I just saw a weird thing on UK Twitter. In the video clip, a young woman on a bus responded to the request that she wear a mask by spitting on the requester, a young man. The young man responded to this action by throwing the woman bodily off the bus.

Replies to the tweeted video clip varied. While many felt that the man was fully justified in thus reacting, some complained that it was 'wrong to hit a girl'. What struck me most, though, was the reply that said, 'This video could be taken out of context. That man might have provoked the woman's action.'

This reply bothered me a lot, and I'll tell you why. It's fast becoming the go-to response for people who see a video clip depicting egregious wrongdoing, and who think to themselves, 'I'd like to do that wrong thing myself. How can I defend it, so as to reserve to myself the option to go and do likewise?'

As far as I am concerned, spitting on another human being is beyond the pale. Even spitting on the sidewalk isn't allowed. In my book, the only acceptable excuses for spitting in public are:

• If you're facing a spittoon.
• If you're two years old or under.
• If you've just realised your Starbucks is laced with arsenic.

What really gets me is the 'out of context' claim. In what possible context could the woman's action be seen as justifiable? This, of course, reminds me of a story, which I will proceed to tell, like Grandfather Frog in Thornton W Burgess' Smiling Pool. You don't even have to bring me any tasty flies.

A little more than a quarter century ago, children, I was freelancing in an obscure corner of the southern US. To understand the story, you have to know something about Americans and education. As a teacher, you either pay your dues in a secondary school, or go tenure-track at a college or university, or you go scratch. Having spent an unauthorised gap decade teaching in Europe, I was now scratching.

At the time of which I speak, I had seven forms of remunerative employment, or 'gigs', as I was wont to call them. Four concerned education in some way: at a community college, the public school system, educational radio, and a four-year college. The other three were selling radio interviews to a local station in receivership for $50 a pop, so they wouldn't lose their FCC licence; demonstrating household appliances on Saturdays at the local department store (I did a mean business in stovetop grills); and playing piano at the Grasshopper Inn (which led to the infamous quote, 'My Sunday School teacher plays piano in a bar').

The education gigs explain what happened next.

8:30 am: Arrive at community college to teach English to my beloved immigrants. This takes place in the Engineering building. Have fun with students for 3 hours.

12:00-12:30: Read the local news over the community college radio as a service for the visually disabled. For this I get paid $7.50, I think. The grant comes from what the Dean calls 'the drunk money' – fees paid by people who had too many 'points' on their driving licence and are forced to take the remedial course. The remedial course involves the high school Driver Ed teacher yelling at you for 3 hours¹. I do this news-reading service five days a week, so the money is simply rolling in. Of course, the Dean frequently refers to this as 'your reading service for the hearing-impaired', whereupon everyone imagines that I shout into the microphone.


1:00-2:00 pm: German class at the local prestige high school. They had a German teacher. They lost her, which was careless of them. Now, they want to let the students finish their second year of German, so they can tick the box in their university applications, without spending money on a whole teacher. So they have me. I'm not 100% kosher, although I have a state dispensation to do this (at other times, I taught, say, one Latin class or a couple of English-for-Foreigners), so I'm not allowed to roam the building at will. I have to take my adjunct cooties to the teachers' lounge. This isn't my worst high school. One made me sit in a trailer in the carpark until everyone else had left the premises.

2:30 pm: Arrive at the four-year college, which is run by Benedictine monks. Find the language department in an uproar. My department head says, 'Oh, thank God you're alive,' which I find flattering, but odd. The departmental secretary, who wouldn't care if I dropped dead in front of her, seems frantic for some reason.

The explanation was as follows: after I'd left the community college, a disgruntled student had entered the Engineering building. He was armed with a shotgun, with which he shot dead his Technical Drawing instructor. The cause of his disgruntlement? The instructor had criticised his technical drawing in a way that upset the student's feelings. So he went home and fetched his weapon. The Language Department was worried because they had heard about the shooting (bad news travels fast, though not to the high school teacher's lounge, which was a windowless bunker). The thing was, they weren't sure which instructor had been killed.

I suspected, rightly, that this wasn't going to pass muster as a crime passionel. Not only because the killer had had to go home to get the gun. He'd also packed a bag and filled up his pickup truck's fuel tank on the way back.

The next day, the high school teachers' lounge was abuzz. Their physics teacher told me, 'I used to teach technical drawing over there. I told one of the students, "You need to make that line perpendicular." He told me, "This is the only colour pencil I got." That was the day I quit.'

The departmental secretary's problem turned out to be somewhat different: the perpetrator of the crime was a parishioner of her husband's. This preacher's wife, naturally, was totally on side of the 18-year-old with the shotgun.

'We're not getting the whole story,' she complained. 'That teacher must have done something terrible to him to make him act that way. He's such a nice Christian boy.' Oddly, the Benedictines appeared unconvinced.

The department head went around for a month muttering darkly (in French and English) about how dangerous it was getting to be for people in the education field. You never knew if your students were packing…

Personally, I wish that young man had simply changed study subjects. And I wish that guy on the bus had clapped a plastic bag over that woman's head, and hustled her off the vehicle, very slowly.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

16.11.20 Front Page

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