Jonathan Mumbles Martin - MSNBC Manure Salesman with a Mouthful of SamplesAt the end of the school year, there was always locker inspection. At Bishop McNamara High School in Kankakee, IL, sometime in the late 1970's, I taught (for want of a better term) young gent by the name of Jasper Hoegen-Vander. Jasper was, I believe, the only student in my career whom I failed for the entire year. Jasper completed nothing - not a homework assignment, not a quiz, not an essay and certainly not an exam. Jasper had and did nothing.
I met with Jasper, talked with his parents, brainstormed with my Department Chair, Guidance Counsellor, and Principal and could not motivate Jasper to do anything. I had taught his older brother Perry, a great athlete, student leader and scholar who went on to University of Illinois. Jasper's folks owned a produce farm in the Dutch colony of Wichert, IL between St. Anne and the Indiana State line. Jasper, it seemed would have been fully content to be Robert Frost's Hired Man until the day he cast off his mortal coil.
On Jasper's last day of four years of complete inactivity at Mac, I asked the lad to do something - anything on a piece of paper that could justify my giving him a Gentleman's D for the year.
"Anything? Like how stupid and boring you are?"
As you wish, Jasper, anything.
"How about how fat and slutty your Mom is?"
One man's opinion might suffice.
For forty five minutes we carried on with this Bizzaro World Socratic Method - Jasper posing ever more gloriously obscene and offensive questions concerning my ontological* place on our planet. On paper, nothing.
All of my other students, six sections of a score or more, had handed in blue books and were cleaning out their lockers for the summer.
Jasper, it is getting on to four o'clock and you have not even put your name on the paper.
"Are you looking on my test,Man? That's cheating. What are you a cheat? Did you cheat your way to the top?"
My position is far from the top, Jasper, and I have to conduct locker inspection.
" Hope you'll find some cool stuff? Bag of dope for you to smoke? That how you got to be such a dope?"
Jasper, hand in your paper.
"What about locker inspection?"
That last question became the stuff of legend. For the balance of my career at Bishop Mac, which ran from 1975-1988, colleagues would ask that question, whenever something absurd was posed by someone at faculty meetings. " We should modify the curriculum to reflect the contributions of political prisoners to our way of life - Thoreau, Gandhi, the Soul on Ice Negro,. . .Theodore Cleaver" would be met with a universal chorus of "What About Locker Inspection?????!!!!!!!!!!!!"
When I heard and later read about the Politico C-4 getting fused by Jonathan Martin all I could say was "What about Locker Inspection?"
Jasper's question floated out into the ozone.
Locker Inspection? What does that have to do with anything?
"I'm asking the question, Mr. A$$hole ( Jasper, to say the least, understood the social proprieties)? WHAT ABOUT LOCKER INSPECTION???????"
It rang loudly through the halls.
Jonathan Martin is a journolist MSNBC regular mumbling manure salesman with a mouthful of samples. Jonathan's lynching of Herman Cain sparked me to again ask, "What about Locker Inspoection?"
Jonathan Martin is Jasper Hoegen-Vander Lite.
Herman Cain is a very nice, black man who is married to a very nice woman and he is also a GOP Presidential Candidate who happens to be more popular than our first Bi-racial President. That will not stand. Jonathan Martin is asking the very same questions of the American Body Politic and Candidate Herman Cain as Jasper HoegenVander posed to me in an all but empty classroom in Kankakee.
Take a look.
If Herman Cain is as MSNBC insists a Minstral Performer, a Racist Joke and a Sexual Harasser, why is Mumbles Martin asking "WHAT ABOUT LOCKER INSPECTION!"
Like Jasper, Jonathan Martin has got nothing.
Unlike Jasper, Jonathan Martin is unwilling to spit it out - a manure salesman with mouthful of samples.
De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.
*Ontology (from onto-, from the Greek ὤν, ὄντος « being; that which is », present participle of the verb εἰμί « be », and -λογία, -logia: science, study, theory) is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.
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