Prior to the restaurant closing, the Landauer boys always had the top spot on the game and defended our title religiously after the frequent Denver power outages erased the record of our dominance.  We would breeze through the easy levels in the perfect amount of time for the kitchen to make up my dad’s Double Decker and my grilled cheese and chocolate malt.  Then we’d trade off eating our food and destroying the alien ships with our strategically acquired double space ship of doom.

If you position your ship in just the right place at the beginning of each level and tap the fire button with the right cadence starting at precisely the right moment, you can annihilate most of the enemy ships before they get a chance to strafe you on their bombing runs.  The ships looked like mutated crustaceans with ominous faces to me, so when it was my dad’s turn to play I’d shout out “shoot it in the face!” between filling my own face with french fries and melting shakes.

When I came across this image in my inbox from the AKC’s “Weekly Winners” e-mail I had a rush of nostalgia and the desire to shoot it in the face.

GCh Ta Sen Bond James Bond

It took me a moment to realize why, but then it hit me.

The dog is an evil alien space ship. Shoot it in the face!

It’s a rather uncanny similarity, no? Maybe if I just push this button here…..

..

Not my dad's brain, but you get the idea.

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated, but the reality hasn’t been sunshine and roses.

My father nearly died in March after suffering a hemorrhagic stroke. If it wasn’t for my mother’s sharp eye and the world class stroke center 3 miles away, he wouldn’t have been given the opportunity to make the miraculous recovery he has slowly made. But the morning of his stroke marked a clear ending and new beginning in the life of my entire family.

This blog has always been a space for me to vent, to work though ideas and encourage debate. And despite a desire to continue frequent updates, this is entertainment, not a job.  And really, getting cranky about dog politics is a luxury for times when everything else in life is going A-O-K.  My dogs have been such a wonderful diversion lately, and an integral part in my father’s recovery, so I just haven’t had the motivation to tackle the dog-world darkness out there when there’s been so much dog-light right here, and more pressing problems to address off-blog.

After finally re-establishing some sense of routine in my new life, I returned to the blog only to find that it had been deleted by Blogger and marked as a spam site by Google!

My father, a.k.a "Guano the Lawnboy," in better times.

Oh joy, when it rains, it pours. I’ve had to pull in favors with old college friends who now work at Google, sift through Google’s horrible help forum, cyber-stalk the one person who could turn my blog back on, and tell off some other Google employee who wanted me to “make concessions” to him to get my blog back.

Needless to say that I can’t trust my content in the hands of a company who would delete it WITHOUT notice of any kind before or after, not respond to their help forum for over 6 weeks, not publish a name, phone number, or e-mail of anyone who can actually help, and then want to chastise me for wanting my content back.

So I’ve made the jump to WordPress (rather quick and painless) and now have my content under my own control. I highly recommend it to anyone still over at Blogger.  Getting a domain name and hosting is an afternoon project, and moving the blog is actually very simple as WordPress does all the work for you. Took 10 minutes.

The new blog address is: http://borderwars.astraean.com/

And my feed is STILL http://feeds.feedburner.com/BorderWars … hopefully this is seamless for almost all of you.

So goodbye Blogger, Hello WordPress, and thank you all for sticking around.  Drop a comment or two now and then to let me know you’re out there.

It’s interesting that most graduations happen in the spring, as they more often mark an ending of the old ways rather than the beginning of the new. In school terms, the new doesn’t begin until the fall, when nature is resplendent in death. A decided lack of symmetry.

But as cliché as it sounds, my graduation speech was the perfect culmination of my high school career. The following video was taped as I spoke before the ~10,000 people who attended Cherry Creek High School’s Class of 1999 commencement, but this was not the golden moment. That came about 10 minutes before as I gave my speech in front of my class and the faculty inside the school gym.

Since the first three speakers performed before the teachers and students had entered the stadium, the Student Body President, our Class President, and I gave our speeches twice. At the end of our speeches we introduced the faculty, the special guests, and finally the student body. Because those groups were waiting outside the stadium during their introductions and couldn’t really hear what we were saying, the three of us had already given our speeches to the 806 graduating seniors and numerous faculty who had assembled in the gym for one last rally.

But some of them are fun and serve a purpose. So here are my answers to the two recent Meme games I’ve been invited to. First up, 4 THINGS Meme:

N.B. Being the nonconformist that I am, I choose to ignore the limitation or suggestion of only 4 answers to each prompt.

Some Jobs I have had in my life: Marketing Consultant for Electronic Arts, Founder of a highly successful treasure hunting forum, President of the Colorado Junior Classical League, Technical Consultant for a major Lawfirm, Real Estate Agent, Student Representative to the CO State Senate Subcommittee on Gifted and Talented Education, Financial Manager of La Casa Italiana at Stanford University, Alumni Co-Chair of the Youth Advisory Board of the Young American’s Bank, Congress Captain of the Speech and Debate Team at Cherry Creek High School, Border Collie Breeder

Some Places I have lived in my life: Denver, Colorado => Cherry Hills Village, Colorado => Stanford University, CA => Palo Alto, CA => Back to Colorado

Some Movies I’ve watched more than once: The Devil’s Advocate, Dune, The Usual Suspects, The Boondock Saints, Graveyard of the Fireflies, Crash, Traffic, Patton, LOTR, Gattaca, Closely Watched Trains, Krull, The Bunny Picnic


Some TV Shows I watch: House, Battlestar Galactica, Nip/Tuck, Deadwood, Rome, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Sopranos (early seasons), SeaQuest DSV, Fraggle Rock, 24, Monk, Family Guy, South Park, The Shield, LOST (only in marathons, constant cliff hangers are annoying)

Some Places I Have Been:

States:
Hawaii, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Florida, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island

Countries:
Canada, USA, Mexico, Spain, Morocco, Gibraltar, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Vatican City, Israel, Egypt

Some of My Favorite Foods: Ravioli, Steamed Chinese Dumplings, Macaroni and Cheese, Stuffed Cabbage, Pumpkin Pie, Spinach and Artichoke dip, Baked Brie, Lo Mein, Prime Rib

Some Places I’d rather be right now: On a ranch in Southern Spain, Outside a warm hut near the arctic circle where I could observe the Aurora Borealis, In the market in Ancient Rome with a pocket full of coin, One thousand years in the future.

Some Things I am looking forward to this year: Competing with my dogs and training my puppies, Getting a new Jeep, Watching Pacific Life go down in flames in the court case I am assisting with and all of the clients getting their money back and then some, The end to election coverage on the news which has been going on for way too long, the return of the final season of Battlestar Galactica, The Deadwood Movies, Keeping up with the puppies and their new families.

Next is the 7 THINGS Meme, for which I’ve been tagged by Fay at the Country Livin’ Blog.

1. I was born a month premature by Caesarian section. I feel that this justifies me to be a few minutes late to just about every appointment so the cosmos stays in balance. I am never early and rarely on time. Despite being tiny and blue at birth, my head maintained its lovely shape from being spared passage through the birth canal. My parents were told to put me in the window with the houseplants upon taking me home from the hospital to keep my bilirubin levels in check. I’ve been in the 95%+ percentile in height and weight ever since.

2. I was voted “Most Likely To Be Sober” by my Freshman dorm, and I’m proud to say that I deserved it. I have no moral or religious hang ups about drugs, I just think they are incredibly stupid and I hate not being in control of all of my faculties. I’m in no way a prohibitionist and will have a drink if the occasion suits it, and I’d even advocate for the mass legalization and regulation (read: sin tax) of numerous other common drugs besides cigarettes and alcohol. I see no reason why the US should be sustaining every country from Mexico on south with an illegal drug business that we could replicate cheaper, safer, and more economically right here at home.

I’ve never tried anything harder than Tequila, nor will I and I find smoking of any kind rather disgusting.

3. I have really good relative pitch, which means that I can whistle or sing most songs in tune but off key. Given a few minutes and a harmonica I could probably transcribe and play most common songs using my own notation, but it’s likely that it won’t be in the same key as the original.

Despite years and years of lessons I don’t read music well at all, but I can memorize the notes and the styling for a whole concert with little effort if only I can hear someone else play the notes first. The notes on the page only make sense if I can associate it with sounds. I can’t sight read worth anything and to this day can’t tell you how the mathematics work out, despite playing the Saxaphone since middle school, the recorder since elementary school, and winning the State Math Contest. I am mediocre at improvisational jazz on the saxophone but excellent at impromptu speech.

4. If I had to pick a designer dog, I’d probably go with a Bordernese, a cross between a Border Collie and a Bernese Mountain Dog. Although larger, dumber, and thicker boned than a Border Collie, I rather like the Bernese and I’ve admired the handful of Bordernese dogs I’ve met in public. There’s something altogether appealing about really big dogs and no other big breed really complements a Border Collie as much as a Bernese Mountain Dog.

Not only do their colorings match, but the Bernese temperament is a good counter to the Border Collie, and the Border Collie certainly improves the elements of the Bernese that I’d find lacking.

5. Normally, I speak in the tenor range and so fast and have to remind myself to slow down. While I sound clear in my own head, recordings usually come out garbled and some people have a hard time following. Other fast talkers have no problems keeping up.

When I debate I speak very loud and in a pitch an octave lower than my normal voice. This trait earned my circle of friends in my Freshman dorm the title of “the loud talkers” as we’d keep the RA up during our late night philosophy fests.

When I speak in public, I rarely have the same problem with pitch or speed and sound like a news caster. This is common among Coloradoans as we have little to no accent. I find that not having a strong accent makes me susceptible to local accents and I’ll often pick one up if I’m visiting somewhere for a few days.

6. I can juggle while riding a bicycle. I learned to juggle because I was always an over achiever and eager to please. This landed me in trouble when the middle school drama teacher asked me if I could juggle and I said yes even though I didn’t know the first thing about it. She cast me in the school play that was opening in 2 days as a jester, so I had to learn fast.

As a child I was always jealous of a kid who used to ride his bike down my street with no hands. I could never figure it out. Then in college, when I was on a bike more the first week than I had been in the decade prior, I finally figured out the secret to riding with no hands. Of course I had to combine the two, although no one was there to film my amazing feat.

7. I was a driver in the longest Presidential motorcade in history.

“Good fences make good neighbors” is a time honored cliché and it’s almost gospel in the dog owning world. Fences protect us, our dogs, and our neighbors from ourselves and each other. Even better than fences is land. Enough land where you don’t have to listen to the neighbor’s teenager with horrible music taste, enough land so you aren’t a party to domestic disputes, the sex crazed newlyweds with the creaky bed in the unit directly overhead, and enough land where you and your pets are buffered from unwanted confrontation.

There have been newsworthy neighbor-dog disputes in the past, but high profile incidents like the mauling death of Dianne Whipple are easy to dismiss for suburbanites outside of the original locale. She lived in an apartment in San Francisco and her neighbors were wackos. Even worse, the simple nature of the case (woman attacked and killed by two vicious dogs that had no place in a cramped apartment building combined with a history of violence and no training) was clouded by zoophilia, the Aryan nation, the victim’s sexual orientation, and an aspiring dog fighting venture. It was easy to miss the forest for the really bizarre trees on the periphery.

I don’t think the Whipple case rang home in mid-America where it’s easy to say “that could never happen with my neighbors. They are nice people and there’s 1.2 acres between me and them. “

The burbs are the better choice for pets, we shouldn’t be concerned with what those crazies in the city are doing. After all, even a laissez-faire place like Colorado has a pit bull ban in Denver. The burbs are obviously better: more room, more of that land, more fences, and fewer neighbors. Right? Well, until you start piecing together the national trend of nasty dog focused encounters in the burbs.

This week the dogblogosphere has been abuzz about Congo. A dog from the wealthy and spacious suburb of Princeton Township, NJ. The poor German Shepherd is now the center of a political tug of war because he attacked a gardener on his owner’s property. The details are up for debate (the animal control officer who supposedly took statements and notes on the situations claims those notes were eaten by another dog!) and the overtones are more than just animal in nature as the gardener was Hispanic and the owners wealthy Whites, neither fluent in the other’s language. The gardeners were invited on the property, but perhaps they disobeyed instructions, and sometime before or during the incident the gardener hid behind or assaulted the owner’s wife causing her to fall. Blah blah blah.

What could have ended as a simple home owner’s insurance claim is now working its way up the courts with death sentences handed down and reversed, puppies being labeled as vicious, and a whole can of worms that no one really wants opened. The ripples are moving well beyond the dog owner world. The Whipple case had the same effect, one of the legacies was the precedent setting civil judgment for Whipple’s lesbian partner, a noteworthy case in the issue of civil unions and rights of survivorship outside of marriage.

Here’s another dog attack story that I’m sure will make some waves. A three year old little girl was unsupervised in her back yard, climbed the cinder block fence and fell into the neighbor’s yard on top of a cactus. Then the neighbor’s dogs, also unsupervised, attacked the girl and dragged her further into the yard. The girl was eventually saved by her mother who hopped the fence.

Now, this story is new so we don’t know how the “victim” and the dog owners are going to proceed. But both stories speak to a dangerous wind blowing in.

That’s the chill of your home no longer being your castle. Where the make-my-day law no longer applies and potential criminals are given more rights and home owners are given more liabilities.

What? A three-year-old and a hard working lawn man are potential criminals? You bet they are, in the eyes of your dogs, a bloody and wailing child could easily evoke the same instinctual response as an injured animal (prey) and an unfamiliar man with a rake combined with a flustered female owner could make for a situation where instinct says bite first and ask questions later (danger). I’m sure a good chunk of you own dogs for protection and are happy that you’ve never needed their services.

Maybe even a few of you own guns for protection too, and likewise are happy that you’ve never had to shoot anyone on your property. That cold wind is also spelling trouble for the handgun debate that neither side has been willing to push too hard for or against (read: take to the Supreme Court for a precedent setting judgment) for fear that the outcome could be worse than the status quo. But this week’s news brings word that the Supreme Court is going to decide just that issue.

Remember pet owners, the Second Amendment to the Constitution speaks directly (if not clearly) at gun rights. There is no Amendment for pet rights, and if you consider them property, then you’re only protected against “unreasonable searches and seizures” under the Fourth Amendment. But “unreasonable” is up for debate, and just like the government takes a little bit a sizable chunk of your land every year in property taxes and your liquid assets in the form of income tax, and another cut off of your buying and selling habits with even more taxes, the trend for “reasonable” seizures of your property has been giving more rights to the government and taking rights from the citizenry ever since the ink was still wet on the Bill of Rights.

No matter how the Congo case goes, the damage has been done. Pet owners are certainly not going to come out with any more rights than before, we are certainly at risk of losing the moral high ground in the debate over what we and our animals can do on our own private property, and now that a sure to be sympathetic three year old girl is in place of an immigrant as the victim, the fight is going to be even more difficult than it already is.

I imagine more than two dogs save their owner’s life or property this week, but you won’t see that in the news. It’s not newsworthy unless there is some sensational spin on it.

I for one want to have the right to shoot an intruder on my property and I want my dogs given every right to bite them in the ass. If there’s a case of mistaken identity, so what, that’s what insurance is for. A little higher premium is worth it to me to err on the side of my safety and wellbeing.

My two dogs are just sweethearts. They greet anyone at the door with boundless affection and this Halloween we had a little traffic jam at my place on what has traditionally been a slow night because so many people wanted to play with the pups. What the heck, it’s good socialization and I got a chance to reinforce good doorway etiquette. Even with the silly costumes, the dark of night, and an oft ringing doorbell that usually sparks enough excitement for a whole day, the dogs behaved with aplomb.

Last week, though, my uncle came to my house to help fix my car. He has not met my two dogs and they have not met him. My girlfriend was taking a nap on the couch by the door and I was downstairs. I heard the security door shut and the creek of someone entering on to the landing. “Uncle Bob?” No answer. I got up with only moderate concern and followed Dublin up the stairs.
That’s when I heard a rumble that came from a place I didn’t know existed in my sweet little boy. He has never needed to protect me, nor would I encourage such behavior if he exhibited it. Celeste, the female who is smaller and daintier than he is has more of a killer instinct (just ask the rabbits and the squirrels) and even she has yet to bark at anyone aggressively.

But as I got to the top of the stairs and came around into the den, I watched as Dublin backed my uncle into the corner, both away from me and my sleeping girlfriend on the couch only a few feet away.

A quick and friendly “knock it off, that’s Uncle Bob” did the trick with Dublin, and Bob and I were in the garage before I had time to really process what happened. But I have since come back to that growl and show of teeth and an unexpected pride wells up in me. I like that my “soft” border collie boy has the guts to stand up and defend the pack and am I so wrong in feeling that way?

I am a large man and I don’t feel threatened very easily. I have avoided most of the fights of youth simply because would-be bullies were smaller and weaker. I inherited a 6’1″ body and a barrel chest, and hands larger and meatier than a professional basketball player. My great grandfather was a professional wrestler, my grandfather a hall of fame boxer, and my father was famed as the “King of East Denver” for his street fighting prowess. My last real fight that came to blows was in kindergarten when I lunched the school bully when he kicked my best friend in the face.

I have never thought of buying or owning a big dog or a powerful dog for protection, that just is not a need I would think to fill. I also like idea of guns for protection, but I don’t own anything more powerful than a .177 air powered pellet gun and it’s never been aimed at anything more vicious than a tree rat. In theory I’d like to learn handgun safety and operations and have one for protection, but again, it’s just not a pressing need to me.

But I got a real taste of what it must be like to think of an animal as a security guard when Dublin defended me, my loved ones, and my property from an unknown intruder who hadn’t been welcomed into the house. I’m still rather confused about it, being that everything I love in Dublin stems from his docility, his neediness, and his affection… and now I have that juxtaposed with a primal respect for his aggressive defense.

It’s easy to give away a right when you don’t think you need it, when you don’t appreciate it. When it won’t ostensibly alter the way you live today or tomorrow. The right to have an animal for protection used to be one such right for me. But now that I know just a little bit what it feels like to be protected by a dog, these recent cases make the hairs on my neck stand up.

I don’t want my dog to be taken away and killed because he stood up to a threat on my property. I don’t want to be liable for the stupid things other people do on my land when I’m not there, especially if that liability extends beyond monetary compensation into the mandatory killing of my dogs. Of course I have reasonable precautions, like well maintained 6″ fences, covers on the pool, and obnoxious security flood lights at night. Of course I socialize my animals and obey leash laws in public.

But apparently the cold winds of change are whispering that such precautions and responsibilities aren’t enough. What if Congo and his crew are either killed or labeled vicious beasts? What if the mother of the 3 year old sues and wins? What if the Supreme Court upholds the ban on handguns in the home? Any one of those three eats away at my castle and my rights to defend it.

I frankly prefer the wind when it’s carrying forth the howl of “Make My Day,” not “Make Fido Pay.”

As I look back across my seventeen years on this planet, I can see that I am a soul in search of a hero. My first recollection of needing a hero was in my third year. Grandma came every Wednesday night to take me to her regular Bingo game where I dazzled and delighted the other grandmas with my witty nursery rhymes and clever songs. On the ride to the big game, Grandma coached me to answer, “President of the United States,” whenever one of the old ladies asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. In 1998, being the President has lost its appeal. I don’t want to be fifty-two, fighting both a Viagra addiction and a dysfunctional Congress that wants to impeach me. Being the most powerful man in the world just isn’t what it used to be.

I went through the normal selection process of the standard heroes, but as the years passed, I failed to make that special bond that leads to a lifelong commitment. TenderHeart is caring and sharing, but—like Hamlet—Carebears have trouble taking decisive action. Batman (chiropterarum homo sapiens) relates better with chiropterae than he does with homines sapientes. Michael Corleone lacks sensitivity. Han Solo is brave in Starwars; yet, in the final analysis, he is just a deadbeat who stiffed Jabba the Hutt. Last year, John Elway won the Super Bowl, but his own coach doesn’t trust him enough to allow Elway to call a single play.

In high school, it became painfully obvious to me that I was different: a man with no hero is always an outsider. The only car in the student parking lot without a bumper sticker was mine. All the other cars were decorated with signs proudly announcing the owner’s commitment to a sports figure, a rock star, or a political candidate; even the school bus had a “Go Broncos” sticker. I longed for that special moment in life when I could connect with a hero by performing that sacred ceremony of attaching my commitment with glue to the bumper of my car.

Last Saturday morning, I was answering my e-mail—with both the stereo and television playing to provide the proper amount of ambient noise to drive my parents out of the room—when the power went out. Deprived of electricity, I decided to entertain myself with pre-historic technology and began reading a book on Eastern religions. The first chapter convinced me to look inward for my hero; he should be someone like me, only better and more complete. He needed to be a thinking competitor who took joy in making a plan and executing it. He would be a modern hunter who stalked his prey with a combination of the latest technology and his own natural talent. A string of tragedies that would send a Greek hero whining blindly into exile would not dent the spirit of my American hero. He would always try again. Even if success never touched his hand, my hero would take satisfaction in knowing that the supreme act is the hunt, not the kill. Then the power came back on.

In a sudden, blinding surge of excited electrons that danced across the cathode ray tube, my own great American hero was finally revealed to me. He was strapped to an Acme rocket sled that was suspended in the air over the Grand Canyon. He even waved goodbye to me just before gravity sent him crashing to the bottom. In less than an hour, I was gluing my new “Wile E. Coyote, Super Genius” sticker to the bumper of my car. Life is good!

–Chris Landauer, Super Genius

Part 1:
A decade ago during the first weeks of 9th grade I got my first and only F on a paper. Of course I was livid when I got the paper back, especially because the only comment on the paper was “I don’t agree.” Ms. Montgomery was a novice history teacher and a pinko socialist, and I had already embarrassed her during the first week when she compensated for her own ineptitude and lack of preparation (no lesson plan) by making us watch irrelevant movies and color in maps with crayons and colored pencils.

Her running a high school class like a kindergarten was degrading and especially insulting to a precocious freshmen who was eager for a more mature classroom experience than he had in Middle School. It was her first time teaching, but it was hardly my first time running into an idiot teacher. The issue came to a head when I refused to color in yet another photocopy of a map of some part of the world that I already knew and wasn’t going to get credit for, to “prepare” for a quiz I could already ace, opting instead to read our as-of-yet unused textbook figuring that Ms. Montgomery would eventually use our classroom time for teaching instead of babysitting and scrambling to do preparations she should have done on her own time weeks before.

One class she finally looked up from her desk long enough to notice that I was reading my textbook instead of coloring and decided to make an example out of me. “What are you doing, Christopher?” “Actually learning something.” “Put that book away and get to your map. This is a history class and I won’t have you doing your homework for another class.” “This isn’t for another class, this is the textbook for this class, don’t you recognize it?” “You’re going to fail the quiz if you don’t study, now get out your map.”

“Ms. Montgomery, we colored maps in elementary school. I learned the names of all the countries in middle school. This is a waste of time. We’ve spent the entire week coloring maps and you’re not even going to give us credit for it. I’m ready for the quiz, coloring isn’t going to change that.” “Really? You’re ready? Let’s see.”

Montgomery walked over to the board and fumbled with the world map. When she finally got it to stay down, she had already lost the whiff of authority and momentum the teacher has in such a situation, but she insisted on making an example. She grabbed a yard stick and started pointing to countries.

From across the room I started, “Morocco, France, Greece, Jordan, Mongolia, Laos, Philippines.”
She chimed in with glee, “No, that’s Indo-ne-si-a. I told you that you needed to study!”

“Um, no, that’s the Philippines. Indonesia is south and west. Look again.”

As she leaned into the map I couldn’t resist. I noticed that she needed to confirm where she was pointing by actually reading the country names, she obviously didn’t know the map. “Maybe you should color in a map.” She retaliated by blitzing through Africa with her yardstick, but I didn’t falter (I had been there a month before) and she only reinforced to the entire class that I knew the map better than she did.

I didn’t get 100% on the quiz… until I brought it to her attention that she had botched the grading of Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Sierra Leone, probably because she couldn’t read her teacher’s manual answer key. The gauntlet had be laid and it didn’t take her long to get even.

The assignment was to watch the Dolly Parton movie “Nine to Five” and do at least a one page analysis. We wasted three full class periods watching the movie and I handed in my paper on the last day, two days before it was due. I did a finely written three page analysis where I argued that social identity comes as much from one’s in group as it does from one’s out group, comparing elements of the film with historical events. My hypothesis was that “I am not” is a crucial to identity as “I am.”

Ms. Montgomery was looking for mindless pap along the lines of conspiracy to commit homicide, false imprisonment, aggravated kidnapping and assault are justified when your boss is a “sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigot” and you sing catchy tunes while perpetrating your criminal revenge. It didn’t matter to Montgomery that my essay elegantly linked a lousy comedy that had no part in a high school history class to more pressing and relevant historical issues. It didn’t matter that I bit my tongue and didn’t discuss how a movie about women botching the murder of their boss was about as useful in effecting change in the workplace as Fonda sitting on a Viet Cong anti-air turret was to ending the Vietnam war.

It didn’t matter that I keenly observed that the difference between the in group and the out group need not be vast differences, and often it was very small differences that lead to the most atrocious warfare. The War of Independence, The Hatfields and the McCoys, the split families of the American Civil War, the Fascists an the Communists, the Protestant Reformation and subsequent sub-fracturing, etc.

Even when I approached her after the papers came back to inquire about why I had an F, her only comment was that she didn’t agree that people behaved like that. Such thinking was supposedly negative and bigoted. She denied that she ever made such assessments and was above such petty behavior. Then I asked her if she was popular in school and her world fell apart. No, she wasn’t one of the rich popular kids, and n
o she wasn’t a nerd. Point proven, she wasn’t this nor that and what group she wasn’t was as significant to her identity as what she was.

I handed her my book and told her that I would not be coming back to her class. And I never did. I marched into the head of the department’s office and demanded that Miss Montgomery be fired and that I be transferred into a real class with a teacher who wasn’t a hack. Mr. Kempton read my essay, saw the one comment “I don’t agree. F” in red, and listened to my beef about her lack of preparation, lack of real teaching, and horrible liberal bias that infected her grade book. He agreed that the grade and her justification was wholly inappropriate, apologized for her lackluster performance and assured me that she’d be reigned in and informed of the appropriate way to grade and teach. Best of all, he transferred me into his class and I earned an A+.

It was a pivotal moment in my high school career even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. Not only was it the first time that I truly took control of my own education and didn’t call in my parents to deal with a stupid teacher, it led directly to many opportunities that wouldn’t have existed if I sucked it up and pandered to the pinko. Mr. Kempton’s U.S. History class was an inspiration and I took his AP US Government and AP Comparative Government classes (and scored 5s on all three AP exams). He recommended me for the American Legion’s Boys State program as well as local program called “Colorado Close Up.” While attending the former I became involved with the American Legion’s speech contest which led me to take Speech and Debate and later become a team captain. In the later program I got my first taste of being a trial lawyer which inspired me to join the Mock Trial teams in both high school and in college at Stanford.

When I acquire my JD/MBA, part of the credit for the JD belongs to that F and the idiot pinko who did more for me by not teaching than she ever could have done by doing her job.