The Teacher Boner Bill

Newspaper stories have noted that in his response to the 30,000 signatures submitted to put HB 1234 on the ballot this fall, Gov. Daugaard has engaged in one of those shameless acts of verbal shystering that does to language what counterfeit bills do to currency.  it makes it useless in dealing with reality.

Daugaard and the teachers.

Gov. Daugaard is now referring to his extraordinarily egregious bit of legislation as The Teacher Bonus Bill.  It is truly The Teacher Boner Bill.I do not mean boner in the sense of an erect male member.  I mean boner in the sense of a genuinely stupid blunder.  It is Daugaard's boner.  It is sticking out there like an erection at high mass.  

There is a bit of imagery evoked by the word boner that might appropriately apply.  When drill instructors inspire overt hostility and menace from a recruit, it is customary for the drill instructor to get in the recruit's face and say "You got a hard on for me, private?"  And then invite the recruit for an opportunity to vent his anger and hatred through physical combat.  However, this bit of parade ground drama was all a matter of bluff and ritual, because any drill instructor who actually provoked hand-to-hand combat with a recruit would soon find himself standing before a court martial.  And any recruit who swung at a drill instructor would be cooling his ass in the stockade.  

I never used that line when encountered by belligerent subordination.  My fighting weight at that stage in my life was 130 pounds and most recruits were bigger than me.  I chose to assault them verbally.  When a recruit glared at me, I would say something like "Private Piddly, if your hemorrhoids are bothering you that  much, you ought keep your head out of there."  That would really incense the recruit, but make the other men snicker and giggle, and then I could dress them down for being disorderly in the ranks.  And then the first sergeant would dress me down for practicing my standup routine on the troops instead of honing their soldiering skills.  

However, Gov. Daugaard and the GOP in general has a big hard on for teachers.  When a drill instructor says "Have you got a hard on for me?" he is not making a sexual reference.  He is using it as a metaphor for the urge and desire to inflict violence.  In that sense, Gov. Daugaard has a big hard on for teachers, as does his GOP comrades.  And for unions.  And for immigrants.  And for women.  And for working people in general.  The plan is to beat the people it wants as serfs down into submission so that it can achieve a corporate serfdom, and finally rid America of all that socialist-like nonsense Tom Jefferson raised in the Declaration of Independence--freedom, equality,  justice for all.


The Daugaard Boner Bill attacks freedom for teachers by creating a system that forces them to teach to tests, not teach what they know and have developed through education and experience and professional development. And he strips away continuing contracts so that teachers can be easily fired if they decide to actually teach rather than program and indoctrinate.   He attacks equality by establishing that teachers are not equal but are graded according to worth by what they teach.  And he dispatches justice in the teaching business by taking away due process that might encumber the firing of any teacher for whom the administrative lackeys develop a hard on.

The only bonus included in the bill is some paltry sums to be awarded to those teachers who can act as role models for sucking and displaying the abject humiliation that the neo-feudalists want from their servants.  

In using the term Teachers Bonus Bill, Daugaard and his cohorts think all people are as verbally stupid as they are and will see the bill as the opposite of the destructive and insulting measure it actually is.  

Daugaard doesn't just have a boner.  He is one.  Big time.