You've Got to Be Carefully Taught

I visited a new church Sunday, and before I had made it 10 feet through the door, two old ladies stopped to greet me. One was named Katherine and said she liked that I'm named Sarah -- "We have old-fashioned names" -- and was even more pleased when I told her that her name was my middle name. The other lady took my arm and started guiding me around the foyer and into the sanctuary, introducing me to teachers and people my age as her "new friend from Texas." After the service, she found my arm again, parading me around to at least half the congregation.

It was then that she caught me by surprise when she introduced me to her family: "We've got a mixed family. Our family is mixed." She said it happily and matter-of-factly, and it took me a few seconds to understand that she meant her white granddaughter had married a black man. She wasn't ashamed, and hopefully didn't think I would be, but I can only assume that the culture she was raised in is so ingrained in her, she's used to having to explain to strangers in the South why a white woman in her family would marry a black man. I don't want to imagine what would have been said to her if she'd said her "mixed family" statement in a more liberal environment.

I just smiled and said the baby was precious, and by then she'd already gone on to fine others for me to meet. It wasn't until today, as I was digesting my obsession with the Broadway revival of "South Pacific" that I realized how far we haven't come as a nation, or as people.

"South Pacific" is a musical I underestimated as a kid growing up watching the film version at my grandma's, wondering why the old French guy was considered so dashing. Once I read about the revival this spring in the New York Times, I was hooked, checking Amazon.com every week to see if a cast recording had been released, reading everything I could about the new production, proclaiming my love for the lead, Paulo Szot, etc. And of course, on Sunday, I watched the Tony's while at work, singing along with various songs with coworkers who, thankfully, love musicals as much as me.

Much has been said about this brilliant revival, most notably how its themes of war and racism resonate today, but it didn't hit me until Sunday, when I spoked with the old lady at church and later watched an interview with the respective daughters of Rogers and Hammerstein. They predicted their fathers would be both proud and disappointed their musical was so relevant; proud that they could tell so keenly of the human condition through a form often thought of as frivolous, and disappointed that 60 years later, America still has a long road to go toward achieving anything close to racial equality.

Sure, Obama is the nominee, but there are also rumors that his wife, Michelle, referred to whites as a collective "whitey." Sure, a local white woman married someone of a different race, but her grandmother felt the need to point the fact out to me as soon as I met them. The "South Pacific" revival brings back some of author James Michener's (the musical was based on his novel, "Tales of the South Pacific") more colorful and truthful dialogue. When Nellie refers to the mother of Emile's children as "colored," the modern audience (especially in New York City) winces. But not everyone these days is so modern, especially here.

When Szot accepted his Tony Award for best leading actor in a musical, he described his character Emile as someone worthy of admiration because he "opposes war and fights for love." Emile also doesn't see the skin tones everyone else sees. Maybe that's why Emile's so loved; he's almost too good to be true.

He's real in art, though, and thank God for the artists who give us heroes to live up to.

Zac Efron is cute, and I don't care how illegal it is for me to say that.

Movies I'm not ashamed to admit I plan on seeing this summer and fall, even though I (maybe) should be:

"Sex and the City: The Movie" (already saw it; cried a few times; ate a whole bag of popcorn; ... crap)
"Get Smart"
"The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2"
"High School Musical 3: Senior Year"

That's really all I can come up with so far, but I'm pretty sure those last two are more than enough to make this list complete. I was going to put "WALL-E" and "Mamma Mia!" up there, too, but who are we kidding -- those will be awesome.

Onward, Fellow Adventurers!

This blog has officially influence the life of one of the four people who read it.

Whilst wandering through the wilds of St. Louis, Malinda and Chris found this marker of a Lewis & Clark Expedition rendezvous site. It's no partially constructed smoke stack or haunted ghost cabin, but it'll do.

Look at these young historians! Who needs the mall or the sock hops when you've got monuments to look at? That elbow leaning against the cool marble, that confident smile, that gleam of the eye you can still make out from behind the sunglasses ... sigh. Lewis is most definitely resting in peace.


We need more Malinda's and Chrissssss (possessives scare me), people. We can all learn a lesson from them.

... I need more sleep.

Where Davy Was Born, Where Meriwether Died

Because Bank of America apparently doesn't consider Alabama a part of the Union, last week I drove to Tennessee to the nearest BofA ATM to deposit my first check. Lawrenceburg, Tenn., is proud of its most famous citizen, Davy Crockett, and erected a statue in his honor in the middle of its historic downtown. Did you know he was almost 50 when he died at the Battle of the Alamo? That's impressive.

What's not impressive is how the monument put the name Alamo in quote marks. Like it's a hypothetical? Really, Tennessee? Just because he left your lame-ass state to go and fight for mine doesn't mean you should hold a grudge.

For some reason, I was the only person taking pictures of Davy's likeness in the middle of the town square at 5 p.m. that Thursday. Cars passed by me and Davy, like we didn't even matter. Kids these days. No respect for history.

Now that I was in a different state and had succeeded in depositing my check so I could pay bills, I decided to keep exploring the Volunteer State. About 30 miles west you can reach part of the Natchez Trace Parkway, a 444-mile road that "commemorates an ancient trail that connected southern portions of the Mississippi River, through Alabama, to salt licks in today's central Tennessee." More importantly, the closest landmark on the Trace to me is the resting place of Meriwether Lewis, oh he of Lewis and Clark fame. He killed himself on the Trace in 1809, and I'm pretty sure he's hung out in central Tennessee since.

I want someone to erect a half-built smokestack to commemorate my life when I die, whether my demise is tragic or not. His memorial actually looks like something I've seen outside of Don Morris on ACU's campus. Perhaps the building's namesake is buried there?

One other car was at the memorial site when I arrived, but left shortly after. Again -- I was the only one stopping to pay my respects to a man influential in this nation's Manifest Destiny or whatever. Kids!

Lewis shot himself in a place called Grinder House, the remains of which can be seen on the site -- a small outline of stones shaped like a square. What a cramped place to die. Near that is a cabin -- likely not historic, just built to look that way. Even at 6 p.m. in broad daylight, the whole "deserted cabin in the middle of the woods" thing didn't instill comfort in this tourist. Neither did the creaking woods surrounding the memorial site. Or the "Pioneer Cemetery" a few feet away that is home to various members of the Higgin and Spears families.

The cabin has two doors -- one locked, one open, its screen door inviting visitors in. Or scaring them away, take your pick. As I opened the screen door, I stopped for at least 10 seconds, debating whether to go in. I said "Hello?" to the empty room filled with eight-grade history project-worthy bulletin boards detailing Lewis's life. Terrified adventurers can sign the guest book or take a seat on the single folding chair against the wall. But buckos, I watch "Lost." What do you bet that chair was already occupied? Eh? I walked around the room for another 10 seconds, signed the guest book ("Rest in peace, Lewis") and then quickly ran out. Ran.

Standing outside, I noticed a panel in one of the cabin's windows was broken -- a window on the room behind the door that was locked. I started walking up to it, but quickly backed away at the thought of an eye appearing from the dark. Again, thanks, "Lost."

I took more photos of the area, all the while narrating the experience, sometimes aloud, because that's what I do. The ghosts probably appreciated the commentary.

I grabbed a few Natchez Trace maps and hit the road, back to Alabama to tell of my excursion.

My friend, who loves to watch documentaries and tell me all about them, told me Lewis's life story a few months ago, calling him one of the nation's most misunderstood manic depressives. Sorry you were born before the days of Prozac, Lewis. Rest in peace.

I'm a marshmallow, too

When you move to a new place and don't really know anyone, you've got options. Do you go outside and meet people like an adult with dignity and self-respect? Heck no! You stay inside and watch endless hours of TV on DVD.

Here are the Top 10 ways you can tell I've been watching a lot of "Veronica Mars" lately -- and by a lot I mean that I've watched 2 and 1/2 seasons in 12 days.

1. I've started responding out loud to the show when I guess a plot twist or react in general to something that's happening.
2. I think about the show while not watching it, and respond out loud when I'm suddenly struck with an idea about said plot twists.
3. I've spent more than a few minutes contemplating the similarities between "VM" and the "Harry Potter" series. Veronica would totally be in Gryffindor.
4. I Photoshopped the masterpiece at right while at work.
5. I actually wasn't embarrassed when a co-worker looked over my shoulder and asked me, while laughing, "What are you doing?" as I Photoshopped.
6. I approach any kind of online search with a heightened sense of emergency and importance, like I'm on the hunt for something only I can find.
7. I popped in M. Ward's "Post War" and felt bad for Logan all over again.
8. I send e-mail updates to my brother, the "VM" afficionado, about where I am in the series, running through the details as if he didn't already know them.
9. I've been late to work because I was watching the show.
10. I only have nine more episodes to watch, meaning I'll have watched the entire series in less than two weeks, and I will then likely go into a state or mourning.

But it's all worth it.

Didn't Michael Jackson write a song about this?

News pundits have had their fun the past few weeks relaying to viewers the totally set-in-stone fact that Hillary's base's backbone is made up of hard-working, lower-class white people thanks to some polling data from West Virginia, Kentucky and other states I'm scared to visit. While there's truth to this data, it's necessary to remind ourselves that Hillary's backbone of voters aren't necessarily representative of the majority of Americans. And while Obama can't really address the whole "there are still a lot of racist white people out there" dilemma (and he doesn't -- he says the campaign is moving on from issues like that) because then he'd be seen as the scary black candidate with the scary black preacher, Hillary could do her part to help ease tensions.

Instead of touting polling data that white voters support her, the braver step would be to ask those white voters -- if they admit that race is a factor in their voting decisions -- why they're so afraid of a black candidate. Timothy Egan said it best: "In Kentucky, over 25 percent of Clinton supporters said race was a factor in their vote – about five times the national average for such a question. Clinton, if she really wanted to do something lasting, could ask her supporters why the color of a fellow Democrat’s skin is so important to their vote." But I guess it's easier to take what you can get, hold on to as many votes as possible and battle it out to the bitter end.

Way to go, Hillary. You have the support of an America the rest of us would like to move on from.

Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics

I've been following the blog postings of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris for a few months now, as well as any news feature I can find about his upcoming film, "Standard Operating Procedure," and book of the same title he co-wrote with Philip Gourevitch.

Gourevitch wrote "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda," the introductory chapter of which is probably one of the best things I've ever read. I read aloud an excerpt from it in college once in my Messages of the Old Testament class when we were debating the act of genocide and whether God still intervenes on behalf of his creations or whether he let's things happen because of free will, etc. Light subject. My reading brought the mood of that 10:30 a.m. Tuesday-Thursday class down considerably, but I never got a chance to go toe-to-toe with the self-righteous Youth and Family Ministry majors who were of the "God Rules, End of Story" persuasion.

Anyway, I pre-ordered the book and am excited about it. "Procedure" delves into the Abu Ghraib scandal and its haunting photographs, but Morris's attention to detail and determination to find the real story will have most anyone rethinking their definitions perception, intention and truth. His latest NY Times blog post revolves around Specialist Sabrina Harman (pictured), who has one of the more recognizable faces from the prison photographers and who was made a scapegoat by the military when they needed someone to blame for the PR nightmare.

She has her reasons for why she would have her photo taken with prisoners and corpses while smiling and giving a thumbs-up, and I like what the facial expressions expert has to say about how Sabrina may be smiling, but she's not happy. But I can't help but wonder what I would have done in her situation, or what anyone would have done. How much does our environment, upbringing, personality, psychological state, etc., influence our actions? A lot, I know, but what about when it comes to those moral issues we all claim we feel the same about? We say we'd never treat another human being like that -- and some of us would likely never get ourselves into the situation of having to decide whether or not to torture someone in the first place -- but how do we know?

One excerpt from a recent New Yorker piece on the book and film got under my skin.

The cat’s head was one of Harman’s gags. She had a kitten that was killed by a dog, and since it had no visible wounds she performed a rough autopsy, discovered organ damage, and then an M.P. buddy mummified its head. They gave it pebbles for eyes, and Sabrina photographed it in various inventive settings: on a bus seat with sunglasses, smoking a cigarette, wearing a tiny camouflage boonie hat, floating on a little pillow in the wading pool, with flowers behind its ears. She took more than ninety photographs and two videos of it. The series, in its weird obsessiveness and dark comedy, has the quality of conceptual art. At one time or another, at least fifteen of Harman’s fellow-M.P.s posed for photos with the cat head; several senior officers and a number of Iraqi men and boys also took the time to have their pictures taken with it. The cat head had become a fetish object, like Huckleberry Finn’s dead cat, which Tom Sawyer admires—a scene that Norman Rockwell illustrated in a folksy print captioned “Lemme see him, Huck. My, he’s pretty stiff!”

The macabre nature of carrying a mummified cat's head around as a joke struck me as an interesting look into her psyche. She might not be the "bad apple" that one of Morris's editors claimed her to be, but was she an Average Jane just doing her job -- doing what was standard operating procedure? Is the cat head trick a sign of the kind of person she was already, or the kind of person she'd become in Iraq? Did the situation of war so warp her and her fellow soldiers' minds/hearts/whatever that the cat's head is more of a warning sign?

We're all a product of our environments; luck of birth is a bitch, but it can't be helped. I'm where I am because of where my parents were when they had me. We're all on different intelligence levels, we all respond to things differently, etc. I believe we're all capable of great evil as well as great good, it just depends on our situations, our level of power and the choices we make -- which all depend on our environments, our personalities, our psychological makeup, etc. Ah, so circular.

Knowing this, I have to ask: Can Sabrina Harman be judged on the same level as I am? As you are? What does it mean to be held accountable for one's actions, and can you really blame someone for the action's they take in a situation you could never imagine?

Morris as the artist taking a closer look at Abu Ghraib has helped me see the situation so much more clearly, which of course means I'm now more confused than ever.

One thing I do know is that Harmon is no worse a person than me. She's just not as lucky as me.