Forgive me, America, but I still cannot get the Oklahoma Superintendent of Education’s masterful pwning of Republicanism’s enemies out of my head. And yes, I realize that is likely a sentence never before written in the history of language. That’s been happening a lot lately.
“In Oklahoma the shelves are not empty. No porn, no indoctrination. We are fighting back to keep our classrooms from going woke. @Moms4Liberty.” What a take-that moment.
We already covered it earlier, of course, but Walters’ tweet brought back a flood of memories of my own Oklahoma childhood. [ed. note: Hunter did not grow up in Oklahoma.] The schools, the libraries, the book fairs, the pogs, the clouds of cigarette smoke coming from the teachers’ lounge. I grew up in Lawton, Oklahoma [ed. note: He did not] and attended public schools there until 10th grade, when I abandoned my education to become a professional lion tamer for what would have been a chain of Chuck E. Cheese-style pizza restaurants featuring live animals. [ed. note: This never happened and we’re giving up now. We’re washing our hands of this whole piece.]
We had it rough, but there was one thing we Oklahoma kids could always rely on back in the heady 1970s and 1980s: our school library’s six books. They were those same six books that Ryan Walters put on display, when he took it upon himself to prove that Oklahoma school libraries still had books in them: two Bill Bennett books, one conservative alternative history book, a book that included the Declaration of Independence, a book with the complete Federalist Papers, and the Holy Bible.