The Department of Education Comes of Age

The Department of Education hired me to write better schoolyard jingles. “I’m Popeye the Sailor Man / I live in a frying pan—where’s the educational value in that?” it said.

It was particularly concerned about kids’ ignorance of sex, of basic knowledge of what an ovum or a scrotum or even a breast was. It liked the wordplay in “Miss Susie” (Miss Susie went to hell / -o operator), but the song ended with the boys and girls kissing in the d-a-r-k dark. “What happens next?” the Department of Education wanted to know.

Or consider how eighth graders, instead of rowing boats gently, sang, Fuck, fuck, fuck a duck / Screw a kangaroo. The Department of Education was appalled. The Department of Education sent me a whole memo about it, part of which read: “This song’s gross ignorance of both biology and physiology is unconscionable. The lyrics do not consider the tremendous difficulties of a human attempting intercourse with a marsupial.” But I didn’t care about that. I was an adman with a deadline.

So I wrote one to the tune of “Yankee Doodle.” It goes:

If you want to have safe sexYou can use a condomYour father should have borrowed oneWhen he banged your mo-om

It was the perfect balance of information and degradation. It spread like a venereal disease. You’ve probably sung it yourself, or at least the girl who sometimes smoked at the back of the bus did.

Teen pregnancy rates plummeted. The Department of Education was ecstatic. It called the song a real “feather in my cap” because it thought that was clever. The Department of Education would sometimes whistle the tune in the halls, lasciviously lingering over the final phrase.

Once it became clear the song was a success, the Department of Education wanted to celebrate. The Department of Education stole a Bartles & Jaymes Fuzzy Navel wine cooler from an unguarded governmental refrigerator. It tasted like syrup and fizz and tin. The Department of Education wanted another.

The Department of Education began to make fun of Nancy Reagan behind her back. The Department of Education came to work late, then later, then eventually not at all. It cussed and picked fights. It got to second base with every member of the sophomore class of John P. Stevens High School in Edison, New Jersey. Its hangnails snagged on the sheerness of bras; the tufts of chest hair sprouted on boys like promises.

The Department of Education was finally caught buying a dime bag of grass from an undercover cop behind a barn somewhere in Kentucky. The Department of Education was grounded, its funding revoked. Most of the story was told to me by a night watchman who found me in my dimly lit cubicle, the office otherwise empty. Surrounded by rank fast-food wrappers, I had been left to work continuously for months, trying to cram a rhyme for fallopian (Ethiopian? Dystopian?) into my version of “This Land Is Your Land.”