A Time to Laugh

How to be a Gadfly:

• Pick a cause that you’re passionate about, and ride that horse for all you’re worth.
• Start small. Your cause may be an item of earth-shaking significance or something utterly obscure, but you’re more likely to get attention, and risk serious consequences, if your views push people’s buttons. So be content with small victories in the beginning and work up from there.
• Share your views. Write letters to the editors of newspapers and to your elected officials. Create a Web site, or visit one of the existing ‘gadfly’ sites to talk with like-minded persons.
• Be prepared to swim against the current.
• Take heart from all the gadflies who have gone before. Know that you’re part of a proud tradition.

Humans are human because they are conscious of living within a community. When the sense of fellowship is lost humanity is lost.

Giambattista Vico

Symmetry works for me. Not a Jeffersonian kind of decorating symmetry where the left side of your house matches the right. But a symmetry of feeling. It’s almost a smell. A color.

I felt that this week. I haven’t felt that symmetry in awhile — after all the upheaval we’ve endured. I found Monkey Joes — that white-noise-and-air-filled indoor playground over on the Motor Mile. Wednesdays are half-price. The food looks lousy. The clerks seem numb. The TV is always on the Food network which only makes the food look lousier. They have massage chairs you have pay to be nice to you. Wi-fi is free though.

The boys play hard there. Happily jumping and sliding and pretending. If you’re ever there, my children are the ones with the pool-noodle swords. They are always the children with the swords. How can a warrior — even a wee warrior — leave home without his sword?

And I read. I read so much the last two visits that I actually feel like a scholar again. I have about 50 pages of notes on that reading and an outline floating around my head for another book. It’s been bliss.

I know that I am a bit of misfit. I am the Square Peg who never fits in the round hole. And I’ve decided that despite what my previous world told me (that such oddity is probably the result of sin), this is how God made me. I’m supposed to be this way. I’m supposed to not fit. I have the gift not of making people comfortable (hospitality) but of making people uncomfortable. I’m a gadfly.

I sat at the Monkey Joes’ desk right near the action. I scattered my books across the top, got out my colored pens, and my legal pad. I had overstuffed my purse with random thoughts scrawled on post-its. And even though I was periodically interrupted by a runny nose or a lost Pooh hat, I read the whole time!

It felt just like my early months at Indiana University. I was not accepted into their Ph.D. program because my recommendation letters were “a little strange” (they were!) and because I was from an unaccredited school. While Grant was actually in a program, I was just a “continuing non-degree student” — neither fish nor fowl. Another Square Peg.

I didn’t have a study space on campus to call my own back then, so I’d sit in the Union in that beautiful limestone alcove that overlooked the Rhetorical Studies building. I had my articles and stacks of books in my overstuffed leather bag, my colored pens, and my legal pad. And I was occasionally interrupted by a friendly prof or classmate. It was bliss. Because I was doing what I knew I was plumbed to do. Nobody else knew it just yet though.

Now that I’m an “independent scholar” — another liminal fishy-fowl — it feels pretty much like it did then. Stealing moments to read and compare. Finding myself in my own head while my dearest examples of humanity spin and leap around me. This feels familiar. And very, very good.

So my idea is this: Even while Gen-X and Gen-Y fundamentalists reject the term “fundamentalism” qua fundamentalism, the separatist rhetorical forms persist in conservative Evangelicalism. Having reified the American ideal of individualism into a doctrine, these sectarians have shattered any sense of community in conservative Evangelicalism. They attempt to rebuild a notion of the community with their discourses of “biblical” living in order to woo and contain, but these attempts simply mask the egocentric and splintering rhetorical forms. They have become too individualistic to be fully human.

Or something like that. Does that irritate you? . . . Good.

If you kill a man like me, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.

Socrates, The Gadfly

Given the Great Recession of 2009, Michael, I’d hang on to my tuppence too!

In the 1960s, Douglas MacGregor codified his Theory X (and Theory Y) management style. Theory X had already dominated for sometime. It doesn’t take too many trips to the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village to figure that out. Industrialization demanded a uniform product and turned people into machines in order to create that product. In Theory X:

Management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can. They inherently dislike work. Because of this, workers need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of controls developed. A hierarchical structure is needed with narrow span of control at each level. According to this theory, employees will show little ambition without an enticing incentive program and will avoid responsibility whenever they can. The Theory X manager tends to believe that everything must end in blaming someone. He or she thinks all prospective employees are only out for themselves. Usually these managers feel the sole purpose of the employee’s interest in the job is money. They will blame the person first in most situations, without questioning whether it may be the system, policy, or lack of training that deserves the blame. A Theory X manager believes that his or her employees do not really want to work, that they would rather avoid responsibility and that it is the manager’s job to structure the work and energize the employee. One major flaw of this management style is it is much more likely to cause Diseconomies of Scale in large businesses.

There it is. Pick up nearly any book on the family that’s widely popular in conservative Evangelicalism, and you’ll get the same exact theory translated into “biblical” language. It’s so predominant that people can’t see any other way. Children don’t want to work/obey and so they must be “enticed” with pain and structure to do so. Order is the savior. Consistency is the highest virtue.

I’m enough of a Burkean to know that “consistency” is the rhetorical trope of tragedy.

Somewhere-er-other we got the idea that our vision of order, tradition, discipline was God’s. This is our generation’s blindspot, our idol. We whack our infants for not bending to our will when we diaper them. We even manufacture tools to do so (or just buy long glue sticks by the dozen like Ezzo recommends)! We refuse to feed our kids except when a book tells us they need it. And we hose down our toddlers when they mess their pants.

We call it “parent-centered” or “functional hierarchy” or “biblical.” Theory X has been codified for the family. And it’ll work as well as running a home like a bank.

But God’s order is not ours. While we do simple addition, He imagines fractals. While we thump our running-behind watch, He sees all of time as one. While we plunk out a tune on the piano, He creates the music of the spheres. Calvin described the Bible even as God talking baby talk to us — like He was lisping for our benefit.

Sometimes God’s order looks like disorder to us. But it’s not. It’s just not-us.

This will be our downfall. There’s going to be a “run on the bank” in 10-20 years as these children become heads of their own homes.

God help us all.

The other day, while reading the first chapter of Beezus and Ramona (where Ramona gets a library card), I asked the boys if they knew what kind of work Daddy does. Gavin was quick to answer: “[He] hammers.”

That makes sense. When you’re 2.8 years old, pounding walls with a heavy object looks pretty fun. No wonder Gavin totes that toy hammer all over the house taming every imaginary nail he finds.

I was too charmed by his answer to ask him what he thinks Mommy’s work is. Sometimes Mommy’s not so sure herself. My recent vocational change to a stay-at-home-mom is so new to me that I’ve been reading about motherhood and childhood. I’ve been immersing myself in the typically-recommended conservative evangelical parenting manuals while studying the history of the parenting advice in the United States.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that our just-previous generation wouldn’t recognize the stuff that passes for “normal” anymore. We’ve regressed — and not in the typical dispensationalist way that you think I’m going to say. It’s not that we’ve gotten way too permissive. We’ve gotten way too punitive — a shift that’s so unexpected that it sneaks past us. There seems to be a backlash even from just 20 years ago to today. I’m trying to figure out what happened.

In 1994-1995, Michael Pearl published To Train Up a Child, Gary Ezzo published BabyWise, and Tedd Tripp published Shepherding a Child’s Heart. Ezzo’s Preparation for Parenting had been around for 10 years before that, so Babywise was a “lite” version of his program sans Scripture references (a version that was covertly but strongly encouraged for new mothers working for my previous employer). And while Tripp is, I’ll grant you, the most widely accepted and the only actually educated man in the trio, all three men argue for the same lousy theology. All three claim that Scripture mandates specific and painful parenting rituals, all three claim that parents redeem their children through those parenting rituals, and all three insist that the spankings start in infancy. Yes, spanking babies. For the most-recommended Tripp, it’s a bare-bottomed spanking for an 8-month-old who does a developmentally normal thing like wriggling on the changing table (154). These three make Dobson look like a hippie and make life in the Banks’ home look like a rave party! Heck — even Jonathan Edwards would be appalled!!

What happened in the early nineties to throw us back to the foolish fantasy of “my slippers, sherry, and pipe are due at 6:02″ (only without David Tomlinson’s charm!)? Was it the Clinton presidency? Bart Simpson? Real World? The first Gulf War? The WWW? When you read these books and then you read the books authored by the people who recommend these books, you get a pretty clear picture of their ideal family. Detached dad and mom, parenting reduced to a chore for hired hands, order/schedule above all else, a quaint archived portrait of an idyllic past with the kids nowhere to be seen or heard or even protected. And no parent really wants that. Even Mr. Banks eventually realizes that’s not what he wants in his family. But the ideal is preached and pushed to goad us and infuriate us and to drive us to kill off some part of our souls in the process. We transport the corporate world’s ideals of order and schedule and top-down management theory to domestic life as if it’s going to work or that God commands it!

Boy — do we need another Mary Poppins!