The Growlery (December 2003)
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Michael Gilleland
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The Growlery (December 2003)
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Two of my favorite stories about President Kennedy have turned out to be urban legends. The first is the story that he said "I am a jelly doughnut" (Ich bin ein Berliner, rather than Ich bin Berliner) at the Berlin Wall. The second is the story that he didn't wear a hat to his inauguration, and that this omission caused men's hats to become unfashionable in the United States.
Whatever the reason, most men in the United States don't wear hats these days. What Thoreau said about fashions in hats ("The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same") is no longer true, at least for men's hats.
Everyone who knows me recognizes that I'm not exactly a fashion plate. Most of my clothes come from church rummage sales and the goodwill store. My current pair of shoes costs a dollar. My wife once gently told me that a rummage sale shirt I'd worn a couple of times was actually a pajama top, and suggested that maybe I'd want to wear it at home but not in public.
Despite (or because of) my lack of fashion sense, I find myself envying men who buck the hatless trend. They look so jaunty with their berets and golf caps. I once worked with a fellow who wore a gigantic Stetson, and wore it with aplomb.
My admiration of hat wearers doesn't extend to those who wear baseball caps backwards, though. I wouldn't go quite so far as Theodore Dalrymple ("It is impossible to look intelligent or dignified, and difficult even to look civil, in a baseball cap") or Terrence O. Moore ("Part security blanket, part good-luck charm, these distinctive head coverings unite each barbarian with the rest of the vast barbaric horde"), but something about a baseball cap worn backwards does make the wearer look like a Neanderthal, even if he's a Nobel Prize winner. Catchers wear them backwards so the visor doesn't interfere with the protective mask, but no one else has an excuse.
Some web pages say that outfielder Ken Griffey started this odious custom, but George Will pointed out that Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye boasted, "I swung the old peak round to the back." Catcher in the Rye was first published in 1951, and Ken Griffey wasn't even born until 1969. I believe I can trace the custom much further back. The first stanza of "The Preacher's Boy" by American poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916) contains a description of a preacher's wayward son that includes the phrase "his cap-rim turned behind" (line 7). See The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1941), p. 284. Whoever did start the custom deserves eternal punishment in the lowest circle of Dante's Inferno.
I've recently been reading Johan Huizinga's biography of the Renaissance humanist Erasmus (1466-1536), which has some reproductions of contemporary portraits by the painter Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). The hats worn by the men in Holbein's portraits intrigue me:
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The first one, on the head of Bonifacius Amerbach, looks especially dashing, although the ear flaps in the last hat, worn by Brian Tuke, might be more practical for a Minnesota winter. If an entrepreneur comes out with a new line of hats, called Holbein Hats, I'll buy one. I'll even wear it, until my wife gently suggests that it might be more suitable at home, not in public.
John Updike, in Self-Consciousness: Memoirs (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 248, 250, celebrates the pleasures of wearing a hat and looking foolish:
My father used to pain and embarrass me greatly by wearing a little wool Navy watch cap; it kept his head warm, yet also made him look like a cretin .... Now, I wear a watch cap just like my father, all winter, inside the house and out, and though my wife complains that I look foolish I discover, what my father in his turn had discovered, that there is no pain and a certain pleasure in looking foolish. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more, and float upward in our heedlessness, singing Gratia Dei sum quod sum [by the grace of God I am what I am]."
I can't resist quoting one final anecdote about hats and foolishness, although it's about a woman's head covering, not a man's. Walter Harding tells the story about Thoreau's mother in The Days of Henry Thoreau (New York: Knopf, 1965), p. 350:
In 1857 his mother at the age of seventy, wearing bright yellow ribbons on her bonnet, called on Mary Moody Emerson. During the entire conversation Miss Emerson kept her eyes tightly shut and when Mrs. Thoreau got up to leave, she remarked: "Perhaps you noticed, Mrs. Thoreau, that I closed my eyes during your call. I did so because I did not wish to look on the ribbons you are wearing, so unsuitable for a child of God and a person of your years."
The University of Indiana is justly renowned for its excellent music department. I was shocked to see that its curriculum includes the following courses which pander to undergraduates' debased tastes:
But perhaps I shouldn't be shocked. This trend is widespread in academia these days. The University of California-Berkeley offered a class on "gangsta" rap star Tupac Shakur. H. Samy Alim (a.k.a. Brother Tha PharaoH Alim) taught "The Language of Hip Hop Culture" at Stanford University. And Shawan Wade, a doctoral student at the University of Michigan, chaired an academic hip-hop conference. But what can you expect when even Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, former Professor of Poetry at Oxford University, praises the filth-spewing Eminem for his "verbal energy"?
At San Francisco's New College of California, you can get bachelor's and master's humanities degrees with a concentration in activism and social change. What exactly is an "activist" anyway? Whenever I hear this word I think of someone who can't sit still, an unfortunate sufferer from St. Vitus' Dance.
Plymouth University in England offers a degree in surf science (i.e. surf-boarding), as does Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. Golf course turf management is also a popular "academic" subject. You can study it in England at Cannington College or here in the States at Mississippi State University.
There's a conversation in Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land (New York: Ace, 1987), p. 85, that is relevant to this topic:
"Which reminds me: I don't like to be called 'Doctor.'"
"Sir?"
"Oh, I'm not offended. But when they began handing out doctorates for comparative folk dancing and advanced flyfishing, I became too stinkin' proud to use the title. I won't touch watered whiskey and take no pride in watered-down degrees."
Advances in knowledge do sometimes require changes in college courses. It's salutary to recall that the study of English as an academic discipline achieved official status only after many years of hard struggle. In 1891, John Churton Collins wrote The Study of English Literature: A Plea for Its Recognition and Organization at the Universities, but it wasn't until 1904 that Walter Raleigh (1861-1922) was appointed the first Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. Cambridge was even slower. The Regius Chair of English Literature at Cambridge was established in 1912. Its first occupant was Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944). And only in 1919 did Cambridge have its first English Tripos. There's an interesting web page on Tripos Subjects by Date of Introduction, which is a history in miniature of the expansion of new academic disciplines.
Call me a troglodyte, but I hope that I never live to see the day when aromatherapy, sports turf management, rock and roll, and surf-boarding become recognized academic subjects at Cambridge and Oxford. And don't get me going on the recent trend for "amenities" designed to attract students to colleges and universities, such as rock-climbing walls (at the University of Houston's $53 million wellness center), golf course simulators (at Indiana University of Pennsylvania), and pedicures (at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh).
When British scientist J.B.S. Haldane was asked what his studies had taught him about the creator of the universe, he replied, "God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles." Over twenty percent of known species are beetles.
To judge from some recent news reports, one might conclude that God also has an inordinate fondness for professional sports figures, who claim that divine intervention is responsible for their acts of prowess on the playing field.
Baseball player Trot Nixon, of the Boston Red Sox, said about a winning hit against the Oakland A's in the eleventh inning, "I wasn't me swinging that bat. It was the Lord Jesus Christ." On the other hand, New York Yankee pitcher Mariano Riviera claimed that God told him the Yankees would win the seventh game of the American League Championship Series this year.
I suppose that this illustrates the impartiality of God, of whom it is said, "He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). I'll leave it to you, dear reader, to decide which team (Red Sox or Yankees) is the evil or the good, which the just or the unjust.
Apparently God looks after His elect off the playing field as well as on. In 2001, former Dallas Cowboy football player Deion Sanders took his 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible to the shop for repairs. The bill was $4,265.57, but Sanders refused to pay the entire amount and the owner of the repair shop sued him. Sanders said Jesus wanted him to pay only $1,500, according to the shop owner's testimony.
Regardless of the merits of the lawsuit (which Sanders won in June 2003), evidently many people hear divine voices instructing them to do this or that. For example, I once overheard a co-worker say that God told him to buy some property in Florida. He wasn't joking.
Gregg Easterbrook, a church-going Christian, wrote an excellent essay for ESPN debunking God's supposed intervention in sporting events. ESPN not only fired Easterbrook without adequate cause recently, but also (in a striking modern example of damnatio memoriae) removed all of his columns from its web site. The column in question can be found here, at least for the time being.
In ancient Greek tragedies, especially the tragedies of Euripides, it was not unusual for the playwright to resolve some problem at the end of the drama by divine intervention. The god appeared in the air, usually with the help of a crane, and this is the origin of the term "deus ex machina" (god from the machine, the machine being the crane). I find it easier to suspend my disbelief at this plot device than at the thought of God controlling the swing of Trot Nixon's baseball bat.
These claims of God's intervention at sporting events might be risible, but it's not so amusing when criminals claim divine sanction for their misdeeds.
On Thanksgiving Day, 2000, Brian David Mitchell (aka Immanuel David Isaiah) and his wife Wanda Barzee received a revelation that the heavenly law of polygamy had returned and that Mitchell should take seven more wives. The first of the seven was fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Smart, kidnapped by Mitchell and Barzee on June 5, 2002, and eventually rescued on March 12, 2003. According to Barzee's friend Vicki Cottrell, "God told them to take Elizabeth. They were doing what God asked them to do."
Horrific as Mitchell's revelation was, it pales in comparison to the chilling handwritten message found in the shirt pocket of Ron Lafferty, arrested along with his brother Don for the 1984 murder of Brenda and Erica Lafferty:
Thus sayeth the Lord unto my servants the prophets. It is my will and commandment that ye remove the following individuals in order that my work might go forward, for they have truly become obstacles in my path and I will not allow my work to be stopped.
First thy brother’s wife, Brenda, and her baby, then Chole Low, and then Richard Stowe. And it is my will that they be removed in rapid succession and that an example be made of them in order that others might see the fate of those who fight against the true saints of God.
Barbara Jones' book about British serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, is entitled Voices from an Evil God, because Sutcliffe in his defence claimed that God instructed him to kill.
I'll take my divine revelation straight from the pages of the Holy Bible, rather than in the form of a disembodied voice. Even in the Bible, one of the most difficult passages for me to accept is the story Abraham and Isaac (Genesis 22:1-18). God saved Isaac at the last moment. But He didn't intervene to release Jephthah (Judges 11:28-35) from his terrible vow.
In New Delhi, Bindu Bahadur cut off her hand because God told her to. I hope she wasn't reading Matthew 5:30 ("If thy right hand offend thee, cut if off, and cast it from thee.").
Mijailo Mijailovic, on trial for murdering the Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh, said that Jesus told him to do it.
Greg Warmke of Fairfield, Maine, admits that he murdered Leslie Bullock, but says that God in a dream told him to do it.
Deanna Laney of New Chapel Hill, Texas, claimed that God instructed her to kill her children as a test of faith. She killed them on Mother's Day. Laney was found not guilty by reason of insanity.