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i have neither the time nor the interest to engage with sophistries concerning prayer in public--that is secular--schools.
on the matter of smalltown censorship of this play, two quick points:
1. grease is an awful awful play.
2. it seems to me that the censoring of a production of this innocuous, badly written piece of crap play derives mostly from fear--which seems to me to rest on problematic assumptions:
the children who are brought up in little towns did not choose to be there. they did not choose the benighted frame of reference, the small mindedness, the isolation--the advantages, the trees, the closeness.
their parents chose it.
but this basic fact seems all too often to go out the window--it is almost like folk who choose to live in these places only understand their choices as being legitimate if they see them repeated by their kids--as if they are afraid to confront the reality of their own choices, and would instread prefer to erase them as choices--they would prefer to control information about the world, eliminate what they do not like, in order to impose continuously the limtations entailed by their chocie to live in a small town as if these limitations were natural...
i grew up in a little town in new hampshire, btw--there were scandals involving both my high school class plays in that ridiculous little place--but no attempt to censor the plays--and so the whole thing--play and controversy, vanished quite fast into oblivion--they hover about in 2006 only as memories and faint ones at that.
my brother often talks about wanting to "protect" his kids by controlling information sources, monitoring what they see, etc. i think that what he wants to "protect" his kids from is the possibility that they will become other people, who want things he does not recognize necessarily, who live in places he does not like--he wants his kids to be like him--even though he arrived at his own sense of himself by going outside our parents' efforts to do the same thing to us. the net result of that is not that he sees the folly of the whole project, but rather that my brother imagines that he is more efficient at censoring his kids' sense of the world because he moved outside of my parents' model. all i think that he is accomplishing is a delaying of the revolt. you cant stop your kids from becoming their own people. if you try, all you manage to do, really, is set things up so that the rejection of that way of life, if it comes, when it comes, is total. that would would try to shape your kids' sense of the world in order to produce a repetition of your choices in relation to it seems nothing more than vanity. a vanity motivated by fear. it seems wholly self-defeating to me.
the irony-like factor in all this is that he, too, lives in a small town--and like many it is no longer self-sustaining economically. so his kids will more likely than not have to leave, will have to go somewhere else, become something Other. if that turns out to be the case, all he will have managed to do is unecessarily limit his kids sense of their own options. i assume---pollyanna boy that i am-that they'll work things out for themselves--but it will take longer than it might otherwise have, will cause them more pain than it otherwise might have.
this is more or less how see this idiotic attempt to censor the innocuous in the name of "community standards"---it is about fear, about the sense of a loss of control that plays out across really stupid matters like "grease" that only function as flashpoints because--unlike economic transformations in a context where captialism functions ideologically as an unqualified good--they are tangible.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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