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"Impossible!" you say But Can You Prove They Didn't?By Rick Horowitz As news conferences go, it hadn't been anything special -- a long table at the front of the room, a clutch of microphones, a press release on every chair. Most of the chairs had stayed unoccupied; reporters had had better things to do with their time. Not that it took much time. In 17 minutes, it was over, and the people in charge of such things were folding up the table again, and loading the chairs onto carts. Even had they bothered to glance at one of the extra releases before stuffing it into the trash, the significance of the moment would almost certainly have escaped them. "Penguins Behind Polka, Group Announces." Can it be that it was only two years ago? So much has happened since! It started slowly,
the way these things tend to do -- when they start at all. The news
conference rated a paragraph at most in a few widely scattered newspapers.
Perhaps the editors were desperate for something to fill that one-inch
hole at the bottom of the page; they'd have run anything that fit. Or
perhaps they saw something there. "Topeka,
Kan. -- One of the world's most popular dances is for the birds, a group
here claimed this morning -- or more precisely, from the birds. Citing
what they called 'irrefutable logic' and 'good common-sense evidence,'
spokesmen for the organization Citizens for a Grand Plan asserted today
that penguins, rather than humans, invented the polka." Missing from that paragraph would have been the spokesmen's insistence that the widely held view of the polka's origins somewhere in Bohemia was "just a theory," and that any dance as creative and complex as the polka could not have been the product of man alone, in Bohemia or anywhere else. And in the third paragraph -- though hardly anyone saw the third paragraph -- would have been the first brief mention of textbooks. There things sat for several months, and might still be sitting to this day, had it not been for an Odessa, Texas, high-school sophomore named Kristen G. researching a term paper about the polar ice caps. In the course of Kristen's research, she came across that one little paragraph, tucked away on a Web site devoted to wearable penguin art. And because she'd found the information on the Internet, she knew it must be true, and included it as a footnote in her term paper. "Ridiculous!" her geology teacher scribbled in the margin. "Where do you get this stuff?" Kristen was devastated. But her parents were outraged. They called the principal's office demanding that Kristen's B+ be erased from her permanent record. They also launched a petition drive demanding that the teacher be fired, and that penguin polka be included in the curriculum. That's when things really started heating up. Most people thought the whole dispute was laughable, but a small but growing band of parents took up the cause. Why, they wondered, should our children be subjected to such narrow-minded instruction? What evidence could these school systems produce to prove beyond a doubt that penguins hadn't invented the polka? Academics scoffed, but the movement kept growing -- first in one state, then in several. Within a year, penguin-polka initiatives had begun showing up on local ballots. School boards were being re-elected, or turned out of office, simply because of their positions on penguin polka. Orders started climbing for new textbooks that included penguin polka side-by-side with what activists began calling "the Bohemian alternative." We're not saying "the Bohemian alternative" shouldn't be taught, they argued, but why should that be the only acceptable approach? Penguins, they claimed, do all sorts of things we never thought they were capable of doing -- who's to say that inventing the polka isn't one of them? By the time the dispute reached Washington D.C., it was at full boil. Senators and representatives found themselves debating the subject for hour after hour in the halls of Congress. Finally, even the president of the United States was asked about it. Did he think that penguin polka and man-made polka deserved equal treatment in the nation's classrooms? "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas," the president replied, "and the answer is yes." Activists were ecstatic. Academics were aghast. The penguins haven't said a word. Posted 8/6/05. Get
award-winning commentary right here at "Rick's" -- and spread the word!
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Rick Horowitz
