Inside Charlie’s Playhouse
Guest column by Kate Miller
President, Charlie’s Playhouse
KATE MILLER is a mother and scientist with a PhD in demography from U Penn, and a Masters in Public Health from Columbia University. In response to the terrible scarcity of toys and games to help kids understand evolution, she launched CHARLIE’S PLAYHOUSE this very month. I wrote a brief but glowing review of the company for Raising Freethinkers. In this column, Kate describes the process that led to the creation of this exciting and brilliantly-conceived resource for science-jazzed parents and their lucky kids.
Dinosaur-mania washed over my two boys a couple of years back, and in its wake came some wonderful discussions about evolution, natural selection and Charles Darwin. We turned toy boats into the Beagle and sailed around the playroom collecting plastic animals for inspection. We unfurled a roll of paper on the floor and drew ancient animals along a billion-year timeline.
Delighted by their interest, I went online one day in search of some educational games or toys on the subject. I easily found fun stuff for kids about physics, chemistry, astronomy and every other branch of science you can think of, but nothing on evolution. Yes, some wonderful children’s books about evolution, and some great videos for grownups, but no toys, no manipulatives, nothing involving physical movement or the sheer insane joy of the history of life on this planet.
I dug deeper into the market. I checked out natural history museums, suppliers of teaching materials, professional biology associations. Nothing. I made phone calls, read toy industry publications, inquired at specialty stores. Nothing. Some toys that focus on the natural world walk right up to an invisible line but will not cross over to actually use the words “evolution” or “natural selection.” Even the vast dinosaur-industrial complex doesn’t touch it. Check out the next dino toy you pick up.
My curiosity rose, along with my indignation. Why is there no infrastructure for presenting evolutionary ideas to young children? No doubt it’s due to political concerns in corporate America, yet for most people evolution does not contradict their beliefs in any way. Many parents who have been looking for evolution-themed toys have found their way to me; these parents are religious, they are secular, they are homeschoolers, they are mainstream, they are everyone. Why should this majority be deprived of educational fun stuff for their kids because of the few who politicize the issue? At the very least, kids have to be aware of evolutionary ideas for the same reason that they need to know about religion: it’s basic cultural literacy.
I also discovered that our national science standards recommend that students should not be exposed to evolution until high school, or middle school at earliest. I was raised in a household where evolution was normal, like gravity, so hearing about evolution for the first time in high school strikes me as odd, like learning that the Earth revolves around the Sun sometime around your junior prom. As member of the standards panel later told me over coffee, that recommendation was driven not by children’s inability to grasp the concepts but by elementary teachers’ discomfort with the material.
So my kids and I stumbled upon this vacant market niche, and I had what one friend calls “the entrepreneurial seizure.” Against my better judgment, we decided to start a business. Of course I hope to make a buck with this venture (wouldn’t it be nice if the kids get to go to college?) but I also hope to contribute to the scientific literacy of future generations. Oh, and also have some laughs with the kids along the way. So here is Charlie’s Playhouse. Welcome!
Cross purposes
“Daddy?”
“Yeah, B.”
“I want to wear something to school tomorrow but it makes me feel weird to wear it. I don’t know if I should.”
It’s completely in character for Erin (10) to open with a “should” question. Erin is as tightly concerned with values questions as the other two are with empirical ones. Most of all, she is intrigued, fascinated, curious, and ultimately repelled by the dark side.
I wrote last year about her long-ago entrée into this ambivalent dialectic, watching Snow White at age four:
Her epiphany came as Snow White entered the deep, dark forest, fleeing the wicked Queen. The Queen had certainly gotten her attention, but Erin’s eyes didn’t pop – and I mean POP — until Snow White fled into the storm-whipped forest.
“Daddy, LOOK!!”
“Oooh, yeah, look at that.” The whipping branches of the trees had transformed into gnarled hands, which were reaching ever closer to Snow White as she cowered and ran down the forest path. I looked over at Erin, whose dinnerplate eyes were glued to the screen.
“What ARE those?!” she asked, breathlessly.
“Looks like some kind of evil hands, B.”
“Daddy,” she said in an intense hush, “…I want to BE those evil hands!”
(For the record, she now talks about pursuing a Pre-Med course of study in college, with only a minor in Evil.)
I wasn’t surprised to hear that she was puzzling over the morality of clothing choice, pondering the implications of spaghetti straps or a too-short skirt. It’s her stock in trade. But this time, there was a twist.
“What is it you’re thinking about wearing?” I asked.
She slowly revealed a pendant necklace, and dangling at the end, a cross.
I remember when she bought it at the dollar store on a Florida vacation last year, selecting a cross of pink plastic beads from a huge display of hundreds of cross necklaces. (I remember the sign over the display reading ALL CROSS NECKLACES $1. I’d added a line in my mind: Jesus Saves—Why Shouldn’t You?)
“Why does it make you feel weird, B?” I assumed she was feeling out the reaction of her secular dad. And there was a time I would have frozen like a moose in the headlights at such a thing, unsure of the right response. But this isn’t some church-state issue. This is about letting my child explore the world for herself. I don’t have to engage anything higher than the brain stem for these situations anymore. But it wasn’t about my views–it was about hers.
“I feel weird wearing it when I don’t really believe in god. Like I’m not being honest. But I just like to wear it.”
“It’s fine, sweetie. It’s a pretty necklace.”
She paused. There was more, I could tell.
“It makes me feel good to wear it.”
Uhhh, okay, there’s at least one unfortunate way to read that sentence. “You mean it makes you feel like a good person to wear a cross?”
“No, of course not,” she said. “It just…” She smiled sheepishly. “It makes me feel good to rub it.”
I’ve been ready for that sentence for years, but the context is all wrong.
“When I’m worried, I rub it with my fingers and it makes the worry go away.”
Aha, okay. It’s a simple talisman. And Erin does spend more time worrying than she ought to. I told her about the jade worry stone I carried in my pocket throughout middle school. Same deal. It did make me feel better. Her cross has no more connection to God than my worry stone. In fact, her concern is that people might think it did when it didn’t.
I asked if I could feel the cross. The pink beads are threaded on two axes and revolve pleasantly beneath the fingertips. “Hey, that is nice,” I said. “Better than my rock!”
She laughed. She’s worn the cross for a week now. And if I know my girl, the compulsion to explain what she does and doesn’t believe is eventually going to surface. It’ll be a conversation starter for her. I could have found a reason to disallow it — something about disrespecting the beliefs of others, perhaps — but I wasn’t fishing for a way to disallow it. On the contrary, I fish for ways to allow things. Here’s a chance for her to engage and think about issues of identity and belief and symbolism. Why miss that chance?
Most important of all, I know it isn’t likely to cast a spell on her—in part because I didn’t treat it like fearful magic, and in part because I know my girl.
Circumcision Decision
- October 16, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Parenting, sex
- 26
Three winners have been selected from the gratifyingly multitudinous and high quality submissions to the first annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition. The winners are:
BLAKE EVANS, “Circumcision Decision”
ROBBIN DAWSON, “Look at the Bird”
ROBYN PARNELL, “Grandmas Gone God-Wild”
The winning entries will be presented here and in Humanist Network News in no particular order over the coming three months. Thanks to all who entered, and congratulations to Blake, Robbin, and Robyn!
Circumcision Decision
by Blake Evans
“I’ve decided to let you decide whether or not to circumcise.”
Sally said this to me one night, about six months into her pregnancy.
“Only if it’s a boy, though, right?”
One side of her mouth turned up. “Yes. Only if it’s a boy,” she said patiently.
Obviously, we had chosen not to learn the gender of the fetus. So few surprises in life and all that. But, apparently, that did not absolve me from making this decision.
“Why do I have to decide?” I asked.
“OK, I’ll tell you what: if it’s a boy, you decide. If it’s a girl, I decide.”
Didn’t seem quite fair somehow.
In the interest of too much full disclosure, I should note that I am circumcised, as are most men who were born in the US between the mid-1870’s and the mid-1970’s. According to Edward Wallerstein, author of Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy, the practice started in the US as a way of discouraging masturbation, and only started to wane in the 70’s after the American Academy of Pediatrics stated, “…there are no valid medical indications for circumcision in the neonatal period.” Still, neonatal circumcision in the US is believed to be as high as 60% of all male newborns.
Why is it still done? Part of the answer lies in religious and traditional beliefs.
This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised. — Genesis 17:10
And Herodotus, the Father of History, writing in the 5th century BCE, said of the Egyptian priests, “whereas other men… have their members as nature made them, the Egyptians practice circumcision.” I doubt, though, that either of these explains why my Unitarian parents chose to have me and my brother cut.
—
“If you decide not to circumcise him, I don’t think I’m comfortable cleaning it.”
“What? Why not?”
“I don’t know how!”
“Well, what makes you think I do? I’ve never had to clean one that wasn’t cut.”
Some people point out that most cultures that practice circumcision come from desert environments, and perhaps this practice prevented infections, called balanitis, that might occur when sand gets under the foreskin. In fact a nurse practitioner at the OB’s office mentioned this when I asked for her opinion.
“They said they see an increase in infection in uncircumcised males over in Iraq, so there does seem to be some benefit.” I was never able to confirm this, and I found it stated as a reason for circumcision going back at least as far as World War II, but there was never any evidence for it. Preemptive cutting to avoid balanitis seemed a bit like removing his appendix on the off-chance he gets appendicitis.
“Plus,” continued the NP,” there is reason to believe it reduces the transmission of HIV and other STDs.” Well, so do condoms, but much more effectively.
—
“So, have you decided?” Sally’s sister was visiting and had just been told that it was all up to me.
“Not yet.”
“Well, if you want my opinion, I haven’t seen many that were uncut. But… they’re kinda weird.”
Aesthetics is definitely about what one is used to seeing. As Herodotus said further about the Egyptians, “they circumcise themselves for the sake of cleanliness, preferring to be clean rather than comely.” Apparently circumcised penises looked weird to the ancient Greeks. I, as with most of my generation, am used to the circumcised look.
Which was exactly why I was having such a problem deciding. Wasn’t my hesitation ultimately about my son looking like me? If there “are no valid medical indications for circumcision,” why on Earth would I do it? If I were uncut, or if I was from a religious tradition that required it as a covenant, I doubt this would even have been a question in my mind. But based purely on aesthetics, with no medical evidence to validate it, nor religious tenet to guide me, how could I justify removing something that could never be replaced? How could I surgically alter “his member as nature made it?”
—
In the delivery room, Sally asked me again, “Have you decided about the circumcision?”
“I’m about 80% sure I’ll leave it intact.”
What did I eventually do?
I had a daughter.
___________________________________
BLAKE EVANS recently left a consulting practice to become a stay-at-home dad. He lives in New York City with his partner Sally, their child CJ, and a brown dog. During nap-time, he runs the blog domestic father, a site dedicated to skeptical parenting and critical thinking.
The white-bearded red herring…or YES, I’m talking to YOU, Lisa Miller
The world is full of ignorant nonsense, and that’s okay. Well, it’s not okay, but it seems to be part of the unavoidable deal, what with unequal access to education and a thousand other things. What I’ve had quite enough of is ignorant nonsense from people who really have no excuse.
Newsweek Religion Editor Lisa Miller (who interviewed me for a Beliefwatch column in July 2007) set me off with a recent column ( “Arguing Against the Atheists,” October 6) regarding her irritation with “the new generation of professional atheists.”
She begins with a variation on the ad populum fallacy (“If 90-odd percent of Americans say they believe in God, it’s unhelpful to dismiss them as silly”), but it’s her second “argument” that had me shaking my head in frustration at the confident sloppiness of someone with the chops to know better:
When they check that “believe in God” box, a great many people are not talking about the God the atheists rail against—a supernatural being who intervenes in human affairs, who lays down inexplicable laws about sex and diet, punishes violators with the stinking fires of hell and raises the fleshly bodies of the dead.
Generally phrased as “I don’t believe in a white-bearded man in the sky either,” this shameful dodge is the current favorite of religious moderates. It neatly sidesteps all challenges by saying, “Sorry, wrong number” and thereby avoiding the messy business of meeting those challenges. One small detail: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and the rest of those whose persistence Miller dislikes have all made it achingly clear that their critiques are NOT limited to literalists. But even aching clarity must be read to be understood. At best, Miller must have skimmed this passage from The God Delusion:
This is as good a moment as any to forestall an inevitable retort to the book, one that would otherwise—as sure as night follows day—turn up in a review: ‘The God that Dawkins doesn’t believe in is a God that I don’t believe in either. I don‘t believe in an old man in the sky with a long white beard.’ That old man is an irrelevant distraction and his beard is as tedious as it is long. Indeed, the distraction is worse than irrelevant. Its very silliness is calculated to distract attention from the fact that what the speaker really believes is not a whole lot less silly. I know you don’t believe in an old bearded man sitting on a cloud, so let’s not waste any more time on that. I am not attacking any particular version of God or gods. I am attacking God, all gods, anything and everything supernatural, wherever and whenever they have been or will be invented. (p. 36)
A good effort, Richard, but I’m afraid Lisa Miller only read the dustcover.
Hitchens, Harris, and Dennett have also gone out of their way, again and again, in writing and in interviews, to make it abundantly clear that they are talking to moderates as well, Lisa. Harris built it right into the opening pages of The End of Faith and, when that was ignored, Letter to a Christian Nation. They all voice two different but related critiques for moderates and extremists. They think religious belief itself, in however attenuated a form, is unworthy, undesirable, even harmful. They further suggest that moderates, by offering blanket endorsements of “faith” as a concept and practice, provide ongoing cover and succor to malignant fundamentalism. These authors offer not just the statement of these opinion, but reams of evidence and argument.
Mustn’t look too closely at that, though.
After placing moderate religion safely out of harm’s way, Miller offers a thought that demonstrates precisely the confident nonsense Dawkins, et al. are concerned about among moderates and literalists alike:
Submitting faith to proof is absurd. Reason defines one kind of reality (what we know); faith defines another (what we don’t know). Reasonable believers can live with both at once.
If there’s a single thrust and focus of the “professional atheists,” it is challenging the unsupported declaration that faith “defines a reality” and yet is immune to the requirements of proof. She couldn’t have created a better encapsulation of the dangerous nonsense of faith if she had tried. That the nonsense itself occurs in the process of simply saying “nuh-uhhh” to the arguments against it is as ironic and unworthy a retort as I can imagine.
You may legitimately disagree with Dawkins and the rest, Ms. Miller. But they’ve worked ever-so-hard to frame clear and concise arguments. Would it be okay if we all read them, then discuss those arguments on their actual merits instead of pretending they are talking to someone else about something else?
Thinking sideways
It’s parent-teacher conference time, which I love. There always seems to be a moment in these conferences when I’m reminded that my kids think sideways.
Present any one of them with a question or problem and they tend to choose the least conventional solution that’s still a solution.
Mr. H, Delaney’s first grade teacher, showed us an assignment in which the kids were asked what superpower they would want to have. Informal web polls tend toward mind-reading, flight, super-strength, super-speed, invisibility, and the rest of the Marvel Comics arsenal. Mr. H said the other kids had generally chosen from that traditional list.
Not Delaney. “If I could have any supper power,” she wrote, “I would want the power to help other peple. Like if some one was blinde, I would make them see again. Wenever I would here HELP!, I would come.”
I wonder where “reversing disabilities” would be on a frequency graph of power preferences. Then there’s the fun fact that the children of Christian parents were busily emulating Superman while the child of humanists chose to essentially emulate Christ.
Last Thankgiving, Erin’s fourth grade class did the usual “what are you grateful for” assignment, and again we heard our child’s sideways answer in the teacher conference. Most of her classmates were grateful for health, family, sunshine, food, a home, our country, our soldiers, our freedom. All marvelous answers.
And my daughter?
“Pain,” said Mr. J. “She said she is most grateful for pain.”
I smiled. “Really.”
“Yes, pain. At first I was a little, uh…concerned,” he said, “but then she explained it. She said that pain warns us when something is wrong, and without it, a little injury or sickness could get worse and we’d never know. We could die from something small. So she’s grateful for pain.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never thought of it that way.”
We’d talked about this once when she had a bad splinter in her foot. If it weren’t for pain, I said as I worked the tweezers clumsily, she might not have known the splinter was there. It could have become infected, even dangerous.
But here’s the thing: that splinter came out four years ago, when she was six. I had no idea at the time that the idea of pain as our friend had made any impression, much less a deep one. Unlike the splinter, that sideways idea worked its way in and stayed.
Pick a number
“Twenty-eight!”
“Hmm, okay, twenty-eight. Ooh, that’s a good one.”
Despite living with him for thirteen years, I knew very little about my dad. He worked three jobs and traveled a lot. When he was in town, he came home exhausted from a hundred-mile round-trip commute.
My mom spoke very little of him after he died, consumed as she was with the lonely and impossible task of raising three kids by herself two time zones away from any other relatives while working full time.
I’ve often wondered how much my kids would remember of me if I keeled over today. The situation is different — I’m much more involved in my kids’ lives for several reasons — but I wanted a way of sharing myself and my life with my kids in a natural way.
About five or six years ago, without even meaning to, I found a way. We started a storytelling tradition in our family called “age stories.” Simple premise–the kids pick an age, and I tell about something that happened to me at that age. It’s become one of their favorite bedtime story options.
Through age stories, they now know about my life at age 4 (broken arm, courtesy of my hobby at the time–walking on a row of metal trash cans), age 9 (I stole a pack of Rollos from Target and felt so bad I fed them to my dog, nearly killing her), age 21 (when I dumped my first girlfriend and got dumped by the second one), 23 (my crushing fear and uncertainty on graduating college), 25 (the cool job that allowed me to meet Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., Jimmy Stewart, Elton John, and a hundred other famous types), 26 (when I pursued and stole their mother’s affections from the studley Air Force pilot she was practically engaged to), what happened on the days they were born, and everything — really, at this point, just about everything — in between.
They know how I tricked a friend into quitting pot (for a night, anyway, at 15), the surreal week that followed my dad’s death (13), how I nearly cut off two fingers by reaching under a running lawnmower (17, shutup), my battles with the college where I taught (40), the time I was nearly hit by a train in Germany (38) and nearly blown off a cliff in a windstorm in Scotland (42).
Age stories can also open up important issues in an unforced way. Delaney happened to ask for “eleven” (the year my parents moved us from St. Louis to LA) right before her parents moved her from Minneapolis to Atlanta — a very difficult time for her. I described my own tears and rage, and the fact that I had held on to my bedpost the day of the move — and how well it turned out in the end. I wasn’t surprised when she asked for “eleven” again and again during that hard transition in her own life.
We’ve talked about love, lust, death, fear, joy, lying, courage, cowardice, mistakes, triumphs, uncertainty, embarrassment, and the personal search for meaning in ways that no lecture could ever achieve. They’ve come to know their dad not just as the middle-aged monkey he is now, but as a little boy, a teenager, a twentysomething, stumbling up the very path they’re on now.
And they keep coming back for more.
Give it a try. Make it dramatic. Include lots of details and dialogue. Have fun. Then tell us how it went.
Name the Brazilians!
- October 07, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, diversity, fear, humor, My kids, Parenting, values
- 19
Most of the time, our family life is typical. But every so often, without warning, a Monty Python sketch breaks loose.
Connor (13) asked the other day why there are bad names for black people but not for others. At first I didn’t understand what he meant. Then I realized he meant exactly what he had asked.
It’s not the first time I’ve been made aware that he is growing up in a very different day-to-day environment than I did. I once asked him if middle school kids still told jokes about people who were different from them.
“Different how?” he asked. I assumed he was just torturing his liberal dad.
“You know…different races. Different nationalities. Different gender. Handicap. Sexual orientation. Hair color.” I was momentarily aghast at the number of categories that leapt to mind, not to mention the number of verbatim jokes I could instantly recall. And they kept coming. “Weight, intelligence. Religion.” I lowered my head. “Birth defects.”
“You told jokes about people with birth defects?” he asked incredulously.
“No! Not me,” I lied.
In fact, I was always the comedian in school. Dale needs to learn when it is time to be funny and when it is time to pay attention was a common report card comment — right next to the ‘A’, thank you very much. I protested that the official “time to be funny” never seemed to arrive. Having chosen comedy, I engaged all the genres of my tasteless time. Fat jokes. Quadriplegic jokes. Black hitchhikers and Polish lightbulb changers and Chinese shlimp flied lice. And yes, any and all birth defects.
This question was different but clearly related. “There are rude names for others,” I said, “not just blacks.”
“What about for white people?”
“Honkey,” I said. “Cracker. Peckerwood.”
He laughed. “What about the Chinese?”
“Chink, slant, gook. You’re telling me you’ve never heard those?”
He was shaking his head in disbelief. “Never. I’ve heard Grandma talk about A-rabs,” he said, leaning on the ‘A’ — “and you can tell what she means.”
“Well, it gets a lot worse than that.”
“Like what?”
“Is…is this for a social studies report or something?”
“I just never heard these. It’s crazy. What else? I’m just curious.”
I looked at him sideways, finally deciding he was not pulling my leg. My teenage son was hearing his first genuine ethnic slurs not in the school corridors but from his dad. I thought about pretending we’d exhausted the list, then decided he could handle it — that hiding hateful stuff from him is less productive than looking them in the eye, giving him a chance to flex his own moral judgment.
“Well, some others for people from the Middle East are towelhead, raghead, camel-jockey.” I paused. “Sand nigger.”
“DAD!”
“I’m sorry, jeez, you asked! Did you only want the pretty slurs?”
He shook his head again, slowly. “What about countries? Like Germany.”
“You mean krauts?”
“What, like from sauerkraut?”
“I guess.”
“Italy.”
“Wop, dago, goombah…”
“You’re making these up!”
“…guinea, greaseball…”
“France!”
“Frogs. Or cheese-eating surrender-monkeys.”
He laughed so hard he turned red. “Why?” he asked at last.
“Well, some people think they caved in too fast to the Germans in the Second…”
“No, I mean…okay, I can see why somebody would make up rude words for people who are really different from you. Still rude, but I can see it. But the French?”
I thought about it for a minute. “Well, I guess it depends on whether you’ve been in conflict with someone, one way or another. We don’t have a name for Greenlanders, as far as I know, because our interests and actions don’t overlap. If they did, I guarantee we’d come up with a slur in a heartbeat. Some people resented France for costing American lives in the Second World War, and some get mad when they don’t support U.S. policy.”
“So we probably don’t have anything for Mexicans.”
“You’re joking.”
“Oh wait. Okay…yeah, I know some of those.”
There’s a large and growing Mexican-American population in Atlanta, which means an increasing perception of conflicting interests — most often groundless — and resentments stoked in part by angry talk radio.
“What about Brazil?” Connor asked.
I thought about it. Brazil. “Hmm. No…I don’t think we’ve ever had enough to do with Brazil to call them anything.”
Ahh, but the century is young. If that shoot-first devotee of Teddy Roosevelt makes it to the Oval Office, can a name for the Brazilians — and the Belgians, and just about everyone else — be all that far behind?
Five little bits
1. Reminder: The deadline for the First Annual Parenting Beyond Belief Column Competition is TOMORROW (October 6). Your entry should tackle a subtopic within nonreligious parenting (as opposed to the topic on the whole) or a personal story from your own experience. Submissions should be attached in a Word document 600-800 words in length PLUS a bio of no more than 75 words, and emailed to column [at] parentingbeyondbelief dot com with the word COLUMN in the subject line.
2. Registration pages for the Austin seminar (Dec 13) and Chicago seminar (Jan 24) are now online.
3. Head-hanging moment of the week: A Christian blogger rightly blasted me for a misattribution in my post on the Book of Acts. I had taken a quote from theologian Bruce Metzger from a secondary source that apparently got it wrong. Metzger was quoting two other theologians disapprovingly, not expressing his own view on the unreliability of Acts. It frosts me when someone does that to the words of evolutionary biologists like Eldredge or Gould — then I turn around and do the same. Oh well, keeps me humble. I’m not perfect, just unforgiven.
But in an interesting way, my error supports my thesis. People cannot help introducing errors even within a single step of transmission and even when they are trying their damndest to get it right. So what chance of accuracy does any text have that has been through 80 generations of transcription, translation, and partisan transmission? Lemme see…carry the six…divide by the number of the beast…okay, here’s the answer.
4. Chest-thumping moment of the week: Question from Delaney last night before bed: “I know what evolution is, but how does it work? I mean, how does it make the changes happen?”
She’s not quite seven. Thumpa-thumpa-thump!
5. Raising Freethinkers, which doesn’t even release for another four months (hell, I’m not even done with the index) has, for the moment, entered the top 25 in Morals & Responsibility. A momentary bump that I’m sure will have dropped by the time you read this. At any rate, it’s the only unreleased title in the top 100, which is nice.
The Devil Goes Down to Georgia
I read to Delaney’s first grade class yesterday. She had prepped me for my visit like a military operation, reminding me at least five times of the exact time and S.O.P.
“There’s a chair you sit in, and I’ll sit right by you,” she said. “You have to bring three stories, but don’t be sad if we don’t get to all three.”
I promised to hold it together.
She nodded, then ran upstairs to rummage through her books. Five minutes later she was downstairs, beaming.
“First, you’ll read this one,” she said, handing me Rosie’s Fiddle, a great version of a classic folktale. “Then Crictor, the Boa Constrictor, and then”–she held up a finger, eyes closed– “IF there’s time…you’ll read Pete’s a Pizza.”
“Ooh, good ones,” I said, only really meaning it about Rosie’s Fiddle. The other two are nothing much, but Rosie’s Fiddle is the kind of story that can keep a roomful of six-year-olds perched at attention on the edge of their buns.
The operation commenced at 1330 hours.
“If Rosie O’Grady ever smiled,” I read dramatically, “no one but her chickens had ever seen it. She was as lean and hard as a November wind…”
The story goes on to describe the solitary Rosie playing the fiddle on her porch at night.
Folks said Rosie could fiddle the flowers out of their buds. They said she could fiddle the stones out of the ground. Folks said Rosie O’Grady could outfiddle the Devil himself. And that was a dangerous thing to say.
Oh…shit.
I flashed forward through the story in my mind, a version of Aarne-Thompson taletype 1155-1169 (Mortal Outwits the Devil). The tale has taken many forms through the years, but once a Russian folktale put a violin in Lucifer’s hand, the fiddling faceoff became the preferred choice, from Stravinsky’s L’histoire du Soldat to The Devil Went Down to Georgia. And Rosie’s Fiddle.
“What’s the Devil?” one kid piped up.
Shitshitshit. I looked at Mr. H, Laney’s magnificently gifted and cool teacher, whose smile was unperturbed.
“It’s a kind of a monster,” offered another kid.
“No,” said a third, “the Devil is the one who curses you if you do something bad.”
Aw shit. Stupidly, this hadn’t even crossed my mind when Laney selected the book.
I turned the page to reveal a drawing of the Devil, horns and tail and dapper red suit, standing at Rosie’s gate with a golden fiddle. They exchange pleasantries, then he gets down to bidness. “I hear tell you can out-fiddle the Devil himself,” I said with a growling Georgia accent, for some reason.
Soon the inevitable challenge is made, and Rosie mulls it over:
Now Rosie wasn’t any fool. She knew what the Devil would ask for if she lost: it was her soul she’d be fiddlin’ for. But Rosie had a hankering for the Devil’s shiny, bright fiddle.
I see all of this as great folklore. But I also knew that if I’d walked into my daughter’s classroom and heard another parent reading a parable of the Devil casting about for human souls, I’d have laid a poached egg.
The kids were riveted — it is quite a compelling story — and Mr. H didn’t seem the least bit troubled. But I was glad to pick up the second book, leaving the world of Faust and Charlie Daniels in favor of a safe, dull story about a pet snake — pausing for only a moment to remember whether the damn snake offers anybody an apple.
Meaning and nonforeverness
Young Pastor: You speak blasphemy, sir!
Man in the Yellow Suit: Fluently.
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What we Tucks have, you can’t call it living. We just… are. We’re like rocks, stuck at the side of a stream.
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Immortality isn’t everything the preachers crack it up to be.Quotes from the film version of TUCK EVERLASTING
Back from the Hawkeye State, where I had the temerity to hold a seminar two blocks from the University of Iowa homecoming game. Went well, as did the next day in Des Moines. Met more fabulous folks including Jaime and Brian Sabel and Becky Mason of Iowa Secularists and our very own blogreader Ei! Plus some nice Amish ladies at the airport.
Driving through corn and a lovely plague of black butterflies on the way to Iowa City, I found myself thinking about a question from an earlier seminar — Cincinnati, maybe. A young man introduced himself as a quite recent deconvert from fundamentalism and told me he’d been struggling with the problem of meaning in the absence of eternal life. If we live for a while and then cease to be, what exactly is the point?
The meaning thing is a legitimate problem. I’ve written before about the ways in which we discover meaning, but that’s down here on the local level of our experience. He was asking the larger philosophical question about the Point of It All. And that’s a much more interesting problem.
Thing is, I don’t remotely see how immortality solves it.
If I live to be eighty instead of forty, is my life more intrinsically meaningful? I think most would agree it is not. How about 200 years, or 500? Ten thousand? These are changes in quantity that don’t seem to affect the M&P question at all. No matter how long you live, right up to eternity, the basic M&P question remains in place. In fact, the excellent novel and movie Tuck Everlasting convincingly makes the opposite claim — that immortality actually robs life of its meaning.
Some suggest that religion solves the problem by means other than everlasting life. Our purpose is to do God’s will, and so on. Aside from how deeply dissatisfying this ant-farm model of meaning should be to any thinking person, it only transfers the question up one level: What is the purpose of God, and why, in the grandest scheme, is this hobby of his worth the time spent cleaning our cage?
Meaning is a legitimate human puzzle. The question is whether this abstracted, higher-level meaninglessness troubles you or not. Unlike death, I don’t find ultimate meaninglessness too arresting a thought, though I have seriously struggled at times with local, personal, self-discovered meaning. As I wrote last year (You put your whole self in, 6/5/07):
I don’t imagine other animals have “meaning crises,” but our cortical freakishness makes us feel that we need more than just the lucky fact of being — makes us imagine these enormous, fatal holes and cracks in our meaning and purpose.
Hence the use of God as meaning-spackle.
When I was a kid, my purposometer (purr-puh-SAH-mit-ter), was always in the 90s on a scale of 100. Didn’t even have to try. I knew what I was here for: getting good grades, playing the clarinet, getting Muriel Ruffino to kiss me (Editor’s note: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, booyah!), getting into college, getting various other girls to kiss and etc. me (mission roughly 17% accomplished). And so on.
Much like your need for a pancreas, you never even know you have the need for meaning and purpose until it begins to fail — which mine did, in no uncertain terms, as I sat black-robed and square-hatted in a folding chair on a Berkeley lawn, not hearing the words of some famous anthropologist standing before me and 150 other black-robed, square-hatted, non-hearing 22-year-olds.
For the first time in my life, I had no earthly idea what was next. It was my first genuine core-shaking crisis of meaning and purpose.
But for reasons I’m not sure about, that larger question — call it cosmic M&P — has never pecked too hard at my consciousness. The best I can do is acknowledge that it is legit and note that religion doesn’t cure it.
Those who aren’t as incurious as I can always imagine themselves in Yahweh’s ant farm — or engage, along with Viktor Frankl and others, in a truly difficult and probably worthwhile bit of philosophical work.
Lemme know how it goes.