Sense of humor deficiency about Hispanics

Recycled from Taranto:

The Ventura County (Calif.) Star reports on a kerfuffle that erupted last month at Westlake High School in Westlake Village:

Classmates watched Dean of Activities James Marshall drive a golf cart decorated like a U-Haul truck into the gym, as two juniors using heavy Latino accents talked about "getting jobs and crossing the border" from Thousand Oaks High School to Westlake High. The cart had a license plate with the letters "BNR," which stood for "beaner"--a derogatory term used to describe Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

This doesn't sound especially funny. Indeed, we'd say the two students should get day jobs as soon as possible, so that they can keep them. But, predictably we suppose, "some students and parents . . . said the skit was offensive and should not have been approved by Marshall." Result:

[Friday] morning, Marshall sat in Principal Ron Lipari's office and wiped tears away as he talked about his remorse over approving the skit. Marshall said the two juniors--both Hispanic themselves--showed him the skit the day before.

Marshall then read a groveling apology over the school's public-address system. "Lipari said Marshall will take cultural sensitivity training next year and no longer serve as dean of activities."

Jeff Davis--not the president of the Confederacy but the Conejo Valley Unified School District's "director of secondary education"--took issue with those who were not properly offended:

"These were some kids who thought they were being funny," he said. "What's really sad to me was they were making fun of themselves, and that's terrible. That's the part that bothered me the most. Sometimes the best lessons are the hardest lessons to learn, and unfortunately this lesson was sad because children had to hear these wrong and insensitive comments.

"The bottom line is, we are going to put things in place to make sure this does not happen again in any one of our schools."

Yes, there's nothing worse than making fun of oneself! The only problem is, if you don't learn to laugh at yourself, you may not learn to laugh at others either. For example, it seems not to have occurred to anyone at Westlake that the idea of a grown man sitting in an office and bawling, over not a broken heart or the death of a loved one but something as trivial as this, is pretty damn funny.

Full disclosure: We attended Westlake High, although none of the names in the story are familiar to us. It was ages ago, and we didn't stay long: We didn't care for the place and got out after sophomore year. Still, it sounds as though things have gotten much worse since we were there. We don't recall ever being taught that it was wrong to laugh at oneself (though perhaps that's part of the 11th-grade curriculum).