Robert Azzi is a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter. His columns are archived at theotherazzi.wordpress.com.
“To a tourist, these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture,” “Peyton Place” author Grace Metalious once said. “But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot — all kinds of strange things crawl out.”
Things are still crawling out.
In 1956, Gilmanton’s Metalious roiled conservative pretenses and petty minds with a groundbreaking novel of infidelity, hypocrisy, race, class privilege, and social injustice woven into sordid tales of neighborly rape, incest, abortion, lust, and murder.
It wasn’t pretty, but it was real.
Today, nearly 70 years later, a new generation of caste-conscious minds channeling delusional grievances and resentments continue to roil our communities, this time with threatening chatter about race, gender, antisemitism, critical race theory, vaccines, and child grooming all based in false narratives extolling an era that never existed.
All describing cultural threats that don’t exist.
Not content to live in the most heavily armed nation in the world, not content killing off its children, not content denying women reproductive rights, not content with denying gender-affirming care or outing vulnerable children, not content with banning books and denying children unexpurgated American history, today we face the absurdity of having to deal with unreconstructed extremists who advocate teaching cursive with one hand while denying students knowledge and sustenance with the other.
Supporters of HB 170 want to require New Hampshire schools to teach “instruction in cursive handwriting” by 5th grade. Personally, I would prefer that my child learn to code than whether they could read their aunt’s cursive handwriting.
It’s not just that such arguments are absurd but the fact that there are people who embrace them is frightening. What at best is a local school curriculum issue has been weaponized by people who want to inflict their righteous ignorance upon our children.
When children plaintively ask, “Why dost thou abandon me?” perhaps they can do it in cursive, perhaps on notepaper scented with purple lilacs, our state flower.
What has become of us?
I have wonderful handwriting. My cursive is classical and clear and I revel, when called upon, in making old-fashioned upper-case Gs and Qs.
I actually prefer Chancery cursive, a Renaissance-era style distinguished by its thin and thick strokes, to the loopy pedestrian letter forms legislators want to introduce in HB 170.
I know how to make reed pens with a small ink reservoir. I have Osmiroid pens with various sized nibs and, when I want to write the Arabic alphabet, which reads from right to left, I find that the nibs I use for Chancery cursive suit Arabic well.
My favorite pencils for special occasions are Blackwing 602s. I sharpen them with my father’s penknife.
Leaving my best self-praise to the end, my printing is so architectural and impressive, in both ink and pencil, that people have been known to clip and save samples of my penmanship from envelopes and packages I send them.
None of those skills matter when I want to read history.
The American Dream wasn’t written in cursive; it was written with the blood of enslaved peoples and victims of genocide and built upon lands nourished by the sweat and tears of diverse peoples inspired by promises that all people are created equal, not that they have equal penmanship. While we have often fallen short of those aspirations the struggle to fulfill them continues — at least by some Americans.
I don’t need to know how to read Babylonian cuneiforms to understand The Code of Hammurabi or know Latin to understand the Magna Carta or French to understand Liberté, égalité, fraternité.
Believers who read Torah, Psalms, Gospels, and Qur’an don’t need to know Aramaic, Hebrew, Koine Greek, and Arabic in order to be fully engaged adherents of their faith traditions.
“How will people read the original version of the U.S. Constitution,” one person asked, “if they don’t understand its cursive handwriting?”
That’s an absurd question.
The reality is that no onereads the original Constitution in cursive except the occasional etymologist in search of errant diacritical marks.
Citizens who ratified our foundational documents read printed, not cursive, iterations of those documents. Within 48 hours, by July 6, 1776, the Pennsylvania Evening Post had published the Declaration of Independence, printed in simple, clear letter fonts, for anyone to read.
In 1787, as fifty-five men gathered to write a constitution for “a more perfect Union” several different iterations were printed representing different drafts before it was finalized.
When the Constitution was finalized, and prepared for ratification, John Dunlap and David Claypoole, “official printers to the Convention” printed approximately 500 copies for distribution.
New Hampshire, on June 22, 1788, became the ninth state to ratify the Constitution. Those who voted for ratification did so because they read printed versions, not cursive.
There may be reasons to encourage cursive penmanship but history and the preservation of institutional memory is not among them. Cursive may be part of America’s educational legacy — like segregated classes, like corporal punishment — but its time has passed, as have literacy tests and poll taxes for people of color.
Cursive can be beautiful but so can a pluralistic America willing to commit itself to the welfare of its children. Today, I’d rather my children learn to distinguish between the benefits and dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) than ink Qs that look like 2s.
Grace Metalious wrote “Peyton Place” on a typewriter. Media platforms have changed but the same bourgeois pretensions and mendacious hypocrisies on race, class privilege, and social injustice that she eviscerated in Gilmanton are those that threaten our children still.
If you see strange things crawling out from under a rock, step on them.