Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [23]
These 150 kids are checking fifteen hundred books a month out of the school library. Many of the fifth-graders read at the ninth-grade level. One hundred percent of the fourth-graders passed the state’s TAAS test in reading; 92.5 percent passed math. The kids are poised, articulate, and stunningly polite. They are getting the rigorous Core Knowledge curriculum developed by E. D. Hirsch at the University of Virginia. The school works with the parents through an astonishing array of outreach programs. It also has a special science-education curriculum where the kids all do original experiments and then parents come to hear them explained. Classical music is part of the deal. A third-grader with silver beads in her braided ‘do was asked what the music was. “Oh, that’s the ‘Moonlight Sonata,’ ” she replied. “It’s by Beethoven.”
To send these kids to the Rapoport Academy costs $20,000 a year per child, some provided by the state and the rest by the Rapoport Foundation. The principal, Nancy Grayson, not only believes but knows that these kids can make it. B is convinced she’s one of the thirty-seven secret saints of the Jewish tradition who are doing the Lord’s work on earth. B and Audre come here frequently to read to the kids. A few years ago they brought Hillary Clinton to the school to read, and she said to the kids, “I am the First Lady of our country. Do you know who the First Man is?”
“Yes,” chorused the otherwise well-educated children. “Mr. Rapoport!”
When B comes to the school, all the kids know him: “That’s my girlfriend!” he carols to one in the fourth-grade line, who beams back at him. But the first-graders are not so well trained, so when B appears, they drop what they’re doing and run to hug him, four, five, six little kids trying to climb over one another to kiss him. He puts his long arms around all of them and says to himself as he hugs them, “I am so rich. Oh, God, I am so rich.” (Yeah, we know, we should have found some repellent, tax-dodging, selfish rich guy for this chapter, but what could we do? B is the only rich guy we know.)
4.
The Blues in Belzoni
I know how hard it is for you to put food on your families.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, JANUARY 27, 2000
Eugene Scalia would be a dedicated advocate to the policies of the Department of Labor.
—ARI FLEISCHER, SPOKESMAN FOR GEORGE W. BUSH, DECEMBER 14, 2001
The first duty of government is to protect the powerless against the powerful.
—THE CODE OF HAMMURABI, THE WORLD’S OLDEST LEGAL CODE, 1700 B.C.
The disconnect (a word that has mysteriously replaced disconnection) between the government of this country and the people in it has been the subject of complaint for the length of our history. This is a report on the specific disconnect between Washington, D.C., under George W. Bush, and some women in Belzoni, Mississippi.
Eugene Scalia, meet the workers of the Mississippi Delta’s catfish houses. But please, shake their hands gently; many of them are in pain. The lumps on their wrists and the fingers that look as though they have been twisted into a bunch of twigs by rheumatoid arthritis are the consequence of what you have so dismissively dubbed “junk science.” Please, shake their twisted hands very gently.
Eugene Scalia describes himself as a labor lawyer, which is true, in a sense—the same way it’s true that the late Colonel Sanders was a big advocate for chickens. Scalia fils is the son of Justice Antonin Scalia. The younger Scalia, thirty-seven, was a partner in the law firm that represented George W. Bush in his case before the Supreme Court, the one that made him president and billed his backers $892,000 for the legal work.
Gene Scalia kept his distance from that case so no one could claim the high court’s decision to name Bush president was tainted by nepotism. Gore v. Bush was not the sort of case the younger Scalia would have argued or briefed, even if his father weren’t on the Supreme Court.