A Time to Laugh

We went to Indiana University. Grant wanted a terminal degree in Voice Performance, and I wanted one in Rhetorical Studies. We needed to go to a place that had both, and that narrows it down to the Midwest pretty quickly. There’s Northwestern (too expensive!) and Louisiana (too conservative!!). IU was an easy choice then.

But I did not get accepted into the Ph.D. program. I was told that the reason was that BJU wasn’t accredited and that my recommendation letters were “a little strange.”

They were. I read them. Ugh! The line that got me was: “. . . and when we were hiring her husband (a fine lyric tenor) to teach, we decided to hire her as well.” Wow. I mean, he is a fine, lyric tenor, but I thought I brought something to the table. ::shrug:: I wouldn’t have accepted me after that either.

That Spring we visited Bloomington for Grant to audition, and I met with the Speech-Comm Graduate Officer to explain that I still wanted to take classes “to get my foot in the door.” He said, “Don’t bother. Even if you do well, that’s no guarantee you’ll get in.”

I cried all the way home to South Carolina. My brother and another dear friend reassured me that he had to say that for legal reasons. The whole thing was very humbling and scary and lonely. I decided to still attend classes with several academic strikes against me as a “professional non-degree student.” Alone.

I worked like a dog. I read every assignment two and three times. Sure, sure — I had read a lot of the texts before, but everything seemed so new.

For instance, Plato’s Phaedrus, that exemplar of the best rhetoric in my previous world, is talking about that? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that before? It’s so obvious if you read the entire original dialogue. Plato, I had been taught in my sophomore philosophy class at BJU, was “the closest a pagan can come to being a Christian without converting.” Whuh?

Plato was actually the biggest and most satisfying target in those initial classes. Rhetoricians like to dismantle him because he was so pivotal in relegating us and our study to “mere” status. But countering his ideas had moral import because, to my peers and my profs, Plato was just a hop, skip and a goose-step away from fascism. They, too, often tied Plato to Christianity, and I knew that was not right even if my fundamentalist education taught me as much. Christ was different from all that, and I was determined to figure out how to express it.

Now my dear brother was several steps ahead of me in the dissing-Plato department and in the foregrounding-Christ mission. His dissertation at Ohio State was about ancient near-Eastern wisdom literature (think Solomon’s Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Book of Job with a side of its Egyptian and Babylonian counterparts) and its similarity to ancient Greek rhetoric texts. In other words, he proved, Solomon sounded a lot more like Protagoras than Plato. And the evidence is astounding. I was very slowly becoming less of just a giddy little-sister admirer to my brother’s persona and more of a giddy junior scholar to his ideas. That alone was a pretty cool transition.

So for me, Plato’s standing was crumbling. He was no longer the philosophical embodiment of Christianity like I’d been taught but, in fact, a rhetorical and religious nemesis.

And who’s the biggest contemporary advocate for a Platonic view of rhetoric? ::drumroll:: Richard Weaver. I admit that it startled me when my professor made fun of Weaver in class. This was the guy I knew the most about. Now my brother had already informed me of some of Weaver’s goofiest quirks — like he would only ride a train and never a plane because it was more connected to the earth and that he would still plow his fields up in Weaverville (!!), NC with a horse because it was more organic and that the only way anyone knew he was dead up at the U of Chicago was because he wasn’t sitting on the same bench at the same time eating his lunch like he had been every day for years previously. Talk about Aspergers!

But my prof’s anti-Weaver quip was something different, and I wanted to understand it. Our final exam for that class was to “intersect” three rhetoricians from our reading that semester to compare and contrast their ideas. I chose Gorgias (because he was a stinker), Richard Whately (because he was another fav from my previous life), and my old buddy Richard Weaver. I had real-life people in mind as I wrote that trialogue — Richard Weaver was best personified by his favorite advocate in my life, DeWitt Jones; Whately reminded me of my terribly practical, business-minded, self-made-man father-in-law; and Gorgias was my brother. To be honest, I think Gorgias gets the long end of that deal because I don’t like the guy that much, but Steve ranks pretty high on my admiration meter.

So what happens when a Platonist, an Aristotelian, and an Isocratean/Ciceronian talk? The Platonist keeps tripping over his own feet because he’s too busy looking for the meaning of life in the stars, the Aristotelian keeps insisting that we need to maintain the status quo because we’ll lose jobs, and Ciceronian jabs and pokes and laughs at the humanity in all of us while he tries to make new and better worlds with his words. At least, that’s what I tried to say in that final exam. Go read it for yourself.

It’s weird to read that final exam now. I was beginning to find what I wanted to find in higher education. The neat and tidy package my paleo-neo-theo-con curriculum delivered to me was too distilled and too naive. And I knew that the Left qua Left (that’s one of the things you learn to do in the Academy — throw in random Latin phrases to put your reader/listener off-kilter) didn’t have all the answers either. But the antagonism I was taught in Theoconsville was misplaced.  My Left-leaning profs criticized Bill Clinton as much as I did. They were heavily critical of Modernity, and if I remember my fundamentalist history accurately enough, so was I. They weren’t the rank relativists I was told they were either. They believed there were moral hierarchies and admitted it. Their main criticism was focused on hubris, that self-serving pride that propped up foolish fictions which sends all of us to our doom.

It’s not the Right is completely wrong nor is the Left evil. Here’s what I said back then in response to a mind-blowing chapter by Richard Lanham:

Having spent the last ten years at a conservative Christian liberal arts university, I have experienced the Weak Defense firsthand. That subculture has grown out of both the humanist education and the current religious fundamentalism that Lanham describes (161). Outside of Scripture, what is considered good comes from what is privileged. Plato, that bastion of Western culture, is described as drawing as close to conservative Christian doctrine as a pagan can. Shakespeare is equally virtuous and considered a supporter of religious fundamentalism. These arguments are not made to justify Shakespeare or Plato, but to justify the subculture itself. The reasoning is, “if these pillars of our culture are essentially moral and if we are like them, then we must be good too.” When students question the curriculum (“Why should I study Shakespeare?”), the characteristic response is the Weak Defense (“Because he’s part of your liberal arts education.”). The winners that we study, whether Greek philosophers or English playwrights, dictate an absolute, objective reality.

By juxtaposing the Strong and the Weak Defenses of rhetoric, Lanham is defining his preference in terms of the other. The Weak Defense is from the likes of Plato and [Allan] Bloom who view truth as absolute, received, and stable. The Strong Defenders view truth as referential, human, and compliant. Offering no justification for this simplistic truth dichotomy, Lanham just assumes that it exists. Plato set the terms for our present view of the world and controls how Lanham sees reality. To Lanham, the Weak Defenders view truth as absolute and rhetoric as castrated; the Strong Defenders view truth as contingent and rhetoric as powerful. He assumes that the divine and the human are separate with neither influencing the other, just like the separation he criticizes in his opponents.

Perhaps there are other choices that see rhetoric as vital, subjective, and human, and truth as contingent yet divine. Truth is not then “handed down by God” (188) and flashed on the back of the cave for only a select few. Truth is with us and available within our perceptions, our culture, our rhetoric and is still divine. My Defense for rhetoric is obviously neither of Lanham’s Defenses. Strongly defending rhetoric within a conservative Christian subculture is not impossible. Language, as a human creation, is inherently subjective. Rhetoric and philosophy are intertwined and equal since both are human. Good can be multiple and divine with rhetoric as prominent and active. Appropriateness or wisdom becomes a conspicuous theme. Plato and Shakespeare are still important but not merely as a self-conscious justification for personal views. The Great Books and the not-so-Great Books are necessary to understand humanity and the constructing of a culture. Such a Defense addresses and celebrates rhetoric as a human creation and the divine as the Image in which we are made. Both are inextricably intertwined and symbiotic. This defense is as uncomfortable as the Strong Defense since it demands rhetorical scholars to reconsider the validity of Plato’s dichotomy and people to discern what is appropriate and good rather than assuming goodness from privilege. This Defense allows me to meld my scholarship with my culture; but, and perhaps more importantly, it requires a more creative and inclusive treatment of the many defenses to rhetoric.

Funny. This is no different than most of the stuff I taught at BJU from 2000-2007, and my students who are reading this know that.

But this is what I was looking for, what was missing in my paleo-neo-theo-con life. It’s not that the Left is completely right and wholly good. Not at all. It’s more that I needed to learn a second (cultural) language to help me understand my own native tongue.

Everyone’s sick to death of lipstick, I know. But I have to tell you this. . . .

I’ve said it before to my students and I’ll say it here: Conservative Evangelicalism is really just like 17th-century patriarchy. The administrators are the patriarch(s) who go out into the world to earn money, fight bad guys, and acquire new property for the wife (the faculty/staff) and their sons (the students). Within patriarchy the wife has very little influence with her husband; he’s too busy and too absent to really know what she does. He just wants her to keep her mouth shut and not embarrass him. But she manages the homestead, keeps things running, and raises the children. She smooths over her sons’ frustration with an absent and detached father. Her one hope for influence? To raise sons who’ll remember her in her old age.

I’ve talked to enough people at other conservative Evangelical organizations to say that it’s not just BJU that’s that way; they are all that way. When you study the religio-cultural Evangelical landscape across the United States, you don’t talk about places or even ideas as much as you talk about personalities — Bob Jones, John R. Rice, Arlin Horton, Bill Rice, James Dobson, Gary Ezzo, Tedd Tripp, Michael Pearl, John MacArthur, John Piper, Bill Gothard, Mark Dever, Douglas Wilson, Doug Phillips, C. J. Mahaney, Rick Warren. I could go on. All in all, they are charismatic, affable, strong men who seem larger-than-life. These men each have their homesteads that compete for influence and affluence. Just like the English patriarchs.

Understanding that little fact made life within fundamentalism make a lot more sense, but it didn’t make it less ironic.

I’ll never forget the chapel message where Bob Jones III ranted about the then-new South Carolina law that required drivers to burn their headlights in the rain. Now we would tell him to get a blog so that he could vent those big feelings somewhere OTHER than the chapel platform. When he said, “I can’t believe those people think they can tell me when to turn my lights on and when to turn my lights off,” you could hear the student body’s collective jaws drop at the irony (for those of you not in the loop, the BJU dormitories require lights off at 11:00 pm every night and lights on at 6:55 am every morning). We all stifled a giggle. Are you serious, Dr. Bob?

To his credit, he apologized for that rant the next day. If I remember correctly, his eldest actually pointed out the irony and the patriarch admitted it. It’s always healthy when the dad admits his humanity in front of his kids.

The rant did demonstrate, however, how the patriarch views himself against the government. It was an old-school competition for control between them, not a checks-and-balances system or a “watch for your souls” relationship.

Sometime late in my BJU choir career, OSHA came to our rescue. Before that, we choir girls in our shiny poly-fugly dresses with too-small shoulders, floor-length hems, and ridiculous pit-pads were meticulously scrutinized for any deviance in appearance. No rings or big earrings, ladies! Suntan hose only and black shoes! Hair must be “rolled” and off the brows and shoulders. And the makeup! Ugh. No nose shine, of course, and we must apply dark streaks of orange blush which, we were told, looked best under the harsh Rodeheaver lights. Okay. Whatever.

But the lipstick. It had to be a dark reddish brown, the costume gods decreed, or we would disappear under the lights (the guys didn’t ever disappear!). Okay. Fair enough. But they gave us one or two tubes for the whole choir. We had to share, they said. We had to use the color they had ordered. Or else.

It was gross. And BAD. I secretly bought my own shade of ugly to use ALONE and crossed my fingers that I’d squeak by inspection before they released me to sing with my fellow second-sopranos.

Then OSHA came along and said, “No way, no how, no more sharing lipstick!! Every choir member must have her own!” HURRAY! We choir girls cheered and smiled and clapped. Quietly, of course, because we knew that the patriarch was not at all happy about the ever-encroaching government imposing its rules on poor hapless citizens. That’s what we were told, at least, in chapel.

But we knew better. We knew that even the patriarch needed rules. We knew that everyone needs oversight — usually from outsiders. We subconsciously knew that patriarchy only could work if, on the off-chance, the patriarch is completely selfless and beneficent. Any fetid whiff of power or ego and the littlest is the first one to get tossed aside.

In these weeks of deregulation chaos when some are actually insisting that we need fewer rules, I think about lipstick.

The politically charged talk didn’t stop when my beloved President Cowboy was Top Dog. In fact, it got more intense. Sometimes I think the reason we Gen-Xers are so politically apathetic is because we were spoon-fed agendas with our rice cereal. I mean, now when I look back at how partisan James Dobson and Tim LaHaye are, those little movies we saw on Sunday evenings in the sanctuary and the paperbacks we had lying around the house seem far from banal. Now, Dobson’d take me over his knee for saying that his intensity caused our apathy, but the case can be made.

I was going to Bob Jones University. No surprise there. Nearly all my teachers in my Christian day school attended there and all but one of my pastors. And that’s where my big brother went to school, and he was all that and a bag of chips in my mind. He would come home and teach me the cool stuff he was learning. That made me feel important and smart — pretty hot stuff for a kinda backward, nearly-Aspie nerd.

I was struggling with my big Senior-year research paper on Prohibition when Steve came home for Christmas vacation in 1985. I was writing the paper for that teacher that admired Richard Nixon, the one who had us read Imprimis for extra credit, and who is now president of a Christian liberal arts school named for another notable, but not necessarily right-wing, Christian politician. I doubt my brother knew any of that when he pulled out Richard Weaver’s hierarchy of argument to help me decipher the historical data.

So my formal introduction to paleoconservatism had begun.

Let me explain. Richard Weaver theorized that there was a “natural” hierarchy to argument: on top was an argument from definition and on the bottom was an argument from circumstance. If I were to argue for, say . . . . a national prohibition of alcohol, my strongest argument would be to say that alcohol was evil by its nature or essence. The weakest argument, in Weaver’s taxonomy, would be to contend that alcohol just caused bad circumstances. The Prohibitionists argued the latter which doomed them to failure. If they had argued the former, it would have been very difficult to prove, but it would have at least stuck.

My paleocon, Imprimis-hocking, Nixon-admiring teacher, of course, loved it.

That wasn’t the end to my Weaverducation. When I sat in Advanced Public Speaking (I would later teach the same class for seven years) my Senior year at BJU, Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences was our required reading. We memorized the argumentative hierarchy that my brother introduced to me four years before. Weaver didn’t just end with the argumentative rubric, however. He went further to say that conservatives always argue from essence and liberals always argue from circumstance. That was the primary difference between the two and why conservatives were better.

Hmm. . . . Really? In my short time at this very Republican place, I had digested enough evidence to the contrary. My EN102 paper had proven otherwise since I was drawing the argumentative connections between FDR’s technocracy and Gingrich’s Window of Opportunity. Now I know that I was perceiving and expressing the contrasts between the paleoconservatism of Weaver and Buckley and Buchanan and the neoconservatism of Kristol and Gingrich.

Why didn’t anyone ever tell me that? I never heard this contrast explained to me. As is typical for fundy pedogogy, I guess, new nuances are ignored either because their heads are too buried in the sand or because it involves an update in lecture notes or in the hopes that these upstarts’ll go away. As I study the conflicts between the paleos and the neos, quite honestly, it sounds like a fight between crabby Gentiles who hate FDR and crabby Jews who love him. When you add the theocons into the mix — Oy! — it’s like adding vinegar to the political baking soda paste.

And I get indigestion.

I saw the GOP courting BJU up close and personal. I don’t know how much it had to do with Bob Jones III’s involvement with the Council for National Policy. I personally never got to hear Reagan speak at BJU, but I did see the bounce in DeWitt Jones’ step (my teacher, advisor, and later boss) during the Reagan years. To be honest, I think he was just happy to have a rhetorical presidency again because it made public address cool. Carter’s malaise had even seeped into the speech-comm classroom.

The 1988 presidential election was fascinating. This was back when the BJU student body’s absorption of these political speeches was less official and ubiquitous than it became in later years. Rather than have a political candidate speak in Chapel or at a required evening Convocation, they came willy-nilly to a rally in the horribly-citron “Concert Center.”

Jack Kemp (neocon) rocked when he came. He was funny and suave. He used Scripture and he used it appropriately. We loved him. I still smile as if I’m recognizing an old friend when I see him standing next to ol’ McCain these days.

A few weeks after that Pat Robertson (theocon) spoke. Ew. Honestly, you all — it was bad. Now, let’s be clear. Pat Robertson’s theology is not BJU’s. Charismaticism and fundamentalism want to be more different than the same, but the sense was that if he’s a good candidate, we’ll listen.

He tanked.

First of all, he had planted shills all over campus to get us to come to his meeting. They weren’t representing Robertson (which would have been fine) as much as they were trying to look like us . . . er rather, us ten years ago. Now, it’s a small campus — 3000 uni students at the time — so you know everyone there. And these people stuck out — like a knee-length jean skirt with ankle socks at Sturgis. They’d cheerfully come up to Grant and me in the Snack and say, “Hey! all us students are coming to the rally tonight!! Make sure you’re there!!”

Whuh? Who ARE you?

So I attended. Of course I did. I was eating it all up. And Robertson was terrible. He was awkward. When the question-and-answer time came, we students weren’t allowed to ask questions (like we were with Kemp). No, his shills – the same ones we saw earlier — got up and asked the planned softball questions they were given. Grrrrr. . . .

Brother. And you Boomers and Silents wonder why we Gen-Xers roll our eyes so much? Your political theater stinks! It all feels like the live Clifford show at Dollywood. Puhleeeeeze!

The clincher came when he started spouting his Dominionism (ugh). He said something like, “And we all know what Genesis 20 says, don’t we?” We sat there quietly. BJU students are painfully polite, and this was one of our main lecture halls — where we attended History of Civ and Principles of Bible Study and Orientation. We were used to listening and nodding dutifully. We didn’t answer questions there, and we thought it was a rhetorical question (I was majoring in rhetorical questions, wasn’t I? ).

So we didn’t answer. And he responded passive-aggressively, “Well? DON’T YOU KNOW WHAT GENESIS 20 SAYS?? DON’T THEY TEACH YOU THE BIBLE AT BOB JONES UNIVERSITY???”

::crickets chirping::

Angry, fuming silence. I think my jaw actually jutted forward and my arms automatically folded. Here we were trying to listen and give the guy a chance even though we disagreed with him. We put up with the shills. And we attended anyway ’cause we were curious. And he insults us? Good riddance, dude.

Pat Robertson’s bumper stickers were the biggest joke in the dorms after that.

So I was reared in a theocon environment with a paleocon curriculum in a growing neocon culture. I got it on all fronts. Even though I didn’t know those divisions, I knew the words and I lived the arguments.

And I knew there had to be more. Something didn’t ring true. As I struggled to teach rhetoric for the next six years at BJU (two as a grad student and four as a full-time faculty member), I knew my tools weren’t very good, and I didn’t know how to really use the ones I had. Weaver, as much of a god as he was to my teachers-turned-colleagues, wore thin real quick.

I needed more.

My Dad always collects . . . well, everything. And we have just-recently and now-forever validated his pack-rat-ness because one of the gas caps from his 70-year collection just happened to fit his granddaughter’s car. But he does like to collect campaign buttons from both sides of the aisle. These were also under my bed.

First, you have to notice that nail file there. See it? That’s from my Dad’s campaign for Warren City Council — a bitter fight in that Detroit suburb. He almost got it too (Pollacks are a shoe-in in that Hamtramck-refuge). Yes, I passed those out the polling place at De LaSalle Catholic School for my dad. Anyhoo. . . .

See that goofy, 80s-fad window-bobber? That marks the shift in my family from being registered in both political parties to single partisan status. We became solely Republicans — like every other conservative Evangelical I knew.

I remember it all vividly. 1980’s GOP convention was in Detroit. I was about to turn twelve, and my family, of course, went downtown to see the glitz.  It. was. glorious. I loved every second of it.

You see, I remember Jimmy Carter’s rhetorical attempt at folksiness. I remember the sweater and the fireside chats, as if trying to summon FDR’s rhetorical skill would help. I remember the malaise. Vividly. Listen to it for yourself. You’ll get what I mean. As my family and I hunkered down in that tiny 1940 farm house that my dad built for his parents back in the day — we couldn’t afford actually purchasing a home because of the double-digit interest rates — Carter sounded like we all felt.

And then Reagan!  I remember the hope that Reagan stirred in us that summer at the beginning of the 80s. Wow. He was the exact opposite of the malaise. He was, for an old dude, energetic and strong. A cowboy.

All that year my sixth grade class prayed every day for the hostages in Iran. Our teacher talked with us about what they must be going through, and to be honest, it felt to me as if they must be stuck in some sort of pubescent 3:22pm limbo. I felt like a hostage about that time every day. And when Carter worked to get them released just before Reagan’s inaugural, I really felt grateful.

And so the 1980s began for me. An arcane crisis in the Middle East I could never understand. A cowboy president. Rubiks cubes and big padded shoulders. Alligators and kilt pins. A stark contrast between a grey hunkering down and a colorful, glittery showcase.

I was looking through a bunch of what-not under our bed the other day. There’s the cardboard “Hot-Box-O’-Love” that houses our love notes from our college years (Yes, despite all the rules, a certain kind of chaste passion could still be expressed though never acted upon). I found my mother’s wedding veil. My grandma’s Christmas crocheted tablecloth. All my sterling charms from every place we vacationed growing up. My honeymoon bikinis. Shelves I don’t know where to hang.

And a box of little memories. . . . My colorful and well-scribbled children’s New Testament. An autographed postcard from Count Scary. A set of tickets from our 1976 trip to the Magic Kingdom. A Chick Tract. A huge stack of fake money from the Indiana State Fair. My CEF devotional. A BJU First button (the badge we were told to wear to get “special” treatment our first few weeks.). A 1995 “I Voted for Pooh” button/sticker also from the Magic Kingdom. My Ten Commandments bracelet. And several Wordless Book items — the actual book, a necklace, and a bracelet. And a big stack of campaign buttons.

It’s funny to find those things in the same box. The quilting together of faith and politics right there under my bed.

Mom and Dad always said they were registered in two different political parties so that as a household they could have a say in both sides of any primary election. I do know they voted for Kennedy, “He was so optimistic. . . . His dad was a bootlegger though,” my mom remembers wistfully.

Politics must have been a regular point of conversation because I knew all about Watergate. I was not-quite four when it first happened in 1972. And in 1976 while Mom and I were making our then-favorite dessert of Watergate Cake, I asked her, “Mom!!?! What are we going to serve President Ford when he comes to our house? We can’t serve him WATERGATE Cake?!?!?!” I had written him a letter, you see, explaining my support and inviting him over for a visit. I was certain that he was due any week. My mom, without missing a beat, flatly answered, “Well, we’ll just call it pistachio cake.” Whew! Crisis averted.

I didn’t think it was fair that President Ford didn’t get a full four-year “turn” (what I heard when people said “term”). I was 8 by then, and I understood turns very well. Everyone deserved a full turn, I thought, and just because Nixon was a meanie didn’t mean ol’ Droopy Dog Ford needed to be punished. So I wanted to vote for Ford.

You see that Ford campaign button up there, right? It’s right next to my Wordless Book necklace. I wore both at the same time . . . especially at one particular meeting.

That fall my Uncle Eddie and Aunt Jean were visiting us in Tulsa on their way to get Layitril treatments in Mexico for my uncle’s colon cancer. The election was near, I remember that, and I think my parents must have informed me that my Aunt and Uncle, being the good Pollacks that they were, would probably be voting for Jimmy Carter. NOOOOOOOOOOOO! How could they? Ford needed a full “turn.” My parents also informed me, I’m sure, that my never-before-introduced relatives were not the fundamental Baptists we were.

My mission was decided then. But I would be subtle about this. I would just wear my Ford election button and my Wordless Book necklace as a conversation starter.

And, of course, it worked . . . enough. Aunt Jean saw my campaign button and said, “Oh honey, I already voted. . . . for Carter.” What? How COULD she? Ford didn’t even have a CHANCE. And she voted ALREADY??!? How?

She turned to my necklace and started to guess what each color meant, “Well, black is for night, and red if for love, right? And then white is for snow, of course, yellow is for sunshine, and green is for money.” Money? MONEY??? Filthy lucre? I was astonished. “Oh NO!” I intoned. So I sang her the little song instead:

My heart was dark with sin.
Until the Savior came in.
His precious blood I know.
Has washed it white as snow.
And in God’s Word I’m told
I’ll walk the street of gold.
To grow in Christ each day,
I read my Bible and pray.

And she patted me on the head and cooed something aunt-ish. And that was done. My mission fizzled. My first attempt at quilting my faith with my politics had crooked stitches and way too many holes.

I failed.

Right next to their portrait of Jesus Christ (which I always imagined was the then-contemporary Walter Sallman portrait), my paternal grandparents had another picture — a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I still have it. It hangs in my “office” (I am, after all, the self-appointed chair of Rhetorical Studies of the School of Lewis) next to my “I Love Lucy” Barbie doll collection. The portrait itself has outlasted the glass that protected it.

Grandma always said that FDR saved their home. According to all my grandparents, the New Deal made it possible for my family to stay out of the Poor House.

My family’s stories have always been flavored with a political zest. My parents were children of immigrants and didn’t speak English when they started school. Governmental programs made a real, material difference in their working class lives. I grew up hearing that labor unions were a good thing. A very good thing. And Social Security? Sure, there were problems, but it was overall a much-needed enterprise and Dad explained specifically and personally why. At U of M, my Dad was actually nominated to be president of the campus Communist party. He did refuse to run, but not because he disagreed.

So when I attended my very, very Republican and very, very middle-class-and-white Christian day schools, I knew that the opinions they presented as Truth weren’t as plainly so. They insisted that prayer should be in public schools like it used to be; my Mom remembered that she never prayed in school (she did enjoy the honky-tonk piano playing from her classmates though!!). They said unions were evil; Dad said they were necessary. They talked like America won every conflict it was forced to enter; Dad reluctantly and with a heavy sigh told me about Vietnam. I do vaguely remember my dad writing a lengthy letter to my third-grade teacher correcting her about her goofy perspective on dinosaurs, but I can’t for the life of me remember the specifics. And when I came home saying that my U.S. history teacher said that “Nixon was the best president our country had ever had,” my dad was flabbergasted and stated baldly and loudly, “BUT HE LIED!”

I’m saying all this not to say that my family was completely correct in their perceptions of FDR’s policies. I have studied enough history to know and to understand the criticisms. Nor were my Christian Day school teachers completely in error (although I do think Dad and Mom had the upper-hand argumentatively).

I’m just saying that there was always a tension. Even from elementary school. It was more than a bemused detachment a la MST3K that all Gen-Xers relish. There always was a tension between the critical but sharp focus in those family snapshots and the glossy but fuzzy ABeka illustrations in those fundamentalist history books. A conflict between personal stories and official (and politicized) memory. Maybe it was more like a conversation between the two. But I always knew that even in school history was an often-commodified reflection, deflection, and selection of reality that contradicted my own experience.

And it was a very, very good thing.

No individual should be allowed to enter into this world and go out of it without leaving behind him distinct and legitimate reasons for having passed through it. How far you go in life depends on your being tender to the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic to the striving and tolerant of the young and the old; for one day in life, you will have become all of these.

George Washington Carver

Am I this old to remember all this stuff at the old-fashioned “country store”? Is this what being forty means? I mean, we’re past knowing every song on the oldies station to remembering when every product at the quaint stores was . . . new?

• My Mom had these candles!
• Remember how weird these felt once you got to the center?
• The coolest umbrella evah!
• A rat? That’s what they called that??
• OUCH!!
• The product named by a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters — Fels-Naptha Soap.
• I need one of these actually. It does the best on combing the boys’ hair.
• No-Water-Needed Shampoo (Psssssst, go take a shower and use real shampoo!)
• Grant loves these.
• He loves this too, but not at these prices! Walmart still carries it. I know that much.
• The Clickety-Clack shoes
• Zim-Zam!
• And my fav — Keswick Theology Magnets.

Another voice joins the chorus of Heaven! You’ll be missed, Papa. But we know you’re enjoying your time with Jesus and with old friends and family — some of whom you’ve never even met until now. We love you.

Thank the good Lord that it is not death to die.