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Americans are painfully ignorant and they don’t like people who are smarter than they are.

Which explains Bush.

He certainly doesn’t want people to be smart. Remember Reading is FUNdamental? He just nuked the RIF program budget for 2009. Gone. To hell with those poor kids. Poor as in disadvantaged, to use that nauseating euphemism. Dubbya just disadvantaged them some more.

What a despicable human being.

What Americans do like is rich people. It’s the American Dream to be a rich person. I assume the saying “The dollar is king” was originally a reference to the currency’s (former) planet-wide supremacy, but these days it’s unquestionably a statement of the culture’s values.

Not only do Americans raise their kids to be good little consumers, they also raise ‘em to be good little capitalists:

Florida-based FranChild enables kids ages 5 to 15 to go way beyond lemonade stands and operate a “grownup-style” business instead. Parents and kids begin by picking a product to sell: beeswax candles, organic soap, jewelry or apparel. The initial startup cost is just USD 25, which gets the child a FranChild Company Certificate to acknowledge his or her business launch; business cards ready to print from FranChild’s ready-made templates; how-to instructions for marketing and selling products; access to the My First Franchise Resource Center, a USD 75,000 marketing system for creating customized packaging products; discount pricing on inventory and supplies; and access to newsletters, updates and a members-only forum. (Source)

FranChild promises “valuable business and life lessons” (like how calling something organic will help you sell it and feel less guilty about doing so, like self-worth and success should be measured by how much junk you can sell, like everybody needs more stuff, like making money is a desirable goal in and of itself…). Those lessons are valuable for American kids, I guess.

Please. I wouldn’t let my kid go around the neighborhood selling candy bars for school fundraisers because I didn’t want him to have doors slammed in his sweet little face or to feel inferior to his classmates if he sold less than they did. (I took ‘em to work and piled them up on the microwave with a ziploc for the money. I worked with 30 women. Supply rarely met demand.)

FranChild also claims it offers “an educational context in which parents and kids can spend time together.” Can you list a hundred better options for truly edifying quality time with your kid? I can.

Like reading to your kid, for instance. I couldn’t read The Velveteen Rabbit to my son without totally losing it. And I will never forget holding him when he was 13, my heart breaking as he cried because he’d just finished reading Of Mice and Men.

Life lessons and values.

Please take a moment to contact Congress on behalf of the RIF program. Children shouldn’t be taught the fundamentals of business. They should be taught that reading is fundamental.

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“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”