THE DARK AT THE BOTTOM

Kids are ignorant, not dumb. They see the priorities. Why should they value
education when, plainly, we don't?

Amongst other afflictions, I'm a lap steel guitar player. My job
involves going into saloons and getting people to drink more alcohol
by assaulting them with live music. I've never liked the seemingly
hard-wired connection between bars and live music, particularly when
my comrades and I succeed to the point where the customers drink
enough to produce their pistols, threatening to mess with the "live"
part. The general rule is to keep playing. And if we play loud enough,
we can often divert attention from anything but actual gunfire - at
which point, like everyone else, we begin hugging the floor.

Lately, I've been playing in a mellow duo accompanying the
soon-great, always-wonderful Ben Jordan, and back in July we got a gig
at The Canal Club down in the Bottom. I had played there before in a
band and liked it for being a big room where the stage was roomy and
the crowds usually large and attentive.

But, unknown to us last July, The Canal Club was almost dark, as in
"closed." The big upstairs stage I'd enjoyed before was dark.

We played downstairs to perhaps five people, two of whom were "with
the band," such as we are. Apparently, there had been recent incidents
of more than usual success in the live music/alcohol
consumption/pistol-producing department.

The prospect of mayhem and death had dampened enthusiasms. Once more,
crime was eating the people and profits of Richmond.

Crime has been taking a bite out of Richmond for many years now. Last
year's bite is written into next year's city budget - and into your
personal profit and loss statement.

Whatever your "enthusiasm," in terms of conducting business in
Richmond, the prospect of mayhem and death will surely dampen it. The
only enthusiasm not dampened by crime is what Eisenhower might have
termed "the Criminal Justice/Corrections Industrial complex," now a
power lobby in every state and federal body. The CJ-CI complex easily
out-lobbies interests in education and social programs, because tough
laws, mandatory sentences and, most of all, Prohibition II: "the Drug
War," have created demand for a supply of police, bricks, mortar,
guards and bureaucrats.

This enriches a very big lobby that is against crime and for
motherhood. It's a perpetual motion machine: Skimping on social
services and schools to pay the CJ-CI complex assures the creation of
more angry, illiterate criminals who can only go to the CJ-CI complex.
We're caught in a downward spiral of botched priorities.

We don't want to pay a few dollars up front getting decent schools and
help for single working moms. We prefer paying millions of dollars on
the back side, "correcting" the predictable result of our front-side
folly: trigger-happy kids with nothing to lose.

Recently, gang activity is up, gangs and the CJ-CI lobby, being the
only institutions actually investing seriously in our children.

I understand that the Swiss keep assault rifles in their houses as
part of a simple national defense plan, to wit: Who wants to attack a
mountainous country where everybody has a machine gun? The Israelis,
awash in terrible violence on a daily basis, are likewise armed, but
like Switzerland, England, Canada or New Zealand, their murder rate is
insignificant compared to ours.

I forget my Michael Moore, but "Bowling for Columbine" re-related the
familiar statistics, with a few dozen fatalities for all those other
countries and thousands of shot-dead citizens for the United States.

It's not just easy availability of firearms, though that doesn't help.
We apparently prefer it this way - unless we or someone we love are
personally popped. Or our particular gig goes dark.

Otherwise, we enjoy electing "tough" politicos who build a bigger prison
where we need a better school. In Richmond, the minute any child of
sufficient means reaches school age, it is whisked away to our local
versions of Columbine: suburbs where the stars shine, schools are whiter,
and the delusion of "safe" soothes the savage commute back to the bleeding
city.

Opponents of educational spending and social supports say caring is
for wimps. They don't know why we kill each other in such outlandish
proportion to other nations, either, but, whatever it is, it isn't the
lack of education and social supports. It's an erosion of traditional
values by the liberal media - or too much gun control, taking the
firepower out of the hands of law-abiding citizens who might otherwise
provide triangulated counterfire from across the bar, literally
lighting up those dark clubs and taking out the bad guys.

But this is crazy. People learn the vast majority of their behavior,
good or bad.

And learning involves teaching, both by our despised teaching
institutions, and by the day-to-day example of a society that looks
down on teaching. Everything from teachers salaries to the derisive
platitude, "those who can do, those who can't, teach;" the burgeoning
home-school movement; and the vouchers - with respect, few can be
unaware of our disdain for the public school system - especially in
cities. They give damning evidence.

Kids are ignorant, not dumb. They see the priorities. Why should they
value education when, plainly, we don't?

Crime, gangs, violence - it always gets back to teaching, the business
of creating citizens instead of problems.

Travis Charbeneau is a writer who lives in Richmond.

Opinions expressed on the Back Page are those of the writer and not
necessarily those of Style Weekly.