Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [44]
“They must do away with the bad and ugly in the law,” he said. “It’s turning into a vehicle to bash our teachers and kids.”
It’s bad and ugly all over, even here in Texas. Bush’s first commissioner of education, now running schools in Dallas, is making the same argument Watkins did—in kinder and gentler words. “I think that the test really needs to be reviewed,” Mike Moses said. “I think it’s troubling . . . there may be difficulties with the test.”
Moses knows it will be bad and ugly when Dallas schoolkids take the high-stakes TAKS test next year. He is one of twenty-nine superintendents petitioning the state to back off on the standardized testing.
Maybe he’ll get Odell Edwards a reprieve.
If not, and Odell passes his test and makes it out of Wheatley High, he ought to buy as much McGraw-Hill common stock as he can afford.
So he won’t get fooled a third time.
6.
Green Rabbits and Yellow Streams
The environment is incredibly important for America in the twenty-first century.
—GEORGE BUSH, IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (MAY 1999)
Put yourself in this situation.
It’s Saturday morning in the New Jersey town where you have lived for ten years when you’re suddenly jarred out of bed by an ungodly racket. You rush downstairs to check—no kids, no cartoons blasting from the television. This is from outside.
You race out and there are two TV-news helicopters circling your house. Standing next to your children, who are dressed in shorts and T-shirts, is a man in a white space suit. A newspaper photographer is aiming his Nikon at your kids, who are watching the person sealed in his protective suit take soil samples from your yard. The same yard your kids play in every day. The same earth in which you plant tomatoes, radishes, and cucumbers every year. The same dust you vacuum out of the rooms in your three-story suburban house. The same dirt that ends up in the kids’ mouths when they forget to wash their hands before meals.
“I was scared to death,” said Gail Horvath. “I thought I was living in another Love Canal.” Horvath and her husband, Alan, are raising three children in Edison, New Jersey, in a house across the railroad tracks from one of the state’s 111 Superfund sites. Make that 114. The day Gail Horvath sat in her immaculate living room and recalled men in space suits digging up her neighborhood, the local paper reported three more New Jersey sites had been added to the EPA’s Superfund list.
Three generations of Gail’s family live across the railroad tracks from the five acres of toxic chemicals abandoned by a hazardous-waste hustler named Arnold Livingston. The late Livingston changed corporate identities faster than Christine Whitman changed policy positions. Livingston of Chemical Insecticide Corporation (CIC) was a small-time, local waste-disposal operator who achieved a rare distinction—he left behind not one but two Superfund sites. Even by Jersey standards, that’s impressive. He also left behind a reputation more toxic than the poisonous crap he so cavalierly dumped.
The more Horvath and her neighbors learned, the more they worried. “They had my kids tested for arsenic. They’ve had their hair cut all these years [to test for toxic substances, primarily arsenic]. Testing. Waiting for results.”
When the Horvaths bought their home in 1989 they had no idea Chemical Insecticide Corporation even existed. But there had been warnings—including one twenty years earlier. In November 1969 six Black Angus cows, bulky versions of canaries in the mine, died from drinking arsenic out of the brook in Julius Yelencsics’ pasture. Edison patrolman Fred Lacik investigated the cow die-off and followed his nose. A stream of “greenish color fluid along with what looked like black oil,” he reported,