George W., Folklorist
George W. Bush gave a speech on Nov. 2 advocating "moral education." Chatterbox agrees
that "values" should play a larger role in educating children, which is why he
supports well-regulated programs requiring high-school kids to perform
volunteer service of some kind. A danger of injecting "values" more fully into
school curricula, however, is that if it isn't done thoughtfully, it will end
up presenting certain pious and erroneous sentiments as fact. This is an
oft-noted weakness of some of the liberal "values" teaching that already goes
on in schools--a lot of silly misinformation about the environment and ancient
African civilizations, for example, routinely ends up being passed along by
bumfuzzled
elementary-school teachers. This drives conservatives (and even many liberals)
batty. Increasingly, something similar seems to be happening when
"conservative" values (like a literal belief in the Bible) get taught at the
expense of evolutionary science. If moral lessons are to be taught more
forthrightly in schools, it's important that the distinction between knowledge
and folklore be maintained.
In his speech, though, Bush himself seems to have stumbled over that
distinction. In a litany of examples in which teen-agers have shown "character
and courage beyond measure," Bush cited the following:
When a gun is aimed at a seventeen-year-old in Colorado--and she is shot
for refusing to betray her Lord.
This refers to Cassie Bernall, one of the teen-agers shot by their
classmates Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris at last April's Columbine High School
massacre. Shortly after the shooting, the horrifying story spread that before
she was shot, one of the two killers asked her if she believed in God. She said
yes, and the gun was fired. The anecdote became the basis for cover stories in
the Weekly Standard and Christianity Today and for a best-selling
book, She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie
Bernall , written by Cassie's mother, Misty Bernall. But as was reported
somewhat tentatively on Sept. 25 in Salon and subsequently confirmed elsewhere, the story
almost certainly isn't true. "We strongly doubt that conversation ever
occurred," Steve Davis, spokesman for the Jefferson County, Colo., sheriff's
office, told the Washington Post 's Hanna Rosin.
What investigators now believe really happened is that another
girl, Valeen Schnurr, was shot in both arms and then asked if she
believed in God. Schnurr said yes and, for whatever reason, the assailant
wandered off without harming her further. (Schnurr recovered and is now a
freshman at the University of Northern Colorado.) She Said Yes
acknowledges this in a backhanded way, with the caveat that "the exact details
of Cassie's death ... may never be known." In the Post piece, which
appeared on Oct. 14, Rosin explained that Schnurr is not going out of her way
to tell her story, because whenever she does it's interpreted as a betrayal of
Bernall. "You will never change the story of Cassie," the Bernalls' pastor,
Dave McPherson, told Rosin:
The church is going to stick to the martyr story. It's the story they
heard first, and circulated for six months uncontested. You can say it didn't
happen that way, but the church won't accept it. To the church, Cassie will
always say yes, period.
What goes for the church apparently goes for George W. Bush too. It's
inconceivable that Bush and his staff don't know the Bernall story has been
discredited; Bush's speechwriter, Mike Gerson, was until a few months ago a
journalist , for Pete's sake. (A very good one; Chatterbox used to work
with him at U.S. News .) At the risk of sounding judgmental--and meaning,
of course, no disrespect to Cassie Bernall and her tragic murder--Chatterbox
concludes that Bush's decision to use the story anyway is something a little
worse than exploitative. It's immoral.
