above the law-they disgrace democracy by claiming that what they do they do for democracy! They should be in jail. They should be in Hollywood*. I know that some of the girls have told their parents that I deliver 'ranting lectures' to them about the United States; some parents have complained to the headmistress, and Kather-ine has cautioned me to keep my politics out of the classroom- 'or at least say something about Canada; BSS girls are Canadians, for the most part, you know.'
'I don't know anything about Canada,' I say.
'I know you don't!' the Rev. Mrs. Keeling says, laughing; she is always friendly, even when she's teasing me, but the substance of her remark hurts me-if only because it is the same, critical message that Canon Mackie delivers to me, without cease. In short: You've been with us for twenty years; when are you going to take an interest in MS? In my Grade English class, Frances Noyes said: '/ think he's lying.' She meant President Reagan, of course.
'They should impeach him. Why can't they impeach him?' said Debby LaRocca. 'If he's lying, they should impeach him. If he's not lying-if all these other clowns are running his administration for him-then he's too stupid to be president. Either way, they should impeach him. In Canada, they'd call for a vote of confidence and he'd be gone!'
Sandra Darcy said, 'Yeah.'
'What do you think, Mr. Wheelwright?' Adrienne Hewlett asked me sweetly.
'I think that some of you have not read to the end of Chapter Four,' I said. 'What does it mean that Gatsby was 'delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor'-what does that mean?' I asked them. At least Ruby Newell had done her homework. 'It means that Gatsby bought the house so that Daisy would be just across the bay-that all the parties he throws ... in a way, he throws them for her. It means that he's not just crazy-that he's made all the money, and he's spending all the money, just for her To catch her eye, you know?' Ruby said.
'I like .the part about the guy who fixed the World Series!' Debby LaRocca cried.
'Meyer Wolfshears!' said Claire Clooney.
'-shiem,' I said softly. 'Meyer Wolfsheim.'
'Yeah!' Sandra Darcy said.
'I like the way he says 'Oggsford' instead of Oxford,' Debby LaRocca said.
'Like he thinks Gatsby's an 'Oggsford man,' ' said Frances Noyes.
'I think the guy who's telling the story is a snob,' said Adrienne Hewlett.
'Nick,' I said softly. 'Nick Carraway.'
'Yeah,' Sandra Darcy said. 'But he's supposed to be a snob-that's part of it.'
'And when he says he's so honest, that he's 'one of the few honest people' he's ever known, I think we're not supposed to trust him-not completely, I mean,' Claire Clooney said. 'I know he's the one telling the story, but he's a part of them-he's judging them, but he's one of them.'
'They're trashy people, all of them,' Sandra Darcy said.
' 'Trashy'?' I asked.
'They're very careless people,' Ruby Newell said correctly.
'Yes,' I said. 'They certainly are.' Very smart, these BSS girls. They know what's going on in The Great Gatsby, and they know what should be done to Ronald Reagan's rotten administration, too! But I contained myself very well in class today. I restricted my observations to The Great Gatsby. I bade the class to look with special care in the following chapters at Gatsby's notion that he can 'repeat the past,' at Gatsby's observation of Daisy-that 'her voice is full of money''-and at the frequency of how often Gatsby appears in moonlight (once, at the end of Chapter Seven, 'watching over nothing'). I asked them to consider the coincidence of Nick's thirtieth birthday; the meaning of the sentence 'Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade' might give our class as much trouble as the meaning of 'an urban distaste for the concrete.''
'And remember what Ruby said!' I told them. 'They're very 'careless' people.' Ruby Newell smiled; 'careless' is how Fitzgerald himself described those characters; Ruby knew that I knew she had already read to the end of the book.
'They were careless people,' the book says '... they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. ...'
The Reagan administration is full of such 'careless people'; their kind of carelessness is immoral. And President Reagan calls
