, like this: The governor gives the speech. Previously, he had stated education was one of his top priorities. But in his speech, education seems to be something on the back burner of a stove with no gas. He surprisingly shuns local professional educators in favor of a Canadian from Edmonton, Michael Strembitsky, to plot the future of education in our state. Strembitsky's name comes to Gibbons via a highly questionable but well-connected woman, Maureen Peckman, who looks hell-bent on anointing herself Nevada's education czar. She's gotten Strembitsky's name from William Ouchi, an author who has borrowed from Strembitsky's model to write a book, Making Schools Work. This education model of Strembitsky and Ouchi is a business model, based on the psychopathy (lack of conscience) of corporations. Their catchwords are decentralized and empowerment. Meaning: more power for principals to painfully twist arms. But apparently neither man has read Breaking the Silence: Overcoming the Problem of Principal Mistreatment of Teachers by Joseph and Jo Blasé, who contend 40 percent of today's principals have either questionable leadership abilities or detrimental ego problems like an aberrant need to assert superiority. Even further, Gibbons appears unaware that teachers in Edmonton, unlike their counterparts in Las Vegas, are paid a decent living wage, boosted regularly by accurate cost-of-living indices; where (HELLO!) teachers legally can and do go on strike when they haven't been treated fairly -- something illegal in Nevada. Gibbons and his new political bedmate Peckman seem to view their empowerment model from a slave master perspective, as yet another weapon to keep Las Vegas teachers down. This model is frighteningly similar to the one used here for the past 10 years -- with horrific results. The public head-scratching triggered by Gibbon's confusing speech is no doubt part of a ploy by him and Peckman to divert attention from the single most important issue facing education in Nevada: the inadequate wages of Las Vegas teachers. Such political shenanigans are enough to drive a Socratic old Sodomite nucking futs.

"What's that you were saying about old sodomites?" my cat, Mr. Henry Miller, piped up.

"What?"

"Old sodomites? You were talking to yourself again," he said, still puffing away recklessly, as if he had nine lives to live.

"Just stuff. The governor and his new soulmate, Maureen Peckman. By the way, smoking is bad for you. You should quit."

"I plan to," he said. "In my last lifetime."

Outside the window, fun Eddie, my neighbor, was hitting golf balls, naked under a full moon. In the corner beneath the window, the dog woke up. And she yawned.

(For a satiric look into Maureen Peckman's bleak future go online to CityLife's archives, choose "Advanced Search" and date "04/13/2006." Type in "Soylent Teachers.")

Chip Mosher is a simple classroom teacher.