Educating Mary Mouse

     Mister and Missus Mouse immediately noticed something was just a little different about their new daughter.  Little Mary was the only girl of the litter; they named her such because they lived under the porch of a house in Maryland.  All mice have great senses of smell, but little Mary could sense danger and also truth from lie better than all ten of her brothers.  Mister and Missus Mouse speculated that their little Mary would maybe grow up to become a detective mouse.

     The family’s burrow was lined with shredded newspaper for warmth and comfort.  Although she couldn’t read the fragments of printed words, she understood they meant something important.  Mary thought about these all day as she foraged for pine nuts and sweet berries then she fell asleep every night exhausted, dreaming of words.

     It soon became clear to her parents that Mary Mouse was destined not to become a detective mouse but rather some sort of word mouse.  They had diligently sacrificed and saved up their dried berries, then sent her to the University of Maryland’s Mouse Campus with high hopes for their little girl.  They had tears in their eyes, but not Mary: she wasn’t even a little bit nervous as she waved goodbye, thinking only of words and the power she suspected they had to change the world.

     As Mary quickly learned the basics then settled into her courses, she realized her destiny was to become a journalist, someone who reports news to countless other mice.  The words on newspaper that had made up her bed she now understood were how humans communicated their most important new and relevant facts one to another.  She now recognized humans act upon this information and make important decisions which do in fact shape their world.  She had been right!  Infused with energy and excitement, Mary immersed herself in all her studies.  She would become the best journalist ever!  She would make her parents proud.  She got accepted into the Philip Mousell College of Journalism at the University.

     Mary wrote so well that she was accepted into the classroom of a very well known Associate Professor of journalism who himself was among the most widely read of all reporters ever in Mouse Dom.  All students were in awe, considering themselves so fortunate to learn from such an experienced authority.  He assigned work and Mary turned in her papers.  The Professor awarded her imperfect grades, merely acknowledging the correctness and quality of her writing.  One dark and melancholy day he kept her after class to speak privately.

     “Mary, your work is good, I’ll grant you that,” he said, Mary blinking up at him with big eager eyes, “but I really think you should change your major course of study.  Journalism might not be right for you.” 

     Blinking away tears, she squeaked, “But professor, is my work not as good as the other mice?  Can I work harder and do better?”

     Professor Mouse’s whiskers twitched.  “Mary-Mary-Mary, your writing is fine, really quite remarkable actually, but you continually have this tendency to write the truth.  You insist upon writing factual accounts of events and about mice, things they have said or done, exactly as they said them or did them.  But that is not what journalism is about,” he said, shaking his head gravely.  “Journalism is about shaping public opinion.  It isn’t about facts.  Facts and truth are merely abstract concepts.  You always get your facts very straight, Mary, and therein lays the problem,” he said, folding his arms, stroking his whiskers thoughtfully.  “Frankly you’re too conservative, too literal in your work.  Perhaps you should consider changing over to creative writing or non-fiction, or maybe technical writing.”

     “But Professor, what could possibly be wrong with the truth?” she asked, hitching and sobbing.

      He looked directly at her, unblinking.  “Mary, it’s time you grew up.  The keyword in “progressive” is progress.  The belief in a perfect future inevitably inspires a passionate and otherwise inexplicable hatred towards the imperfect present. The first agenda of social redeemers is to dismantle the existing social order, which means their intellectual and political energies are focused on the work of destruction.  First we create the lie and then somewhere along the process we begin to believe the lie that we ourselves have created.  Without lies, the ideology of liberals and progressives would cease to exist,” he said calmly.  But then his eyes narrowed.  “My dear, if you remain unwilling to be perpetually fake and hypocritical, I would spare you the pain of being treated like a heretical mouse.”   

     Wiping away her tears, Mary’s eyes narrowed to little black slits.  “Communism, which killed 100 million mice in its course – in peacetime, not in war but in peacetime – and bankrupted whole continents, created unimaginable poverty for a billion mice, artificial mass starvation where millions upon millions of mice died because of government schemes that didn't work, showed that this Socialist idea is a bankrupt idea; there's nothing there.  You’re a liar, and no, professor.  I will not give up on becoming a journalist who reports facts instead of ‘framing’ them as you would have us do.  I trust the intelligent mice to filter through facts and draw their own conclusions, thank you.” 

     Smiling, the professor turned his back on Mary and she returned to her student burrow to work on his assignment.  He did award her a “C” grade, although having read it other students felt Mary’s paper was better and her facts more honestly and clearly presented than in their own papers, by a mile.  Mary felt no bother by this unfair grade, nor did she resent all the unfair grades from him and other journalism professors which followed. 

     After graduation, Mary found it impossible to find work as a journalist.  She learned the journalism community talks amongst themselves, so that professor must have put in a bad word for her, effectively locking her out of “the club.”  She moved home and found work as a reporter with a few tiny local newspapers amassing some experience, but in order to pay her parents back for their extreme sacrifices of going hungry so many nights, Mary became a media expert to help political mice and corporate mice communicate unfiltered facts to consumer mice with ears to hear and eyes to see the truth.

Story based on an actual prof-pupil exchange.  Universities continually churn out journalism undergraduates taught to distort facts and manipulate consumers of news to fit a liberal and progressive agenda.