Azzi: Today's Peyton Place: Guns. Culture. Cursive.

“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 New Hampshire's Metalious roiled conservative pretenses and petty minds with an ground-breaking 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.

Local news: 8 books in Dover schools challenged. Here are the titles targeted for bans.

Supporters of House Bill 170 want to require New Hampshire schools to teach “instruction in cursive handwriting” by fifth 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 or 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.

Robert Azzi, a photographer and writer who lives in Exeter, can be reached at theother.azzi@gmail.com. 

This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Azzi: Today's Peyton Place: Guns. Culture. Cursive.