General Discussion

His barely covered snark combined with genuine feeling toward students made me love that class. It was finally more than dates and facts, it became part of riveting reality. He had a curious and free mind, in a way that most other teachers at my high school did not.

There was a lot that he wouldn’t have been allowed to teach or say. So I graduated from high school still wondering why the US was supporting a bunch of awful dictators — Pinochet, Marcos — and training death squad leaders in torture techniques at the School of the Americas — while pretending to be all about democracy. Took me 22 more years to find Chomsky, Zinn..suddenly the lightbulb moment. When a population in a poor country is 98% landless, while the 2% that inherited all of the land wants to prevent progressive taxation or funding for public schools or nationalization of resources, an obvious irreconcilable conflict may arise between ‘capitalism’ and ‘democracy’. The 2% can always phone-a-friend, Uncle Sam, to stop the ‘excess of democracy’.

But he told us about his experience as a dog handler in Vietnam, which I’ll never forget. They are at the front of the line, and the average survival rate of soldiers in that position was only around 6 weeks, but he was there for …a few years? One time he gestured at the reality of the two places on a human body that the dogs were trained to attack, one of which was the neck.

He was wiry, strong, not tall, reportedly had lots of plants in his van and students who got a demerit for being a little late for the bell could give him a plant to remove the demerit. That sounds like bribery, but in the late 1970s, there was much more room for individuality than there is now.

I tried looking him up several times over the decades, to tell him thank you and that I’ve never forgotten him.