Cheri Pierson Yecke: Dominatrix of Education

They call you many things. Your official moniker is state education commissioner. You'd like that to become permanent, wouldn't you. Ooh yeah. I bet you would. I bet.

But other words have been used to describe you. Education Czar. Bitch. Agent of Change. Educrat. Dominatrix. Wipe the spittle of contempt from your lapel, Cheri. Lots of people here despise you. Right now provocateurs scheme your downfall. In teachers' lounges across the state, they sit on nagahyde, surreptitious Basics smoldering, and plant push-pins into their Yecke dolls. Back in the classroom, they turn their students against you gently, subtly. Your portrait pops up during "Good Touch, Bad Touch" units. If scary people like this try to make you do things, run! Tell a parent! Scream 'no!' A gold star for every dirty Yecke limerick.

Oooh, and you had to go and fuck with the quarter. What the fuck were you thinking with that giant snowflake? The U.S. Mint delivered you a temporary blow. But their rebuff and snickers only steel your resolve to control the destiny of our two bits. Such hubris can be dangerous. Your enemies are training an army, Cheri. And whoever controls the army, controls the State. Watch your back.

Yecke. Yecke. Yecke. Oh. Excuse me. Where's a bathroom. Yecke.

Pawlenty may be Governor of the state, but you are Dominatrix of education. You smell of oiled leather and Estée Lauder. That's not a laserpointer in your hand, but a coiled crop. You purse your lips at the lectern, and I am a kid again, quivering in anticipation of the delicious contact your firm hand will make with my flabby liberal ass-cheek.

What is the atmosphere like, in the Governor's chambers, on all those late nights you and he spend pouring over education standards after everyone else has gone home? Your breath smells of stale coffee. Pawlenty is a clean-cut boyscout, a scrappy little brat who'd rather play hockey than learn his multiplication tables. Do you take him over your knee?

Of course you don't. You are impervious to his advances. You have transcended sex. S & M is God's work. You are morally righteous. You float above the people you touch, like a dragon floats above the fields it scorches.

I wonder who your children are. Do you run your household like a re-education camp? Do your children fear the decadence of 'play'? Do you make them their lunches everyday or do you force them to butter their own goddamn bread? How do you sleep at night? How do you? Law & Order: Criminal Intent. A glass of Franzia. Your hair is down. You comb with a wide-backed brush, imagining its many implications.

Since coming to us from Virginia, you've stiffened up. Discarded those lascivious blousy clothes that made you feel like a hippy. Stiffened up in T.J. Maxx powersuits with shoulder pads higher than your heels. You cut your hair, too. Shortened your bob, petrified it into the perfect coif we see you in today, swirling in two giant spirals around your head like the antlers of a bighorn sheep. You project an air that says, Fuck with my education standards, and I will head-butt you so fucking hard!

Cheri Pierson Yecke. Cheri Pierson Yecke. It's a name straight out of Dickens. How would he have told your story?...

"Time now, my young calves, for today's Pledge of Allegiance," the homely teacher called out to the assembled miscreants with a voice tired and slow, occasioned by the previous evening's inebriation at the hands of a young gentleman caller.

"Yes, missus," the bright and obedient lambs responded, all each in the same key. All except one ... tiny little Smike refused to stand with the others, and sat silently at his desk without airs.

"Smike?" the kindly Missus Dalby called out, as though coaxing a cat from the larder. "Why in the devil do you sit?"

"if it pleases the Missus," Smike responded, with a voice quieted by a history of welts unbecoming to his young years, "I prefer not to say the pledge," repeating for good measure,

"If it pleases the Missus."

"It doth not please the Missus," hissed a voice that belonged to a formidable shadow that had been eavesdropping from the hall.

"Yecke!" called Missus Dalby, a gloved hand to her lavender throat.

"Indeed!" Cackled the headmistress as she burst onto the scene. "What have we hear, Missus Dalby?" she said to the the fearful Missus Dalby, who it must be said was quivering like a flower before the gale.

"Oh, why, Mrs. Yecke, nothing, quite. Smike here just feels ill, that's all. Yes, ill. And he'd rather sit for the Pledge of Allegiance."

"Sick, eh? Sick in the head, more's like it," she said, turning to bring the wideness of her forbearance full-force onto the tiny Smike, who it must be said was quivering much more noticeably than the Missus Dalby. "Boy, why won't you say the Pledge?"

"If it pleases the Mrs., I love my country and all, but think that such a display of patriotism, when legislated in this way, is diminished by the very duress of its necessity."

"DRIVEL!" Screamed Mrs. Yecke. "This is exactly the nomenclature that a liberal education system allows its students to get away with. This ... this ... relativism. This ... this ... snooty elitism that allows a mere puke of a boy like you, Smike, to simply decide this is not for you. Do you think this country is here for you to spit upon?"

"No, no, no," implored the pale boy. "Not in the least, with all due respect Mrs. Yecke. I love my country. My father is an amputee currently serving in the Senate--"

But Mrs. Yecke cut off the boy's words with a swift box to the ears. "Enough of this blasphemy," she cried. Mrs. Yecke had deemd it expedient to operate upon him, in presence of the assembled class. In any other place, the appearance of the wretched Smike would have occasioned a murmur of compassion and remonstrance. It had some effect, for the lookers-on moved uneasily in their seats at the monstrous bellow; and a few of the boldest ventured to steal looks at each other, expressive of pity and fear. These were lost on Mrs. Yecke, however, whose gaze was fastened on the luckless Smike. Without further hesitation, she grasped the stalk of the boy between her fists.

"A nasty, ungrateful, pig-headed, brutish, sneaking dog" explaimed Mrs. Yecke, taking poor Smike's head under her arm and administering a cuff at every epithet.

Mrs. Yecke, when excited, was accustomed to use strong language, and, moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of a figurative kind, as the word dog, and furthermore the allusion to Smike as like a pig, which was not intended to be taken in its literal sense, meaning that Smike possessed the head of a pig, but rather to bear a similitude of likeness to man's porcine subordinates.

At this moment, might I apprise the reader to say that Mrs. Yecke, in her five-and-fiftieth year, had exhausted the store of grace and womanly beauty God had bestowed upon her. Through years of toil among the lawless and feckless little heathens of humanity she had thickened like an ox in the yard, and underneath her tatty blouses one could only imagine gristle and sinew. She was neither short nor tall, but rather like a stout stone that refuses to give up the field for plowing.

Finally, out of breath with her violent contortions, she asked between gasps, "Have you anything to say, dog?"

Like all the great Dickens villains, the time for your judgment is at hand, Cheri Pierson Yecke. You have scaled the face of the state capitol, and have tried to take your place among the golden charioteers of the quadriga. You dangle in the spotlights from a thousand hovering helicopters. Below, the legislators gather; they weigh your crimes, they listen to your pleas. The vote is neigh. Will they give the Yorkshire schoolmistress what she deserves, or will they bend over for more of your cane...?

Posted by jason at March 31, 2024 10:58 PM