Ron Paul had an affair with my 3rd Grade teacher?

Well, intellectually, maybe. And I think he would have liked her.

The whole Ron Paul-is-a-closet-racist-homophobe controversy has made me think about three incidents from elementary school that may shed some light on thinking about Dr. No and his now-infamous newsletters.

Incident one: pay no attention to the fat lady behind the felt board

In rural Virginia during the early 1960s there was Protestant religious education in the public schools. Once a week we had music class; once a week we had Bible class. You could get out of it if you brought in a note from home that said you were Jewish or Catholic (apparently being an atheist was not an option). At the time my family did not go to church, had never gone to church. In first grade I thought about becoming a Jew or a Catholic to get out of Bible class, but then I found out that Jew and Catholics had to go to the library and spend an hour doing worksheets (take that you despicable non-Protestants!), so I thought it would be more fun to stick around and torment the Bible lady. Years later I would see the Church Lady on Saturday Night Live and have flashbacks.

The Bible lady was (not to put too fine a point on it) obese. Which was OK because it meant that we could see part of her sticking out around all sides of the two foot by three foot felt storyboard she strapped on her chest every Tuesday to tell us the story of Genji, the good Japanese boy. Genji was a very thoughtful, smarmy type of brat, who kept getting victimized by the awful priests of the false god Buddha. (I swear that I am not making this up.) He would put his offering coins for the poor in the little niche in the back of the false-god-Buddha (a one syllable word like "damnyankee"), only to have them stolen out at night by the alcoholic priests who bought saki and cavorted with his money.

Eventually Genji was saved-for-the-Lord (another one syllable proposition) by a thin, blond American missionary woman with big breasts. OK, maybe I made up the big breasts; it was first grade. She showed Genji that Jesus loved him as much as He loved white children in America, or at least almost as much, since the schools were still pretty segregated.

This story took a year to unfold. Those Jews and Catholics in the library never knew what they were missing.

By third grade the evil-Earl-Warren-inspired Federal government had ruled that Christian education in public schools was unconstitutional. No problem. The school leased a small patch of land from the farmer next door and put up a trailer. Once a week we all trooped down, left school property, and voluntarily attended Bible class. We all carried the Gideon Bibles that had been given to us at the first of the year, since Mr. Warren had forgotten that his Communist masters wanted him to forbid those as well.

Incident two: but not to their faces

My school was a 1-7 school (no kindergarten in the Old Dominion), attended by about 700 white cracker children. Some of the seventh graders had been there so long that they drove to school.

In the Third Grade we came back from summer vacation to find out that Wilson Elementary School had been integrated. Integration in Virginia in the 1960's consisted of taking the two Braxton brothers (one in 2nd and one in 4th grade), dropping them in with our 700 white cracker children, and hoping that they didn't get killed before the Federal compliance reports could be written.

Our teacher, Mrs. Guynn, had a long talk with us on the first day of school. She told us that she wasn't about to be embarrassed by bad conduct on the part of her students toward the new colored students. Most specifically: "I don't want to hear any of you ever calling them niggers to their faces."

Incident three: an unlovely development

You took Virginia history in fourth grade. My history book was copyrighted 1958 and had lots of cool, politically incorrect pictures in it. The watercolor sketch of the Jamestown Massacre of 1622 had a great picture of an Indian hatchet splitting open the skull of a colonial farmer.

The book also talked about slavery, which it described as "an unlovely but necessary component of the Negro's transition from savagery to civilization."

When I think back to my elementary school education, I almost wonder how I didn't turn out to be the infamous ghostwriter for the Ron Paul Report. And when I tell these stories to my students (most of whom are African-American) they visualize me growing up inside a Satanic hotbed of racism and hatred.

All of which ignores context.

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. "not-niggers to-their-faces" Guynn, was not in fact a reactionary conservative. She was considered a dangerous pinko liberal, and had worked tirelessly in favor of integration. But she was also a prisoner of her linguistic upbringing, and a plain-spoken woman. What she wanted was appropriate conduct from her students; she thought she had to be blunt to get it.

Today she would have been on CNN and YouTube and it would not have mattered.

I actually got to meet the woman who wrote that Virginia History text nearly thirty years later. She was a blue-haired Southern matriarch who walked with a cane by then. When I summoned my righteous indignation to ask about that offending savagery-to-civilization quote, she laughed at me. "The problem with you young people," she said, "is that you really don't understand the time in which you grew up. I had to fight to get that sentence into the book, because it was the first reference--ever--in a Southern public school textbook to suggest that the Negro had any capacity for civilization under any circumstances. It was revolutionary for 1958, boy."

And after doing my research, I am forced to admit that she was right.

Bible class? Not only wasn't I hurt by the exposure to Protestant Christianity (although I eventually turned out to be Catholic), but I eventually realized that--at least in my school district--that Bible class was a sort of last stand for local control over what their children should be taught. In a way, I wish half as many parents were half as concerned with their children's education today.

Context is critical.

Ron Paul is, if he is a Libertarian at all, a Paleo-Libertarian. Stone age. Fundamentalist. The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle USMC were cutting edge television, and I doubt anyone has yet broken it to him that Jim Nabors was gay.

The social upheaval of the 1970s and 1980s caused lots of reactions that we'd all be better off trying to forget.

How does Jane Fonda keep getting a pass on that photo of herself aiming the anti-aircraft gun at American bombers while John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton?

I have said here on many occasions that Ron Paul is a phenomenon rather than a candidate. He is also a representative symptom of what happens when the so-called mainstream casually alienates large segments of American society. They get paranoid, draw in on themselves, and become exceptionally easy to parody (or, if you're the FBI, to get wire-tapping warrants for).

Sometimes I wonder about the difference between pseudo-Ron-Paul's comments on all the welfare-state blacks and the blanket characterization of anyone who lives in rural Wyoming or Montana as a wacko militia nut that the mainstream has tacitly supported for years.

If diversity (ugh, 'scuze me while I hock a big 'un) means anything, it doesn't just mean women, people of color, or gays. It also includes survivalists, bikers, gold bugs, stamp collectors, people who spend too much money on model railroads, and Eminem. The big lie is that diversity is supposed to be comfortable. It's not.

Barack Obama's pastor is simply bizarre.

Mitt Romney follows a religion that believes that all good Mormon men will eventually end up ruling their own planet.

Mike Huckabee has advocated quarantining gays and doesn't believe in evolution.

Bill Clinton wrote that he loathed his country when he was in college not inhaling, and grew up to get head from an intern while he was talking on the phone to heads of state.

Dick Cheney shoots his friends while he's out hunting.

Jesse Jackson called New York "hymie-town."

John McCain has the same taste in sweaters as Joe Lieberman.


Dr. Seuss drew racist anti-Japanese cartoons during World War Two. (And in The Cat in The Hat, mom left the children ALONE in the house; they had to put a sleeping babysitter into the movie for PC purposes.)

I also bet nobody told Eddie Murphy that the original Doctor Doolittle series of books had the good vet dying an African prince's face and hands white because he wanted to look smarter like Americans.

John Edwards is a multi-millionaire trial lawyer passing himself off as a populist.

Rudy Giuliani is so corrupt I get nose bleeds just thinking about it.

If Fred Thompson were ever awake, I'd find out what his quirk was. (As it is, I just want a Thompson-Kucinich ticket so that I can oogle their wives.)

Ron Paul IS a nut. But in this company, that's not a disqualification, that's a pedigree.