Wednesday Haiku

Peanuts are good food

boiled tastes better than roasting 

my father said so

Duel of the Fates

Should I not survive, I've left money in my will for someone to read this either at the wedding of Jack Cooke or the funeral of Jay Cooke, with an extra stipend if they are concurrent.  

Because the Campbell boys chose mates based on sentimental rather than logical reasons, the Campbell Clan remained childless for a quarter of a century after the birth of my sister.  She would be the one to break the drought when she announced at family Sunday dinner that a child was on the way.   Katie Aiken had pioneered the process a few months before and declared it safe, at least the child-bearing part; the child-rearing part remained undetermined.  Months later, my boy Jack was born without any hope of escaping a wicked mouth or a mind on his own, as he inherited it from dozens on either side of his genome.  

Sixteen years after his last space epic, George Lucas presented The Phantom Menace to revive his most successful franchise.  I had seen it at a theater that's now closed for the very first showing with some Millsaps kids.  Jay, despite his deep-abiding love for genre films, had not.  At Sunday dinner with grandmother, Jay declared that his firstborn would not survive this earth without a love for Star Wars, and, although he was but four years old, Jay and I should take our young padawan to see The Phantom Menace at the Northpark multiplex cinema.  

Having already seen the movie, I knew it kind of sucked.  Completely sucked, actually, except for one part where the two good Jedi had the greatest lightsaber duel yet with the evil Darth Maul.  Tickets were purchased, popcorn and cokes for three, and we entered the theater only to find that the only seats together were on the third row from the screen.  

As a child, I loved sitting in the front row as it made me feel more a part of the action.  As an adult, I learned that was actually a terrible place to sit because you have to look straight up, and it distorts your perspective on the screen.  We didn't have a great deal of choice, though, so seats were procured with Jay to the left, me to the right, and Jack nestled safely between us, or so we thought.

With Jack being in the first round of children in our social group, none of us were prepared for what it might be like.  The women seemed to have a handle on it, but we men were still determined to carry on as before, but occasionally carrying a tiny mascot with us.  It was still our practice to visit the Cherokee every Thursday for beers and sandwiches and rounds of mutual defacing and sometimes pool or video poker.  

In those days, a pretty dreadful man from Memphis decided to bring topless entertainment to Jackson, and our Thursday night adventures began to end at Tiffany's Cabaret, mere blocks south of the Cherokee.  Jay's contribution to these side-quests usually involved him asking the dancers if they ever regretted not finishing high school and why they wanted that godawful tattoo.  This practice came to an end when one member of our retinue forgot he was borrowing his wife's car on a night when he had the misfortune of winning a Tiffany's Cabaret T-Shirt in a lapdance competition.  When she found the T-shirt he drunkenly left in her car, or rather smelled it before she found it, on her way to work in her car the next day, our visits to topless joints soon came to an end.  While we may have been ready for adult entertainment, we may not have been ready for the adult responsibility of taking a four-year-old to the movies.

Although it had been nearly twenty years since the last Star Wars movie, George Lucas didn't do such a great job writing the script for his return to that universe.  Far too much of the film centers around a frog-like creature who talks like an idiot and has the unfortunate name of Jar-Jar Binks.  Jay was making the best of it, though.  Nobody ever called him Jay Jay Binks, but they could have.  He'd waited so long for more Star Wars, he was going to make the best of it, and even if the movie sucked (which it did), his progeny, the fruit of his loins, his firstborn, was there with him, experiencing this "masterpiece" with him, and that made it worth-while.

Once you're introduced to the character of Darth Maul, you know there's a pretty good chance that at least one cool scene might be ahead.  At some point, this (very cool-looking) Sith knight must do battle with the two Jedi.  I'd already told Jay how cool it was.  After enduring what seemed like days of Jar Jar Binks, Boss Nass, and a teenage Natalie Portman phoning in her lines, you could tell the one cool scene in the entire goddamn movie was coming soon.

Much of the success of the first three films was due to the score by John Williams. Returning to the Star Wars universe, he was determined to come up with something new and impressive.  Knowing in advance that there was just the one cool spot in the movie, he saved his considerable talents for that and composed a moving piece called The Duel of the Fates for the fight between the Sith Darth Maul and the two Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn.

With the two Jedi facing off against the horned Sith, I could see Jay's knuckles grow white as he gripped the armrest.  This was it--the only cool thing in the movie.  The Lightsaber Duel was about to commence.  Williams' score begins with an ominous choral note.  The light sabers light up with the now famous swisssssh sound.  

Among people I know, there's something of a rule that the more you want something, the less likely you are to get it.  Jay had waited sixteen years for another lightsaber duel.  He wanted so much for it to be cool.  I had told him it was cool. He'd heard the music on the radio and seen video snippets.  This was it!  The moment was now!

Just as the lightsabers first clashed with an electric spark and a bit of smoke, at the bottom of the screen, away from the considerable action on the screen, was the unmistakable figure of a completely naked four-year-old running in front of it.  Jay looked at me.  I looked at him, and we both looked down at the spot between us where Jack was supposed to be safely nestled, now an empty bucket of popcorn.  With a pained look on his face, Jay seemed to plead that, since I'd already seen this part of the movie, I might field this crisis for him.  I mentally ran down my inventory of how to handle social situations and found there was no entry for how one handles a naked four-year-old at the movies, and I turned my hands up.  

We were indoors, and there's every reason to believe that Jack would have survived unharmed had we ignored him for three minutes until we get to the part where Darth Maul gets cut in half (spoiler alert).  I would survive, and Jack would most certainly survive, but if his mother found out we let him run naked through the theater unhindered while we watched the movie, there's every reason to believe that Jay may not survive, and if he did, Jack would be an only child because Jay would spend the rest of his life sleeping on the sofa. 

Regretfully, painfully, Jay motioned, "I got this," to me and left his seat in pursuit of the naked child.  I'm sure there were times when Jay got to see the entire sequence unhindered on television.  The movie wasn't really that great, anyway.  There's just one chance to see the first Lightsaber duel in sixteen years, though, and my brother-in-law sacrificed it for his firstborn.  There would be other times and other opportunities to screw up, but for this one, Jay did the right thing.  

Do Say It

 In several parts of the country, including Mississippi, there is a movement to eliminate any mention or suggestion of homosexuality from undergraduate education.  In Florida, it surfaced as the much talked about "don't say gay" bill.  Their goal here is to protect children from ideas and influences that can harm them--without any proof that these ideas or influences actually do harm them.

I am a product of that kind of education.  Until I went to college, there was never a mention of homosexuality in any of my educational experiences.  We learned that Pangloss lost the tip of his nose due to syphilis, but there was never any mention that a man could love another man in even the most remote fantasy.  I was a product of that kind of education, and at sixteen, I tried to use it to ruin a man's reputation and destroy his career.

I've written before about the troubles I had with my headmaster, David Hicks.  David called us dolts, degenerates, and worse.  He was making, what seemed to be, a specific effort to push half my friends out of the school on charges that could have applied equally to others but didn't because David Hicks never touched the kids who he imagined had fathers who earned more than the rest.

My efforts to discuss the situation rationally with David went nowhere and were evidently irritating him.  By the spring of my tenth-grade year, it was clear we were headed for a collision course, one that I would lose.  My dad agreed to sit in on one of my meetings with our headmaster.  It was generally his policy to let me fight my own battles, secure that his reputation was enough to help aid me along the way without having to show his face.  That he went in person to this meeting was most likely my mother's influence.

Although my father had little to say, David Hicks was not impressed by him, by me, or by anything either of us had to say.  I could tell by the look on my father's face that even if David Hicks didn't kick me out of St. Andrews, I wouldn't be returning the next year.  He had had enough.  

Desperate to turn the tide of this battle and give me something to use against Hicks, I blurted out, "Professor X is a Gay!" hoping to prove to my headmaster that the true degenerates were on his side of the field, not mine.  It's not important that you know who Professor X is.  More than forty years later, I haven't any idea if he was actually "a gay" or not.  I do know that my friend had said he was and I should be careful, or he'd look at my butt.  He said it often enough that, in my moment of desperation, that's what came to mind.  

Keep in mind, this is the same friend who said I should put my "mule" on the overhead projector in the hall and shine it into Peppermint Patty's classroom because it'd be funny. When I pointed out that it'd be just as funny if he projected his own "mule" into Peppermint Patty's classroom, he told me to shut up.  I should have remembered that before using his reference to try and smear another man's reputation, but I didn't.

The truth is, at sixteen, I had no idea what homosexuality meant.  It was in none of the books I read, none of the movies I saw, no teacher ever mentioned it, and I had yet to meet a single person who was willing to say they were gay.  I was as shielded from the concept as Ron Desantis wants the students of Florida to be, and I tried to use my ignorance as a weapon.  

The truth is, I was actually surrounded by homosexuals, but nobody ever said it.  A fair number of my classmates would come out by the time they were thirty.  Several of the shows I watched on television had people like Paul Lynde, Charles Nelson Riley, Rock Hudson, and Raymond Burr in them, but it'd be another fifteen years before I had any idea of this.  Paul Lynde even sued a reporter who said he was gay once and won!

All I knew about homosexuality was that it was something you really didn't want to be, and this Hicks character was endangering us by forcing a teacher on us who might look at our butts.  Of all the times David Hicks ignored what I was saying when he shouldn't, this is a time when I'm glad he paid me no mind.  Accusing a teacher of being a homosexual in 1980 could have been a career killer.  A few years later,  there was an extremely popular professor at another school who made the mistake of admitting to his students what he was and was shortly thereafter shown the door with no recourse.

My ignorance could have really hurt somebody.  I wasn't a mean or vindictive kid, but the kid underground told me these people were bad, and they were bad for us, and nothing in my experience gave me any positive information about homosexuals to counter that.  

Let's amplify this situation a bit.  At the same school, there were several kids who would eventually tell the world they were gay.  There was even one of us who was transgender.  Neither society nor our school gave us any way to conceptualize this situation as anything but negative stereotypes.  One woman I know who eventually told us she was a lesbian was one of the meanest kids I knew.  I never understood that at the time.  She was so pretty.  Now I understand that she was mean to protect herself from us.  We were unintentionally being really very cruel to kids we didn't mean to hurt simply because we didn't know any better.

Psychologists tell us that up to ten percent of the population doesn't fit into the traditional heterosexual description.  In the late seventies, our upper school was around two hundred kids.  That means that twenty of them weren't heterosexual.  That means that, had they been found out, twenty of them would most likely have been bullied by my friends and me because we didn't know any better.  We were told they were aliens.  We were told they were this odd combination of very weak but also very dangerous.    It means that there were at least twenty kids at our school who couldn't tell us a very fundamental thing about themselves for fear of how we would react.  

That's a dangerous and painful situation, and it could easily have been avoided by an education that treated homosexuality as a human condition that should be discussed at least as much as the Syphilis that Pangloss died of.   That's the world these "don't say gay" bills create.  Children who are ignorant and uninformed can be vicious and hurtful.  I was.  People say they're very tired of having the "gay agenda" rammed down their throats, but I lived in a time when nobody said gay, and there was a genuine cruelty about it, cruel because homosexuality does exist and it exists without taking any victims, but without guidance, people can easily fall into victimizing them.  

Myopia

Many people choose to see nothing in the world beyond the tip of their nose.

It's a matter of self-preservation.  Blinding yourself to the troubles of the world gives you more time, energy, and resolve to deal with your own.

Shortening our vision creates a deficit because we can't see threats as they approach, so we pay people to go out into the world and report back on what they see.  There once was a time when we could rely on these reporters to simply tell us what they saw.  Men learned there was money to be made by reporting back what they saw, but from a particular perspective, and then the reporters became unreliable.

Because we cannot see who our enemies truly are, there's money to be made in telling us who to hate and who to trust.  Telling people they have enemies to fear makes them very loyal and their generosity very dependable.

Finding things out for yourself is a difficult path, but in the end, who else can you trust?  In the world there are many more people who are afraid then there are people to fear, but the only way to know who is who is to find out for yourself.