Roots of Bitterness

This is the school paper of Warren County High School, circa 1984. I was on the staff of the paper but my teacher didn't like any of my ideas, hence I rarely participated in class.

My first proposal was to change the lower-case 'o' in the masthead to upper-case and remove the useless dash between 'Co' and 'HI': WA-CO HI-LIGHTS.

It's still an eyesore and illiterate as fuck-all , but at least it's a little more symmetrical.

Better yet, we could change the name to anything but 'WA-Co' - howza 'bout 'The Warren Piece, or Warren Speaks', you know, a pun on the book...by Tolstoy...that one. No, we don't have a copy in the school library...in fact , our school library is a 'hand-me down' collection from the old, shuttered middle school and is largely comprised of juvenile fiction and textbooks from the 1950's and 60's.
I would like to do a news article about our suck-ass library.
May I do that?

No.

May I write an article questioning the validity of my 8 am American Government class? Most mornings we watch a live broadcast of the Phil Donahue Show until the bell rings. I suspect that my teacher, who is also the girl's basketball coach, knows absolutely nothing about American Gov't and I think that the student body is poorly served by her lack of knowledge.
May I interview her and find out just how much she does know about the subject she allegedly teaches?

Yes, but you can only ask her about sports.

Oh. Well, may I do a series of articles on how to play hooky without getting caught?

No.

May I write a 'fluff' piece about fuzzy animals and how cute they are?

No, because Melissa is already writing one. But that is a good idea.

Can I buy ad space in the HI-LIGHTS and use it to sell my old term papers and book reports that I wrote for my other schools?

Are you trying to get me into trouble?

No, I'm looking for a story. I don't have any assignments. Can I at least re-write some of these articles?- they are wrong. Even the layout is a mess.
(Note: This was an Honors class, not the "special needs" project that it looks like- I think the headlines speak for themselves)
Look:


Have you read this part? , I asked. It's nonsense.


This doesn't mean anything. Even in high school, this sort of sloppy writing drove me nuts...
I recall pointing out just a few of the flaws in the 'editorial' piece" quoted above:

-How can the something be both "elementary" and "not basic at all?"

-The " basic needs" are food, water and shelter. Those have never changed and they never will.

-"Thousands of years ago, Greek and Latin were the basics..."
I thought they taught History here at Warren County...'thousands of years ago' is absurdly vague, but if you were lucky enough to have been 'educated' then , there's a good chance you were instructed in Hebrew, Tibetan, Sanskrit or hieroglyphics...and isn't Latin essentially a Roman corruption of Greek, the latter being the last of the Hellenic tongues and the former being the first of the Italic ?
( Please, no umbrage from the Umbrian crowd)

There should be classes for this stuff, I opined without welcome.

- "Instead of the basic needs being reading, writing and arithmetic, we need more computing, communications and calculations to succeed."
According to my calculations, your communication fails to compute. If writing and arithmetic are NOT communication and computing/calculating, then what exactly are they?
Please don't use words to answer that question, as you obviously do not understand words.

-There is no such thing as a fractional high school diploma; one cannot obtain a "diploma in fractions."

Can we please publish some articles that don't make us look like we just fell off the DogPatch turnip truck?

I am getting frustrated with your attitude.


I was at least as frustrated as my teacher.
Every time that I said something that was true, correct, or made sense, I would be ignored , laughed at and/or shunned.

The class was called Journalism. Weren't we supposed to be concerned about facts, accuracy and truth? Boy, I sure did have some dumb ideas back then...

All I was really doing was pointing out the obvious, but that was enough to separate me from my classmates- they even did an article on me:

I didn't have many friends at that school, but I did have a mustache that allowed me to buy beer for the kids with money.

Eventually, I became bored and stopped attending class altogether and started spending my days drinking beer in the woods with the same illiterate rednecks that I mocked in my interview.

After a few weeks of absenteeism, I was called into the Principal's office , where I was told that my chronic truancy was a show of disrespect for my teacher and for the school in general.

I asked my teacher if he had ever read his own paper. If he had, he'd have seen that the Feb. 1984 issue contained an interview with me in which I insult the school, the students and the entire town- my disrespect is public record-any 'real' journalist should know that.

After that I didn't have to attend Journalism Class any longer. I was given a grade of "D-" and banned from the newsroom. I was told that I was not to communicate with my teacher for the duration of the school year.

That D- grade knocked me off of the Honor Roll and ruined my dream of writing a series of self-help articles tentatively titled: "How to Make Honor Roll Without Attending Class."

That same year, I traded my Atari video game to a classmate for a cheap electric guitar and a Boss DS-1 Distortion pedal. I lost interest in computers and starting writing angry punk rock songs about my classmates.
That trade may have been the biggest mistake of my life. Had I not done that, I'd probably be richer than Bill Gates instead of being an unemployed guitarist.

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Next: My First Gig.