NOTES FROM THE HINTERLAND
THE UNITED STATES OF BUBBLE-LAND
By Laurie Meunier Graves
Not long ago at a meeting in town, I was talking to a woman I know. She has young children, whom
she homeschools, and the whole family is very religious and conservative.
Needless to say, when a liberal woman has a conversation with a woman who is
a conservative Christian, the path is littered with potential minefields and
pitfalls. Many topics must be avoided, from President Bush to the
environment to gays in the clergy. It’s also best to steer clear of the
Harry Potter books, with their emphasis on witches and wizards, and I wasn’t
about to get into either SpongeBob SquarePants or The Fairly Odd
Parents. However, I figured that Disney, with its cheesy, simplistic
approach to the classics, would be safe territory. But I figured wrong.
“We don’t let the children watch Disney,” she informed me. “And, of course,
we don’t let them watch television.” I just nodded, deciding to heed
Gandalf’s advice to Pippin in the movie version of The Return of the King:
“Maybe it’s best if you don’t speak at all.” (Or something close to that.)
I started thinking about those children, homeschooled and isolated from all
but their like-minded peers, with no snake-in-the-grass young riffraff to
corrupt them with the temptations of the big world. No Saturday morning
cartoons, no waiting anxiously for the latest movie, no trips to the store
for movie action figures. The only reality these children get is their
parents’ reality, tightly controlled. After all, how else can the flock stay
together? And stay together it does. I remember reading in the New York
Times Magazine that children with conservative Christian parents tend to
become conservative Christian adults. With such firm supervision, the
outside world doesn’t intrude until the children have become thoroughly
instilled with their parents’ unyielding philosophy.
That mother and her children put me in a position that I never thought I
would find myself in. That is, as a defender of popular culture. After all,
I’m the one who watches little besides PBS, who has never seen one single
episode of Survivor, and who has relied on friends to confirm my
suspicions that Desperate Housewives is a complete waste of time. In
my life, there have been no Hill Street Blues, no CSI, no
Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (However, I will admit to having watched a few
episodes of Lost and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Both were
entertaining enough but ultimately couldn’t hold my attention.) I’m the one
who prefers the small private restaurants to the big chains. I’m the one who
uses Wal-Mart as a last resort and even then with a guilty conscience. I’m
the one who looks forward to winter, when I have the time to watch Book TV on
C-SPAN 2. In short, I am a pinhead and have been since I was a teenager.
Yet, yet, and yet. My husband and I let our children, in limited doses,
watch the cartoons and the television shows of their time. I took them to
the He-Man movie, which, as my youngest daughter joyfully observed,
was like one big television show. Yes, it certainly was, but even so, her
enthusiasm made me smile. My daughters had Strawberry Shortcake
dolls, Star Wars figures, and, of course, spin-offs from the
aforementioned He-Man. As they grew older, they moved on to other
shows and other movies that were firmly a part of the popular culture.
On the other hand, my husband and I read aloud to our children every night,
and we made our way through such great children’s classics as Little
Women, Charlotte’s Web, and The Hobbit. We took them to plays,
and when they were quite young, they saw many of Shakespeare’s. We
listened to classical music. We listened to pop and to rock ’n’ roll. We
even went to the opera a few times.
What this all boils down to is that my children were exposed to a broad
range of things—age appropriate, of course—that came from our culture, the
past and the present. They experienced the highbrow, the middlebrow, and the
lowbrow, and I can’t help but think that this range represents the many
aspects of the human condition, which in turn has helped them become
thoughtful, discerning adults, alert and open to the wider realities of
life.
Conversely, it seems to me that for their children, the conservative
Christians are creating a United States of Bubble-Land, a utopian fantasy
based on the desire for absolutes and the wish to deny everything that
doesn’t match rigid religious beliefs. In Bubble-Land, evolution doesn’t
exist. In Bubble-Land, environmental regulations are evil. In Bubble-Land,
the meek most certainly do not inherit the earth, and the poor get what they
deserve. In Bubble-Land, Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and
was in thick with the terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Towers.
Perhaps he even considered flying one of the planes.
In about fifteen years, the young residents of Bubble-Land will become
adults, and because of the fecundity of their parents, there will be a lot
of them. Not a majority, perhaps, but enough to make a real impact that will
be difficult to check. Then
what? For clues, we need look no further than President Bush, who, no matter
where he goes, resides in his own sort of Bubble-Land. (Indeed, in today’s
New York Times [August 17], columnist Maureen Dowd referred to
President Bush as “the Boy in the Bubble,” a synchronistic idea that seems
to be spreading among certain journalists. My idea for this essay came well
before I read her piece.)
In Iraq, we have seen the results of Bubble-Land thinking: almost 2000 dead
Americans, many more dead Iraqis, a country that has become, since the U.S.
invasion, a magnet for terrorists, and a nation on the brink of civil war.
Similar examples can be shown on almost every front, domestic as well as
foreign. To paraphrase an editorial comment from the New York Times:
Because Mr. Bush fails to see and acknowledge the facts, he fails to respond
appropriately.
Gandalf, from The Lord of the Rings, was full of pithy sayings, and
he stated, “Not even the very wise can see all ends.” That might be true,
but it’s also true that the wise can see more than the rest of us. In
addition, it’s not unreasonable to expect our leaders to possess at least
some wisdom so that they can chart an intelligent course for this country to
follow, a course based on the way the world is rather than on the way it is
fitfully dreamed, willfully askew, dangerously wrong.
I try not to think about a country run completely by residents of
Bubble-Land. Such a country wouldn’t remotely resemble the country I grew up
in, a country with optimism and vitality. In fact, if allowed to have their
way, the Bubble-Landians would cause the United States to lose its edge,
especially in science and math, subjects that seem to be anathema to the
Christian conservatives. America would not be the place where everyone
yearns to come. Instead, it would be a place to avoid, a dark intolerant
place of repression and hardship.
All of these ruminations make me glad I live only six hours away from
Canada, home of my forebears. Who knows? The time might come for a reverse
migration, to retrace their steps back to either Québec or to Prince Edward
Island.
By now, readers might be shaking their heads and thinking I am overreacting.
I hope I am. But consider this: in the 1970s, the women of Afghanistan were
wearing miniskirts, drinking wine, and dancing with men. We all know what
happened twenty-five years or so later, and it can happen anywhere. The
change can come quickly, making the bright promise of a liberal, open
society seem like a distant dream, as unsubstantial as a Disney movie.
