As the more transparently sleazy, odious, and second-rate features of President Junior’s “No Child Left Behind” program became known, the sarcastic nicknames began to fly — among them my own favorites, “No Child Left Unrecruited” and “No Child Shall Escape”. Indeed, no child shall escape the State’s program of psychiatric drugging, captive-audience mass-marketing, military recruitment and political indoctrination. Education? Who said it?

By this time, as well, military recruiters’ encroachment into high-school campuses had markedly increased, along with more aggressive tactics ranging up to and including harassment, threats, and telephone harassment of students’ families at home. Student resistance escalated in kind, including the blockading of military recruiting office in downtown DC; in at least a couple of cases, young men in the process of enlistment got the message and backed out on the spot.

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I’ll never forget the first time I heard George W. Bush, in the ‘00 Presidential Campaign “debates”, describe a vision of a national education policy in which “no child is left behind”. At the time, I didn’t think much of it beyond noting the Bush campaign’s total lack of original ideas in their theft of a slogan from an educational nonprofit’s PSA that appeared on TV in the 1970s — and a Liberal educational nonprofit, at that.

Of course, by the time Iraq War 2.0 kicked off, we’d heard plenty about Bush’s vision for No Child Left Behind, and large numbers of parents could be heard commenting to the effect that if this is what President Chimp has in mind, then they’d prefer that their children be “left behind”. Needless to say, the sickening carnage of the US bombing of Iraq in the first six weeks of the war had given us a whole new meaning for the slogan “No Child Left Behind”.

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