Free Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry Page B

government: Come and get it! And while you’re here, please take these Supreme Court justices, because they’re starting to smell.

Why Abe Was a Geek
    I t’s back-to-school time, parents, and you know what that means! It’s time to get the kids off the TV-room sofa, using logging equipment if necessary, and take them to the mall for back-to-school supplies.
    Getting the right school supplies is crucial to your child’s chances for success in life. We all remember the tragic story of young Abraham Lincoln, whose family could not afford school supplies, so he had to write on a shovel blade with a piece of coal. This meant that if young Abe saw a cute girl and wanted to pass her a note in class, he had to hand her this big gross filthy digging implement, sometimes with worm parts stuck to it, and she’d go, “Ewwww!” and all the other kids would laugh at Abe (it did not help that he was the only boy in the fifth grade who had a beard). As a result, Abe had low self-esteem and was so desperate for popularity that he became president. Unless you want that kind of thing to happen to your child, you had better get the right kind of back-to-school supplies.
    What are the “right kind” of supplies? According to the American Association of School Teachers Who Get The Whole Summer Off and You Don’t Ha Ha Ha, to meet federal educational standards, “every item your child takes to school, including dental braces, must be festooned with a licensed cartoon character such as The Little Mermaid or Leonardo DiCaprio.”
    Your child also needs a backpack or—if you wish to have a trulymodern, state-of-the-art schoolchild—an actual airline-style suitcase with a handle and wheels. In my neighborhood I see elementary-school students hauling these things around, and I say to myself, “They’re in SECOND grade! What are they CARRYING in there? Fifty-pound Twinkies?” But that is not the point. The point is, American students may not have the best educational test scores when compared to foreign students, or even certain species of foreign plants, but by gosh our kids lead the world in cubic feet of academic carrying capacity.
    Also it goes without saying that you cannot send your child back to school without a compass and a protractor. A compass is a thing with a sharp metal point and a little mutant pencil that is always falling out. A protractor is a thing that you always get when you get a compass. It is a centuries-old tradition for children to go back to school with these two devices, even though nobody has the faintest idea what their educational purpose is, other than using the metal point to carve bad words into desks. A spokesperson for the American Compass and Protractor Manufacturers Association told us, “We sell 23 million of these things every September, and we lie awake at night asking ourselves,
WHY?”
    Another traditional item you should have on your back-to-school list is some kind of notebook. I know there are many kinds of newfangled “high-tech” notebooks on the market today, but for my money, the old-fashioned three-ring binder that I used as a schoolboy remains, as an educational tool, one of the most useless things ever invented. I spent basically all of my classroom time from 1955 through 1963 trying to repair torn notebook paper with those stupid “reinforcing rings” that were always gumming themselves together into a little defensive clot. It cannot be coincidence that during these same years, the Soviet Union surged way ahead in the Space Race. So whatever you do, do NOT get your child one of these. Your child would be better off with a shovel.
    Finally, while you’re in the school-supplies department, see if they have any of that heavy white paste that we used in first grade to makeart projects. Kids don’t need it for school anymore, but you should pick up a pound anyway, because it’s delicious.
    OK! Now that you’ve got the educational supplies, it’s time to shop for back-to-school