After more than a week of controversy, President Obama finally delivered his back-to-school speech to our nation’s children on Tuesday. To the surprise of many Right-wingers who opposed the speech, Obama did not pass out cups of Kool-Aid, ask the kids the children to take blood oaths, or read excerpts from Das Kapital. Instead of offering the surreptitious brainwashing ritual that the wing-nuts promised, the president gave an inspirational message about the value of staying in school, working hard, and realizing dreams. As has become the case with Obama’s most extreme critics, it was much ado about nothing.

To be fair, Obama and his aides enabled the teapot tempest by distributing a lesson plan that included questions like “What can you do to help the president?” While I would argue that such a question is perfectly appropriate –even criticism and loyal dissent are helpful to the process of governing– it only plays into the ever-growing narrative of the president as cult figure rather than statesman. Still, the notion that a Presidential address to schoolchildren is inappropriate is both disingenuous and ahistorical. After all, Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the GOP, also gave a back-to-school speech to children in 1988. Unlike Obama, however, President Reagan ventured away from a universal feel-good message and offered a defense of supply-side economic policy to a group of pre-pubescent children. I guess presidential indoctrination is okay as long as it’s coming from the Far-Right.

If we are truly worried about the school sanctioned brainwashing of our children, there are far more worthy targets than Obama or any other politician. For decades, schools have been filled with commercial ads, preparing them early to define citizenship through product consumption. Textbooks continue to promote American jingoism at the expense of global respect and solidarity. Anti-gay discourses continue to promote homophobia and cause trauma to gay and lesbian students. Every year, urban schools become increasingly militarized, normalizing a culture of fear and incarceration for our most legally vulnerable children. In the face of these and other legitimate sources of subliminal seduction, the outcry about the Obama speech can be rightly recognized as a cheap political stunt designed to reinforce the image of Obama as an untrustworthy outsider who threatens the very status of American democracy. Sadly, given the racial, cultural, and ideological anxieties that persist within our country, this is a lesson that many of us have yet to learn.