Jewels in the Garbage

I wish I could jump right up on a soapbox, wave a flag and say that the 1st Amendment has been violated at Pali High, but I can’t.

I wish I could say that the students there published a stylish underground newspaper that completely honored the tradition of protest journals, but I can’t.

I also wish, however, I could say that the kids were dealt with in a cool and professional manner, but I sure as hell can’t say that either.

In the clash between emotion and education, neither side won.

My reference here is to the underground newspaper put out by students at Palisades Charter High that got 11 of them suspended and four more transferred to other schools.

It was a computer-generated paper so filled with expletives that I can’t even begin to impart the extent of their usage. They called it the Occasional B.J., and I leave it to your imagination to guess what the initials indicated.

Teachers were written about in a style intended, I guess, to be satirical, but wasn’t. One teacher called the paper slime and wouldn’t talk about it further. But another called it learning, and said the kids were only looking for a voice.

The truth always lies somewhere in between. The most obvious truth is that we’re dealing with young people from a generation we’ve created.

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That the Occasional B.J. was filled with obscenities, no one disagrees. That its humor fell short cannot be denied. But, said Mary Redclay, an English teacher at Pali for 25 years, “We’re hung up on the language and not the point.”

She was one of the few I tried to contact at Pali who would respond. Neither the principal, Don Savarese, nor the dean, Lawrence Marshall, would return telephone calls. It indicates the distance they desire to maintain from the issue, and maybe that’s why underground newspapers occur.

Redclay says that students are unhappy because “some teachers are not giving them an education at all and are verbally abusive.”

She says the kids need a forum to express themselves and adds: “We should teach them how to criticize without vulgarity. I love the kids and I’m honored to teach them. We learn from them.”

Both Redclay and a man she once taught, Los Angeles school board member David Tokofsky, agree that the students should have been talked to, not punished so severely. They should have learned from the experience and not had to suffer because of it. They’re our children, not our enemies.

“It was overkill,” Redclay says. “We reward whistle-blowers, then punish the kids for whistle-blowing in the language that is part of their culture.”

And therein lies another hard truth.

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What we’ve done in the name of free expression is flood our lives with the kinds of obscenities that were rarely said in public until the 1960s.

The F-word, along with a variety of other equally colorful expletives, are about as common now as sunshine in L.A. They permeate the culture through film, television, music, sports and art.

There are no limits, no self-imposed dignities. We’ve raised kids worshiping Howard Stern, the king of all crudity, as some kind of cultural icon. We’ve taught them, in effect, that the only way to communicate is to reach into the depths of the language and throw garbage in each other’s faces.

Then we’re shocked and outraged when they do.

I’ve been a hell-raiser all my life, beginning with a pre-pubescent neighborhood newspaper and continuing right up, I hope, through today, and I’ve been in occasional trouble because of it.

But my advantage has been that I’ve been called to task for my intemperance by those who understood that I ought to learn from the experience rather than walk away embittered by an authority that battered me down.

What we apparently had at Pali High were teachers and an administration that folded under the student exercise in excess. They felt threatened by the name-calling and the obscenity. Instead of dealing with it, they ran for shelter.

They heard none of the message that the paper intended, and that’s too bad. There were jewels among the garbage.

“We don’t like that you won’t let us speak our mind,” the O.B.J. editorialized at one point. “We don’t like that you want zombies and not students . . . and most of all we don’t like that you only pretend to respect us.”

Their feeling of disrespect, says Mary Redclay, is the key to their protest. And to the students, disrespect may be the dirtiest word of all.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.