By JAN GLIDEWELL
© St. Petersburg Times, published July 27, 2001
Things can get really dull up in this neck of the woods come summertime, and that is why I want to put in a special request to the Citrus County School Board to start meeting more often -- like maybe twice a week.
Where else could you deal, over a relatively short period, with a chanting witch, praying Christians and animal rights activists threatening mock bullfights with fake blood because they are upset over a mural depicting bullfights?
The Wiccan prayer flap continues, despite a brief lull that occurred when Charles Schrader -- a pagan minister who has butted heads with the board about its tendency toward exclusively Christian prayer -- collapsed at a board meeting and had to be assisted by school officials who called 911 and, of course, offered prayer.
But the battle of the bull continues, and probably won't be resolved until the board's Aug. 14 meeting.
That controversy is about a mural at Citrus High School depicting (like black velvet paintings in the homes of the decoratively challenged) a matador, sword in hand, confronting a bull. Probably the next best fight to a witches vs. Christians matchup is a good old Citrus County-style censorship battle.
For those of you in other counties who have missed it, Pine Ridge resident Joseph P. Smith and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are unhappy about the mural, which depicts a blood sport that they perceive as cruel to bulls. And having seen a bullfight, I can say that it's hard to argue with them. For all of the Hemingwayesque glorification of the blood sport, it is still about an animal with its muscles weakened by puncture wounds being lured into a series of charges and then, one way or another, dispatched with a sword. The fact that matadors and horses occasionally get gored by the bull (which is doomed, anyway) doesn't make it any prettier.
And in May, the school district's director of student services seemed to sidestep the issue by saying that the mural would be painted over as part of a scheduled remodeling of the school.
But this week it was a bull of a different color as students, staff and other residents came to the defense of the mural, which they saw as representative of Spanish culture.
So we might get to see the mock bullfight yet.
Despite that I find bullfighting distasteful, I have to come down on the side of the review committee and would like to point out that, yet again, a great teaching opportunity is being wasted.
Life is full of distasteful things: war, blood sports, executions, crime, Florida politics.
But we should move carefully when we let the fact that something gives some people the willies make a case for the government -- in this case the School Board -- removing it.
None of the bad things in life get made better by ignoring them, and sometimes being reminded of them sparks action to change them.
Enterprising educators could build an entire multidisciplinary (they love that term) project around a bullfight mural. Students could research what goes on in a bullfight. They could read Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, which also deals with sexual dysfunction and could lead to a lot more interesting School Board meetings. They could take sides in a debate about blood sports, rodeos and animal cruelty. They could read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and research modern methods of animal slaughter to see if they are any more or less humane.
And they could study censorship and how guidelines are drawn, what community standards are and how they are measured, and what methods can be used to influence the decisions made by people who decide what it is all right for the rest of us to see, read and hear.
Although it is, alas, taking place only one day after school goes back into session, the Aug. 14 board meeting, at which the issue will probably be debated again, would be an excellent venue for teaching about how the First Amendment applies to censorship just as earlier meetings would have been instructive about how it applies to separation of church and state and freedom of worship.
Maybe the School Board should videotape itself and become its own best teaching aid on the subject of embracing life rather than hiding from it.