Lose the "the," and it costs a little under a billion dollars a word: The Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act. Now 12 years old, it has allocated nearly US$6 billion of federal money to state and local governments for the purpose of -- well, guess. Who could argue? Last time we checked, not too many anti-school-safety advocates were working the halls of Congress or making the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows. Then, of course, there's the fact that schools really are a great deal safer today than they were 12 years ago, a distant era when the student body was less able to mount a decisive, armed defense.
Just how safe are they? Ask Ralph Frammolino, the Los Angeles Times reporter who recently bothered to investigate how all that money was spent -- a question with an awfully long answer. There's the "clown act promoting bicycle safety" in Arkansas, the $1,000 in bait and poles for field trips to a fishing hole in Utah, the $6,500 remote-controlled toy police car in Louisiana, the dunking booths in Pennsylvania, the new Pontiac Grand Prix for the always-stylish cops at the Los Angeles Unified School District. There's Miss Louisiana singing the theme song from Titanic to some unlucky children down in Jefferson Davis Parish. And then there's the magician who defended his anti-drug school assemblies with the helpful explanation, "We have a live duck in the show."
The act really is an act. The departments of Justice and Education both released reports last year offering that conclusion, calling it "a relatively narrow range of intervention strategies, many of which have been shown either to not work ... or to have only small effects." The Congressional Budget Office suggested -- unsuccessfully, of course -- that maybe it was time to stop funding all those live duck and clown acts. And actual students handed in their own verdict on the effectiveness of the anti-drug portion of the act by getting stoned out of their gourds. As the Times explains, the number of eighth graders trying marijuana has more than doubled since the early 1990s. (In similarly consternating news, sales of Canibus CDs more than doubled just last week.)
"Still," Frammolino reports, "US education officials insist the program is worthwhile and that schools are safe, with 90 percent of the nation's campuses never reporting any act of serious violence." Ah, yes, the Sun-Coming-Up Program accepts your thanks for this morning's sunrise. The program is worthwhile, and schools are safe. We're pissing off the balcony, and forest fires are down 10 percent in the Pacific Northwest. Think of it as a kind of crossword puzzle or "Where's Waldo" game.
But there's more to our favorite crisis-programming convolutions than their brainteaser value; the best ones both demonstrate and inspire true courage. Remember Al Gore on Letterman -- the show, that is -- all those years back, smashing the ashtray with a hammer? Sure you do, particularly since you've received occasional reminders that the administration was busily reinventing the federal government, making it more effective, faster, and less expensive. Except that a reporter at The Washington Monthly just checked into that new, more efficient federal government by trying to get a series of government agencies to perform simple tasks. Seth Grossman's story, in the September issue, details such complicated interactions as calling a cancer-information hot line, maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services ... and trying to get some information about cancer. Insert big surprise here: It didn't work. Grossman was -- in calls to a dozen agencies -- disconnected, promised information by mail that never arrived, charged 1-900 fees of 35 cents a minute for passport information, and instructed to call hotline numbers that were no longer in service. His stretching-deep-for-the-lesson conclusion: "In far too many of these agencies, help lines seem to exist just for the sake of existing, not really because the agencies really want to provide anyone with any help." But the reshaping of the federal administration has achieved one key goal: the reduction of the federal work force by 351,000. Symbols don't need to be staffed -- they just need a sign on the door.
Writing in the 7 September issue of The New Republic, the less-than-dazzling Martin Peretz came up, surprisingly, with a bit of precise, perfect language -- describing the critical political balance between "polemical outrage" and "functional indifference." He was writing about Clinton's policy toward Iraq, but he could just as easily have been writing about nearly any national politician -- and just about any issue.
Still, Clinton is very much the all-time champion at this game. The Monday after the president was distracted by personal issues, he appeared before the oh-so-seriously-named Council on Foreign Relations -- or, rather, before a hastily assembled audience that was arranged in front of a sign with the council's name on it. The president's staff had called the council on Wednesday of the previous week, explaining with some urgency that the president needed to give a major speech on economic policy right away. His cause: saving the world economy from a crash. Speaking somberly, wearing an expression of grim determination, the leader of the free world laid out his program for stopping a crisis that had already engulfed Russia and Asia and was emerging in Latin America. He had ordered the Secretary of the Treasury and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve to convene a meeting with their counterparts from other countries. And he didn't just want a meeting -- he expected a report, too, "to recommend ways to adapt the international financial architecture to the 21st century." For substance, Clinton added a demand that Congress ship more money to the IMF, committing the United States to helping the collapsing economies pay their Visa bills with their MasterCards -- or, we suppose, with American Express. Not much more advanced than casting shadows on the wall, but for a day the president was busy saving the world and didn't have time to dwell on less significant matters.
We, on the other hand, would greatly prefer to dwell on the less significant matters, which tend to be simpler and much funnier over drinks -- and which cost a whole lot less money, $40 million in investigations aside. Feel free to agree or disagree, but the duck-owning magicians among you should take at least one additional piece of information into consideration. Clinton is recommending that Congress increase funding for the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act in the next budget year -- a position that really does take courage.
Or something a lot like it. **
Republished from Suck.com
