It's always such a pleasure when a really well-drawn but minor character shows up after a long absence, like Thomas Pynchon's "Pig" Bodine or Chloris Leachman as Frankie Muñiz's vile crypto-Slavic grandmother in Malcolm in the Middle, so I'm gratified to report a sighting of Arizona's own White Whale, attorney general Tom Horne.
In the past, we've watched Horne as a champion in the conservative battle against racism, as when he fought bravely against the Tucson school district's Mexican-American Studies program ("It's just like the Old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it"), or when he claimed (probably falsely and possibly perjuriously) to have participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Now he shows up as a moderate in the struggle to arm America's schools, between the two extremes of making all the teachers pack heat (conservative) and doing nothing at all (apparently liberal?).
There is awesome comedy material in this setup. Obviously nobody on the staff wants the job, if only because of the Weekend Warrior training aspect, and all the teachers are under orders from the union rep not to do it because it's not in the contract, and so it goes to the most unsuitable person on the staff, a suckup vice principal with delusions of grandeur. Presumably a man, but think Chloris Leachman. Only I don't see how it ends without some serious bloodshed.
In the past, we've watched Horne as a champion in the conservative battle against racism, as when he fought bravely against the Tucson school district's Mexican-American Studies program ("It's just like the Old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it"), or when he claimed (probably falsely and possibly perjuriously) to have participated in Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington. Now he shows up as a moderate in the struggle to arm America's schools, between the two extremes of making all the teachers pack heat (conservative) and doing nothing at all (apparently liberal?).
"The ideal solution would be to have an armed police officer in each school," Attorney General Tom Horne said in a news release Wednesday. But budget cuts have limited the number of Arizona schools with "school resource officers" on campus, he said.
The "next best solution," Horne said, "is to have one person in the school trained to handle firearms, to handle emergency situations, and possessing a firearm in a secure location." (CNN, via ThinkProgress)
The one person would be the principal, or "another designee". (I guess the real leftist extreme would be raising the property tax to pay for the real cop.) |
| Grandma Ida |
There is awesome comedy material in this setup. Obviously nobody on the staff wants the job, if only because of the Weekend Warrior training aspect, and all the teachers are under orders from the union rep not to do it because it's not in the contract, and so it goes to the most unsuitable person on the staff, a suckup vice principal with delusions of grandeur. Presumably a man, but think Chloris Leachman. Only I don't see how it ends without some serious bloodshed.
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| Chloris Leachman's model? And Tom Horne's favorite music critic. |
