Teaching, Indoctrinating, Same Diff.

My grandmother asked me to explain to her why I voted for Barack Obama. In an effort to avoid prolonging a rather horrific conversation (ask Grandpa Ragni what he’d like to do to Michelle Obama!), I mumbled a few low-impact reasons: good on Israel, supports teachers, likes The Godfather films (except III).

She stared at me for a few seconds, wrist bent at a ninety-degree angle so her oily fingers spread across her lips. She blinked twice and said, “You’re so indoctrinated.”

This coming from a woman who spends a good portion of her day worrying about what level of purgatory she’ll occupy after passing (if she continues watching reruns of Matlock, it’s going to be Lust). Interestingly enough, this odd “indoctrination” phenomena attracted the attention of long time anti-feminist Mrs. Phyllis Schlafly, or La Schlafly for short.

Besides boasting an annoyingly unpronounceable name (Shla-fly? Shleh-flee? Shlat-the-fuck-up?), La Schlafly has a stalwart record for talking about things she knows little about. Take for instance this lovely op-ed, where she blames the English Department at Virgina Tech for Cho Seung-Hui’s killing spree. It’s a breathtaking example of senile lunacy at its finest. Her more recent works target alleged “one-party” classrooms, where evil commy professors “indoctrinate” students into “William Ayres-style ‘social justice.’”

La Schlafly, in her eagerness to take a bite out of her own shitstorm, fails to distinguish between “a change of ideological beliefs due to coercion” and…learning things. La Schlafly’s parents raised her Roman Catholic, which means she and I have something in common! We were told by our superiors that if we did not ascribe to a specific ideology, we would face an eternity in hellfire! But that’s not indoctrination, right? Shall we call it “colorful teaching?”

I don’t recall any of my professors threatening to dip me into a roasting pit should I refuse to conform to their world view. Maybe I simply suppressed the memory of coercion? Probably not, for you see, I’m not mentally retarded. Something La Schlafly and I, unfortunately, do not have in common.