Lying, particularly when done by attractive children, is considered an endearing quality in American culture
A while back I prayed to God (the Christian one. I always mean the Christian one when I say God unless otherwise noted, it is just how I roll) that I could write something funny and He heard my prayer and the result was a little story called “Healthy Gods”. I never actually finished it (as in it never had a satisfactory ending) but it was very funny and I found out that I liked writing funny stuff. I liked writing funny stuff a lot. So I tried writing funny stuff again. Not so funny. Why didn’t it work? I prayed the same as before but nothing funny came out.
So I went through all of the stages of the ‘I-didn’t-get-what-I-wanted’ temper tantrum. I felt sure it would endear me to my Creator for Him to know that I was quite mad at Him for not giving me what I wanted. I was wrong. I was stove up for funny stuff. I had lost my funny mojo. Or maybe I had never had it to begin with. It’s not like I was churning out funny stuff by the trainload and then one day it dried up.
When I was a kid, I, like most children, like my sons today, wanted my dad to do the hard stuff for me. But at some point he had to say “nope” (It was his favorite term, a one-word summation of his philosophy of life, as in “Dad, can I have a color TV for my room?” “Nope” or “Dad, can I have a car when I turn sixteen?” “Nope.” Or “Dad, can I have life-saving surgery?” No hesitation at all: “Nope.” Actually, this isn’t fair; the surgery part never came up. I think he would have given it to me, after I had signed a binding legal agreement to pay it back.) The point is that at some point I have to do these things on my own. (Though I don’t think this would have applied after the surgery thing since ‘doing this on my own’ would have involved clawing my way from my hospital bed and learning valuable life skills selling pencils in dark glasses [me, that is, not the pencils. They would look stupid in dark glasses] from a tin cup on some street corner with a crude, hand-lettered sign around my neck reading “blnd, will work for dokter bills”.)
Okay, let’s start over: God, like my dad, wants me to succeed. But in order to succeed, I have to learn to do things on my own. So He (or he) might help me the first time or two, but after that I’m going to have to learn to do it on my own. That’s why I started reading Thurber again. A few years back, I got a copy of his collected writings (an excellent edition published by The Library of America, highly recommended if you’ve never read him before) for Paige at Christmas. The first time I read it, not long after Christmas that year, I just read and enjoyed. But this time I wanted to go back and study why he was funny. I wanted to read it critically. Please note here that by “critical”, I don’t mean that I want to find fault with Thurber’s writing. I define “critical” as “involving skillful judgment”, in this case, as to how he took material that in less-skillful hands would have been boring or pedantic, and transformed it into something sublimely ridiculous. Funny, like anything else, is a skill (though I know many who would say otherwise), and like any other skill, it can be built upon and grown.
Critical reading is essential to being a good writer. Without it a writer cannot dissect the writing of others to learn from it and to improve his own. I’m really just starting on the road to being a critical reader and have much to learn but one resource I have found is Harvard Library’s page on interrogating the text. Although not exhaustive, it does start one on the road to critical reading.
One of the issues that surrounds writing from a Christian and conservative point of view is what I call the gatekeeper issue. The university functions as the gatekeeper of our culture. While it isn’t absolutely necessary to be trained in a university to aspire to a successful career as a purveyor of our culture (artists, journalists, etc.), it helps a lot. In a university setting you not only receive training but are introduced to your professional culture as well. Your professors will introduce you to your future employers and fraternal organizations will be comprised of your peers who will travel with you down your career path. Does it then make sense that people in these institutions with a predominately left leaning mindset will recommend or want to associate professionally with those who come from right leaning mindset? In effect the university becomes the gatekeeper that keeps big media predominately on the political and ideological left. (And yes, I do recognize that there are cultural purveyors on the right, but they are the exception rather than the rule.)
So the real question here is how do we circumvent the system? How do we become counter-revolutionaries in the fight to take our culture back to a saner, more conservative mindset? I do have some ideas along those lines but I want to develop them further before airing them here. For now I think developing critical reading skills is an excellent place to start.
Author’s note: The character ‘Dad’ above bears no relationship to my real father who would no doubt sell the farm (yes, my parents really live on a farm) if I needed an operation and there was no other way to finance it and never ask for or expect a penny back. Though he did tell me no on the other issues but I have long since forgiven him for this as it turned out to be for the best. Also, my real father goes by the more respectable moniker of ‘Daddy’.
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