So the head monkey has fired the giraffe in charge of looking into the Russian banana pilfering that has everyone questioning his fitness to rule. Rule? Heck! I question his continued right to own bananas!
But this post is supposed to be a reflection on surviving, not another angry animal metaphor about things that can’t be cured until the next election, or until the elephants that put the monkey in charge do something about their own addiction to bananas and work up the necessary human emotion and moral outrage to remove him as head of the zoo.
Steve Bannon, the idea-monkey of the Monkey Kingdom
So let me enumerate some of the thoughts that give me peace in the midst of this insane monkey-house cacophony. (Cacophony is a good word to use around the topic of the monkey king because it has both the words “caca” and “phony” in it.)
- Bannon is a very scary chimpanzee, but he is apparently on the outs in the court of the monkey king. He got in a verbal kerfuffle with Orangutan Junior Kushner, and the monkey king has not recently crayoned his signature on the poison-in-executive-order-form that Bannon cares most about.
- Orangutan Junior Kushner is now in charge of everything under the sun. All bananas now grow by his doings, and he can’t possibly run everywhere and poo everywhere to properly fertilize all the banana trees. And considering the toxic qualities of the monkey king’s banana trees, we probably don’t really want them to grow anyway.
Orangutan Junior Kushner has taken to wearing Trump-style hair.
- The Russian banana pilfering has put all other monkey initiatives on hold. The monkey king was planning to create monkey laws with the elephants that would prevent most other animals from having any hope of health care. It made its way successfully through the Elephant House and was supposed to move on to the Elephant Senate to be officially stamped with the notion that providing the other animals with mythical “access” to health care wasn’t just a way to make animals pay all their money to insurance piranhas and still not be able to afford any real health care. Now they are forced instead to talk about other banana-related things.
- And on the subject of bananas, the monkeys and the elephants actually have them all already. So we don’t have to worry about having bananas. We probably never will. All they have left for us are the peanuts. But they like to take and eat our peanuts too. The good part of this is that peanuts are a healthy food for diabetics. And, of course, you can’t die of over-eating if you cannot buy food.
So, the long and the short of it is this. It is not hard to see the end of this struggle to survive the monkey king’s rule. I, for one, will probably not survive. But cutting the legs out from under the giraffe investigating the Russian banana pilfering was probably the beginning of the end of the monkey king himself. The lions, wherever they have been hiding, will now come out and eat him.
Catch a Falling Star 
I Have No Idea
Yesterday I posted a weird picture that I haven’t used before and made myself cry gushers of tears again for the boy the picture is a portrait of. I suppose it is a catharsis I didn’t really need. I woke up today with a blistering headache to keep my perpetual backache company. Could that have been caused by the crying and the blues that ensued? Probably.
So, I have no idea for today. My brain hurts and my heart is burned out.
I checked Facebook where I had posted this quote from Malala ;
I wasn’t really prepared for controversy. I should’ve been. It is obvious from the guns versus books graphics that it would stir emotions in my liberal author and teacher friends, as well as my conservative cracker anti-Muslim friends.
My aunt, a former career teacher, responded first. She wrote, “Like the thought.” She was a great third grade teacher in Iowa for many years. She loved all kids then and still does today. I want to be like that in retirement too.
But the next response was from a former high school friend who voted for Trump and hates all the people the Republican Party orders him to hate.
“Sounds great like most sound bites. Much harder to explain and implement.” My friend, Ali Hassenbutter (not his real name, but this will make him angry as well as protect his actual identity), likes to take jabs at me for being a liberal, and the subtext here is that, even though I was a teacher for many years, I don’t know what I’m talking about when it comes to education. So, I answered him with some heartfelt teacher-ism.
“I had Egyptian and Lebanese and Arab students in my classes at Garland ISD. They are people just like us. You help them learn English. They make American friends. Americans learn that most Muslims are not terrorists. What’s so complicated about that? Unless you start slamming doors in their faces and treating them as less valuable than you are.” I admit to maybe being a bit snarky in that last line, but sometimes he gets my goat. (I know I should just let him have it. I have never liked my goat that much anyway. It smells bad.)
A fellow ESL teacher from Garland chimed in even though she doesn’t know Ali. “And these students added spice in our classroom… Just like they do in the USA.” She knows all the students I was referencing.
Then one of my other Belmond classmates who knows and probably detests us both as heathens added his words of wisdom, “The real concept here is that we are in fact ALL HUMAN.” See there? The Bible banger gets it. And I really appreciate when he steps in and tries to make peace. He’s somewhat nutty at times, but his new-found religion allows him to believe like I do that we should choose love over hate as our default response, even to terrorism.
But Ali comes back with; “It takes both approaches to this problem. But then there is Berkley as a shining example of education gone off the rail.” He’s at least trying to sound like he is listening to our comments, but then he pulls this old red hot chestnut out of the fireplace. He offers it like the opinion of the crazy, racist uncle at Thanksgiving Dinner.
“Yes, because it was the teachers’ fault at Berkley. That poor young racist agitator from Breitbart was supposed to have a peaceful forum for spewing his hateful mouth garbage at young liberal college students, and the college administrators who granted him that right didn’t bend over backwards far enough to prevent a violent reaction.” I know, sarcasm is the resort of the defeated. I should be championing love over hate and freedom of speech over my personal revulsion to Milo.
My teacher friend had this to add; “I understand the “right” instigated that incident.”
“Yes, but they wore masks to hide their identity. That makes them automatically liberals, doesn’t it? If I am able to follow Fox News Logic, anyway.” Sez I.
And so, there we stand, at the very beginning of a month-long Facebook love/hate debate. And I will lose. You can argue with brick walls and score more debate points than you can arguing anything political with Ali. And the frustrating thing is, he’s an ordinary decent human being and stand-up guy too. Not just a dismiss-able deplorable because he voted for Trump.
I have no ideas today. I have a headache. If I can’t defend Malala’s heroic logic, then I can’t even argue my way out of a bowl of chicken soup. Doomed to drown in chicken broth. At least I will die healthy at the bottom of that mixed metaphor. That should be worth a laugh.
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Tagged as arguments about education, Facebook friends, Malala