A spherical jackass in a vacuum...

Oh, goody, something else for the legions of the besieged to get the vapors over: puportedly there's some school in Seattle that's trying to call Easter eggs, "Spring spheres." Guess it's just a matter of nanoseconds before we atheists finally get to turn the United States into a radical Islamic country like we've always wanted.

Now if we can just get all these state lawmakers to stop introducing all this anti-sharia law legislation so we can go ahead and stamp Beelzebub's name on the currency.

No, here's the thing: I don't know if the "story" about the school's hostility towards Easter (significance of the quotes will be apparent in a moment) would even be worth mentioning but for one thing--it smells like rotten Spring spheres. Drew Grant at Salon alludes to the fishiness when she asks, "Is this real? This seems like one of those Onion News Video[s]," and she's right to raise the question. "Spring spheres?" Really?

If you go to Google with "Spring spheres," what you (unsurprisingly) find is that everything--all the angry blog posts, Fox News affiliate sputtering, rabid comments, etc., etc., ad nauseum all appear to go back to one source: initially, an article at MYNorthwest.com by Stephanie Klein about a teenager named "Jessica," allegedly a private school student, who dialed a radio call-in show to tell them about a community service project she was working on at an unspecified public elementary school. "Jessica" (and is that her real name?) claims:

"At the end of the week I had an idea to fill little plastic eggs with treats and jelly beans and other candy, but I was kind of unsure how the teacher would feel about that," Jessica said.

She was concerned how the teacher might react to the eggs after of a meeting earlier in the week where she learned about "their abstract behavior rules."

"I went to the teacher to get her approval and she wanted to ask the administration to see if it was okay," Jessica explained. "She said that I could do it as long as I called this treat 'spring spheres.' I couldn't call them Easter eggs."

Which school? She'd rather not say. Which schoolteacher, which administrators? That would be telling. What's this girl's last name and what private school was she attending? SHHH! Isn't this poor whistleblower entitled to some semblance of privacy? (And while we're asking questions: what the hell is an "abstract behavior rule," I'd just like to know?)

Is it a surprise that the Seattle school board hasn't been able to confirm the incident occurred at all? (Sure, of course they've investigated--random wackos all over the world are incensed on this frontal assault on the most sacrosanct of all religious traditions, celebrating the slow torture and murder of the savior of mankind by painting eggs and hiding them. Second only in the Western world to the custom of commemorating the physical manifestation of the One True God by paying too much for a dying pine tree and hanging trinkets from its branches.)

See, I could be wrong, but I'm guessing none of it happened. There's the essentially anonymous nature of the source with no way to track her down--a radio call-in who doesn't give a last name. There's the purposeful vagueness of the narrative--no names provided for any of the schools involved. The set up itself is a little fishy: while I can't say that there are no public schools in the United States that allow student volunteers to show up and plan events for classes, the increasing litigiousness of parents and corresponding paranoia of administrators have (at the very, very least) put such programs into decline (if they haven't, in fact, eliminated them altogether). And even if the Seattle school district does allow student volunteers onto campus, little plastic eggs full of "treats and jelly beans and other candy" is also exactly the kind of thing schools are discouraging these days (the school really had a problem with the nomenclature of the eggs and not the lack of nutritional value of the choking hazards "Jessica" was bringing into their classroom, really?).

And "Spring spheres"? Oh, come on. (N.b. the previous sentence should be read very slowly in a sort of sarcastic guttural with the single syllables drawn out as long as conveniently possible.)

What this has, is it has "urban legend in the making" written all over it. Okay, it could be true. I can't, at this time, disprove that it happened. But what I really expect is that "Jessica No-last-name" will quickly fade beneath the furor (do we even know if she's really a high school student and not some adult fabulist getting her rocks off?), while the story continues to spin 'round the great circular current of the angry dispossessed white conservative Christian right. "Did you know," one of these people will still be saying in five years, "did you know that you can't even say 'Easter egg' in public schools--you have to call them 'Spring spheres.' But you sure can tell children they come from monkeys." Bill O'Reilly will still be filling space with it during the holidays if he doesn't have a pacifist war widow to call a pinhead. Et cetera. The story may or may not have been true the first time it was told, but it will have become certain fact by the two-hundredth or two-thousandth time it's trotted out and run around the track and made to jump over a hedge and through a hoop and stand on its hindquarters.

We are a nation full of people who industriously manufacture outrage. Of course, getting angry about things that merit anger (Federal employees publicly molesting six-year-olds, anybody, anybody?) might require some level of introspection or acknowledgment that there are certain flaws in Americanism; better, then, to make up something to be furious about. I just sort of wish we could do a better job of exporting and monetizing it, with the economy in the shape it's in; a few people get jobs at the Fox News affiliates and some of the bloggers probably sell some advertising, I guess, but probably it isn't enough. If we could get every family in China to buy a stupid thing to be angry about, in much the same way we Americans hoped we could sell all of them bicycles, we'd be rolling in the dough. Filthy lucre, yes, but so what?

But it would never work. The shit works here because we're a credulous people, lacking in healthy skepticism and basic critical thinking skills. I saw this on the news and it must be true: in American schools, kindergartners are taught how to sodomize farm animals as part of "sex education," but if a child says "Jesus" they execute the child and bury him or her in a shallow grave beneath the monkey bars. (And don't believe the lie that few schools have monkey bars anymore because kids kept cracking their heads open and the schools kept getting sued--if schools didn't have monkey bars, where would the bodies of good Christian children be buried? This is basic logic, see?) The schools are all trying to turn kids into vegetarians, because liberals admire Hitler and Hitler was a vegetarian and an atheist. If you stand in front of a mirror and say "Bloody Mary" three times, Karl Marx will manifest and turn you gay and you will put Obama stickers all over everything and your children will be Jewish Muslims and have tails. Here's how to be angry and afraid--after a quick word from our sponsor.