Grad-studenting the Golden Classics: Conformity and Queer Fear in Tootle

As most of you know I went through the voluntary ordeal of graduate school in English. Why? Because I love books. No kidding. I thought that would be enough. This would be sort of like signing up for the military because you are good at pushups. 

Books aren't really the thing anymore in the world of English. Books about books? Yes, sir. Queer re-readings of classic works? Bring it! Critical explorations of television shows about vampires? Oh, hellz yeah! I count it one of the great accomplishments of my life to have escaped loving books, real ones (and, no, I don't mean only dead white guy books). 

In the spirit of the buffoonery we were required to write every semester, I thought it would be fun to look at kids' books and give them the Earnest English Graduate Student Treatment (EEGST). I probably spend an hour of every working day reading books to my son in the evening and sometimes three or so hours on the weekends. As such a whole new library has been opened to me and I feel it my duty as a person who has read Critical Theory to apply some of the principles to these books. First up, Tootle, a seemingly benign tale of a young train coming to terms with limitations and making the right choice, but under the surface graduate-studenty things lurk. Read on. If it must be noted, all works quoted and scholars cited are fictitious.  

"Conformity and Queer Fear in Gertrude Crampton's Tootle"

Marissa Walsh-Rodriguez notes in her seminal work on the topic of conformity and children's literature, To Mine Own Self Be True: Power and Politicking in Pre-Teen Literature, that " [children's literature] exists merely as a vehicle for enforcing the dominant bourgeois cultural structures of the day. . . without which the system would ineluctably collapse" (5). This is so manifestly true that is hardly bears mentioning. We tell our children stories to enforce our own morality with little forethought to the ways in which that morality will change as new social movements come to life. In this, we often hamstring the future of our children, making them moral automatons rather than the freethinkers needed to navigate a complex, gray-shaded world.

Nowhere in the whole corpus of socially-approved children's literature is the conforming element of children's stories more evident than in the Golden Classics work Tootle by Gertrude Crampton. Crampton is an artist for whom conformity was something of an oeuvre. Her other works include the appalling Scuffy the Tugboat and the laughless and lifeless The Large and Growly Bear. First published in the halcyon postwar days of conservative romance, Tootle effectively undercuts any chance of raising children that might buck the system, explore their divergent desires, or experiment with new identities. The conformity expected by young readers of Tootle is well-documented by Honeycutt-Baker, Przybyszewski-Smith, and Palomares-Levin amongst others, but the specific issue of gender conformity and the fear of homosexuality has never been treated by a scholar before, especially one with my pedigree and aptness with polysyllabic words. In this paper I will show the degree to which the conformity expected of young Tootle is gendered in nature, explore the work's own use of the word "queer" as a pejorative to describe Tootle and its implications for a queer reading of the character, and suggest ways in which the book might best be modified for a contemporary reader.

The character Tootle is introduced to us in the opening pages of Tootle as a young engine who has come to the Lower Trainswitch School for Locomotives to receive his formal education in pulling a train across an idyllic America. If you will pardon the expression, Tootle is under the tutelage of Old Bill, a grizzled veteran of the school and presumably the tracks who instructs the young locomotives in a curriculum of proper training technique as well as the principles of conformity that undergird the program. Tootle is introduced to us from the beginning as a brash young engine, confident in his own abilities and desirous of future acclaim as a fast engine on the most prestigious route to which a young engine may aspire: that of the flyer between New York and Chicago. Even Bill accedes to Tootle's exceptional abilities, but from the beginning the need for conformity becomes manifest when Bill enjoins Tootle to work on the one lesson most tied to conformity: Stay on the Rails No Matter What. This course also represents a type of mantra for the young engines. Bill cloaks his desire to suppress Tootle under the auspices of helping him to achieve his dreams but it is impossible not to read resentment in Bill's words to the young engine who he fears might make his cushy job just a bit more difficult. Bill, a lonely bachelor, is confronted by a virile and flamboyant young engine and he is appalled at the contrast to his own decrepitude.

Tootle is diligent in his lessons until one day he is tempted off the track while racing a horse across an open meadow. There is a curve in the track that if he follows will allow the horse to win and Tootle therefore makes the rash decision to leave the track. He ties the horse in the race and returns to the roundhouse in shame. Though the amount of time he has thus far spent at Lower Trainswitch is indeterminate in the text, the degree of indoctrination in the articles of submission propagated by the school is manifest in young Tootle's fragile consciousness. Fearing repercussions for his actions and desirous to remain in line to achieve his career ambitions Tootle hides his dalliance in the field from Bill and the other authorities that impose upon him. 

The next day out practicing his lessons, the siren song of the open field rings again. With ostentatious abandonment Tootle breaks loose of the shackles of the track and frolics in the meadow happily. He smells buttercups and makes himself a daisy chain and dances through the meadow. From these descriptors it is quite clear that Tootle has homoerotic tendencies, tendencies highlighted by an evening conversation between Bill and two of the other railmen, the Day Watchman and the First Assistant Oiler. At their nightly card game, the three bachelors sit in their work garb playing checkers. The bathos of the scenario is palpable. These three pillars of conformity, representing efficiency and cleanliness, the surveillance state, and institutional control sit in their free time and discuss the actions of young trains who refuse to comply to their mold.

"It's queer," says the First Assistant Oiler to Bill. Now while some would argue that the usage of the word "queer" in the mid-1940s differed from the pejorative usage common today, as preeminent queer theorist Alain Fournier argues in his seminal work The Arc of Justice Bends Slowly: The Ubiquity of Unwitting GLBTQILMNOP Prejudice in Literature, even anachronistic readings of texts using today's linguistic tropes and attitudes towards homosexuality are accurate given "the vicious and unrestrained homophobia latent in all of our forebears." In other words, though Crampton might not have explicitly intended a homophobic utterance on the part of the oiler, the effect was latent both in the language she used and in the undoubtedly homophobic attitude she harbored herself. It is important that we remember and judge people from earlier epochs for their unmitigated homophobia, even without explicit evidence to do so. The fear of homosexuality ran so deep and was so acute that it undoubtedly colored an otherwise innocuous remark in a children's story.  

What is more, Gertrude effectively queers Tootle, by having him dancing in a field with a daisy chain around his anthropomorphic neck. The drawings by the ghastly Tibor Gergely--his first principle in art appears to be as little imaginative as possible, his second to whitewash the world with nondescript European faces--highlight the flamboyance of Tootle's actions. Tootle represents the worst fear of mid-twentieth century culture--an out and proud young person, escaping the false constraints of Neo-Victorian culture. As such, both his individuality and his sexuality must be crushed with all of the weight of the prevailing culture. 

We see this in full display in the denouement of the story. Tootle has been spotted in the field by the mayor or Lower Trainswitch who brings the vast bureaucracy of the town to bear on the young engine. Working with Bill and the townspeople, Tootle's jackbooted conformity police work through the night making a number of red flags for each member of the all-white town to hold. It should be noted here that another of Tootle's cringe-inducing courses was Stopping for a Red Flag Waving, something every engine knows he must do.

The next morning when he leaves the track to enjoy his small moments of freedom he is accosted by a red flag behind every bush and tree. He stops for each one and looks for a way around. Alas, in their cold efficiency the townspeople assure there is no other option but to return to the track where a triumphant Bill awaits, green flag in his steely grip. Tootle returns to the track and offers the following heartrending line: "There are nothing but red flags for trains who leave the track."

His will broken, Tootle grows up to achieve his ambitions to run the route between New York and Chicago. Moreover, he becomes a mentor to the next generation of young engines, imparting his wisdom about the importance of staying on the rails no matter what. Fully repressed, Tootle can never be fully happy. 

Perhaps the most appalling fact about Tootle is not that such a work was produced in a time of high conformity but that it continues in print and influencing the minds of what ought to be a generation freed from such concerns. Part of my effort in this paper is directed toward addressing this error, not merely in highlighting how backwards older generations were in what they expected from youth. It is not difficult to conceive of a revision of Tootle more in the spirit of the times. In this version, the young engine would be nurtured in his non-traditional pursuits by a progressive headmaster and his lover the Day Watchman. They would tailor a curriculum toward Tootle's desires and perhaps even encourage him in a transition from a track-bound locomotive implement to something freer to roam the meadows outside of town, for example an ATV or a Jeep. Some simple cosmetic work ought to allow for that transition. The opposition would come from a greedy corporate railman in the model of a Vanderbilt who wants to harness Tootle's raw speed and virility for his proposed route that would carry baby seal carcasses and oil fracking equipment with greater speed. Bill and his lover and the townspeople would help Tootle break free of the railman and become who he feels he is at the time.

Isn't that more of the type of book we want to be reading our children? 

Next up: The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of the Third Little Pig: Industriousness, Capitalism, and Anti-Semitism in The Three Little Pigs.

An Update on that Crappy Running Log Idea, and a Comment on the False Dichotomy Between Fitness and Other Things

hu·bris: a great or foolish amount of pride or confidence

A few months ago I thought I was getting good at running again. I had been logging nearly daily miles for almost six weeks and was progressing nicely. I had signed up for a 20 mile trail race in February and was planning a marathon in April. I had just had a very good long run, with a funny side story involving copious amounts of crotchal (sic) chafing. Carried on by my own inflated view of my athletic prowess (JV basketball, yo!), I thought I would make a weekly training log a feature of this blog. Thus I wrote my first post.

Six days later on a short long run before church I was smitten by the running gods. There is only really one thing pain emanating from your Achilles can mean and it sucks. In the 2-1/2 months since the injury I have ran less than 100 miles. I basically took the entire month of December off after trying to limp through November. I am back at it now, slowly, but chastened and you shan't see me bragging about my epiphanic long runs anymore.

However, I do want to address an assumption about physical fitness that has stuck in my craw for some time and is, for most people, complete B.S. It is, broadly speaking, the false dichotomy between being in shape and excelling in the other parts of your life. People are great at coming up with excuses for not exercising. 

A common one that I hear, given my season of life, is that there is some sort of tension between being a parent and being someone who exercises. I remember running with a friend once and after the run he was red-faced and panting and I was feeling fantastic. He said something about how he knew he was being a good father because I was in better shape than him. I didn't have kids at the time so there was no insinuation that I was being a bad father by running everyday, but there was a clear insinuation that if this guy didn't care about being a superstar dad he would totes smoke me in a 10k. However, at the time I was working probably about 15 hours more per week than my friend. I got up at 5 o'clock every morning to run before getting to work at 6:45. I asked him what he was doing with his kids when I was running at 5 a.m. Both of us, no doubt, were struggling with our pride in this exchange: his pride wounded over not being able to keep up and mine smarting from the assertion that if I was busier I too would stop running.

This was my first glimpse of parenting as cover for being lazy, a dodge I have subsequently used. What I have found is that not many people will call you out on this excuse if you utilize it. I have joked with people since becoming a parent about sympathy weight and being OMG so busy!!! no time to workout!!!! and no one has yet said, "Stop making excuses, you lazy doughy blankety-blank." But Owen isn't exactly pining for me while he is comfortably asleep in the predawn period. Also, dude goes to bed at 8 o'clock in the evening. He is awake for 13 hours per day and sleeps for two of those in the afternoon. And that's why I can't work out? We don't make the same excuses for entertainment. You've never heard anyone say, "I can't be a good parent and watch Downton Abbey." Or, "In order to properly parent my child I just don't have time to read Buzzfeed articles." We all make time for what is important to us. And what should be important to us in our deskbound, computer-clicking, crappy-food-eating culture is getting into a weight room or onto a treadmill or into one of those Zumba things or even being a Cross-fit bro, bro. Don't blame your laziness on your kids. You are out of shape and breathe hard after eating because of choices you make, choices independent of spending time with your kids.

I am saying this as much for me as anyone. After my Achilles injury I was in the Slough of Despond for a bit. By nature I hate lifting weights. I also hate stationary bikes and those elliptical things that mimic no motion any human should ever make. So I was lazy. Eating poorly, watching too much television. AND IT WAS ALL BECAUSE I'M SUCH A GOOD DAD!!! How weird does that sound? But people let you off the hook if you say that. Don't say that. If fitness is a priority you will find a way. I know moms who teach Zumba, run marathons, or do P90X in their basement since dad works early, and they still love their kids. You don't have to qualify for the Boston Marathon or look like someone on the cover of Runner's World, but my guess is you want to teach your kids to treat their bodies well. Treat yours well. 

Anything apart from that is an excuse and usually one cheaply made to make other parents who do get up early and work hard feel bad about it because they are not as great of a parent as you are. If you don't want to work out and don't care much about your health, at least admit it. Don't throw someone else under the bus to cover for your apathy.

Drop the mic. Walk away.

God's Forever Family

The Jesus Freak or Jesus People movement of the late 60s/early 70s has interested me for some time. The church association I was a part up until about a year and a half ago is an offshoot of one such Jesus People movement in the Midwest and still carries some of the enthusiasms from the time. Therefore it was with interest that I read God's Forever Family, a cultural history of the movement by Larry Eskridge, a scholar at Wheaton. In the book, Eskridge argues that the short-lived and intense JP movement has led to many of modern evangelicalism's adaptations and is therefore important to understand even considering its brevity.

The history is interesting, if a bit repetitive. The first group Eskridge keys in on were legitimate hippies, tripping acid and flaunting sexual liberation who came to faith in Jesus, hooked up with a square Presbyterian minister, slowly put away the drugs, and eventually spent their time roaming Haight-Ashbury looking for converts. They were successful to a remarkable degree and, as so much of the counterculture of the time emanated from San Francisco, their blend of oldtime religion and long hair and guitars and flower child affectations spread to the rest of the country.

Some of the colorful characters of this early period are a pleasure to read about (others, mostly the cult leaders, are less of a pleasure, but still entertaining). In a real way they seemed to grasp the gospel and at the same time delighted in confounding their more staid fellow believers. It was a radical time for our country, and in the words of the Bob Dylan Christian-phase song, everyone was serving someone fervently. A bold call to radical discipleship was just one of many bold calls to radical something or other that were fermenting in the period. 

However, it is not long into the narrative before it becomes apparent that the majority of the "converts" to Jesus People Christianity were kids who were raised in the church, but thought it was cool to grow their hair out and ditch the hymnal. In other words, most of the JP folks were young evangelicals who show how steadfast the young evangelical tradition of thinking your parents are doing it all wrong runs historically. The Christianity espoused by the Jesus People was not some liberal, egalitarian mainline strain, but fit for a Methodist tent revival from the prior century. I am not saying this to complain, only to point out that the main innovations of the Jesus People were not doctrinal but aesthetic. In that sense they were less reformers than repackagers. Again, not a complaint, but people tend to treat the era as if epochal change had finally come to Christianity. I am not sure whether it was implied strongly in my early-adulthood but I recall having the distinct impression that Christianity was mired in the muck of conformity and silly tradition from the New Testament church of the early portions of the book of Acts (until they started arguing about stuff) until the post-World War II period.

Indeed, the focus on Acts 2 (oddly neglecting the churches in the epistles of Paul and the rest of Acts) as the sine qua non of true Christianity was one of the central focuses of the Jesus People. One of the top bands of the movement was called The Second Chapter of Acts (!!!THIS IS A SYMBOL!!!). What is striking about this focus is the idea that we can simply attain the communalism and faith of the early Christians in Jerusalem by willing it to happen, as well as the notion that the early communitarian spirit was borne of anything other than necessity given the state of the infant church. It represents an ahistorical view of lived Christianity, assuming that the Christian experience in 1972 Fort Wayne, Indiana is basically the same as 35 A.D. Palestine. Our Savior is the same, but our experiences are different. There is a reason the Apostle Paul wrote different letters to different churches rather than just sending them a copy of his physician's account of the early church and highlighting three verses and telling them, "DO THIS!"

The ultimate undoing or dissolution of the Jesus People (such as it happened) was not caused by sexual scandal or even by the rampant cultic activity, but by one of those inexorable laws of humanity--the early Jesus People grew up. It is easy to advocate communal living and possessions while single, harder when married, nary impossible when you have kids. Further, it is easy to spend your days sharing the gospel when you have no one to support but yourself, and far more difficult when you are married and have kids and read Biblical injunctions about providing for your family. The old hippie saw about not trusting anyone over 30 proved accurate. The hippie generation grew up and elected Ronald Reagan, twice. The Jesus People turned 30 and grew up, returning to their Presbyterian church or the Baptists or joining nondenominational churches that allowed people to live out a non-apocalyptic form of Christianity.

Eskridge argues though that many of the innovations of Christianity since the short-lived Jesus People movement have been linked to the emphases of the movement. Features of contemporary worship like "praise" songs rather than hymns, the growth of contemporary Christian music (CCM) as an industry, the "seeker-sensitive" movement that sought to make church a fun place to hang out on a Sunday morning and hear a pithy sermon about something vaguely Christian, and the focus on harnessing youth energy are all attributed to the influence of JP Christianity. Reading back over this list some of you may wonder whether this should evoke praise or condemnation. I don't think there is an easy answer either way. For many of my generation, having grown up in churches where positive and encouraging seemed to outweigh doctrinal and historical, this seems like a Faustian bargain. You might get people into the door, but what if you have nothing to tell them? And what do you give up to get them to come? But that is far too simplistic. A lot of good came out of and continues to come out of the seeker sensitive churches. This is not necessarily to approve of their efforts or to gloss over the anti-intellectualism, consumerism, and emotionalism they promote, only to acknowledge that God is far greater than our filthy rags whether they be traditional and reformational or contemporary and emotional and that He can save people in a variety of contexts.

The primary lesson for me in this book is that we have to be cautious in what we are willing to do to try to get young people to stay interested in church. In order to placate and accommodate the Jesus People, pastors and elders who ought to have known better rolled over on a number of things more important than hair length, such as proper interpretation of the Bible and the solidity provided by tradition as opposed to temperamental emotionalism. I went to a church in high school that had a separate building for young people so we didn't have to suffer through boring church with our parents. There was a gym and a punk band and fifteen year old kids were actually encouraged to share things at various times in front of the whole group as if any of us had one infinitesimal clue what we were talking about. I made out with a number of girls I met there, including two in the parking lot of the church. I had better luck there than I did at my school. 

Of course this is due to my own insecurities and sin at the time. It is not as if I was actively encouraged by the youth leader, a man I hold in tremendous respect to this day, to make out with girls after youth group. However, the whole content of the service was based on an emotional response, hands lifted high in worship, fervent, unconsidered prayers to NEVER SIN AGAIN!!!. In other words it was like eating candy, especially at an already highly emotional phase of life. I went out hopped up on the sugar rush and crashed by the time I got home. Young people simply cannot conceive of ever not feeling as intensely about things as they feel at the time. Anyone who does not feel as intensely as they do is therefore not as committed or devoted or whatever. Thank God I don't feel things like I did was 15 or 22. People who chase that stuff into their older age are pathetic. Boring has a lot going for it. Also, in actually reading the Bible you find young people repeatedly warned that they are proud and stupid while the elders are repeatedly praised. Thus, contra our culture, the Bible praises age and experience and wisdom over fervency and zeal and stupidity. The Jesus People, admirable as they were in many ways, had plenty of the latter three qualities. Unfortunately, their legacy to the church appears to be the same focus on youth that led to their excesses (Google "Children of God") as well as their quick flame-out.      

Some Disparate Thoughts on the Legalization of Marijuana

Let's all burn one down in honor of Colorado. If I didn't want to move back before, I definitely do now. As one far-seeing individual told NPR the other morning after he drove for 10 hours and waited for another six to buy a bag of weed, the first day of 2014 was a "monumental day in American history." The signing of the declaration, the Emancipation Proclamation, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and marijuana legalization. We'll all tell our grandkids where we were the first time we toked up legal weed.

Really this whole thing evokes no strong feelings for me. I remember in college that marijuana legalization made perfect sense to me as a libertarian solution to the drug war. Tax the crap out of it and stop buying it from Mexico and use the tax money to fight the really bad drugs. One of my good friends from El Paso was a city councilor who is now a congressman and one of his plank issues was legalization. Seeing the ravages of the drug war across the border in Juarez was enough to convert him and I respected that position. Every day we were inundated with news of beheadings and mutilation and murder just a few minutes' drive from where we enjoyed a privileged first world existence. The contrast is stark, to say the least.

The effects of our prohibition on drug creation in our country has created a war in Central America that is nasty. This, along with the disproportionate effect of our drug policy on minorities (how many white kids go to jail for possession?) is often cited as the central reasons for ending the ban.

But anyone should be able to admit that these are not the primary reasons pot is now legal in Colorado. Don't get me wrong, the above issues certainly merit policy considerations, but I don't imagine those two issues are particularly vexing in Boulder. Pot is legal now because enough people think there is nothing wrong with it. As we live in a democracy, this is fine, but I don't like it when people who just want to get high act as if they have some higher-minded (see what I did there?) social consciousness animating their decision. Of course you can support legalization for a number of reasons, but let's just be honest and admit that for most people who support legalization it is for a selfish reason. 

Also, as to those important social issues I can't imagine why anyone would think that removing mandatory sentencing for marijuana offenses would somehow mitigate the chronic (see what I did there?) urban problems of which marijuana possession is only an outward symbol. I can't help but think that if one substance is legalized most people who were looking to profit from the illegal sale of marijuana will merely switch substances. Further, there are ways to elide the disproportionate effect of drug policy on minorities that fall short of legalization.

And here is where I run into a problem with the pro-legalization crowd: they cannot conceive of any reason someone in good conscience might oppose their position. These progressives once again prove more Puritanical than Puritans. Dissent from their position doesn't mean that you have a thoughtful alternative perspective, but that you like nothing better than locking up young black men for petty offenses and preventing other people from having fun.

As to the ubiquitous alcohol comparison, this might be the only argument where, "Hey this thing we want to do is not as bad as another thing that is already legal," has received real traction. Isn't that more of an argument against alcohol than pro-weed? Also, the two substances are different. I had a glass of wine last night and was not drunk. I don't think you can smoke weed without getting high and can't imagine why you would want to were it possible.

We all learned in DARE (how will this effect their curriculum?) about how marijuana is a "gateway" drug to the more serious stuff. This is easy to laugh at in the same way it is easy to laugh at the fuddy-duddies in the 50s who talked about how rock music was going to promote a sex-obsessed, narcissistic, short-attention span culture: both just sound so damn square while at the same time being so damn right. Obviously not everyone who smokes weed turns into a tweaker, but at the same time there are probably very few people who regularly snort cocaine who did not start their illicit drug career with marijuana. What's more, the people who do go from weed to meth are probably socioeconomically disadvantaged to begin with and government-sponsored weed might take the place of clandestinely grown schwag in their consumption choice. Hooray! (The anti-prohibitionists here sort of take the tack of extreme gun-rights folks who argue that we may as well license the sale of automatic weapons because a black market exists for them anyway. Great, kids can get pot now from their friend's brother or their uncle or whatever, but that doesn't mean we should legalize the process.)

I guess my larger point here is that most of the active voices for marijuana legalization are rich, privileged white people. As in most things, the harsh side of a certain practice tends to be softened by money and privilege. Most rich, white people can smoke weed without worrying about falling into meth, whereas a lot of poorer people don't have the same sort of protective structure. What's more, most rich, white people probably smoke marijuana to avoid burnout and relax for a bit (think of the lawyer billing 80 hours a week that smokes on Sunday to come down), rather than to temporarily escape from their boring existence (a solid majority of the people who smoke weed). It is the difference between having a cocktail in the evening after a day in the office and having beer for breakfast on a Tuesday. 

This is why David Brooks' much-aligned article was right in asking us to consider what we want our government to promote. To take the Apostle Paul, for instance, is there not a difference between what is permissible and what is beneficial? This is another instance of our culture of consent, whose reasoning goes something like: if consenting adults agree what could be the problem? But is consent the only standard worth worrying about? If it is, what else do we expose ourselves to (slippery slope alert)? 

Christmas and Consumerism or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Giving

It is pretty easy these days to mock the excesses of Christmas. The stores opening on Thanksgiving, five year-olds asking for iPhones, the Best Buy commercial where an aunt gives her nieces tablets (seriously? I am from a fairly wealthy family, but I don't recall ever getting anything from an aunt nor would I expect anything), and the way the birth of Jesus is tied into people going into debt. The critiques write themselves and are so, so boring. Yes, we get it anti-consumerists, you don't want to buy things for people. Could you please just quiet down about it? Left hand and right hand not knowing each other, Pharisees praying loudly and all that.

I used to fall into the critic crowd (though I always lustily accepted whatever my parents got for me) and then I had kids. Kids make you go bananas about giving. There is nothing better in the world than giving your kids a gift. I do it all of the time. I'll see some little knick-knack that no one alive really needs and get it for Owen because I love to give him stuff. We bought him a Strider bike for Christmas and I kept it at work so he wouldn't see it before the big day. For the past two weeks I have walked past that thing multiple times every day and broken out into a mile-wide grin. I can't wait to give it to him. This morning I was at the farm store getting some chicken feed for our girls and bought him four little animal toys because they had giraffes and he loves giraffes. And then I got him a horse, too, because he has a rocking horse upstairs that he likes to ride while I ride next to him on the rocking chair (we ride to the duck pond to feed the ducks and go fishing). His horse is named Lucky, and my rocking chair is named Lightning. He told me last night that instead of flying to Hawaii we should ride horses. "A fine, strong black horse," he told me. Who am I to disagree?

My parents get this better than anyone. They don't sit around fretting about the creeping consumerism of Christmas--they just give and give and give. If you want to break out of the secularizing impulse of our American incarnation of the holiday you don't do it by refraining  from giving. We are celebrating in this season the greatest gift of all time and all of our gifts are mere whispers, dull, petty imitations of that great gift God gave us in his Son, but we give them anyway to remind ourselves of that great gift. 

I am not trying to sanctify all giving that is done in the name of Christmas. Some is probably irresponsible. I don't advocate debt. Some is done with ulterior motives. But to me the extravagant giving is better than the self-righteous refraining that some seem to want to put in its place. Our Father has dealt with us extravagantly after all. And his generosity outstrips anything we could ever come close to matching. My answer to the consumerist conundrum, then, is to give more and give with a view to our profligately gifting God. 

Merry Christmas! Drink some eggnog.    

Violence and the Old Testament

As part of my Advent readings this year, I have read most of the Old Testament law. If Christ comes to enact a new covenant I want to better understand the old covenant. The Old Testament is such a strange--in the sense of foreign--set of documents to me that I often feel while reading that I am treading on ground best left undisturbed. There is so much of it I don't get, in the same way I don't get the Letter to the Hebrews--the culture is alien to me.

Given this cultural alienation it can be easy to condemn much of the book for its harshness. The violence in the Old Testament, God-endorsed and otherwise, is staggering. Along these lines Mark Twain once quipped that it was not the parts of the Bible he didn't understand that bothered him, but those parts that he did. Every time I read the Old Testament I become sympathetic to the Manichees and their dualism.

But the Manichees were heretics and the God who set Israel to clear the Holy Land of its inhabitants is the God who shows steadfast love to thousands and who sent Jesus to die on the cross to make atonement for our sins. If you lose the Old Testament, you lose Jesus. If God is not a God of wrath then there is nothing to be saved from. If God is not a God of grace than we are not saved. If God is not a covenantal God than we can have no assurance in our salvation. 

Anyway, I was reading one of those difficult passages in Deuteronomy this morning that makes our modern sensibilities shudder:

"If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, 'Let us go and serve other gods,' which neither you nor your fathers have known, some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all people." (13.6-9)

There are many such commandments in the Old Testament and in the historical books we see examples of people acting on these commands. It makes Jesus's famous words that whoever doesn't hate his mother or his father or his sister of his brother seem benign. It also makes the Bibles I had as a kid, with their cutesy pictures of serene animals and smiling Hebrews, seem far too saccharine for such R-rated material.* As I was puzzling over this issue over my morning orange juice I felt I must be missing something. And of course I was.

Right before chapter 13 begins with its kill all blasphemers commands, the Lord gives Moses a word about the people they are going to dispossess:

"When the Lord your God cuts off before you the nations whom you go in to dispossess, and you dispossess them and dwell in their land, take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods, saying, 'How did these nations serve their gods?--that I may also do the same.' You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way for every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods." (12.29-31)

There are certain sins the Lord detests more than others. I don't feel it is a stretch to say this. All sin is sin, but there is a qualitative difference between speaking a harsh word to your child and throwing your child into a fire. And in setting out a people peculiar to Himself, God could not allow that type of evil to remain in the land. How could you leave any remnant of that about? For if you don't destroy it utterly it will rear its head again.**

I think we have a tendency to sit at a distance from this culture and this time period and smooth over the differences between these competing faiths. We are not talking about the difference today between a practicing Jew and a practicing Hindu or a practicing Buddhist and a practicing Christian. We are talking about a people claimed by the Creator God, Yahweh, and people who sacrificed their children to Moloch. The differences are more than stark and the danger of returning to that type of brutalizing faith was an ever present reality for God's fledgling people. If he was to fulfill his purposes for Israel, that simply could not be allowed to happen.

In John Milton's stunningly weird and weirdly stunning Christmas poem, "On the Morning of Christ's Nativity," he pictures the infant Christ banishing the old gods of the world, ranging from the more benign (the nymphs and Thamuz) to the more insidious (Moloch, Dagon), from the new world he inaugurates. And in doing so, the infant Christ is bringing to completion the work began in the Promised Land by the people of God so long before him. But, as Christ inaugurates a new and better covenant, so the promise to worshipers of foreign gods is better. Now rather than dying for their gods, their gods have died, and the walls between them and the true God have been removed. So while I can appreciate what the old covenant was doing, I must say that I am immensely thankful to be living under the new. 

* In reading kids' Bibles to Owen I always am tempted to finish the story. For example, kids' Bibles seem to cut off the David and Goliath story after David flings the rock. Yea! He hit a guy in a head with a rock because he trusted God. The End. Violent, sure. But they leave out the part where David goes over to the not-yet-dead Philistine and picks up his giant sword and cuts his head off and holds it up for the armies of God to see. Master Caravaggio, take it away. I mean this with all reverence, that is a completely badass scene, but one I have yet to see depicted on felt-board or glistening card-stock pages.

** It should also be noted that it is not as if the Jews went on an unprecedented rampage through Palestine. It was not for nothing that the land of the Assyrians was called "The Land Bathed in Blood." Some cultures were spared, some individuals were converted to the faith. But there were certain peoples that could not be left to spread their disease to the people of God.

The Horrors of Homeschooling

I came across this lengthy article in Prospect by Kathryn Joyce profiling children who had been raised in fundamentalist home-schooling homes and escaped out of the miasma of Parental Control. I tend to chuckle, despite myself, when I read articles like this. Not that there aren't terrible homeschooling situations. Undoubtedly there are. And I feel real compassion for children who are raised to believe that any dissent from there parents is a sure route to hell. That is vicious and mean doctrine and should be spoken out against. In that sense, I have no problem with an article talking about some of these awful scenarios in which fundamentalist kids were raised. When this becomes problematic is when the anecdotal stories of abuse are slap-dashly used to represent the logical outcome of any homeschooling by Christians.

You can see this tendency in scare paragraphs ("scareagraphs"?) like the following: 

"What many lawmakers and parents failed to recognize were the extremist roots of fundamentalist homeschooling. The movement’s other patriarch was R.J. Rushdoony, founder of the radical theology of Christian Reconstructionism, which aims to turn the United States into an Old Testament theocracy, complete with stonings for children who strike their parents. Rushdoony, who argued that democracy was “heresy” and Southern slavery was “benevolent,” was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he inspired a generation of religious-right leaders including Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. He also provided expert testimony in early cases brought by the HSLDA. Rushdoony saw homeschooling as not just providing the biblical model for education but also a way to bleed the secular state dry."

Now I have never heard of Rushdoony, and maybe he is the rat bastard he is made out to be in this clearly objective paragraph, but really all this paragraph seems to be saying is "one douchebag favored homeschooling." He was too extreme for most conservative Christians, but he nonetheless "influenced" James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. How? you might ask. Doesn't matter. Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson! You just have to recite the names of conservative bogeymen and let that do the arguing for you.

I imagine most of you know that my wife was homeschooled through junior high and went to public high school. I don't know if her parents have ever heard of Rushdoony, and they would surely be surprised by the notion of democracy as "heresy" but none of that matters--they were Christians and homeschoolers, ergo bad people who suppressed their children.

The whole article is about as well-researched as a term paper one of my old freshman writing students turned into me at K-State. There are stats about how many people give money to the Homeschooling Defense fund, but none that might give any indication about the percentages of homeschooling students who are disgruntled and felt the need to escape the Fundamentalist Philistinism of their parents. Joyce relies on horrifying anecdotes. A homeschooled teen was killed by her parents and they had a popular homeschooling book on the shelf. Although the book does not explicitly tell parents to kill their kids it is clearly implied. Spanking is a gateway drug to murder, after all.  

But anecdotes don't prove much, really. My wife and her seven siblings seemed to enjoy the experience of being homeschooled and most will probably homeschool their own kids (as we might well do ourselves). My wife's dad is one of her heroes, and her mom her example of servanthood and love. Should I use their anecdotes to cancel out an opposing one?

You can feel Joyce's frustration when she writes things like this: "Homeschooling now exists in a virtual legal void; parents have near-total authority over what their children learn and how they are disciplined." For shame, America! Letting parents teach their children and discipline them. Discipline is so medieval. Or this: "The amendment [in Pennsylvania] would enshrine in the Constitution parents’ 'fundamental right' to direct their child’s upbringing however they see fit, free of state interference." I think we used to call this being a family. And I think that is Joyce's most elemental problem with homeschooling: the state does not have complete control, but parents. It is a short road from that belief to advocating for children to being taken out of their home because any conservative parenting constitutes abuse. 

There are problems aplenty with parenting in our nation, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that most of the problems are not emanating from the occasional over-zealousness of Christian parents. Clara helps moms deliver babies nearly every day with stories that would put to shame the sob stories of kids who weren't allowed to watch The Simpsons (incidentally, starting at an appropriate age, The Simpsons will form an integral part of our children's education; everything I needed to know about pop culture and America I learned from The Simpsons). She had a patient recently, eight months pregnant who is so addicted to alcohol that she drank hand-sanitizer while in the hospital to get a fix. How is life going to go for that kid? She has had numerous moms who were on meth and continued to use while pregnant. Others, less overtly extreme, just seem as if they do not care about their children at all. Often there is no father around. And I would imagine that these cases are relatively more common than an abusive homeschooling parent. But those cases don't rile up the target audience of Prospect to the same level of fear as that of the Christian Fundamentalist. Plus, they are only anecdotes as well. Most moms are drug-free, non-alcoholics, who will love their kids and try hard to raise them well. 

It is a complex world. Do abuses of homeschooling mean we should outlaw homeschooling? What about teachers who abuse children? Should we outlaw teachers? Does encouraging your daughter to value motherhood and children equate to naked patriarchal subjugation? What about just not giving a shit about your kids? Which is worse? Joyce doesn't want to answer complex questions. For her, it is not a complex issue. These disparate anecdotes are evidence enough, and her confirmation bias tells her everything she already knew.