A regular reader of this blog teaches history at a high school in Baltimore County. Normally, he reads from home, but he was at school recently and wanted to find a political cartoon I had mentioned in an older post. So he typed ThePublicProfessor.com into the address bar on a school computer only to find that this site had been blocked by the county, under the ominous heading Potentially Damaging Content.
It’s true. I’m bad for kids.
Why the ban? It was probably the result of a potty-mouth filter. And truth be told, I have been known to say words like “fuck” and “shit” from time to time. As in “Fuck the Nazis,” or “Mein Kampf is such shit.”
But no matter. A couple of days later, the filter had corrected itself and this site was accessible once more via the school computer. And that’s about right, because children shouldn’t be protected from things that are harmful. Just let them be. And if anyone talks about protecting children, we should complain about how much that would cost and how wrong it is to interfere.
This, so far as I can tell, is the argument being laid down by some members of the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee concerning the good health initiative for school children championed by Michelle Obama, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
School lunches have long been the butt of jokes, better as ammunition for food fights than for actually eating. But it’s not just a matter of bad taste. It’s also about lousy nutrition. So the Obama administration is trying to do something to genuinely improve school lunches. And we’re no
t just talking about jazzing up the tater tots. It’s about getting school kids to eat food that is, you know, kinda sorta just a little bit healthy.
How does the Obama administration propose to do this, you may ask? By putting in place stringent guidelines that mandate what children can and cannot eat? Hardly. Rather, it is by creating a series of voluntary guidelines for schools about what constitutes healthy eating, and what doesn’t. Simple stuff, like pointing out that kids probably shouldn’t be eating frozen french fries for lunch everyday. It turns out they’re actually not very good for you. Go figure.
However, some members of the House Appropriations Committee are voicing their protest, and since Appropriations actually appropriates the money for the federal budget, what they say is very important. To some members, the new program is a sure sign of unwanted government intervention. Should we believe them?
Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) is chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee on Agriculture. Kingston’s spokesman Chris Crawford recently complained about the cost of the healthy foods program, and claimed the policy is “classic nanny-state overreach.” He then voiced his moral outrage that MTV is drenched in sex and drugs, but “you cannot see an advertisement for Tony the Tiger during the commercial break.”
It could be that Kingston and Crawford are genuinely concerned about American schoolchildren. After all, they’ve clearly mastered Kindergarten Lesson Number One: two wrongs make a right. If MTV is wrong for targeting kids with inappropriate programming, then we should be aghast that they’re not spicing it up with inappropriate advertisements.
I don’t doubt that some members of the House are rigidly dogmatic enough to believe that it really is a form of insidious regulation for the federal government to create guidelines that encourage schools to feed American children nutritious food. But then again, I also don’t doubt that perhaps many of them are intent on representing the interests of agribusiness, which produces all that crappy food. This year is looking to be the fifth in a row that total agribusiness spending on lobbying efforts goes far beyond the $100,000,000 mark.
That’s Kindergarten Lesson Number Two, kids: Money Talks.
And if money talks, then poverty remains quiet while it shoves its face full of tater tots. Because after all, it’s mostly poor kids who eat 
crappy school food. Most middle class kids show up with a lunch that their parents send with them.
So what we have is this. Elected officials citing supposed concerns about cost and regulation as they try to shoot down a completely voluntary set of guidelines that schools can use to improve the nutritional value of the food they serve mostly poor children. But there’s more than a hundred million reasons to believe politicians are actually objecting because they are more concerned about agribusiness profits than they are about the declining health of American school children.
The only think I can think to say about that is: Goddamn, that’s some fucked up shit.
Oops. Sorry, kids. I did it again.