Justified Conditioning...

The row of children, pivoting their hips to the sway of the canary yellow bus, sat singing, two to a bench, all matching the verses with ingrained hand gestures that unearth memories of 50's bop dances. In unison the children sang:

I'll never go to Mexico no more, more, more
I'll never go to Mexico no more, more, more
There's a big bad policeman at the door, door, door
And he'll grab me by the collar
And he'll make me pay a dollar
So I'll never go to Mexico no more, more, more


The song finishes and the children revert to the chaos that plagued the bus ride on the way to the field trip. Kids climb upon their seats and hang over the backs. Half of them are laughing and joking in Spanish, the others in English.

The teacher tries to resurrect the singing, but the din of the children is too powerful to overcome. Accepting defeat she sits back down in her first row, pleather lined seat. Glancing at the large mirror above the head of the driver she caught his fleeting eye contact laden with pity.

A little girl trots up to the first row and plops herself down next to the teacher. Her feet dangle and bounce over the edge of the cushion but are unable to touch the floor. Smiling down at her, the teacher expected Angelica to keep her company as she has done during most bus rides.

Angelica, who is the star pupil of this first grade class asks her teacher in a shout to overcome the roar pouring from the back of the bus, "My papa is in Mexico right now. He writes to me from there."

The teacher senses that the song she regularly has the children sing may cause a scandal. She had overheard a couple girls singing it while jumping rope her first year at the school. The song became a regularity for class bus rides and she never protested. Eventually she joined in and now she encouraged it. Bringing her attention back to Angelica, she looks down at her with concern and asks, "Is that right?"

"Yes, and he will be coming back a mule."

"Don't you mean he will come back 'on a mule?'" the teacher tries to correct Angelica.

"No, he's coming back on an airplane."

The teacher has heard that term before. Angelica's father would be returning to the states with his intestines lined with heroine or cocaine. Her family wasn't a favorite amongst the faculty.

In kindergarten Angelica was scratched during a fight with another girl. Her brother waited after school for her teacher and confronted her. He stepped out of his glossy Cutlass G-body with 20" rims and told the teacher in broken English that she would pay the price if Angelica were to come home again hurt. He lifted his shirt to emphasize his point by exposing the handle of a pistol tucked between the waistband of his pants and boxers.

The parent teacher conferences were useless. Both her parents spoke little to no English. The teacher would have to manage with whatever phrases that they picked up from the children. Luckily Angelica had no real issues to discuss.

Unlike most of the other children who were horridly supplied for class and rarely dressed properly during a Chicagoland winter, Angelica wore brand name clothing and had expensive accessories. While the other children lived three families to an apartment with every adult working, Angelica's family had an address that didn't end with a solitary number or letter. The teacher understood that the deprived child's parents sacrificed their children's luxuries in order to support their families in Mexico. Angelica's parents were exceptions.

Many of the first grade boys were known to steal from the other students. Kids lost hand held video games, cell phones, money and even their lunches. Angelica, who was regularly equipped with healthy lunches, a camera phone, and a purse full of gadgets, never had an item stolen from her. Both the girls and boys kept their distance, which is assumed to be the reason why she befriended her teacher.

This past Christmas, Angelica gave her teacher a present before leaving on winter break. The teacher opened it to find a portable DVD player. In January when the kids came back, the teacher told Angelicathat the gift was too nice to accept and told her to bring it back to her parents. Upon hearing this Angelica cried causing the teacher to fear a visit from her older brother. The teacher soothed the situation as best she could and never brought it up to Angelica again, but that nervous feeling remained when the intimacy level grew too comfortable.

Now Angelica was rambling that a boy named Manuel was throwing rocks at geese during the field trip. The teacher was barely listening. Instead she was staring out the window at the large homes that lined the road they traveled through the affluent town of Elmhurst. These mansions crammed onto the maple lined boulevard. They seemed to belong more on postcards than passing across her window.

Gradually the mini-estates transformed into apartment buildings. They crossed the border into Addison, it would only be a few blocks before the bus pulled into the school parking lot. The children took notice of their proximity and their behavior worsened and the volume increased. The teacher could no longer hear Angelica's ramblings. She could only hear the vibrating bass of the occasional SUV or low rider that passed by.

She didn't want her students to stain her reputation, so she stood up and walked down the aisle of the bus quieting the students. She returned to the head of the bus and saw the order rapidly decaying. She raised her hands and waving them to the rhythm began singing, "I'll never go to Mexico no more, no more..."

---

These are actual events witnessed during the end of the school year field trip for the first graders at a public elementary school in Addison, IL.

Pataphorical Power...

In December of 2005 Vice President Dick Cheney addressed the press aboard Airforce Two stating, "If you don't support everything I do, you aren't serious about terrorism."

The frightened children pulled the covers up over their noses, hoping to filter out the smell of rotting flesh lodged between the abusive father's lower canines.

The noxious gas spread from the breach in the tanker truck, through the town, causing residents to seal their windows and huddle their children in the basement, glued to the television screen covering the rescue efforts of those still trapped in their homes.

The mouse writhed in pain after the trigger released the spring, snapping the metal bar against it's back crushing it's ribs and vertebrae.

Releasing the choke, the steam roller discharged a dark plume of diesel exhaust darkening the sky and blotting out the sun.

The ink drained from its resevoir onto the table, leaving a meandering black river to the edge of the table.

The current dragged the boy out to sea, no matter how hard the boy paddled in his inflatable rubber raft.

Drifting through the cosmos, the satellite's battery supply gradually loses power, it's communication signal getting weaker and weaker, causing it to disappear in the vast distance between itself and the terrestrial antennae.

The din of the stock exchange floor drones out the cry from a man covering a crimson stain in his belly with his hand, pleading for help and getting no eye contact.

A blind man asks the clerk to make change in singles only but is unable to realize that the clerk is giving him sheets of white paper.

The author worked through the night filling his notebook with metaphorical prose, but it was too dark for him to realize that for twenty pages his dryed pen left only impressions of words on the lines.

After waiting hours for the ticket sales to start, a senior in high school shattered his fist from punching the tempered glass enclosing the ticket booth because seating was no longer available for the last show of the final tour of his favorite band.

Recalling the words of record executives that said he must change his lyrics to better conform to the corporate model, the gloomy musician loaded bullets into the magazine of his pistol.

A teenage girl lays in bed after school, flipping through the pages of her teen magazines and eyes the lithe figures with big smiles and expensive clothes, feeling guilty she walks to the bathroom and forces herself to vomit the small lunch she ate on the footsteps of the school.

The district administrator emailed a principle encouraging her to label more students as having behaviour and learning disabilities so that the district could be granted more government aid while eliminating poor scoring students from the average GPA.

Sitting on the cold, oil stained concrete floor of the garage, the boy unravels long strips of duct tape to bind back together the ripped cover of his geometry book, thinking to himself that his father has grown more violent since he was laid off work.

After receiving a bonus in stock options for cutting costs, the CEO cashed them out and resigned before the board performed analysis on his measures to find out that, after taking into account the transitional costs for the changes and the CEO's large salary, the company's financial situation worsened rather than improved.

With the anti-monolpoly laws weakened by the FCC, the power of mass communication and media companies has been consolidated and have resulted in easier targeting by government pressure, most notably, the intelligence agency invading personal privacy and the Bush administration broadcasting pro-policy propoganda.

The message in the message is more than the message could carry.

Youth is Sin...

Years ago when my conscience wasn't so burdened with regret and guilt, I trusted the world and surrendered to the current that carried me through time. Unfortunately I wasn't able to hold onto that innocence. That current was my family, my school, my friends. Friends betrayed me. School mislead me. And family simply couldn't be burdened with carrying me forever.

I left the nest, still retaining the concept that people can be trusted. Little by little I realized that tragety could lay around every corner, and other people were aware of that same truth. Everybody fell into competing for advantage so as to insulate themselves against the unknown. The unknown is only threatening because there are people willing to employ villainous tactics to strip resources from the gullible and naive.

Indeed advantage is only acquired through the detriment of others. Those not willing to share equally, those that poach, and those willing to compromise the welfare of the many for selfish gain, are all those that succeed in the "real world."

Why then, in my youth, was I taught to trust people, to share with others, to show compassion and mercy? Those virtues of yesteryear have become hinderances of today. If sin is a liability then youth itself is a sin.

Should parents provide their children with personal assets that will guarantee success? They could lift the burden of a conscience, teach methods of pilfering, instruct them to swindle, lie and cheat. Those skills will aid them in becoming a success.

Given this revelation, I still don't think I will abandon this conscience that torments me, nor those niave virtues that I believe contribute to pointing the collective experience toward a brighter future. Certainly, I think it disappointing that youth is sin. I just hope that someday youth is in.

Counterfeit Chick Lit...

Plaguing the op/ed sections of every newspaper I've read for the past week, the now infamous Kaavya Viswanathan has received more attention than Paris Hilton's break up with Greek shipping heir Stavros Niarchos. She is so popular that even Americans unable to properly pronounce the word "bedroom" are comfortable saying her name. This notoriety has permiated the media to such a degree that her next book, even if it is another compilation from the works of various other authors, is guaranteed to be a best seller.

Due to her blatant plagerism her notorious and extensively titled book "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" has reached number 58 on Amazon.com's best seller's list. Her success has trumped that of thousands of writers that have slaved over their original works for twice her tender age of 19. Karma appears to have spared Kaavya.

Those that have purchased Viswanathan's work of plagerism have given into the pop culture impulse reaction to purchase whatever it is that is advertized. Perhaps the buyers are hoping to auction the books off on ebay just in case Viswanathan commits suicide from literary theft induced teenage depression. That gamble may be worthwhile since writers have a high suicide rate and Viswanathan has much to feel guilty about. Hemingway commit suicide simply to save his soul. Will Viswanathan do it to save herself the humiliation that will endure the rest of her life?

The modest pursuit of capitalizing on the growing infatuation amongst young women towards depth deprived literature has spiraled out of control. Is Viswanathan simply an victim of circumstance? Were the dozens of alleged literary borrowing simply accidents as she says? Doubtful.

The clue that marks the multitude of mistakes as intentional is derived from the name of the book packager that shared the copyright: Alloy Entertainment. According to Merriam-Webster's dictionary, the word "alloy" means a compound, mixture, or union of different things. Although the packager hasn't been reached for comment, the mixture of different works by chick lit authors appears to fit the corporate namesake. Something is suspicious here.

With the over abundance of published works from blogs to chap books, how is it that anyone could assert that they are not plagerizing? Viswanathan simply made the mistake of borrowing from too popular a book. There have been questionable instances of literary borrowing in the past. Sagan's "Contact" was too similar to Lem's "His Master's Voice". Lem's "Memoirs Found in a Bathtub" is similar to Kafka's "The Trial". Kafka's "Amerika" is similar to Voltaire's "Candide". Voltaire's "Treatise on Tolerance" is... ad infinitum. The perception of originality is inversley related to ones wealth of knowledge.

Hunter S. Thompson was able to avoid the pitfalls of plagerism by employing his Gonzo Journalism. He recorded his own subjective interpretation of the events he experienced and editted out the drug induced incoherence. He essentially eliminated the possibility of plagerism. But even if there were some similarities to literary works, he could blame the resemblence on the cyclical nature of the world.

If some don't subscribe to Thompson's full proof plagerism avoidance method, then they should learn from Viswanathan's mistakes. Her borrowed work was too similar to the original. If you want to borrow from Camus, instead of starting out with "Maman died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know," say "My mother died, either yesterday or today, I can't discern which." With Dostoevsky instead of starting out, "I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man. An ugly man. I think my liver is diseased," say "I'm unhealthy and abnormal... Just disgusting. I can feel my bile boiling up within me."

Viswanathan was simply lazy. Placing words between the stolen phrases instead of replacing them. Perhaps Viswanathan thought that she could hide the plagerism of "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life" by packing filler prose between the lies. Now that her lie is exposed there is no burying it again, no matter how many words she throws into the title.