Two memories

This whole brouhaha over President Obama’s “back to school” speech to be delivered Tuesday has had me thinking back to my own tender public school youth. I don’t remember the nationally televised addresses by Presidents Reagan, Bush or Clinton, but I do remember the time in third grade that President Gerald Ford spoke at my elementary school.

At the time, the only presidents I knew of were Washington, Lincoln, JFK and Reagan, who was at the tail-end of his second term. So there was no way for me to know that President Ford’s son lived in Winston-Salem, or that his grand-daughters went to Speas Elementary with me. One day, we interrupted our regular programming to watch via closed-circuit TV as Ford spoke from the library.

Honestly – and I think this is important for the people worried about Obama brainwashing their kids – I have absolutely no idea what Ford said. Part of that was the late-80s audio that made him sound like one of the grown-ups in Peanuts, only talking from the bottom of a well, and part of it was that I was an eight-year-old who had no clue who this guy was. I was probably picking my toe-jam the entire time, or having a “Star Wars”-related day dream. And given that I’m an un-Ford-like liberal, I think it’s safe to say that I wasn’t brainwashed.

And here’s the best part. My parents were not informed that this would be taking place. In fact, when I told my mother about it later, she didn’t believe me because it hadn’t even made the local news. But even if Mom had known about Ford’s visit to my school, there’s no way I could ever imagine her yanking me out of class to keep me from being exposed to a president whose views she opposed. She was certainly politically active. But she also understood that the president is the president, and that’s got to be immune from partisanship (which is why, a round the same time, she urged me to write President Reagan – a whole ‘nother story).

Apparently times have changed, judging by the hysterical, paranoid outcry over Obama’s address. Last week, when I started reading about people comparing the address to Hitler Youth-style indoctrination, another memory came to mind:

In college, I worked at Old Salem with a woman named Irma, who’d been a child in Germany during World War II. I did an oral history interview with her for one of my classes. Among the things she told me was how her oldest brother was the only one of her siblings of age to join the Hitler Youth. She described how the group was advertised as a Boy Scout-esque leadership training club that promoted physical activity. But parents still knew about its white supremacist underpinnings. It was optional… but not really. Irma’s mother wanted no part of the Hitler Youth, and ended up having to get a family doctor – at great risk to himself – to fudge an exemption for the son.

The Hitler Youth, by Irma’s account, was a piece of an oppressive regime that seemed fairly innocuous on the surface. Had her brother not joined just because he didn’t want to, the family would’ve come under intense scrutiny and their loyalty questioned. And Nazi Germany was not the best place for that kind of thing.

This is where I don’t buy the comparisons of Obama talking to school kids with the frakking Nazis. Isn’t the very fact that the Glenn Becks and World Net Dailies of the world are freely spewing their rants without being hauled off to re-education camps proof that America is as far from Nazi Germany as one can get?

Just for fun, here’s a brief list of things Obama has NOT done: eavesdropped on phone conversations without a warrant; given wide-ranging no-bid contracts to mercenaries; seriously thought about how the U.S. could justify suspending habeas corpus; financed a Central American coup by illegally selling weapons to frakking Iran; broken into a rival party’s headquarters; asked Secret Service details to spy on political enemies; promoted the overthrow/execution of democratically elected foreign heads of state.

And this is the guy you’re afraid of? Seriously, the Democrats are the last people you need to worry about. Hell, we’d spend a year arguing about how high to build the internment camp fences.