CULLMAN, Ala. — Teacher unions finally met a foe they couldn’t conquer in the form of the yellow, spiky-haired Bart Simpson.
Those unions were skewered in a recent episode of the long-running Fox series “The Simpsons.” A new teacher at Springfield Elementary tormented Bart before being embarrassed by him at Blazing Man, a knockoff of that great hippie commune in the desert, Burning Man, when Bart’s flame retardant prevented the teacher from lighting the Blazing Man statue on fire.
Jack Lassen, voiced menacingly by Willem Dafoe, was transferred to Bart’s school during what Superintendent Gary Chalmers referred to as the “Dance of the Lemons,” in which school officials practice what little control they have over teacher unions by allowing principals to select their worst teacher to send to another school in the district.
Screenshot via Watchdog
“The union is happy, the parents are placated and only the children suffer,” Chalmers explained.
Lassen — among the group Chalmers refers to as “sociopathic child-haters who are only teachers because they got tenure after two short years” — doesn’t suffer Bart’s foolishness, responding to the mischievous one’s skeleton-in-the-closet prank by buzzing the top of his head with clippers.
“I didn’t know that a teacher could cut kids’ hair,” his mother, Marge Simpson, says as they eat dinner.
“The teachers union won the right in their last strike,” Bart replies.
D’oh!