Category Archives: Personal

17th of May

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Today is the seventeenth of May, a very big day for those of us with Norwegian ancestry.  Syttende Mai, in Norwegian.  May 17 is the Norwegian Constitution Day.  Sometimes Norwegian Americans call it the ‘Norwegian 4th of July.’  May 17, the day Norway declared itself an independent nation, free from Danish rule.

I didn’t know much about the history of the Riksforsamlingen, the Norwegian Constitutional Assembly of 1814.  I’ve been to Eidsvoll, the town where the Assembly met.  When I was a kid, my Dad took our family there. A museum about politics, I remember, with all these paintings of guys in 19th century garb.  Boring.  It was one of those historical sites your parents drag you to when you’re a kid.  (Which, later in life, you really appreciate more, and vow to drag your own kids there someday.)  So this morning, I thought I should learn more about my heritage and history and did one of those Wikipedia search things, where you bounce from link to link and it just gets more and more fascinating.

Eidsvold, for example.  (They changed the spelling of the place in 1905, to today’s Eidsvoll).  Leading Norwegians met there in 1814, tasked with writing a constitution.  And they did it in, like, a month!  I know a lot about the American constitution, the ferocious debates and compromises.  But the Norwegians, heck, they did theirs in, like, five weeks.  Starting on April 10 (my birthday!), they finished their work by May 17.  When the US constitutional convention finished, the other delegates asked Benjamin Franklin to give a final speech, in which he said, basically, ‘look, we all know what we wrote isn’t very good, but it’s the best we could do, given our differences.’  Not the Norwegians. They had done great work, and knew it. This is my favorite part of Eidsvold: when the delegates finished, they all held hands and vowed: “United and loyal until the mountains of Dovre crumble!” I love that.

Here’s the history: for 400 years, Norway was under Danish rule.  Denmark, however, bet on the wrong horse in the Napoleonic wars.  So when Napoleon lost, the Brits forced Denmark to sign the Treaty of Kiel.  Norway was transferred from Danish to Swedish rule without Norwegians having any say over it.  The Danish Prince serving as Norwegian governor was outraged, and called for Norwegian independence: thus Eidsvold.

One might expect that a declaration of independence might lead to war, and that’s exactly what happened.  The Norwegian/Swedish war of 1814 was as mean as internecine wars can be. Nasty stuff. It made for a very tough couple of weeks, I’ll tell you.  Yep, that’s how long it lasted: Sweden invaded Norway on July 26, 1814, and badly outnumbered Norwegian forces battled ‘em to a standstill.  By August 9, both sides agreed to a cease-fire, and peace negotiations began, in Moss (where my Dad was born!), and concluded by August 14.

There’s something maybe a little bit comical about a civil war/war of independence lasting two weeks.  It feels a bit like a chess match, where white opens by advancing a pawn, and black goes “hmm, can’t beat that,” and offers a draw.  But actually, the two sides didn’t have a lot to fight about.  What made the most sense was to have two independent nations under a single king. Norway essentially had autonomy, except for foreign policy, which the Swedes ran.

It gets better.  Norway had gained its independence from Denmark in the Treaty of Kiel.  At the time, the governor of Norway was Prince Christian Frederick, who was also the Danish crown prince.  And he became the strongest advocate for Norwegian independence!  So when Norway agreed to accept a Swedish king, poor old Christian Frederick had to go back to Denmark and be Crown Prince again.  And eventually, king of Denmark.  Later, in 1905, when Norway decided to go completely independent, with its own king and foreign policy, they (I love this) had an election!  They elected a king!  The guy they elected, A Danish prince who became King Haakon VII, had impeccable credentials, from the House of Schelsvig/Holstein/Sonderberg/Glucksberg, and, as a junior Danish prince, wasn’t ever going to be king otherwise.  And he turned out to be a tremendous king.

His grandson, Harald, is the current king. And I love this too, his daughter, Martha Louise, fourth in the line of succession, decided she didn’t want to be a Princess anymore.  She’s wonderfully loopy; a licensed physio-therapist-turned-entertainer, into holistic medicine, plus she says she can talk to animals and angels, plus she writes children’s books, plus she does a lot of charity work for disabled children. She’s not a royal princess anymore–just got out of the family business, mostly, though she’ll occasionally agree to attend public events.

I love this stuff.  There’s something irretrievably goofy about contemporary Scandinavian history.  I love the fact, that possibly the most popular museum in Sweden is the Vasa museum.  The Vasa was this great seventeenth century warship, symbol of Swedish military might, back in the 1620s when Sweden genuinely was a significant European power.  10 August, 1628, the Vasa, Sweden’s greatest warship, was launched amidst all sorts of pomp and ceremony.  It sailed out into a major Stockholm harbor shipping lane, and sank ten minutes after being launched.  Royally screwed up shipping navigation for the next two hundred years.

In WWII, Norwegians genuinely showed their mettle–the Norwegian Underground fought with great courage and determination, and by destroying a German heavy water shipment, put a real crimp in Hitler’s attempts to build an atomic bomb.  Here’s a link to the trailer for a terrific Norwegian film about the Underground, Max Manus, for example.  But Norway is generally a wonderfully peaceful place.

That’s nowhere clearer than on the Seventeenth of May.  It’s a wonderful holiday in Norway, with lots of flags and children waving flags and flag parades. Some folks dress up in traditional garb, and that’s really lovely, all the Norwegian women in their bunads.

One of my favorite parts involve the russ parties and celebrations.  Norwegian kids graduate from the equivalent of high school on or around May 17, and traditionally, they stay awake the entire night, partying.  It’s called the russfeiring.  They wear a hat, a ‘russ’ cap, and they get pins for their hats depending on the kinds of mischief they manage to get up to.  If they can keep a teacher up all night by ringing his doorbell: that’s a pin.  If they actually stay up all night, that’s a pin.  You’ll be shocked, shocked, to learn that a lot of the russ pin awards involve drinking games. But I remember, for example, some really imaginative and pretty funny acts of semi-vandalism–comical sayings painted on town statues, that kind of thing.

And the seventeenth of May parades (including the big one down Karl Johansgate in Oslo), end with the singing of the Norwegian national anthem, ja vi elsker dette landet.  The text is by the great playwright and novelist Bjornstjerne Bjornson, and it’s lovely.  None of this martial American flag worshipping.

Yes, we love this, our country
as it rises forth,
rugged, weathered, above the sea,
with thousands of our homes.
Love it, love it and think
of our father and mother
and the saga night that blesses our earth with dreams. And the saga night, that blesses our earth with dreams.

It then goes on, verse after verse, heralding the Norwegian Viking past, which it reimagines as a continuous fight for freedom.  It mentions the two week war fought with Sweden.  And then, this stirring peroration:

Norwegian men in house and cabin,
thank your great God!
The country He wished to protect,
no matter how dark it seemed.
Our fathers fought

And our mothers wept

and God quietly granted us

Our sacred freedom.

It’s a beautifully celebratory day for a compassionate and peace-loving people.  I wish I were in Norway today, in Tromso and Moss and Oslo and Porsgrunn and Lillehammer, the places I know and love.  I wish I could wave my flag, and sing ja vi elsker.  Meanwhile, if you know any Norwegians, give ‘em a hug.  This is their day.

 

Bums

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One place they gather is just outside the Maceys parking lot.  Maceys is where I do most of our grocery shopping, and the entrance onto State Street is narrow enough that traffic backs up there.  They give you time to see them, with their cardboard signs.  ‘Homeless Please Help.’  Friday, it was a family, multi-generational, multi-racial.  The youngest looked about twenty; he was tall, had something wrong with his left leg, gimped over. He was on my right, passenger side, had to lean into the car for the money.  I gave him three dollars, all I had in small denominations.  “Thanks, man,” he said.

Something about homelessness; language reverts to a sixties usage and idiom.  Adding ‘man’ to every sentence.  “Here you go, man.”  “Wish it were more, man.” “Thanks, man.”  And yesterday, outside Bed Bath and Beyond, from the short toothless elderly African American guy I gave a few quarters to, “God bless you, my brother.”  It’s heavy, man, thinking about homelessness. Groovy to give. The sound track is Tracy Chapman and “Fast Car” and Jimi with Highway Chile and Tull with “Aqualung.” It all feels very tie-dye and patchouli oil.  Like, man, the first time we cared about our brothers, you dig?

I wonder how they decide who gets which spot.  The corner of State and Bulldog seems like a bad place to panhandle.  Cars move too stop–there’s not a good place to stand.  But they were there too, Friday. I’d broken a twenty and had a few bills for the Native American-looking woman, there with a daughter.  But the car behind me honked when I stopped to give it to her.  Impatient, maybe angry.

My wife and I have agreed; if we can give ‘em a few bucks, we try to.  We don’t always.  And I’m stingy about it.  I’ll give a couple of bucks, or a few quarters, but if I have a ten or a twenty, it stays in my pocket.  My charity has serious limitations.

We shouldn’t encourage bums, you hear.  This is their job, panhandling, and a lucrative one.  You’d be shocked how much they make at it too!  Instead of just getting a real job, and doing real work, for an honest wage. Don’t be a sucker.  They work on the sympathies of soft-headed liberals/Christians/doo-gooders. And if you give them money, they’ll just use it to get drunk.

I don’t care about any of that.  Maybe some of them will get drunk. Or high.  I don’t care.  I see a family with children.  The kids look hungry.  I see an old guy, defeated by life, hanging on.  I see a battered face, I see worn jeans and a filthy jacket and a backpack.  A shopping cart, filled with junk.  I see some of the worst shoes ever.  Limping, like the shoes, crappy as they are, also don’t fit.

They don’t seem to hang out by Harmons.  We don’t shop at Harmons, much. It’s a lot nicer grocery store, with more organic veggies, with expensive cheeses, with fancy breads and muffins. Not many processed foods.  We shop there occasionally.  They offer a service where they bag your groceries and then take them to a loading area, where you can park and they load ‘em in your car.  Harmon’s is north east Orem, closer to the nicer neighborhoods in Lindon and up in the river bottoms and foothills.  You don’t see a lot of panhandlers there, outside Harmons.  Rich folks equal slim pickins, I suspect.

And I wonder what it’s like in the northwest valley, up by Alpine and Lehi and Cedar Hills and Saratoga Springs.  I once knew a guy who was a bishop in an Alpine ward.  He said that from time to time, it was his duty, as bishop, to tell people who had moved in, ‘we think you probably move.  We think you can’t afford to live here.’  Those wards, where Youth Conference involved trips to Cancun or Wahweap.  I wonder where they shop for groceries.  I wonder if panhandlers haunt their parking lots.  Maybe so.  Maybe it makes sense for them.

But in Provo, outside Macey’s or the Fresh Market on Center Street.  They’re always there. And I bet the real poor-people grocer, Reams, I bet that place is crowded with homeless beggars.  The people who shop at Reams, where you have to bag your own groceries, those are the people who know how fragile the line is between them an poverty. They may have less, but you can bet they give more.

And here I am, judging.  In fact, it’s hard to see any part of homelessness that doesn’t get all caught up in judging, in self-righteousness, in feeling superior.  We judge the homeless, assume their failures are entirely their fault, that they’re homeless because of recklessness or profligacy or self-indulgence or addiction.  (What’s that great Mitch Hedberg line? ‘Alcoholism is the one disease people get mad at you for getting’).  We try to think of ways to help them on our terms.  ‘I’ll buy you breakfast?,’ we consider saying, instead of giving cash they’ll just drink up.  But breakfast, at least he’s getting a decent meal.  Or we think, ‘what if I offered him a job? I bet he’d turn it down.  He’s a bum because he likes being a bum.’  We think that.

We like to judge beggars.  But then, when we hand the guy a couple of bucks, we like to judge the people in all the other cars that don’t give him anything.  I just did it, judging folks who shop at Harmon’s.  We judge those who give more than we do, and those who give less than we do, and we judge ourselves too–’why didn’t I give more (or less).’

And yet, it’s precisely when dealing with the poor that we’re not actually supposed to judge at all:

And also, ye yourselves will succor those that stand in need of your succor; ye will administer of your substance unto him that standeth in need; and ye will not suffer that the beggar putteth up his petition to you in vain, and turn him out to perish. Perhaps thou shalt say: The man has brought upon himself his misery; therefore I will stay my hand, and will not give unto him of my food, nor impart unto him of my substance that he may not suffer, for his punishments are just—But I say unto you, O man, whosoever doeth this the same hath great cause to repent; and except he repenteth of that which he hath done he perisheth forever, and hath no interest in the kingdom of God.  For behold, are we not all beggars? Do we not all depend upon the same Being, even God, for all the substance which we have? (Mosiah 4: 16-19)

And I’m not even going to get into the whole ‘the government should help more/no it shouldn’t, government programs just foster dependency’ debate.  I know both sides of that argument, and perhaps there’s some merit to both. It does seem to me to be getting worse. And I know which arguments we’re not allowed to make, as Christians.  We’re not allowed to say ‘it’s his fault.  He gets nothing from me.’  We’re not even allowed to think it.

So my wife and I do what we can, give a little each time, wish it were more.  Look into the faces of the poor, and see defeated eyes, rheumy eyes, crazy eyes.  See reflected desperation or anger or mental illness.  See our Heavenly Father’s children, down and out, down and falling, down to nothing in the richest country the world has ever seen.  So we give.

 

 

season of, well, me

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Saturday night, Plan B Theatre Company in Salt Lake announced their next season; the 2013/14 season.  It’s a season of plays by, well, me.  Here’s a link to their website for details about season tickets and stuff.

It’s insane, humbling.  There it is, right there on the website, ‘a season dedicated to works by Eric Samuelsen.’  It’s a tremendous honor, and a monumental trust, for Jerry Rapier and Cheryl Cluff to take a chance on me like this.

So okay: what are the plays?  This is shameless self-promotion, obviously, but I am hoping we sell some tickets and I’m hoping friends, at least, will come see the shows.  So, very briefly, the plays:

First up: Nothing Personal (Oct. 24-Nov.3).  During the dark hours of Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, Susan McDougal, wife of Jim McDougal (who ran the S&L at the heart of the controversy), refused to testify before Starr’s grand jury.  The main Clinton accuser, David Hales, had testified that she’d had an affair with Clinton.  She hadn’t, but was afraid of being charged with perjury if she said that under oath.  And so she was imprisoned for eighteen months for contempt of court.  Put in solitary confinement, in fact, on death row.

I started there, with the Susan McDougal case.  But when I wrote the play, the various Bush administration violations of civil liberties and human rights were in the news.  I felt the play should expand its scope, talk about larger issues: the war on Terror, torture, detention.  So the characters are simply called ‘Susan’ and Kenneth,’ no last names; it’s more a play about the nightmarish atmosphere of our recent history than specific politic events of the late ’90s.  We’ll see how it works.

Next: Fairyana (Dec. 3). A radio show, which will be performed live while also being broadcast on KUER.  It’s a play about a children’s television program, and the hardened, alcoholic, violent, cynics who write it.  The radio show is very noire-ish in style. There’s a murder at one point.  I’m going for the funny here; the cast is terrific.

Clearing Bombs (Feb. 20-March 4) is a play that just got a lot more topical this week, with British historian Niall Ferguson’s recent comments suggesting that the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes should be discounted because he was gay.  In fact, my play is about Keynes, and Friedrich Hayek, and the night, in 1942, the two economists spent on the roof of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, tasked with clearing away German incendiary bombs.

So what did they talk about?  No one knows.  But I thought it probable that they talked about their academic discipline.  I added a third character, Mr. Bowles, a fire warden, basically so the conversation wouldn’t turn so hopelessly technical audiences wouldn’t be able to follow it. So, yeah, it’s a play about economic theory.  As a playwright, you have to give audiences what they want, and what theatre audiences are clamoring for today is hard-core macro-economics. Clamoring, I say.  An amazing cast will help: Mark Fossen as Keynes, Jay Perry as Hayek, and Kirt Bateman as Mr. Bowles.

So, yeah, the risk is that it’ll be dull. Ninety minutes of economists arguing economics–shoot me now.  I get that.  But you can’t say it’s not relevant today; what with the US and international economies all struggling.  My biggest fear is that this rap video will end up having said everything I want the play to, only shorter and funnier.

Finally, 3 (March 27-April 6).  That’s 3; that’s the title.  Three short plays, each with a cast of three women, in which Mormon women confront their own culture.  The three plays: Bar and Kell, in which an abused young woman becomes the ‘ward project.’  Community Standard, in which a jury tries to determine the community standard for obscenity, and one of the jury members confronts the dark secret at the heart of her marriage.  And Duets, in which a decision by a straight young woman to marry her gay best friend has tragic consequences. I’m sort of hoping my friends at Mormon Feminist Housewives will try to catch it.

Plan B will also do a script-in-hand reading of my play Miasma, which they premiered a few years ago, but which they want to take another look at.  In addition, they’re doing another script-in-hand reading of my translation of Henrik Ibsen’s masterpiece, Ghosts.

So, if you live in Salt Lake County (or close enough to drive up), come see some plays.  We’ll hang out.  This is seriously a tremendous honor.  Plan B Theatre company is, IMHO, the best theatre company in Utah, and of the best in the West.  An entire theatre company almost entirely devoted to new plays by local playwrights.  Astonishing.  Foolhardy.  Brave.  It’s going to be an exciting year.

 

SLAM: a personal history

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A few days to SLAM.  I’m already getting nervous.

I wrote another version of this post for the SLAM blog, but wanted to expand on it here.  I love SLAM, and hate it, and am terrified by it, and wouldn’t miss it for anything.  Here’s how it works.

SLAM is this event sponsored by Plan B Theatre Company in Salt Lake, my favorite company in the world.  It’s a 24 hour theatre experience.  On Friday, two weeks from now, I’ll drive to Salt Lake and meet with the Plan B torturer in chief artistic director, Jerry Rapier.  We’ll get a title, see the set, be handed the names and headshots/resumes of 3-5 actors.  Our task; to write a 10-minute play that night, overnight, and deliver it the next morning.  The actors and directors will then rehearse all day, and they’ll perform the play, off-book, Saturday night. Here’s a link for info and tickets. If you’re in SLC this weekend, come see it!  You’ll be blown away, I promise.

That means that on Saturday, May 4, an audience will see a play in full production that did not exist twenty-four hours earlier.  My task, after delivering the script, will be to catch up on my sleep, then come back to the theater and writhe in my seat.  Watching the plays is terrifying.  The playwrights are all friends, and we’ve talked about it, how we all say the same prayer, sitting there in the theater.  “Please let mine not suck the worst.”

I live in Provo.  When I write for SLAM, I drive to Salt Lake, get my info, and then drive back to Provo to write.  That forty-five minute drive is immensely important.  I like driving, and I use that time to think about the play.  Usually, by the time I make it home, I’ve got at least an idea to work with, and sometimes, I have the whole play mapped out in my head; at least a rough draft of it.  Of course, over the course of the night, I’ll usually put the play through two or three more drafts, (length is a real challenge–my first draft is always too long), but generally, the drive south is crucial.

My first year, I had no idea what to expect.  My title was The Butcher, the Beggar and the Bed-time Buddy, and driving home, the only thing I could come up with was this:  three actors to work with; three possible characters in the title.  So I came up with a ‘butcher,’ an elderly wealthy rancher; a daughter who kept ‘begging’ him for money for her siblings; and a ‘bed-time buddy,’ his mistress.  The play had monologues, was very repetitive—I was told it was a memorization nightmare.  Tony Larimer, a wonderful older actor, had the line “fill your lungs!” referring to the stench of a feedlot, a smell he likes, because it’s money in his pocket.  In performance, I had the strong impression I was hearing that line a lot, more times than what I’d written.  Tony told me later, he used ‘fill your lungs’ as filler, to give himself time to remember what he was supposed to say next.  He patted me on the arm and said “that line was my default mode, dear boy!”  One of the great memories.

Anyway, the play turned out okay:I was eventually able to expand it to full-length, with a new title: Miasma, which Plan B later produced. 

The next year, my title was Spoiled Cheese. Driving home, I thought, ‘well, what would spoil cheese?  The end of the world!  That’d be tough on cheese!’  That led to a post-apocalyptic scenario, with an Adam and Eve, now ejected from the Garden (Central Park), ruefully remembering various cheeses they recall having eaten. In performance, I thought it was intriguing but incoherent.  Re-reading it today, it’s still intriguing but incoherent.  Not a great play, but also not terrible; my actors were good enough to make it watchable. 

We sometimes draw SLAM titles from a hat, so I have no one to blame but myself for another food related title the next year: Blood Pudding.  With a cast of three women. two younger, one older.  Hmmm.  Driving home, I wondered it might be intriguing to explore the aftermath of a robbery.  I thought of three employees at a restaurant, locked in the meat locker; two tough girls, blase and cynical, and their older, ineffectual manager.  The girls have been robbed many times before, and are mostly concerned that they’ll get paid for this one—one of them, turns out, used to date the robber.  One of my actors was Colleen Lewis, a wonderful actor, but a thin, stylish, lovely young woman, hardly anyone’s idea of a mean, ornery tough chick.  But she played the role beautifully.

I finally got away from food-related titles when I drew Behind the Blue Door the following year.  Driving home, I wondered if I could do something Iraq-war related, perhaps something metaphorical. I vaguely remembered that a lot of homes in Iraq had blue doors. Safely home, on the internet, I learned that blue is considered good luck: blue=sky=paradise. The set looked like it would support something fantasy-related, and so I ended up writing a knight in shining armor, his fair maiden, and Jesper the Self-Loathing Jester.  That was one thing that came to me driving home, that character name.  One of my actors, Jason Tatom, is an old friend, and I will never forget the big grin on his face when I told him he would be playing Jesper the Self-Loathing Jester.

The play then shifted back and forth from fantasy to nightmare—knights and dragons, to Iraq, and then back again. Every time the knight killed the dragon, three more dragons took its place–the central conundrum of the War on Terror.  Daisy Blake and Paul Mulder were terrific, as was Jason, who, as Jesper, also got to tell a number of exceptionally tasteless jokes I found on a website that night.  No-arms-no-legs jokes?  IEDs?  Works.  Blue Door remains one of my favorite SLAM pieces.  

The next season, a major SLAM change—we went from three actors to five.  I liked it, personally—liked the opportunity to tell more complex stories.  I’m sure it was also easier on the actors; memorization is always a challenge.  Anyway, my title was Burning Desire, and we had a set to work with that I also found provocative; really mysterious and gothic.  I had a great cast too, Jayne Luke, who I’ve always admired from afar but had never worked with, plus Jay Perry, Tracie Merrill, Nancy McAffee and Nick O’Donnell. Driving home, I thought maybe I could start with Jayne dying, her family waiting for her on the other side.  I started there, and Tracie played the same woman forty years earlier, in the pivotal moment of her life, when she rejected and kicked out her son, played by Jay Perry.  Jay and his father, now dead, wait in an anteroom of the afterlife, a kind of waiting area with vending machines–Jay wonders if he should have gotten a Danish to greet his Mom with.  Nancy, meanwhile, played an Angel of Death.  We were able to move back and forth in time, in a story about regret and loss and forgiveness.  I’ve been working on expanding it–I like the play a lot.  

I then got sick, had to take a year off.  When I came back, we were back to three actors, and the playwrights had been thrown another curve—we all got the same title.  Alt Control Delete.  I had been reading Moby Duck, a book about bath toys that washed off a cargo ship and were floating all over the world.  I thought of environmentalism, about the possibility of going  Alt Control Delete and basically starting over with our poor beleaguered planet.  I liked everything about the play that resulted except the ending, which just sort of fizzled out. But Christie Summerhays was magnificent, playing an arctic environmentalist dealing with the destruction of an ecosystem.  

The next year, we got the biggest curveball yet: no title at all.  I would have thought that this would be freeing, but it turned out to be anything but.  Drove me crazy, not having a direction. But the set—just some benches—gave me something to work with, and, on my drive, I finally thought it might be fun to just do a comedy, set it in a DMV.  Called it Gaming the DMV.   I liked the play, but afterwards, I realized it wasn’t as funny as it could have been.  Opening night, I kept thinking up jokes I wished I could have thought of in time to put in the play. My cast saved me, though, with Jason Tatom, Kalyn West and Claire Wilson, a teenaged actress who was astonishingly funny and great.

So, we’re doing it again.  Couple weeks, back on the bicycle, climb on the horse again, back in the cockpit.  The creative folks have promised us lots of curveballs this time.  I have no idea what that’s going to be about.  I keep telling myself that I really love SLAM.  And I do.  It’s terrifying, exhilarating, uncomfortable, exciting.  It gets my adrenaline flowing like nothing else.  Theatre without a safety net.  Fill your lungs!  Please let mine not suck the worst. 

The NFL Draft

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I spent three hours last night watching what has to be the most incomprehensible TV program possible for anyone outside the loop.  The loop, in this case, is hard-core fans of the National Football League, and while our numbers are legion, we’re not ubiquitous; football haters likewise abound.  And not to get too gender-cliche-y, the NFL draft does strike me as a potential battlefield in the war of the sexes.  It’s a guy thing.  Guys like football, action movies, and NASCAR; gals like gymnastics/ice skating, chick flick romcoms, and mini-vans.  Of course there are also lots of exceptions–girls who like football, for example; not to mention Danica Patrick.  But cliches exist because they have some basis in reality.  ESPN has both male and female anchors, and yes, Chris McKendry does draft analysis, just as Linda Cohn is a hockey expert.  Still, I watched the draft last night, and while my wife was exceedingly awesome about it, she conspicuously didn’t watch with me.

Anyway, the NFL draft.  Boy, is it weird.  I’m sort of a football fan, even, and I get how weird it is.  So here’s how it works: college football players are put into a pool of candidates, and NFL teams take turns choosing which ones they want; they then have exclusive rights to sign their selections to a contract.  Yes, it’s exactly the same system used to pick sides in junior high school gym class: “I’ll pick Bobby; okay, I pick Sam.”  Imagine that every person who graduated from college in Accounting were then meticulously ranked and underwent accounting skills tests and interviews, and then every Accountancy firm in America got to pick, in order, which ones they wanted to hire. That’s the basic principle.

I watched last night because of Ziggy.  Ezekial Ansah, who played football at BYU this past fall.  Ziggy is from Ghana, where he played a little basketball, but no football at all, ever.  He joined the Church, came to BYU, and then was persuaded by roommates to try out for the football team.  The roommates thought maybe Coach Mendenhall might find some use for a guy 6’5″, 275 pounds, who was also a fantastic natural athlete–incredibly fast and quick.  And, by all accounts, a heck of a great kid.  Coach worked him out, and couldn’t believe what he saw.  My favorite Ziggy story–apparently at one point, he told his roommates that he thought he’d quit the team.  He liked it and all, enjoyed the camaraderie, liked the coaches and his teammates, but he came from Ghana, after all, needed to put his education first.  I mean, it’s not you could make any money at this football thing, right?  Right?  (Ziggy was drafted fifth, by the Detroit Lions. Last year, the fifth pick in the draft signed a contract for 18.5 million dollars.)

I am a deeply conflicted football fan. I probably would not have allowed a son to play high school ball, for example; not that either of my boys wanted to.  It’s a dangerous, violent game, with serious health consequences for way too many players.  It’s also beautiful, with an occasional athleticism that takes your breath away, and the guys who play it professionally talk about how much they love it, and miss it when they can’t play anymore.  And I look at the NFL draft, and part of me is thrilled for these guys, for the bright (and wealthy) futures their drafting portends.  It’s about opportunity–an opportunity for guys to do well, but also an opportunity for teams to improve themselves.  That’s why we watch–we want to see who our favorite team drafted, and fantasize about how great they’re going to be.

But you also can’t help but notice another resemblance–to a slave auction.  Before the draft, there’s the NFL Combine, where all the players run and lift weights and jump and undergo interviews and take intelligence tests.  Are weighed and prodded and examined.  And the top physical specimens are then selected, without having any choice in the matter.  Ziggy Ansah blew everyone away at the Combine–he’s a sensational athlete.  He also has less football experience than anyone else in the draft.  He’s seen as a ‘project,’ with a ‘high ceiling.’  For that potential, the Detroit Lions will be gambling 18-20 million dollars. And Ziggy will have no choice but to move to Detroit.  He’s from Ghana.  Perhaps he would find a gentler clime more congenial.  Tough noogies–it’s Detroit or nothing.

Now, if he’s a slave, he’s an exceptionally well compensated one.  The draft exists to ensure competitive balance–bad teams get the best players.  And nobody is forced to participate–either in the Combine or the draft. You can choose to do something else with your life.  But if you want to play professional football. . . .

And this is on television? Yep.  The teams select players in ten minute increments. So what happens is that a team picks a player, announced by Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the NFL, and the guy who got picked comes up and poses for a picture with him, and then these ESPN talking heads analyze the choice.  Chris Berman (aka Boomer) starts off, but defers to the real experts, Mel Kiper Jr. and Todd McShay.  For years, Mel Kiper was the draft guru.  He was employed by ESPN at what I have to assume is a preposterous salary just to do this, just to work, basically, one day a year.  And, my gosh, the guy really is an expert, with an encyclopedic knowledge of essentially every player on every team in all of college football, their strengths and weaknesses, and how they fit the needs of the NFL teams considering them.  Then, the last couple of years, ESPN hired McShay, a second guy to do the same job.

And it’s one of the highest rated shows on television. Hour after hour, we watch.  Imagine high school graduation.  Imagine, then, that the principal took ten minutes between announcing each graduating kid.  Imagine that your basic high school graduation ceremony took three days to complete. Now imagine it being televised, and getting a twenty share.

Also, if you’re a fan, you’re a fan of one team, right?  I’m a 49ers fan; I root for the San Francisco 49ers.  Obviously, for a kid in Indiana, I would root for sports teams from the Bay area.  Anyway, I was rooting for Ziggy, but after he was drafted, I kept watching.  I wanted to see who my team picked.  And I had opinions!  On who they ought to pick!  I was hoping for a defensive end, a cornerback, or a safety.  They picked Eric Reid, a safety from LSU.  I knew a lot about the guy; fast, good tackler, could be the next Ronnie Lott.  I liked the pick.  And I am, at best, a casual football fan.  In other words, I watched TV for three hours, tension building, anticipation mounting, for one moment that lasted maybe ten seconds (“The San Francisco 49ers, with the 18th pick in the NFL draft, select Eric Reid. . . “)

It is, a lot, like graduation, where you wait in uncomfortable chairs for that moment when your kid gets her diploma.  Or, like, her 3rd grade play, where you know she’s playing the crucial role of Third Tree, and you sit there waiting for her one line (“Trees also provide shade”).  Which you already know, because you drilled her on it for, like, days.  That’s what you’re there for.  You could give a darn about all the other kids.

It’s complete, utter insanity.  The NFL draft, its massive popularity and the fantastic ratings it gets on TV, it’s completely crazy.  It’s not just the most boring show on television, it’s the most boring show you can imagine anyone ever putting on TV.  And I’m, at best, a casual fan of the sport; mostly, I’m conflicted about whether I should keep  watching football.  Let alone a show about sorting young wizards into their respective Houses (Mel and Todd arguing about who Gryffindor drafted). Neither of them wearing a Sorting Hat.

And I watched it for three hours last night.

And it’s on again tonight.  And I’ll probably watch it tonight too.

Guys, let’s face it.  We’re nuts.  Why on earth do women put up with us?

 

 

 

Reinhart/Rogoff.

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How about, just for grin and giggles, we talk some macro-economics?

So in 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard economics professors (they’re both at Harvard now; she was at Maryland when she wrote the paper), published a major study. “Growth in a Time of Debt,” about the relationship between debt and economic growth.  To summarize; they argued that whenever a nation’s debt rises above 90% of GDP, it slows economic growth–destroys it, in fact.  This paper proved very influential–was cited all over the place, especially by politicians suggesting that our number economic priority had to be deficit reduction.  Reinhart/Rogoff was laid the the intellectual foundation for European austerity measures.  David Cameron cited it, in Britain.  Paul Ryan did so as well back here in the US of A.  It was a Very Big Deal.

Most other macro-economists disagreed with it, and are on record opposing both the paper and the policies it spawned.  Paul Krugman was prominent among them.  But it took a grad student to completely blow Reinhart/Rogoff out of the water.

Guy named Thomas Herndon.  A grad student at the University of Massachusetts, Herndon was taking a class in Applied Econometrics.  For his term paper, he suggested replicating Reinhart and Rogoff’s findings. This story describes what happened: his profs almost didn’t approve it.  It was too simple, they said.  Just basic math.  For a graduate level class, they suggested he do something more challenging.  But he kept pushing, and they finally let him do it.

And Herndon discovered that Reinhart and Rogoff’s entire thesis depended on a spreadsheet error. That they’d made a simple mistake, probably because they didn’t know how to use Excel.  That economic growth, according to their own statistics, for countries with debt exceeding 90% of GDP, wasn’t negative .1 percent.  It was 2.2 percent, positive.  That they had basically gotten all the math wrong. Because they didn’t know how to use the most popular and user-friendly spreadsheet program in existence. Why had no one caught it before?  Because the initial publication of the most influential paper in macro-economics in my lifetime had not been peer-reviewed.  That the first peer to review it was this kid.  A grad student.

Nightmare.  Some kid caught you.  You’re a university professor, tenured and respected, and you’ve published a lot, many articles, and you write something really significant, something people pay lots of attention to.  And some whippersnapper comes up to you and says, “uh, prof?  Seriously, you can’t use Excel?  Wow. Here, let me show you.  You made this simple math error.  It invalidates your entire argument.”  Marketplace of ideas, indeed.

True story: many years ago, I was a grad student, and I had a paper accepted at an academic conference.  I went, and my dissertation advisor invited me out to dinner with some of his friends.  It was me, another grad student, and five of the most distinguished theatre historians in the world.  Completely terrifying.  We went to this incredibly nice restaurant in New Orleans–I couldn’t have afforded anything on the menu, but the profs kindly offered to get the check–and it immediately became clear that the two grad students were on trial. They were grilling us: I was holding my own.  But I had just gotten the seventh edition (may have been the sixth), of Oscar Brockett’s History of the Theatre.  And there he was, in the flesh, Brock himself, the great Oscar Brockett, right there at the table.  And I’d read the book that night, preparing for the dinner, and caught a mistake.  Not a little mistake either–he’d gotten Shakespeare’s birth year wrong.  I mentioned this, and the look on Brockett’s face was priceless.  As was the ribbing he got from his colleagues at the table.

Could have been worse. He could have had Stephen Colbert making fun of him/them. But it is great for the grad student who catches the big boys.  If you catch a big enough prof in a big enough error, Stephen Colbert will put you on his show.

The Colbert clip with Herndon is great, mostly because Stephen Colbert has so much fun with it.  But I loved this fact: Herndon wondered, initially, if he could have possibly gotten things wrong.  So he had his results peer-reviewed.  He showed ‘em to his girlfriend.

It’s certainly possible to feel a bit bad for Reinhart and Rogoff.  But I’ve gotten to feeling a lot less sorry for them since Herndon’s paper was published. Their reaction has been wholly defensive, insisting that their basic conclusions were basically right even when the evidence supporting those conclusions has gone pooft.  Oh, and they admitted that they deliberately left out counter-examples.  Australia, New Zealand and Canada had inconveniently robust growth despite massive debt; R/R excluded them from their data.

The fact is, these two became policy wonk celebs, testifying before the House Budget Committee and the British Parliament and the EU General Council.  Anytime anyone talked about austerity, it was Reinhart/Rogoff they cited, unless they decided to put the guy’s name first, and call it Rogoff/Reinhart.  Now they look like bozos.  Caught by a kid.  (Who now replaces them as policy wonk celeb du jour.  By, among other things, going on Colbert.)

The thing was, as Keynes pointed out in his General Theory, austerity is always going to be puritanically attractive.  When an economy stalls, it’s tempting to see that failure in moral terms.  Our spending was too extravagant, too luxurious; our debt suggests profligacy and imprudence.  We need to cut back.  We need to punish ourselves, tighten our belts.  Look at government, wicked, evil government!  I wouldn’t run my family finances that way!  When I want to buy a new car, by gum, I save up for it!  We’re on a national (look at the moral implications of this language) spending spree.  And we need to stop.

Except none of that’s true.  Everywhere I look, I see a federal government where basic functions are endangered because they’re underfunded.  Say that to people, and they’ll go on a tirade about wasteful government spending.  And sure, there probably is some.  But mostly what needs to happen right now is more spending, stimulative spending. We’re in a Keynes moment, and Keyne’s basic IS/LM model has actually performed superbly in this crisis. R and R published a paper that was deeply and obviously flawed, and they got away with it for three years because it said something policy makers wanted to hear.

So the whole thing would be pretty funny, if it weren’t also serious.  People are suffering out there.  Unemployment is too high and underemployment rampant.  Europe is really struggling.  Austerity has been tried and tested and found wanting.  We know what works and we know what doesn’t work.  Peer review, turns out, works good.  Austerity, not so much.

 

 

BYU Dress and Grooming

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A friend shared this image, a poster from the BYU Honor Code office, and a parody of that poster from the Student Review.  Yes, that’s James Bond being used as a positive example, a guy who follows the BYU Honor Code.  Clean-shaven and all.  Also a womanizer who kills people for a living, but let’s not quibble over nuances.

A couple of points worth making about the BYU Honor Code.  First of all, every college in America has an Honor Code.  They may not call it that, exactly, but every school has one.  If you’re caught cheating on a test, or plagiarizing, you’ll get in trouble.  If you’re a serial sexual harasser, or have multiple DUIs on your record, you’ll get in trouble; state schools, private schools.  BYU is not unique in having an Honor Code.

Where BYU is unique is what sorts of things the Honor Code includes.  You can’t drink, smoke, drink coffee or chew tobacco. You can’t have sex with anyone, unless you’re married. BYU cares what clothes you wear and, if you’re a guy, the length and location of your facial hair.  Tattoos are not allowed, nor are multiple piercings.  Here are the actual rules, if you’re interested.  BYU is a university where students are not allowed to drink or fool around.  Yeah, BYU’s unique.

I taught at BYU for twenty years.  And my feelings about the Honor Code were, to be honest, conflicted. Obviously, some provisions of the Honor Code were there because it’s a Church sponsored school, with its own institutional take on the doctrine of in loco parentis.  Other rules were just public relations. BYU wanted students to look a certain way, clean-cut and well scrubbed. That part always struck me as silly.  I couldn’t care have cared less how my students wore their hair, or their shorts were knee length.  I used to get the giggles, thinking of the Honor Code committee, and how comically solemn committee meetings usually were anyway, and then add sober-sided administrators issuing Talmudic disquisitions on hair or skirt length to the agenda, and ROFL.

But personally, I was actually kind of grateful for the grooming stuff.  Here’s why; my preferred mode of dress and grooming is basically that of a hobo. Left to my own devices, I absolutely would have worn my hair to the waist, gotten my ears pierced, festooned my visible bits with tattoos.  I’m essentially a hippie at heart.  I would certainly have sported any number of styles of beard. Faded and patched jeans, Grateful Dead tee shirts, Hawaiian shirts; heck, I wouldn’t have put anything past me.  Lava lavas.  Kilts.  Jodhpurs.

In short, I would have looked like a pathetic middle-aged guy desperately clinging to a long-vanished youth, and I would have made a public spectacle of myself.  Now, as it happens, I’m also married, and would never have gotten away with any of that.  But here’s my larger point: I don’t know how to dress.  I don’t care.  I don’t just value comfort over style, I value comfort over everything.  BYU’s silly rules simplified my life.  I had to get a haircut every few months.  I had to shave most mornings.  And I had to dress decently, wearing clothes my wife bought for me because she didn’t trust me to buy anything for myself, nor should she have done.

So BYU prevented me from following my own misguided sartorial heart, and I’m grateful for it.  As a teacher, I didn’t care what anyone wore–I couldn’t be bothered.  If I saw a kid with a beard or long hair, I figured he was an actor growing it out for a role.  It would never have occurred to me to turn anyone in for anything.

Boy, some people sure care, though.  As I understand it, one big issue now has to do with a current fashion popular among young ladies, in which they wear a short skirt with long leggings.  This either is or isn’t a violation of the Honor Code, and some people have taken it upon themselves to write nasty notes to perceived offenders, or otherwise chastise them.  One joker wrote one to my daughter.  Apparently, some guys find some women’s fashions sexually arousing, or something, and think it’s the responsibility of young women to dress in a non-arousing way. “When you dress that way, you don’t know what it does to my relationship to the Spirit.”  Or some such self-serving blather.  “I’m a spiritual Giant, I am, except for those times when you make me not be one!”  Blarg.  BYU fauna do include herds of self-righteous dolts–let’s hope they grow out of it.

As a professor I never would have noticed if a girl was dressed inappropriately, because noticing would have required that I look at her, not as a student, but, however briefly, as a sexual object.  I said that badly, I think, but I want to make this clear; my students were there to learn from me.  My job was to teach. I felt it was my professional obligation to treat all students, male or female, exactly the same–as people who were there to learn.  It certainly wasn’t any part of my job to think of any student in any other way.  For me to look at a young woman and think ‘I think that skirt is too short’ would have required for me to consider something as irrelevant to the subject matter as the length of her skirt.

But it’s tricky.  First of all, I wanted all my students to think of themselves as special, unique, valued.  This went beyond trying to remember their names.  If a student had distinguished herself in some positive way, I tried to remember that, and refer to it in conversation.  If a student had asked me a question about something, I might ask her about it later–’did you ever find an answer to such and such?’  So I might say something like ‘cute tee shirt,’ if the student was wearing a clever or funny tee shirt.  I might say something like ‘did you change your hairstyle?  It’s cute.’  Because college aged women do change their hairstyle with some frequency, and like it when people notice.  This is going to sound weird, but the persona I tried to cultivate was ‘older gay friend.’  Odd, because I’m not, in fact, gay. Just romantically uninterested/unavailable/unappealing.  Just this: there’s a fine line between ‘I like that sweater’ and ‘wow, you’re really hot,’ and I tried to stay on the appropriate side of that line, and I think I generally succeeded.

One thing that helped, I think, is that I’m not an attractive guy.  I’m big and I’m not good-looking.  When I say this, understand I’m not pathetically begging for sympathy and reassurance.  I’m perfectly fine with how I look.  Remember–I’m a theatre guy.  When I say “I’m fat,” I don’t mean “I’m consumed with self-loathing!”  I mean it like an actor: “there are parts I’m right for.”

I was a professor of Theatre, a playwright and a director.  And that means being acutely aware of clothing, of social signifiers and cultural constructs, and what message does wearing that outfit send.  I did get to work with costume designers, really good ones, and that was sometimes tricky for me, because I really genuinely don’t personally care about clothing.  But I do care a great deal about stage picture and the look of a show.  So in casting a show, I did have to take looks into consideration.  Again, a fine line: I couldn’t allow myself to think ‘that’s a pretty girl,’ but I could allow myself to think ‘she’s an ‘ingenue type;’ probably not right for Lady Capulet.’  I think I engaged in more non-traditional casting than most other directors in the department, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t take looks into account.  I do one time recall telling an actress that, although her audition was tremendous, I didn’t think I could cast her, because I thought she was too pretty to be convincing in the role.  She showed up to the call-back looking like a complete mess–no makeup, hadn’t showered, she said–wowed me with her acting, and easily won the role.

So the modesty debate is an interesting one, on a lot of levels. It certainly does get caught up in all sorts of issues of sexism and misogyny and how our culture constructs gender and gender roles.  So saying ‘I don’t care if that skirt is considered immodest’ doesn’t mean ‘I’m indifferent to issues relating to sexual immorality.’  It means ‘I’m deliberately placing myself outside that particular debate.  I’m absenting myself from considering her physical attractiveness.  She is, to me, a student. I am, to her, a teacher. And that relationship, teacher/student, is, to me, something holy.’

 

 

Sports, for people who hate sports

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I like sports.  I grew up playing basketball, baseball, football, tennis.  I played all these sports very badly, but in our backyard, or the backyards of neighbor kids, or in our driveway.  It was how we bonded, and it was also how we excluded.  One neighbor kid didn’t play sports–he was somehow even less coordinated than I was–and didn’t want to.  We didn’t mean to treat him badly, but we did.  I still feel terrible about that.  But we loved sports, and when we weren’t playing sports, we were watching them, either live or on TV.  Or talked about them. My brother was just in town, and while he was mostly here on family stuff–his daughter’s baby’s blessing–we did fit in two basketball games on TV.

I know lots of people who can’t stand sports, who especially can’t stand televised team sports.  I am, in fact, married to one of those people.  I get that. We sports fans can be quite sadly fanatical in our devotion to the teams that have earned our allegiance–that’s where the word ‘fan’ comes from, after all.  I hear from people from time to time who tell me they like this blog, and usually they add “except for the baseball ones.”  I get that too, which also doesn’t mean I’m going to stop writing baseball ones.

But why?  Why do we attach ourselves do devotedly to something as artificial as a professional sports team?  Or college team.  In fact, isn’t inter-collegiate athletics somehow worse?  Doesn’t big-time college sports detract from the educational mission of high ed?  Doesn’t it divert resources that might be better used to hire a new math professor, build a new lab, construct a theatre rehearsal room or dance studio, pay TA’s properly?  Are we seriously seriously, pretending . . .  no.  Wait. Stop! I like sports.  I’m arguing for them.

How?  Why?

It’s good to care about something.

The great New Yorker writer, Roger Angell, used to make this argument; that caring deeply is a basic human good, even if it’s for something silly.  In fact, lots of things we care a lot about are silly.  Once we silly human creatures have got the Food, Sex, Shelter thing down, turns out we have plenty of time and brain-space for silly stuff.  And full-blown life-long infatuation with a sports team is, turns out, mentally healthy.

It’s a shortcut to bonding with other people.

So this past weekend, our family spent some time interacting with my niece’s husband’s family.  I found myself spending some time conversing with my niece’s father-in-law.  Seemed like a nice guy, and we chatted a bit.  Then he mentioned being a baseball fan.  And we went from ‘awkward family party conversation with a stranger’ to ‘my gosh what a cool guy how much fun were we having?’  We got along immediately.  I know the guy now, know how he thinks about something important to both of us.  And it was something safe, not something really volatile–politics, religion.

There’s a theological angle to it, a celebration of human potential, of human beauty.

The human beauty we’re talking about here. . . has nothing to do with sex, or cultural norms.  What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.  There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body.  We can just quickly mention pains, sores, nausea, odors, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits–every last schism between our bodies and our actual capacities.  Can anyone doubt we need help to be reconciled? Crave it?  It’s your bodies that die, after all.

Great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch, to move through space, to interact with matter.  Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things the rest of us can only dream of.  But those dreams are important.

David Foster Wallace “Federer both Flesh and Not.”

And as a Mormon, I believe that the human body is magnificent, not sin-filled and vile.  I believe that bodies enhance and enable spiritual capacities, not stunt them.  There is not Mormon equivalent to the heresy of ‘the mortification of the flesh.’

BYU is in a basketball tournament right now, the NIT (National Invitation Tournament), and one of the announcers last night was Bill Walton.  Walton was one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived, sort of a hero of mine.  He’s also a dreadful announcer.  Too talky, too interested in long stories about his own career, and not, like, the ballgame right there in front of him.  He was a former teammate of Danny Ainge and we got to hear many stories about what a great guy Ainge was.  And so on.  But then he talked about Kresimir Cosic.  Cosic was a genuinely brilliant player, for BYU and later, for the Yugoslavian and Croatian national teams.  And Walton stopped himself, got a little choked up, trying to describe the beauty of Cosic’s game.

This happens sometimes.  You remember a Willie Mays, a Joe Montana, a Wayne Gretzsky, a Magic Johnson, and your eyes get a little teary.  What they did was so beautiful, it still takes your breath away.

It’s good to care about things, and to care about beauty.  And of course, I get that same feeling when I hear a great tenor sing, or a great dancer dance, or a great actor in a great role.  If there is anything virtuous, lovely, of good report, praiseworthy . . . So watch this kid,twenty years old, from Africa, already a college graduate.  Watch him soar: Victor Oladipo, from Indiana.  Meanwhile, the NCAA tournament is on-going, and baseball season soon to start.  Go Hoosiers, and go Giants.

 

“Not a feminist”

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At a family party over the weekend, my brother and I found ourselves chatting about our grandmother.  I’ve written about my grandmother before; a remarkable woman.  Her husband, my grandfather, was murdered in 1940, leaving her with five children under the age of nine.  She moved in with her mother, and went to work. While working as a teacher, she earned an MA and a PhD, and ended up on the faculty of BYU, in Library Science.  She was a strong-willed and forceful woman, and her four daughters grew up to be equally remarkable.  My mother and her sisters (my deeply admired and redoubtable aunts) are woman of extraordinary accomplishments and talents.  Two of them earned doctorates; the other two, master’s degrees.  Two of them are published authors.  One is an extraordinary playwright, another a remarkable poet.  I love them all deeply, and continue to be astonished by their humor, wit, energy and intelligence.

Anyway, my brother and I got to talking about my grandmother. We were in a big family gathering, surrounded by our kids and their kids and in-laws, and we were sort of evangelizing about this amazing woman who was such an important part of our early lives.  And then my brother said something that completely amazed me.  He said “of course, she wasn’t a feminist.”

Well, of course she was a feminist.  She was a feminist pioneer.  One of the first women to be hired as tenured faculty at BYU.  A former Utah Mother of the Year.  An actress and a writer.  She fought for equal pay.  She raised her daughters to value higher education, and she taught them the importance of working outside the home. And her daughters all did–they were, all of them, well respected professional women. Obviously she was a feminist.  They are, all of them, feminists.

But for my brother, it was equally obvious.  Of course she wasn’t a feminist.  How could I even suggest such a thing. Yes, she was an accomplished woman, a fiercely independent woman, a professional woman of extraordinary abilities.  But that didn’t make her a, you know, a . . . a feminist.

It blew my mind, honestly.  And it was a big chaotic family gathering–not a setting where we could really pursue it, or where I could ask the question burning in my mind: “what the heck do you think ‘feminist’ means?”  The moment passed, the conversation swirled off in another direction.

And I love my brother, and I respect him.  But come on.  If my grandmother, of all people, wasn’t a feminist. . . .

But I do think she might have rejected that label.  She opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, for example, back in the day.  She was a loyal Republican, and she thought the ERA might bring with it serious unintended consequences; she thought it wasn’t worth the risk.  I talked to her about it; she said she preferred to work one issue at a time–on equal pay, for example, job by job, rather than a big federal approach, or something as potentially scary as a constitutional amendment.

So what is it about that label?  Why is feminist a new F-word?  Why do some women, bright, independent, strong women, still resist calling themselves feminists?

My Mom’s one.  When I was a kid, my Mom always ‘worked outside the home,’ as all those sacrament meeting talks back then insisted married women had no business doing.  She was a school teacher.  My Dad was an opera singer and a music professor; I don’t know much about their finances, but she told me once that she didn’t work because they needed the money.  She worked because she needed to, because staying at home with kids drove her insane.  She chose to work.  So when I got home from school, it was my job to watch my younger brothers.  Which was completely no problem–all we did was play basketball.  Home from school, drop the book bag, grab the ball.  Babysitting made easy.

Mom wouldn’t go to Relief Society for years.  Every time she went, there’d be a lesson about not working outside the home, and so she’d stay away for another year or so.  Finally, after years gone, she finally started going, because they made her RS President.  But my Mom also didn’t consider herself a feminist.

Feminist means . . . well, to me, it just means someone who believes in and supports equality.  To me, feminist means equal.  Period.

But for some people–people every bit as committed to equality as I am–feminist means, well, all sorts of nasty things, I imagine.

What I think, though, is that the central feminist critique of patriarchy, of how patriarchy functioned in the past and how it still controls the power centers of our culture, that the feminist rejection of patriarchy (such a potent and central concept in academic feminist discourse), that that may be the key to why so many LDS people are uncomfortable calling themselves feminists. ‘Patriarchy’, a pejorative word for feminists, is a positive one for Mormons. We give patriarchal blessings.  We talk of honoring our patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob.  Priesthood is exclusively patriarchal.

I’m reminded of the probably apocryphal story of the kid, graduating from primary, brought up to the pulpit by the bishop.  The bishop tells the congregation “little Sally here will be joining the Young Women’s, and I was so impressed with her bishop’s interview.  Let me show you.”  He then turns to the girl in the best beaming bishoply fashion, and says, “so Sally, a little quiz.  There’s something that your Daddy has that your Mommy does not have.  And it starts with a ‘p.’  What is it?”  The girl stares up at him, appalled, and finally replies, “I think I know the answer, but I don’t think I’m supposed to say it in Church!”

My wife likes to say that she doesn’t mind not having the Priesthood right up to the point that some man, talking about women’s roles, says she shouldn’t mind not having the Priesthood.  And my Mom and grandma were much of the same mind.  I used to love watching my grandma in Sacrament meeting.  Whenever a speaker would talk about ‘women’s roles,’ or why women shouldn’t ‘work outside the home,’ my grandmother would start cleaning our her purse.  And she would say ‘oh, dear, oh dear,’ under her breath, just loudly enough that the speaker could barely hear it, but not so loudly as to be distracting.

But ‘feminist’? That’s going to far.  That suggests, maybe, that patriarchy itself is at fault, that an organization run entirely by men, correlated by men, is inherently, automatically unjust and unequal.  That society itself remains unequal, despite the undoubted advances women have made. And for some women, that’s pushing things too far.  They’re perfectly happy being women, comfortable in their skin.  And they don’t feel they’ve been disrespected, either in Church or society at large.  Sure, there are problems, and we need to work to fix them.  But we don’t need to completely re-order society.

Of course, ‘feminism’ means many things to many people.  To some feminists, the essence of feminism is the critique of and opposition to patriarchy.  To other feminists, the essence of feminism is simply equality.  For some, my grandmother’s muttered comments in Church when men talked about women’s roles was an act of feminist subversion (muted to be sure, but certainly unmistakable).  But to others, her rejection of the ERA couldn’t be reconciled with committed feminist activism.

My grandmother was a strong, independent woman.  To me, that makes her a feminist, an important and powerful feminist pioneer.  My Mom is equally strong, equally independent, and very much a feminist too.  That’s because, to me, feminist is a positive word, a terrific thing to be. To others, it’s another ‘f’ word.  Either way, equality is what we’re aiming for.

 

So, what now?

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Yesterday, I posted about doubt, about the crisis of faith in the Church and issues many of us have with Mormon culture.  I appreciate all of you who responded.  One respondent linked to a talk by Richard Bushman, the brilliant historian, author of what I believe to be the finest Joseph Smith biography, Rough Stone Rolling and perhaps the most thoughtful LDS apologist.  Here’s the link.

Many of Bushman’s thoughts resonate with my own.  I was especially taken with his description of disillusioned members of the Church who have managed to find their way back. I kept nodding my head–’yep, that’s me, yep, there I am.’  According to Bushman:

We’ve learned the Prophet was human. We don’t expect him to be perfect.  I would add that Joseph Smith clearly regarded the Word of Wisdom as good advice, not a set of requirements, for example. He wasn’t a good businessman. He was flawed.

We also don’t believe he was led by revelation in every detail. Nor, I think, do we see current Church leaders as led by revelation in every detail.  We don’t believe, for example, that every talk in General Conference is equally valuable.  Revelation’s hard.  It’s hard for us, and it’s hard for them.  And human beings make mistakes, even pretty serious ones.

We newly revived Latter-day Saints also develop a more philosophical attitude toward history. We come to see (like professional historians) that facts can have many interpretations. Put in another along side other facts, they do not necessarily destroy Joseph Smith’s reputation. Having said that, knowing about Joseph Smith and Nauvoo (and earlier) polygamy is really tough to deal with.  To me, it’s an entirely repugnant part of our history.  I plan to spend a later blog post just on this subject.

Revived Latter-day Saints focus on the good things they derive from their faith.  Which doesn’t mean that some aspects of Mormon culture don’t drive us crazy. black and white thinking, self-righteousness. The stuff, in fact, that other cultures also have, and that are annoying parts of those cultures too.

Obviously, some LDS people decide to leave the Church.  I’m not sure it’s possible, though, for someone who has been part of this culture to separate entirely from it.  It’s still part of you, it’s still one of the things that shaped you, that made you who you are. Most, I think, find that they still have to come to terms with their past, with their heritage.

But some LDS doubters, and I count myself among them, come through doubt to a place of renewed faith.  The experience of doubt does change you, and I think in good ways.  (I genuinely do believe that doubt is one of the most important genuinely creative forces in human history.)  But okay; we’re here.  We plan to stay.  What now?

I can’t talk about anyone else in this regard.  I’m not a prophet–I don’t have definitive answers for anyone.  i can just speak about my own experiences.  But here are a few things I’ve learned.

For one thing, Sunday school answers aren’t really very satisfying anymore. One Sunday School answer, of course, is ‘read the scriptures.’  I love the scriptures, and I enjoy reading them; always have.  But they don’t really invite the Spirit for me.  The spiritual exercise of reading fifteen minutes a day (or thirty, or whatever), just doesn’t work for me at all.  I read Mosiah 2-4, and find King Benjamin’s talk wonderfully edifying.  I read 2 Nephi 9, and wonder what the heck I’m supposed to get from all that olive tree grafting stuff.  Sometimes, reading the Book of Mormon really builds my testimony.  Sometimes, it really feels like a nineteenth century text, so conveniently answering every 1830s Protestant American doctrinal issue; a product of that time and place, and not an ancient one.

The real questions are these: does God exist?  Does He communicate with human beings?  I believe the answer to both those questions is yes.  So there’s this: 2 Nephi 29: 9-12:

Because I have spoken one word, ye need not suppose that I cannot speak another; for my work is not yet finished. Wherefore, because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words; neither need ye suppose that I have not caused more to be written. For I command all men, both in the east and in the west, and in the north, and in the south, and in the islands of the sea, that they shall write the words which I speak unto them; for out of the books which shall be written I will judge the world, every man according to their works, according to that which is written. For behold, I shall speak unto the Jews and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the Nephites and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto the other tribes of the house of Israel, which I have led away, and they shall write it; and I shall also speak unto all nations of the earth and they shall write it.

What does this mean?  To me, it means that God has spoken to every culture on earth, to everyone.  That when we talk about ‘the scriptures,’ we mean all the scriptures, every inspired, edifying word.

It means the Qur’an is scripture.  It mean the Baghavad Gita is scripture.  But I’ll never truly understand those scriptures, because they’re the scriptural accounts of God’s dealings with cultures very different from my own.  I can read them, and profit from the experience, but I’ll get a lot more out of the scriptures of my own culture.

So I do read the Bible, and I do read the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Mormon.  But when those pall (and sometimes they do), I think, well, what else have I read recently?  Well, Taylor Branch’s great three-part history of the civil rights movement and of Dr. King.  Is that scripture?  I don’t know if it counts exactly as scripture, but wasn’t Dr. King basically a prophet?  Mormonism tends to equate ‘prophet’ with ‘President of the Church,’ but historically that wasn’t what a prophet was–most Old Testament prophets were rebels, trouble-makers, agitators against the political and cultural status quo.  That was certainly true of Amos, sheepherder and farmer, who protested the cozy complacency of Samarian politicians. It was also true of Father Lehi; a successful businessman, but a thorn in the side of the ruling elite.  So does reading about Dr. King, reading his speeches, watching him speak on Youtube, does that count as scripture study?

I’ve decided it does, for me.  Don’t recommend it to anyone else, necessarily, but it draws me closer to my Heavenly Father, it edifies my soul.  And that’s the point, isn’t it?  Aren’t we supposed to look for actions that draw us closer to the Lord?

What about that other great Sunday School answer: prayer.  Prayer is massively important to me.  It really is.  But I have spent much too much time in my life engaged in two kinds of prayer that really don’t get me anywhere.

First of all, there are the perfunctory prayers over meals and at bedtime, prayers full of cliches and catch-phrases.  The ones where you feel like you could just plug in the same four-to-six sentences regardless of circumstances.  The prayers that feel like a chore–okay, I’ve said my prayers, check that one off the list.

The other ones are probably just as annoying to my Heavenly Father; the long, angst-ridden, desperate-for-an-answer prayers where you’re upset and mad at yourself and basically want God to solve your spiritual problems for you.  You want to force an answer; you insist on an answer.  I want to know. And I want it now.

I am not an accomplished pray-er by any means.  But what I’ve been working on is just trying to build a relationship.  I mean, what kind of friend is it who either just speaks in cliches, or spends every conversation whining?  I get that God is infinitely forgiving and wise, but I also don’t want to be this tiresome person, dull or desperate.

And when my kids are sick, and need a blessing, I lay my hands on their heads and I pray.  And something happens. Something two-way, some genuine communication.  Every time, there’s a feeling or thought or impression or impulse, and it genuinely feels external to myself.  Not something I made up, something Someone’s trying to tell me.

I can count on that.  I can rely on it.  And that’s wonderful.

And that’s why I’m sticking around.