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From the Print Version Editor's Intro All the Dogs (A Jump Rope Rhyme for Kids) by Ada Limon Nuthin' Sirius (a collection of conspiracy theories from the people of California) by Phil Ramirez Oasis (by Elton Cunniffe) American Reform (a memoir by Karl Soehnlein) Chemi Ali (a poem by Alec Way) Five Political Facts and Associations (by Alex Robertson Textor)	American Reform by Karl Soehnlein In 1980, my high school held a mock election, allowing us underage citizens a chance to vote for President of the United States. Like almost all my friends in the tenth grade, I voted for Ronald Reagan. To us, Jimmy Carter, the peanut-farmer with his unglamorous wife and bumpkin brother, was a joke, and he was to blame for the energy crisis and the hostage crisis and every other crisis, too. Plus, we all knew our parents were voting for Reagan. That night, I got a surprise when my mother revealed that she'd voted for John Anderson, the Independent candidate. "I question some of Reagan's beliefs," she said, "and I don't trust him." I admitted that I'd "voted" for Reagan, as had my father, but I was embarrassed, because I didn't actually know what his beliefs were. Dinner conversation that night was more animated and more substantive than usual. It made me wonder why we hadn't talked like this before the election, when it might have made a difference. The next year I signed up for a social studies class called American Reform. The mimeographed catalogue description had said the course would cover subjects like the abolition of slavery and the temperance movement. I signed up because the older kids I knew claimed that Mr. Taber, who taught American Reform, was a "pisser." High praise in our corner of New Jersey. On the first day of class Mr. Taber drew a horizontal line on the chalkboard. At the left end he wrote "radical," at the right end he wrote "reactionary" and in between he demarcated everything else: left wing, liberal, moderate, conservative, right wing. Our political education had begun. He called out topics and positions, like "anti-abortion," "pro-nuke" and "pro-gun-control," and asked us to chart them on the spectrum. Many of us didn't know what went where. I knew more than some kids in the class, because since the Presidential election I'd been reading Time magazine‹a gift-subscription from my mother‹and I was starting to keep up on current events. I asked Mr. Taber where "independent" belonged on the spectrum. Turns out it wasn't a fixed position; you could be a conservative on some subjects and a liberal on others. That seemed like a pretty safe place for me, because I was a regular at a Catholic youth group, so I thought abortion was wrong; but I also had read in Time how Reaganomics was taking away money from services for poor people, which was definitely not what Jesus would do. It soon became obvious that Mr. Taber belonged on the left side of things, farther to the left than most of the faculty at Westwood High School‹farther than most of our parents, too. His goal, it seemed, was to debunk everything our parents had taught us, and with his arsenal of facts and statistics, he usually succeeded. When one of us would defend an opinion espoused by our parents, like "Cutting taxes will get the economy back on track," Mr. Taber would explain how much of our tax money went toward military spending and wonder aloud if we should start our cutbacks there. If someone then argued that we needed to defend ourselves against the Soviet Union's plans for Communist world domination, he'd tell us first that the totalitarian Soviet government did not represent real communism and then remind us how the superpowers already had enough nuclear arms to destroy the world a thousand times over. If someone said that abortion was murder, he'd demand that we scientifically defend the notion that life began at conception (huh?); or he'd ask one of the girls in class who should make decisions about her body if her boyfriend got her pregnant (gasp!). Someone would say that marijuana was addictive; he'd cite studies showing how alcohol and tobacco were worse. I often wondered why the school didn't fire him, but he was also the varsity baseball coach, and the team had a winning record. Nothing was safe from Mr. Taber's analysis, even the food we packed in our lunch bags. "If you put a Twinkie on a log in the forest and come back in a hundred years," he said, "the log will have rotted and the Twinkie will still be there." "Unless a deer eats it!" someone said. "Deer are smarter than that," he said. He could name the chemical additives in everything we ate; he knew that pasteurization took the healthiness out of milk and that peeling vegetables removed most of their nutrients (to say nothing of our mothers' preference for boiling). One day he revealed he was raising a pig; when the time came, his family would slaughter and eat it. Total pisser! In their house, they only ate meat that they raised, because the food industry shot animals full of hormones and artificial ingredients. And on top of that, his sons didn't go to school; they were taught at home by his wife. Mr. Taber's sons' names traced the evolution of his politics: The first one was Robert, Jr. Then came Sky and Bran. Mr. Taber had dark hair past his ears and a beard that swayed from his chin, like Ho Chi Minh. One day, a classmate brought in her older brother's yearbook and pointed to a photo of young Mr. Taber: clean cut, buttoned down and freshly scrubbed. We passed around the dorky image and made fun of Mr. Taber, who laughed with us and said, "Yeah, I used to be that guy." For me, the picture was more than just a joke. It told me something about Mr. Taber. He hadn't always looked this way--which probably meant he hadn't always thought this way, either. He'd changed. That was the lesson: Anyone could change. The clean cut baseball coach might turn out to be a radical home-schooler. From there, it wasn't such a big leap to understand that a militaristic government could be reformed into something more democratic and just. Like everyone else, I argued with Mr. Taber all the time, but secretly I was under his sway. Every evening, I'd report Mr. Taber's latest assertion to my parents, and it became fodder for dinnertime conversation. The strange thing was, I usually wound up arguing his position against my parents and sisters. I wrote a paper for him on "Native American Land Rights"; it had finally clicked for me how these people, who were no longer to be referred to as "Indians," were here first and didn't deserve to be massacred or chased at gunpoint from their ancestral homes. That's not the way the textbooks had taught it, but, duh, it was so obvious. I wrote another one called "The History of Conscientious Objection," which led to my belief that if I was ever drafted, I'd refuse to serve. Although my research taught me that even Quakers, pacifists since birth, had been arrested for resisting the draft, I decided I'd go to jail before I'd kill another human. Mr. Taber gave me Bs on my papers. No one ever earned an A, because none of us, according to Mr. Taber, had yet learned how to argue effectively. Toward the end of the semester, I went away for a weekend on a Catholic teen retreat and returned with my devotion to Jesus renewed. Some of my friends had also been on the weekend, and in the hallway that Monday we sang out loud a song we'd learned, "I Have Decided To Follow Jesus." I loved this Son of God, who gave up his worldly goods to heal sick people and forgive sinners, and who went to his death rather than denounce his true beliefs. I wore a three-inch steel crucifix around my neck, hanging from a braided cord that looked like Jesus's very own rope belt. That afternoon in American Reform, while everyone was writing an essay, Mr. Taber took a seat next to me and asked me to explain the crucifix. I told him that I was a follower of Jesus. He began to ask me questions. Did I believe in the death penalty? I told him no, I didn't think killing for any reason was right. What about abortion? I said it was against my beliefs, but I didn't think politicians should make laws against it. He asked if I believed in paying taxes. I quoted what Jesus had said, "Give to God what is God's, give to Caesar what is Caesar's." He didn't challenge me with statistics. He nodded, even smiled grudgingly. I felt like I'd passed a test. Before he went back to the front of the room, he tossed off one last remark: "Jesus was pretty cool. He was a real communist, don't you think?" A couple years later I went away to college, free at last from conservative Westwood. Within a couple of months I was having sex, doing bong hits and protesting at nuclear power plants. I took political science courses with professors who were farther left than Mr. Taber, though none of them seemed to have half the fun that he did. They were all so gloomy, their arguments so serious. I don't remember any of them offering as vivid an illustration as a Twinkie remaining in tact on a log for a hundred years. I turned 18 that fall and registered to vote, which also meant registering with the selective service, putting me in a position to be drafted. I didn't claim myself as a conscientious objector--I'd worry about it if the time ever came--though I did register as an Independent, not because I was anti-abortion but because I wasn't sure the Democrats were liberal enough. I cast my first actual vote for President in 1984. This time, it didn't go to Ronald Reagan. When I came home for Thanksgiving break, I declared myself an atheist, provoking a huge argument with my father, who told me I still had to attend Sunday mass while I was under his roof. After things had cooled off, he and I sat down to talk, and I reassured him that though I no longer believed in God, nor supported the "hypocrisy" of organized religion, I still thought Jesus was a pretty cool guy: Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Love thy neighbor as thyself. Turn the other cheek. I could still get behind the politics of those words--the kind of politics that could make the world a better place, whether or not you believed in the God the Catholics believed in. I guess I argued my case pretty effectively, because he stopped insisting I had to attend mass. At dinner I discovered that my younger sister was taking American Reform. She came to the table really worked up about something Mr. Taber had said that week in class. "Just like old times," my mother noted, as once again our entire family sat around the table, hashing out what we believed in.	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