Actually, I do like telling you I told you so. And I did tell you so.
It happened in a television interview broadcast nine days ago, four days ahead of the formal introduction of doomsday for academic freedom and traditional public education in Arkansas.
The television moderator scolded me for calling Gov.-elect Sarah Sanders "DeSantis," which is not quite as bad as Jethrine or Wide Body, which were among the names I called this governor-elect's parents back in their day, and for which I am properly forever ashamed.
So, on the spot, I came up with Sarah DeSanders. But the moderator didn't go for that, either, and I don't feel it catching on. Others have suggested Rhonda Santis.
Anyway, DeSantis, first name Ron, is the culture-warring demagogic governor of Florida gearing up to run for president on a message that he's as resentful as Donald Trump but not yet widely revealed as every bit as frightful.
Sanders is planning to inject into Arkansas public-school classrooms not her natural Trumpism--because who knows what that is other than lunacy--but DeSantis-ism, her newer affiliation.
She announced Thursday that she would nominate Jacob Oliva, who has been in Florida fighting gay references and math-class bar graphs as director of public schools for the aforementioned DeSantis administration.
In government we call what Sarah is doing "cut-and-paste."
Well, I call it that. It just takes a chunk of Florida thinking, copies it and plops it down over here. It saves a lot of your own thinking.
Press research out of Florida suggests that Oliva, as a local superintendent before becoming the state chief, had a solid and even progressive record. But further is that he subsequently got in lockstep as a front-line warrior for DeSantis' cultural objections to references to gays in the early school years or to bar graphs in mathematics textbooks that illustrate findings on surveys of attitudes toward social awareness and integration.
DeSantis, and presumably this fellow whom Sanders has plucked for Arkansas, think children might get confused about their natural selves if someone says "two mommies." And they seem to fear that basing bar-graph construction in arithmetic class on social and political survey findings amounts to advancing "critical race theory."
Critical race theory is a post-secondary field of study that has been co-opted as a code phrase for cultural conservatives to use in reference to what formerly was widely called education.
"Social awareness" is a bad thing in the view of this movement.
Sanders seems to be wholly of the DeSantis ilk, apparently for real instead of merely for campaigning. She believes public education as we know it has failed--left our kids illiterate, indoctrinated them, stolen them from parents.
She may not believe that to be true of all schools, but she believes it of many.
Her solution is not to keep fighting, and to fight harder and better, to make better those poorly performing schools, which tend to be the poor ones. Instead she wants to introduce full school choice with public vouchers in hopes of doing to lower-performing local schools what Walmart did to Main Street five-and-dimes.
You know the concepts--only the strong survive; only the mobile thrive.
School choice is coming to Arkansas. This four-fifths conservative Republican Legislature will pass it. Local legislators sensitive to their local superintendent and the community school have begun rationalizing that they won't be affected, but only others will.
The big question is whether to include, at least in the beginning, homeschool families in the full choice universe.
Will we say, sure, here's your money, to any ol' boy who calls up and says he'd like some of that voucher cash because he's gonna keep his young 'uns at home and learn 'em their ABCs and their numbers instead of all that open-minded stuff that them school teachers have started brainwashing kids with, like Sarah says they're doin'?
If you'd like an idea of how these local-school culture wars tend to go, take a look at Conway, where a right-wing school board has made utter turmoil of an otherwise fine school system by trying to rewrite the textbooks as Sunday School flyers and provide separate bathrooms for "others."
Elections have consequences. Arkansas voted in November to turn itself into a small Florida and a big Conway.
The late and lovable Frank White, an accidental Republican governor in 1981-82, was way ahead of his time when he told the Governor's School for the gifted and talented to start teaching only his values.
All Frank got was laughed at. But who's laughing now here in West Florida?
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.