Teacher, leave those kids alone.
Isn’t it curious how some people volunteer their personality’s skeleton key? They tell you, This is the most important thing about me, and, by thunder, they are right. But these kernels of soul-truth don’t necessarily mean what the naïfs think they do.
Tim Walz wants you to know he’s just a regular guy. He’s from a little town in Nebraska, he hunts, he was in the armed services. Most of all, he wants you to know he was a public school teacher. The Mankato Scarlets marching band delivered a musical interlude shortly before the Minnesotan governor and vice-presidential nominee took the stage Wednesday at the Democratic National Convention. “Never underestimate a public school teacher!” he crowed as he recounted his first congressional race. He subjected his audience to the tedium of endless and sometimes mixed football metaphors (although, I will admit, Walz’s record as a coach is pretty impressive).
This has been incorporated into the media campaign to cast Walz as an aspirationally avuncular or paternal character. (It’s gotten kind of weird.) Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), a prototype for Walz, also enjoyed or endured this kind of fawning as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 running mate. President Joe Biden, in the happy days before he became a revenant, underwent something similar too. Kaine and Biden, however, had a serious handicap relative to their Minnesotan successor. They maintained a basic sanity or dignity that told them, at the end of the day, they were politicians, not people’s actual honest-to-God parents.
That is, they were not teachers. They could only aspire to the self-righteousness of a man who works for two-thirds of the year as a guard at a minimum-security juvie facility, and thinks that gives him the right to have his pension plan bankrupt the state. The fanaticism of the public school teacher is rivaled only by that of the unionized transit official. (Stiff competition. I once met a minor MTA bureaucrat who freely admitted to drawing about $60,000 of falsified overtime annually, and went on to explain in tones of outraged dignity that he was the aggrieved party.)
These peoples’ professional lives are in fact premised on the idea that they know how to raise other people’s children better than they can—can do a better job of feeding them, sheltering them, and occasionally, when the great white wings of the Pädogogesgeist are spread over the face of the earth, even educating them. The social upheaval of the early 2020s centered on schools for a reason.
Walz has been polishing a line on the campaign trail that got trotted out Wednesday night: “We’ve got a golden rule: Mind your own damn business.” This isn’t American folk libertarianism; it’s more on the order of Keep your hands to yourself. My fellows in the conservative press have been giving the Covid “snitch line” story a good workout; then there’s the gun control and the child gender transition measures undermining parental rights. This is Mr. Walz’s classroom; he knows what’s good for you, and he’ll give it to you with tough love if need be. An awful lot of raw power can be papered over with sewing-sampler morality, variations on the dictum Just be nice and appeals to school-day simplicity.
Unfortunately, the American character has a weakness for this slop. Kevin Costner is worth $250 million entirely on the merits of movies about pressing social themes like “What if Dad had said ‘I love you’ more often?” and “This rural Christian votes for Democrats.” Despite the apocalypse of the written word, the great, yawning, ever-growing void that has in a single generation all but destroyed book publishing and the print news industry (please subscribe, by the way), Hallmark still sells six and a half billion pastel cards that say things like “A Grandfather’s Prayer” and “You Are Two-Riffic!” Americans, especially Americans in the millennial generation and younger, are addicted to potato love, to the cheap mercies of mental health days and sweatpants, to the easy morality of Ted Lasso and The Great British Bakeoff.
So perhaps the Walz gambit will work. Worse news for those of us who didn’t like school. When I was young, there was a phrase you don’t hear trotted out too much anymore: “the nanny state.” Nannying sounds like a definite improvement to the future coming into view: Mr. Walz’s national classroom, where, with great patience and a pure, simple belief in his own rightness, he asks you to stand at the board and repeat the lesson again, until you’ve got it right.
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