I am not a fan of the whole idea of “tolerance”. I mean, I get the spirit of the campaign but as an English teacher and as a writer, I am just not a fan of the word choice at all.

To me, to “tolerate” someone connotes that I should endure them. That I should “bear” them. That I should recognize that I am superior to that person but, for the sake of not creating conflict, I should shut my trap, bite my tongue and suffer the shortcomings of this person’s inferiority and differences and just take the high road.

Tolerating black people sounds condescending if not racist.
Tolerating jews sounds bigoted and belittling.
Tolerating Asians, tolerating Hispanics, tolerating YOU… I mean really, who in the world wants to walk in the room and be made to feel as if everyone else is “tolerating” you?

And teaching kids to “tolerate” other kids seems as though we are missing a chance at striving for, if not ascertaining, more lofty goals.

Maybe we could teach recognition or validation or acceptance or empathy? I am not sure. But of all the words chosen, “tolerance” seems to me to have an Achilles heel.

As a teacher, should I “tolerate” my special needs students? Should I “tolerate” my low-income, minority parents? Should my students “tolerate” me because I am white?

Like I said, I completely get the spirit of the campaign and trust me, eradicating hate and intolerance would be a major step for my city, this country and out world.

But teaching people to merely tolerate others sounds, well… it sounds mere to me. When it comes to fractious ethnic and racial strife, asking folks to merely be tolerant of one another seems as if tolerance is a bar set too low.

As a writer, I want the readers of my books to be happy. As a teacher, I want my students to be happy. As a keynote speaker I want my audiences to be happy. Having these folks happily satisfied after they have spent their time with me matters to me. Right or wrong, it just does.

In order to accomplish this, however, I must remain responsive to feedback. But if you are going to be the type of person that welcomes feedback, you are also going to have to 1) develop a thick skin and 2) recognize when it’s time to listen to your own thoughts on the matter as opposed to the thoughts of others.

When it comes to developing thick skin, well, for me it didn’t really arrive in my life until being thin-skinned about matters proved to be too much of a detriment to the goals I was seeking to accomplish. Here’s a little tid-bit about how I have found my own human nature works.

I’ll give a speech, do a keynote, write a work or what-not, and people will compliment me, want me to sign their books, chat more after the program, whatever. But if one person wrinkles their nose, shrugs their shoulders and points out where I wasn’t really all that great, I take it personally.

And when I go home later that night, do I remember the good stuff? Do I remember the praise? Do I remember all the compliments, even if they outweighed the critics 50 to 1? Of course not — I remember the criticism.

And I dwell on it.

The fact is, if you are going to put yourself “out there”, if you are going to “try”, if you are going to take a stand, make a speech, author a novel or whatever, you have to know that 1) no matter what you can do, it can be improved — which is why I find it so essential to listen to feedback and 2) know that some people just like to criticize for the sake of being critical (as opposed to doing it for the sake of being constructive).

It’s like a double-bind. I need to listen to the feedback but human nature makes me feel like I only want to hear the good stuff. And hearing just the good stuff is potentially ruinous. How can I improve my efforts if I don’t hear where I am falling short in my efforts?

This is why I know I need thick skin. When I show my books to people and ask for their opinion, I want the truth. If it ain’t working, I need to know it so I can make it work. It’s not about my feelings; it’s about the material. Having published multiple books has brought me to this doorstep of understanding.

When you stop taking it personally, you open up avenues to improve your craft in innumerable ways. That goes for almost anyone — teachers, writers, administrators. People are SO defensive about what they are doing that they often tune out to the ways that they can do the things they are doing better. Hey, no one’s perfect.

It’s why I have tried to become more thick-skinned. It makes me a better professional.

BTW, young writers are often hard to have conversations with because they take criticism of their material as personal criticism. Look, I admire anyone who straps up, sits down and cranks out a book. Hats off to ‘em… it’s hard stuff. But if it’s not great and you only want people to tell you it’s great instead of ways it can be improved, then you’re setting yourself up for trouble.

The best administrators, educators, businesspeople and so on want feedback. They want reflection. They want to improve. Even if it’s a wee bit salty on the soul, to get better, one must hear about the “issues”.

After all, is there really any such thing as a “master” who does not still have room to grow?

So I have been getting lots of notes and the such as of late asking me to let a few people backstage, behind the scenes, into the kitchen to see how books get written, vetted, sold, and published.

Yes, I am a regular ol’ high school English teacher working at Lynwood High in Los Angeles but I also moonlight as an author having published books with Disney, Scholastic, Recorded Books and, coming soon (I just inked a new contract for a new YA title), Penguin, as well.

I write books for teens. Or for people that work with teens. Right now, that’s “my thing”.

The truth is, there are a great many similarities between student writing and professional writing. And there are scores and scores and scores of pages I can write about the process of becoming published. So going forward, I am going to start flavoring this blog with insights from the “other side” of literacy (i.e. the book writing side as opposed to the book reading side) and then work to make connections back to the kids, the classroom and so forth.

In a way, the writing/publishing process seems as if it’s kind of secretive to others. People ask me all the time, “How do you get a book published?”

Really, it’s not all that cryptic. Write a good book. Do that first and foremost.

Wait, let me re-phrase that, because we all know that there are lots and lots of books out there that are hunks-a-junk.

So what’s the rule?

Write a good book. Yes indeed.

See, I don’t really need to re-phrase the advice at all. Everyone is going to have an opinion on what is “good” and not everyone is going to like your stuff no matter who you are. (Just ask Stephanie Meyers who has some folks swearing she’s the cat’s meow and other folks complaining that if they read about one more “crooked smile” on the face of some sexed-up teen vampire hunk they are going to heave her Twilight tome into a furnace!)

You, as the writer, must believe in your own work. If you are not ready to stand up for your own effort, to declare that “Yes, this is worth reading!” then why-oh-why do you expect anyone else to waste their precious time investing what you yourself do not believe is really worth a hoot. Reading takes time, effort and mental energy and there are lots and lots of options out there for us all to digest.

So if you want to become published, write something you believe is worth reading. Write a good book! Human beings are hungry, starving for things that “speak” to them… and I have yet to meet anyone who has said, “Ya know, that’s enough for me. I’ve had my fill of hearing good stories, meeting great characters, vicariously experiencing new predicaments, settings, circumstances, triumphs and so forth.”

Look, for me there comes a point for me where I hate every book I am working on and think it’s the worst piece of crap that has ever been stroked on a keyboard. (Homeboyz one of my most successful and highly acclaimed books to date was, in my opinion, an absolute train wreck at times and I literally wanted to pull out the hair of my main character — as well as my own — because he was torturing me like you don’t even know. And yet, with time in the chair, my butt in the seat and a steely determination to “crack this nut” I finally broke through — stuff that no one really knows about this experience of writing what has become a real student favorite, particularly with reluctant reading kids.) Then again, if you are a writer, you have to know that by nature you are a dramatist and therefore, you can’t fall prey to the daily roller-coaster whims of “this is going to be the best piece of literature ever!” on Tuesday to ” I knew I should have become a CPA… why-oh-why did you ever think you become an author?” on Wednesday.

Neither extreme is true.

You put your butt in a chair and work day in and day out and give it your best — and then, after you string a few hundreds days in a row like that together, you have something. What do you have? Well, that’s up to you. But before you can be a writer you must do the work of a writer. You must learn your craft and the only way to do so is by applying your craft.

Writers write.

Like I tell my students, there is no magic pill I can give them to improve their reading ability or improve their writing ability. There are no literary steroids. What there is is true effort. Intellectual sweat. Mistake making, hard work and time — lots of it.

Really, I am not sure anyone becomes “good” without having travelled along the road of having been “poor”. Is there such a thing as talent? Sure, but talent will rarely reveal itself nor fulfill its own potential until work ethic plows its path.

You may not like Stephanie Meyers, you may love her, but one thing no one can dispute is that she sits her rear-end in a chair and cranks out 600 plus page books. That takes effort, discipline and endurance.

And those are the elements which real writers cultivate.

Writers write.

As for me, currently I am proofing a new book. The title is still under lock-n-key as I haven’t yet sold this book — my agent just finished it, really, really, liked it, and we are going to “go out with it” and try to sell it in the next few weeks. (I’ll keep ya posted.) But I will tell you this, it’s a comedy, it’s for YA readers and my wife thinks I am cuckoo because she hears me late at night typing away at my computer laughing out loud in a room where I am sitting all by myself. (In my own defense though, if I am not laughing, who will? — even if it does mean I might need to be fitted for a straight-jacket at some point going forward. I mean some things, like being published, are worth the price of admission, right?)

Now, I’ll circle back to the genesis of ideas (my students supply me with SO much material — all I do is work to be a listener and entire universes unfold), the process of actually writing (often late at night when others are sleeping — but you have to find the time no matter what), character, plot, motivation, antagonists and protagonists, setting and more — at a later date. Right now, if there’s a take-away today it’s this.

Writers write. It’s the only way to advance.

I’ll never forget the time I heard Neil Simon say,” The page is just as blank for me when I wake up in the morning as it is for you.” That stuck with me.

Writers write. He knows it. I know it. Now you know it.

Writers write.

For the first time ever, I got me some hate mail. It was in response to my blog post the other day about Alabama on October 12th and re-segregation.

I’d copy and paste the message here but I think protocol would dictate that I remove all the profanity — and if I remove all the profanity from the email, there really would be any message left to copy and paste.

Let’s just say it was elegant, simple, direct and remarkably blunt. Truth be told, it was a model of concise writing. Though only 7 words, the message about who I was and what I should go do with myself was unmistakably clear.

(Good to see that in the land of the almost hyper-politically correct America in which we now reside, this gentleman from Alabama didn’t seem too worried about being nuanced or opinionated. Bravo, I say. Though I must admit, I don’t think I am limber enough to actually perform the act he instructed me to perform on myself.)

I can’t say I am all-together shocked by getting a bit of push-back from a few folks in Alabama based on what I wrote. However, when I see that some new NAEP test scores have just come out and point to an obvious and troubling racial achievement gap I realize that even if I was a bit harsh on the folks down South, it’s not just me who finds some of the by-products of racial disparity troubling.

As this article says…

While 4th grade scores among the nation’s white, black, Hispanic, and Asian students all have improved since 1990, they remained flat from 2007 to 2009. The gap separating black and white students’ scores, and that between Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, also stayed the same—a discrepancy that has not narrowed in recent testing cycles.

• Is gerry-mandering the school district zones going to help?
• Is America as a country better when certain racial groups out-perform other racial groups?
• Am I some sort of turncoat for raising the issue?

Students are apparently making some progress on the NAEP tests but, according to the folks who study this data, it’s not enough and the racial disparity is a troubling element which needs to be eradicated in order for our country to climb to the next level of scholastic achievement.

Yep, I got me some hate mail. All I can say is, though I tried to be fair, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Last night after putting my daughter to sleep, I spent a long time writing a blog for today. Actually, it was too long. I’d spent over 45 minutes on it and knew it needed to be trimmed down or converted into a two-part piece, something like that.

See, I want to start adding in a little more about how I, as an author, write. The process of authoring a book, the ins-n-outs, the behind the scenes, from idea to page to literary agent to sale to publisher to bookstores. Looking behind the curtain at this process feels like it might have relevance to teaching ELA and I suspect there might be much to be mined in terms of making connections from the toils of a professional author to those of the student author — as they are really more closely related than most kids probably imagine.

It was a goodie, too. Really meaty.

Then my wife zapped it.

45 minutes worth of work gone-zo. I went to go score some jellybeans from the kitchen cabinet (the ones she’s been hiding from me cause I’ve been eating too many as of late… in her opinion) and she wanted to take a look at something on Web MD since everyone in our house right now has a bit of a tickle in their throat. So she opened a new tab and read a few pieces of info while I covertly munched some orange little droplets of love in the other room. Then, when she was done, she closed out ALL tabs on the computer.

Not just Web MD but all the tabs… and a heck of a lot of thoughtful work of mine went bye-bye.

So for today, it’s kinda like the dog ate my digital homework. I am frustrated that I have to do it again — and it will almost assuredly be different — but the thing is, stuff happens, right? At first I was steamed, aggravated and so on but the fact is, it was my fault, not hers. I could have “saved it as a draft”. I could have backed it up somehow. I could have taken steps to make sure I didn’t lose the material before I got up from my seat to go satisfy my sweet tooth.

But I didn’t. But what I did do right after that was make sure I backed up every file on my computer to an external hard drive because losing 45 minutes worth of work is one thing — but losing an entire computer’s worth of work is something else entirely.

After all, who doesn’t have scores of irreplaceable pictures, lesson plans, writing and so forth on their computer? So in my small pain let their be a great lesson to all who have read this today: BACK YOUR STUFF UP!

Remember, the time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining.

And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have to go apologize to my wife for my outburst. There are two reasons for this. 1) I flew off the handle a bit and 2) cause if I don’t she’s gonna hide the damn jellybeans where I’ll never, ever find them again.

It’s SAT season and if there is one thing about working in a Title 1 school, it’s that you get to witness a HUGE disparity when it comes to college test prep.

The fact is, those who can afford to take SAT test prep classes are wise to do so. And the parents of kids in upper-socio-economic communities understand the value of this which is why these test prep programs absolutely thrive. As for the parents in communities such as mine, well… they’d love to be able to offer their kids the best (I never doubt their desires to do so) but quite frankly, it’s exceedingly rare that they have the $1,000 (or even more; these classes cost big bucks) needed to spend on stuff like Kaplan, Princeton Review and what not.

I mean, check it out. Kaplan offers “Premier Tutoring for $3,999″. You think a kid with parents who can afford this kind of test prep for their child isn’t at a distinct and very real advantage over a kid who can’t even afford to sign up for the faceless, online test prep Kaplan offers for around $300 bucks?

If you know anything about the SAT, you know that before it’s a test of brains, it’s a test of strategy. Knowing when to guess. Knowing when to move on. Knowing how the test will be scored, knowing the “tricks” and “tips” and so on. To walk in cold without this knowledge is to set yourself up for having your clock cleaned. Parents with money can buy this “How to crack the test” knowledge for their kids (cracking the test is a big slogan in the test prep industry) while parents without cash are often left scrambling to even pay for the SAT registration fees.

It absolutely feeds into the conversation about social justice, iniquity in education and the Achievement Gap. Kids at my school simply cannot afford top quality test preparation and that puts them at a tremendous disadvantage when it comes to test time.

Like I said, and this is no secret, before the SAT is a test of one’s intellectual aptitude, it’s a test of one’s ability to know how to navigate the test in order to manipulate the scoring methodology to the test-taker’s best advantage.

This is also why I offer over 50 FREE pages of SAT prep on my website. Because I don’t believe money should be the reason that a kid can’t fare well on the SAT if they are willing to put in the elbow grease. Now, do I compete with a $4,000.00 price tag? Of course not. But I do empower people to have the ability to use some good ol’ fashioned “roll up their shirt sleeves and get to work” self-empowerment to even the playing field… and I do it at absolutely no charge.

That’s right…

• No fee.
• No sign up with your email and I’ll spam you to death for the next 1,000 years. (Trust me, I don’t have time.)
• Just free as in free. All I am trying to do is level the playing field a bit.

Again, here’s the resource — click on the link on the left under Free Resources and pass it on.

Below are some tips for all test takers. (You can owe me the 4,000 smackers… LOL! But it is amazing how folks are just being absolutely FLEECED isn’t it? I mean why don’t our public schools, if the SAT is so important — and it certainly is for college bound kids — offer free SAT courses instead of allowing the corporate behemoths to drink from the wallets of the rich parents while the poor kids get shortchanged? Geesh!)

Tips ALL Students Must Know for Success on the SAT

• Do NOT answer every question.
  • There is a PENALTY for guessing – if a question is too difficult, the best strategy is to move on and use your time to solve questions that are more within your reach.
  • NOTE: The #1 biggest pitfall of ALL students on the SAT is that they attempt to answer too many questions. Skipping super difficult problems is a very critical strategy for success.
• Use the process of elimination.
  • Get rid of wrong answers. 80% of the answers are wrong on the test – wrong answers are much easier to identify because they are much more abundant.
• Read the questions carefully.
• Do not make assumptions. Answer what is being asked of you.
• Identify “key” words.
  • Key words clue you in to correct answers. Context is critical to unlocking answers on the SAT.
  • Underline “key” information in the reading passages.
  • Studies show that one common theme of students who score well on the SAT is that they mark up their test with notes.
• Refer back to the reading passages as needed.
  • Flipping back and forth on the critical reading section is a strategy.
• Read each answer choice completely.
  • Don’t be afraid to re-read information (and test questions) to aid comprehension.
• Do not be afraid of unfamiliar words.
  • Strive to get a feeling for unknown words and see if they have a sense of being positive, negative or neutral in tone. Use this knowledge to help “crack” the answer.
• Know your grammar!

The University of California is now mulling charging different rates for different majors. In this article, they cite the example of the engineering student. Because such a kid uses more tangible and costly resources in their field of study, colleges are now mulling the idea of making that student pay more for their schooling. For example, since engineering majors erect 20 foot long concrete canoes using university money for class projects (and the university foots the bill for the raw materials) it costs the school a lot more to educate this student than it would, say, an English major (because that kid pretty much buys all their own books and taps primarily into the university’s brain power to pursue their degree and not their wet cement supply as well as their brain power).

I gotta say, it seems sort of fair to me. I mean when I go out to eat, they don’t charge me the same price for lobster as they do a hot dog. If the “goods” cost more to provide to the customer, the customer almost always is asked to take on the extra burden of price. Besides, people everywhere across this country are used to paying different prices for different things. If anything, I kinda gotta ask, “How come they didn’t start doing this years ago?”

Of course, the question becomes, “Will the more expensive majors see a decline in enrollment?” I am not sure. But I’d speculate that the more expensive majors will typically offer higher paying job prospects as well. Compare the engineer’s average pay to the average philosophy major’s average pay and a cost benefit analysis would most probably show some type of corollary between an “it’ll cost ya more” type of degree to a “it’ll earn ya more” type of profession.

And what about the more popular majors? Shouldn’t they also pay a premium in this land of supply and demand? I mean right now the Toyota Prius, a car that get 48 mpg, sells for above sticker price because so many people want to buy a hybrid car. On the other hand, a Chevy Tahoe, an SUV that gets like 11 mpg, has all sorts of crazy discounts being offered. I mean business majors are more popular than ever — why not charge more for a business degree than a poli sci degree? Supply and demand, right?

So the question becomes, are universities about to charge a la carte prices instead of buffet style admission depending on the major chosen? Seems that way.

One thing that is sure to come is the outrage from the kids that are going to see their tuition raised yet again. It’s like the airline traveller that has to pay for bags.

In times of budget issues people sharpen their pencils. Only question now is, am I entitled to a refund? I’ve never built a cement canoe in my life. Actually, wouldn’t a cement canoe sink? Guess that’s why we need engineering majors in the first place — the only time us English folks often have concerns about canoes is when Huck and Jim are trapped in one with a pair of rapscallions!

For those of us with students who don’t think they’d ever want to consider a career in writing, this article might be an arrow in your quiver to help inflate a student’s sense of why knowing how to properly punctuate a sentence is a skill that they might want to have in their professional, job hunting arsenal.

After all, who’s going to want to read reviews about sensie bud from a person that doesn’t even know how to correctly incorporate a lucid and illuminating appositive phrase?

That’s right, a new day is here with new, 21rst century jobs out there for the taking and as marijuana clinics boom all over the country we now find ourselves in need of weed connoisseurs.

The day of the critic has arrived. Don’t laugh, because just as cars need reviewing, restaurants need reviewing and wine needs reviewing so do the multitude of different styles and offerings of the wacky tabacky!

Wanted: Pot Critic

Experience Required:

• lots of smoking
• lots of toking
• having visited lots of laser light shows while blazing out of your mind on Thai Stick a plus.

Skills Required:

• joint rolling
• bong loading
• pipe stuffing
• able to self-edit manuscripts because your bosses will probably be too high to actually read what you write.

Hours:

• whenever, dude

Okay, I jest. But the thing is, the city of Los Angeles has seen an explosion in “medical dispensaries” this year and they have become so popular that there is a very real job out there to be a Bud Critic. (Read this article and be amazed: 966 clinics are now open in L.A.) I mean from what I have heard some of this pot will hit you like an elephant gun and some will simply give you a “mild, light buzz, you can still remain semi-coherent” buzz. Users want to know what’s what and what to expect.

Imagine not knowing the difference between having two beers and having two shots of Arkansas moonshine. This is where the erudite dope folk come in. They will have sampled the goods, smoked the various strains, and done their “get high as a friggin’ kite homework” in order to be a guide, a judge and a navigator for other users journeying through this very green forest.

Do we turn our noses up at wine critics? Will weed experts be welcomed into society with the same open arms? Will there be a stigma to be a stoner or is this just a new brand of cultural connoisseur?

Either way, the job requires a person to be able to write… and do it well.

And really, look at those hours.

As Joseph Campbell once famously said, “Follow your passion!”
As the military once famously said,” “It’s not just a job, it’s an adventure.”
Or, as Cheech and Chong once famously said, “Hey man, how am I drivin?… I think we’re parked man.”

(BTW, that pic above shows a map — as identified by little red marijuana leafs — where all the pot clinics in L.A. currently are open. The explosion is so large that there are now two of them within walking distance of my house… each open less than a year. Can’t say I’m the biggest fan at all of the ubiquity but then again, I never even bother to count the bars. Fodder for another post, I guess.)

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

I had a school-wide faculty after-school meeting this week on Wednesday afternoon — one that we were not notified we’d be having until Tuesday afternoon. (As if we don’t have actual lives outside of this place.) And why?

Cause there was some really important stuff to go over. Like hall passes.

We literally spent 23 minutes discussing the proper implementation of granting hall passes. Which hall pass to assign. When they should be assigned. When they should not be assigned. How many of them can be assigned. How we are now supposed to keep track of who we are granting hall passes to so now, when a kid asks to use the restroom, we are supposed to stop everything we are doing, get out our “Accountability of the hall pass” sheet of paper, and note who took the pass so, in case someone absconds with the hall pass, we know who the last kid to have the hall pass was.

Because apparently, hall pass abduction is on the rise. And sophisticated classroom discussions on the theme of oppression throughout the ages as evidenced in a cross section of texts by international authors easily afford the opportunity to start-n-stop to do menial book-keeping like making sure that I note that Jenny took the hall pass because she is menstruating!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

(But at least she’s not pregnant… alas, I drift.)

Never mind the ditching on campus. Never mind the fire alarms being pulled. Never mind the graffiti, the truancy, the tardiness, the lack of homework, the immense need for more parental support, the fact that there’s always a 15 minute line to use the faculty photocopier (when it’s working) and on and on and on.

Hall passes are now a major concern and damn it, we are going to beat this problem… as a team!

It was practically a surreal experience for me, sitting through this hall pass certification training process. But trumping the fact that our admins were spending our precious planning/professional/life time so ludicrously was the shocking sight of seeing so many teachers with their hands up waiting to ask questions about hall passes once the admins had concluded their section of the day’s preposterousness.

Will we be getting special hall passes for the nurse?
Are the library hall passes good for more than one student?
Can we color code the hall passes so that we know which department issued the hall pass?

Every time I think the admins are acting foolishly I look out to my peers and think, Aw Geesh, please put your hand down.

Am I the only one who knows that the golden rule of long, silly staff meeting is to NEVER raise your hand to ask a question because it only prolongs the pain?

BTW, school started six weeks ago, I have about 10,000 hours of work to do in terms of grading and lesson planning and trying to bring in a new unit on Body Language to tie to some oral presentations I want to have my students give later this month and we’re talking about freakin’ hall passes for 23 minutes well after 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon after I’ve been at school since before the light of day?

My Freakin’ School is Wastin’ My Freakin’ Time!!!

AAaaaaaaaaarrrgghh!!

David Letterman has made a fantastic living ruthlessly roasting people over their foibles. Their issues. Their own personal “affairs”.

And now the chickens are coming home to roost for him, aren’t they?

Now I am a fan of Dave. Or was. And I don’t want to be smarmy or display schadenfreude. I started watching him in 1985 when he was on from 12:30 – 1:30 and used to do bits like “Network Time Killers” which were literally designed to simply kill network time (cause the writers were on strike). The man has often been, imho, really funny.

Yet now the “hurt to his own family” caused by him sleeping with his staffers is the punch line of all punch lines and all his fellow comedians are… taking it easy on him?

I mean Leno dined on Bill Clinton’s affair for Clinton’s entire presidency… and he still does it. And Conan and all the rest of the comedigensia… they are practically giving Dave a free pass right now.

And why?

Cronyism.

If this were a Congressman, forget about it. Remember when Dave made all those sex jokes about Palin’s teenage daughter? Borderline out of bounds — maybe entirely out of bounds. I mean look, I’m no Palin fan but the sense of arrogance and entitlement shown by Dave to do sex jokes about other people’s kids while thinking he’s above the law, will never be discovered, is “of rank” to do material while simultaneously “behaving like” the people he is ridiculing is shocking.

If Dave were the CBS Network President who’d been schtupping staffers he’d be gone.

But Dave’s above the law, isn’t he? I mean he’s media savvy so he knows the mea culpa route works, he pokes a wee bit of non-scalding fun at himself as if to play, the “since I give it out, I gotta show I can take it, too” card, but does he ravage himself? Does he go for the jugular?

Do the other comedians show any teeth?

John Edwards, Bill Cosby, all those Congressmen in Florida, and countless others have literally been the butt of Dave’s jokes, his bread and butter, for years. Really, think about how many side-splitters Dave has made about all the extra-marital affairs.

Now think about being on the receiving end of those jokes and think about all the people who Dave has has made squirm, cry, weep, hurt, writhe and so on.

At least now we know why his fellow comedians don’t roast Dave the way they do other folks in the limelight. It’s cause they know he’s a real person with real feelings who is in real pain as a result of his own real shortcomings — and the women in this guy’s life are hurting bad as a result right now.

Great time to show a heart, huh comedy folks? (NOTE: A few folks did do some lukewarm Dave stuff but no one has really taken off the gloves on-air.)

For example, here’s Dave on Elliot Spitzer. Just on Elliot:

“Spitzer’s going be out of office, he’s going to be looking for a job, and I’m thinking, ‘Whoa, isn’t that what got him in trouble in the first place?’” –David Letterman

“Don’t kid yourself, ladies and gentlemen, this is serious. We’re having a lot fun here now, but it’s really serious. Eliot Spitzer could go to jail, he could go to prison, think about that. The former governor of New York could go to prison. And, well, that’ll be sex he won’t have to pay for.” –David Letterman

Here’s Dave on Palin’s teen daughter:
“There was one awkward moment during the seventh inning stretch. Her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez.”

There are so many jokes Dave has made about other people having “illicit sex” that if someone were to post all of them, it would require a really thick, thick book to reprint all his little funnies.

Now maybe I am getting old but the humor of Dave from this point forward seems kinda as if it is going to live under a shadow of such immense hypocrisy that it’s not worth it to tune in for the “all is forgotten” laughs. As a teacher, as a parent, as a person living in a world of shrinking values, giving another pass to Dave simply because he knows how to crack a good joke, gets paid a lot of cash, or whatever really feels like just simple enabling.

He thought he was above the rules, he acted as if he was above the rules, his spineless peers give him a free pass on the whole matter and to let him just roll on as if life is normal proves that Dave knew best all along — he really is above the rules.

It’s good to be the King, right?

We all have our shortcomings and no one wants them held up to a microscope. But when you making a living doing it to other people, you gotta expect the tables being turned is fair play.