High School Dramas With Scary Endings

The saddest lad in the class of 2005 at a Los Angeles high school may be the student who got his way.

El Camino Real is the Woodland Hills high school that collects national academic decathlon titles the way Rupert Murdoch collects television stations. Its big student play premieres tonight, a satiric stage piece written back when most of the students were still gumming their lunch, that is, the 1990s: “The Complete History of America [Abridged].”

The play’s original jacket showed George Washington as Groucho Marx. The drama students’ updated poster for the play subbed out Washington for George Bush -- likewise tricked out in Groucho’s horn-rimmed glasses with a stogie and a Saddam Hussein-sized mustache.

The student in question complained about the poster. The ‘stache, he told the school paper, made Bush look “like a Middle Eastern person.” It savaged the student’s sensibilities so deeply that he went to the principal, who went to the school district lawyers, who, shopping for a way out of this, found one more: The cigar endorses smoking. Take the thing down. Score one for the phylum invertebra academia.

It’s hard to credit either of these alternatives: that this student is walled off from life as it is lived -- not to mention “Mad TV,” “The Daily Show” and the school newspaper’s April Fool’s satire issue -- or he was gaming the system. (It’s the time of academic year when seniors get silly and bored. A week before my graduation, I called in sick with Irish potato famine.)

Political? Damn right the poster is political. If politics isn’t on the curriculum, somebody should hand back those academic decathlon medals.

What the poster is not is partisan. The campaign is over. Bush won. He’s the only president we’ve got. If you’ve got another incumbent president out there to make light of, I’d sure like to know about it. And the day that Americans can’t make fun of their president is the day that Rush Limbaugh sobs apologies to Bill Clinton, splits his millions between PETA and the Hillary ’08 campaign and slinks back to Sacramento to take over the “Garden Show” on KFBK.

Personally, I’m wildly jealous. What a dope I was, not to think of that angle back when I had to take calculus: “Mr. Willis, I don’t understand calculus, and I object that anyone thinks I should have to.” But then, what should we expect of mere students when Kansas is about to allow biology teachers to refuse to teach biology, to wit, Darwinian theory?

High schools don’t give degrees by subject, but if they did, this student would have earned his in “Be Careful What You Wish For, It Might Come True.” A little student drama production has turned into a cause celebre. The play is almost sold out for its brief run. The drama students printed new posters, whiting out the offending bits and filling the spaces in with phrases such as “What First Amendment?” Originals that survived the purge went up for sale on eBay, the money going to pay for the drama class trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival to perform a play about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard. One of the play’s co-authors, Austin Tichenor, delivered virtual applause on the drama students’ website: “You’re honoring America’s greatest freedoms and showing America reverence -- by being IRREVERENT.”

In Berkeley last week, a high school voted to change its name from a founding father, Thomas Jefferson, to a founding tree, Sequoia, because Jefferson owned slaves. Can we get this all over with at once and save a lot of time? Can we just change every school name and every school mascot in the country to a number? Let’s give a cheer for the Fighting 37s and move on.

One L.A. student objects to a cheeky poster of Bush. A number of Berkeley students and teachers object to a school named for a genius with feet of clay. I object to this new national preemptive timidity that stretches way beyond political correctness. Better safe than sorry; better not to take a chance at all. Fear imposes a self-censorship stricter than any government agency can exact. It’s the new obscenity, and as former Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said of the old obscenity, he couldn’t define it, but “I know it when I see it.”

That’s the problem we’ve now created: You won’t be able to see it -- all the plays that won’t get performed, all the essays that won’t get written and all those posters that won’t be there for us to draw funny mustaches on, if they’re not already there.