How many people who consider themselves to be progressive bloggers have gone to school at Messiah College? Probably not many. I did. But not in the same sense as Monica Goodwin. Goodwin actually attended the college as a student. I was there more than two decades earlier attending vacation bible school. I grew up, if not within walking distance of the college, certainly within bicycling distance. A number of my friends had parents who taught there or worked as administrators. For some time the church my parents attended was on campus.
And so, when I was in grade school I got sent to vacation bible school (VBS). Now, I have to admit that my own experience was probably not typical. The fact that VBS was filled with lots of people my age and therefore gave me a chance to be a good, sociable person was not one that I valued as much as most attendees might have. Nor did the stories. They always seemed targeted to people a lot younger than I was at the time. Actually, they seemed targeted to people a lot younger than I can ever remember being. And I can remember being two.
The music was alright, but we never did sing the "Noah's Arky" song. Ours was a serious religion. And anything that made us laugh or smile was considered evil. The logic that supported this point of view can be roughly approximated by this syllogism:
It is a curious thing to believe because it is wrong in a lot of odd ways. Its form is flawed, though I cannot remembe the technical name for the flaw. And I argue separately that for people with a twinge of conscience that the enjoyment of things evil is generally spoilt by this. So the first premise is wrong.We speculate that this syllogism, embedded in the minds of virtually all fundamentalist Americans is at the root of much of America's unhappiness. But that is another discussion.
Greek philosophers understood virtue pretty well. Their notions about living a constructive and cooperative social life might easily be have been informed by modern neuroscience's discovery that cooperative acts actually release dopamine into our brains and cause us to feel pleasure. So being good makes us happy in rather durable ways. The Greeks, Aristotle in particular, might have posited:
In short, VBS was a sort of early training that would help us live serious, measured, dour lives that would be productive but would turn from sour to bitter as the fruits of our labors matured and became our sustenance.
I freely admit that my experience is biased. It is colored by a single event that takes up 98 percent of my memory about that moment in time. Learning to be good and holy saps one's energy mightily, even when one is in grade school. So the students have little breaks. We would emerge from the dark lecture hall and stand in the warm, waning summer sunlight. I remember one such break. I stood with two other boys on the sidewalk in the courtyard. The grass and trees of the campus spread out in three directions. The spare, old concrete block building that smelled of mouldering books, old woodwork, and the sweat of study stood at my back.
Eric, Craig, and I talked about something or other - something inconsequential and uncontroversial. Eric and Craig were jokers. Eric, golden haired and freckled, wore a perpetual smile that I would ever after grow to associate with the hyena, laughing over his dinner. I don't remember what I said. Or if I said anything. It seems to me the event in question had no causal trigger; but I remember Eric's foot rising from the concrete sidewalk, moving upward swiftly, contacting my groin. I remember incredible pain. Then nothing.
I must have been out cold for at least a minute or two because the next thing I remember is a face. A dour old face. I couldn't see it for the mist, the heavenly halo. Or rather, the detail. I saw the wrinkles, the grey and vacant eyes, the grey hair severely pulled back. I saw a person worried. Worried, I would imagine later, less for my well being than for her own. And God's, perhaps. If I were injured what would that do to VBS? Had my collapse put VBS in peril? Was my collapse going to lead to the eventual collapse of VBS and God's kingdom on earth? This is what that face communicated.
It asked "What happened?"
"Eric kicked me in the balls."*
One is disinclined to mince words when one has been kicked in the balls. Especially when emerging from the fog of unconsciousness. Being measured and civilized is not just far from consideration it is fundamentally impossible. The causal act is so dastardly that it does not exist in fight scenes in movies, except in comedies. Real men don't do it. Cowards run away. There simply is no category for the act. It does not exist. All consideration of the subject ended with my utterance.
I am completely convinced that had Eric kicked me in the head or the thigh or the knee, had he punched me in the nose or chin or eye, he would have commited an infraction that was punishable under the VBS charter. But Eric had committed a crime that did not exist. He had assulted a deniable part of my anatomy. And because that part did not exist in Miss Eulalie's reality, the crime was imaginary. My words denied both crime and its effect. They might as well have damned me to hell. They certainly saved Eric from punishment. That was definitely not my intention in speaking them.
I have no reason to believe that this is a typical event. I expect that most people do not experience VBS as a kick in the groin and violence against them unpunished. Nor do most people experience Messiah College in that way. It is a beautiful campus. And aside from my experience with VBS, I have fond memories of times spent there with some of my childhood friends. I am grateful that the college then viewed itself as being a constructive part of the neighborhood and had a reasonable level of tolerance for people who - by contemporary institutional measures - simply did not belong. Back then the college was a liberal arts college in the noblest sense of the word. And there was a sense in which dour old Miss Eulalie was as much out of place there as I was then or would be now.
But by the time I left home for college, the winds of change were blowing. There were a lot of people in the community and at the college who saw being Republican and being Christian as being interchangeable, indistinguishable. And they saw being Christian and being "blessed" in the same way. That meant entitlement in the first person. The line of reasoning goes something like this.
Or, in the words of the obscure musical genius Dad Gum Swing Jesus Loves Me, but He Can't Stand You! **
The next logical step from this view of social order inspired from a peculiar bit of Protestant theology, is to turn opponents into "terrorists" or "defectives" and to use force to dispose of them in arbitrary ways, saving God the effort. It's not a large step. It is so small, in fact, that it seems almost inevitable that should enough people who lives that embrace ideas three and four also come to power, the act of disposal must ensue.
What rightly rouses wrath about Gonzogate and Monica's role in it is her presumption to do just this. Gonzogate is about one party presuming to be good and right and holy and just in contradistinction to the other party which is bad and wrong and evil and corrupt. The judgment is made not on the basis of action, but on the basis of power, of group identity. The judgment is presumed to be definitional. It is made on the basis of "God's blessing," which, ironically in this case, appears to be attained through use of fraud and arbitrary force. Again, God, for all his power evidently appreciates it when we do his dirty work - torturing, killing, firing people without cause. That sort of thing.
Gonzogate is about disposing of inconvenient people. It is categorically similar to other such disposal acts in other times and places. And it is motivated by the same logic. Bad though the act is, it retains a kind of plausible deniability. It may be a kind of kick in the groin to justice, but where's the law against it? Gonzo may not have golden hair, but he wears Eric's laughing hyena grin. He and Goodwin and a few of their cadre have kicked justice in the balls. Let's hope we deal with it more justly than did Miss Eulalie.
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*The event is real but some of the names have been changed.
** I do not mean to suggest that part of the academic training at Messiah College contains this thinking. Rather, I mean to suggest that the college tends to naturally attract people whose religious attitudes and views of the world can be approximated by this line of reasoning.
Copyright: Stephen R. Brubaker, 2006. All Rights Reserved