GIMME SHELTER

GIMME SHELTER

For the high school teacher, especially for those of us who teach English, a winter storm emphasizes the other storm we must endure: the realization that we have about half a year to go, with endless piles of papers, or, in some cases, piles of shit; whiny students, who don’t want to do much of anything; their parents—even worse, who often en/(dis)able their students not to do anything; and some of our crazy colleagues who get a little cagey in the cold Ethan Frome of winter. A snow day can thus be a beautiful thing, for it provides us teachers with a shelter to brave all those slings and arrows of the mid-school year maelstrom that’s underway.

Rather than rejoice in my “snow-day” shelter, though, I braved the outside world with gusto; I tortured myself with President Bush’s late morning press conference. It really was like a trip back and forth to the future. Hey, I had just finished watching an episode of Little Einsteins with my three-year old, so I was feeling a little adventurous. And I couldn’t get the Little Einstein ditty out of my head: “we’re going on a trip in our favorite rocket ship, zooming through the skies, little Einsteins.”

All aboard and ready to explore just like little Einsteins, I couldn’t help but notice that Chimpy was indignant and as arrogant as ever. In fact, he was doing what he does best: not telling the truth while possibly laying the groundwork for a coming war.

In a revealing exchange with the ever ballsy David Gregory of MSNBC, Chimpy conflated yet another accusation: whether or not the Iranian government was supplying Shiite fighters with explosives targeting American soldiers. Sort of sounds like whether or not there was a connection between Saddam and Osama, doesn’t it? Hence, my little Einstein journey back and forth to the future.

As Editor & Publisher has noted, ever since these claims about the Iranians, which began last weekend, skepticism has quickly grown, even from the likes of General Peter Pace.

But if we really have a countdown to our truth mission in the spirit of those Little Einsteins—5,4,3,2,1: we find the real news involving the Shiite fighters and their use of explosive devices on our soldiers and their vehicles. It appears that yet again, our brave troops and their humvees have NOT been equipped with the necessary FRAG Kit 5 armor to sustain a new powerful roadside bomb, which may or may not involve supplies from the Iranian government. And while the U.S. military plans to armor all unarmored vehicles as quickly as possible, that mission won’t be accomplished until sometime this summer.

Hoping that the Little Einsteins would make my listening to the Bush conference more of a magic carpet ride than a dance on the deathstar of neocon foreign policy, I eerily thought of “Gimme Shelter”: War, children, it's just a shot away.