LAST WEEK, the powers that be at our local elementary school laid down the law for its annual Valentine’s Day bash. Any kid who wanted to give out any valentines had to give them to everyone in his class. What’s more, any kid who gave out valentines had to give the same valentine to all his friends. This would seem to put the frosting (of radical egalitarianism) on the cake (of teacherly bossiness). But I can see their point. I was a schoolchild in the country’s golden age of libertarianism, when kids pretty much got to set their own rules. Not just in high school (where students demanded, and got, a smoking lounge); and not just in junior high (where the whine of “We want a movie!” would reliably forestall a history lecture–which was bound to be about the teacher’s reminiscences of Vietnam war protests, anyway); and not just in grade school (where music class consisted of listening to Beatles records, and French of eating crepes) . . . but right down into kindergarten and first grade, where Valentine’s Day celebrations meant to showcase youthful sweetness turned into episodes out of “Lord of the Flies.” I won’t say Valentine’s Day is the lousiest holiday of the year (it is, of course, but I won’t say it), but it certainly has the lousiest signature food. If Halloween is candy corn and Thanksgiving is pumpkin pie and Christmas is petit-fours, Valentine’s Day is those chalky, rock-hard little pastel hearts that taste like they were pared off the end of some slum-barber’s styptic pencil. To make matters worse, they are imprinted with nothing-phrases like YU + ME = LOTSA LUV, which would be taken as raunchy come-ons if adults said them and seem to hold as a general principle that there’s something dreamily romantic about atrocious spelling. (You have to eat these things, of course. It’s like airplane food. You’re six. You’re sitting at a desk in class. There’s nothing else to do.) If eating a box of crummy candy had been all a kid had to endure, Valentine’s Day celebrations around 1970 wouldn’t have been so bad. What was brutal about them–and this was perhaps their underlying purpose–was the Darwinian lessons they taught children about romance. For the Valentine’s Day celebration was the only chance the anonymous kids in the class had to communicate with the popular ones. And on the day the valentines were exchanged, we were all given, in a matter of seconds, an illustration of just how un-reciprocal that “exchange” could be–and a harbinger of how un-reciprocal everything romantic could be. At a signal from the teacher, kids wandered about the classroom, drawing valentines out of paper bags and manila envelopes, and dropping them on the desks of their classroom favorites. In general, kids gave valentines only to a few close friends of their own sex, and a few noteworthy classmates of the opposite one. When the dust had cleared, a skewed hierarchy had asserted itself, based on two factors that nobody would have thought of individually, but which were glaring once the class was taken as a collective: first, the tendency of girls to take love letters more seriously than boys; second, the tendency of boys to discriminate ruthlessly on grounds of looks. So the popular boys–particularly my friend Georgie Winchester, who lived on my street and sat at the desk in front of me–had mounds of testimonials before them. The popular girls and the moderately popular boys had an intermediate number. And the unpopular girls had maybe one or two. I can see Anne Wiggins sitting at her desk in (as luck would have it) the front of Mrs. Fuller’s first-grade class, under the pitiless gaze of 25 six-year-olds. Poor Anne had probably spent the whole previous week picking out the valentine most likely to please Georgie Winchester, who was just then picking his way slowly and disdainfully through a heap of two dozen similar cards. And at that moment, the unprepossessing and weaselly Bart Yarmouth, perhaps to disguise his own hurt pride at having got only four or five valentines himself–and perhaps even to fend off tears–hollered, “Hey, look, everybody! Piggins” (for such was her nickname) “din’t get any Valentines at all!” I’m as certain that Anne will remember that day on her deathbed as I am that Georgie has no recollection of it whatsoever. Had no one thought of this? I guess the answer is no–no one had thought of this. Three decades ago, parents were famously less interested in children than in wife-swapping, barbiturates, and self-fulfillment. But even had ours been a nation of dream parents, something similar would probably have occurred. Because, for a parent who did care about his children, the idea that the young thing would wind up on the losing end of a plebiscite on prettiness was unthinkable. About as unthinkable, in fact, as the idea that such a barbarous plebiscite would ever get held in the first place. Christopher Caldwell
