Within a few seconds, one of the teachers had made her way down the line and stopped. She crouched down to my eye level. "What did you say?"
"Aaaaah ... raspberries!" I repeated, with a goofy smile, thinking it was just about the coolest thing I could say under the circumstances. She was kind of hot, and I thought I might impress her with my derring-do.
But before I knew it, I was being hustled down to the main floor, and the headmaster's office. I was told to sit in one of the big leather chairs in the room where the headmaster's secretary sat, giving me a look of keen suspicion.
"What's the problem?"
"Paul seems not to understand the proper way to behave in class."
"What'd he do?"
"He said, 'Aaaaah ... raspberries!'
"Ah ..." replied the secretary, clearly pleased. "I see."
Before too long I was summoned into the headmaster's office. Mr. Grant was an Episcopalian minister and a heavy smoker. He was pretty much a nice guy, but he had a bit of fire and brimstone left in him, as when he would ask a pupil who had given him a shaky and noncommittal answer to a question like "Why did Moses lead the Israelites to the Land of Milk and Honey, "Are you asking me, young man? Or are you telling me?!"
Anyway, he and I chatted for a few minutes in a pretty friendly way, mainly about fruit and the proper way to talk about it, but what neither of us knew was that, prodded by the deeply offended teacher, the secretary had called my mother to come and take me home. I was to be sent home for this offense.
Since I lived right down the street from school, it didn't take her long to show up. Mr. Grant and I had just gotten to the subject of peaches when there was a knock at the door, and the secretary popped her head in to say, "Mrs. Spillenger is here."
"What?" said the headmaster, clearly a little confused by what was going on around him.
Then Mrs. Spillenger walked through the door, and the conversation, slightly Thurberesque by any standard, led us all to understand that I was being sent home because I had said, "Aaaaah ... raspberries!"
During the five minutes this exchange took, I was, as they say, shitting a brick, because, as would often be the case in later years, I felt I had transgressed in some mysterious way that I would never truly comprehend. But my mother, one of whose finest moments this was, spent these minutes struggling in vain to keep from bursting into laughter, a fact that was not lost on Mr. Grant, who clearly felt he'd been left holding the bag for the insane whim of a couple of women whose sense of propriety had been incomprehensibly violated by my outburst.
As we walked back home, I gradually realized that I was not, in fact, in serious trouble with the authority I feared most. In fact, she was grateful for the entertainment. It was one of those rare moments when I felt we got along like a couple of drunken sailors, and I would refer back to this in later years from time to time as an example of something that didn't happen much but was pretty cool when it did.
All of which somehow reminds me of the Republicans' opposition to the "public option" in the health care reform bill.
I can't recall a time when these clowns -- and I use the term only out of herculean restraint -- the word that came immediately to mind was far less charitable -- when these clowns haven't droned on and on like soused fanatics in some little Tangiers watering hole about the sacred and infallible wisdom of "the market." We must not interfere with the "natural" operations of the market. The market will sort all this out. Government is full of stupid bureaucrats who want to control us, while the market is an instrument of freedom. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
You can't have government regulation of corporate shenanigans because that will put a damper on the free operation of the market, which in the end will always tend toward justice and equity. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
OK, this is their line and they're sticking to it. Fine. Except that they don't always stick to it, do they? When it comes to massive bail-outs of floundering banks and investment houses and automobile manufacturers that can't figure out how to survive the ... what shall we call it, if not "the market" -- when it comes to this, all of a sudden the market isn't so bloody infallible anymore, is it?
Well, all right, what's a little hypocrisy among friends? Let's not be too quick to judge.
But wait. There's more. We must not offer the American people a "public option" -- a health insurance plan underwritten by our tax dollars -- because that would lead to something "socialist" like state-run health care. (Oooooh....) Just like what they have in that quintessentially pinko nation, Canada.
But we all know what's really at stake here, don't we? The Liebermans of the world are all terrified that a public health care plan would be so popular, so attractive to scads of Americans, that the private health insurance companies, whose executives have made obscene amounts of money for decades by charging huge premiums but refusing to pay even the most innocent claims -- that these companies will not be able to compete. They will lose business. They will lose the monopolistic strangle-hold they have on our health care system. Oh dear me. They might even have to start lowering their premiums and covering more conditions.
In other words, Republican politicians fear that they might have to play by the rules of "the market." They fear free competition. But I thought that the market's natural selection was supposed to weed out those companies that need to be weeded out. Hmm.
So, here's what I have to say to the Republicans mouthing these dreary public option-bashing platitudes:
Aaaah ... RASPBERRIES!!
