surge. It is clearly a part of my Romanticism, but I strongly suspect that everyone experiences it in some form. I also suspect that most people live mainly to experience it, though they couldn’t tell you that in a few words. For me, as for others, it came through art and stories, and sunrises and the beauty of nature. Our frequent trips across the Colorado River were often done in early morning, so I came to associate being on a highway at sunrise with joy. I still find this experience of sunrise roads to be one of the most satisfying experiences I have ever had. This joy was part of my second world that included books and ideas and art and travel.
The first world shifted on me rather suddenly. I found myself in what we called then, junior high, though it’s now known as middle school. My parents, in despair of my ADD refusal to work in school, had placed me in a private school, a strategy that had no effect. If, Romantic that I was and am, the assignment did not engage my imagination, I zoned out and didn’t do it. When the school I’d been attending, Salem Lutheran, ended with sixth grade, I was put in another school for seventh grade, that was part of a conservative Missouri Synod church. I had learned much more about the Sunday School Jesus in my first Lutheran elementary school, as well as Martin Luther and just how wonderful he was. The two were rather a package in the books they gave us. And Luther was clearly up there with the Apostle Paul. Even at that age I was able to discern the partisan difference between this and the view of Luther in my Presbyterian Church, and thus suspect that there were different schools of thought. Where did I stand? The question was raised but not answered for some time.
However, this new Lutheran junior high school, compared to the other, was a prison. It evokes for me even now, all the horror that Dickens, and later Lewis portrayed in literature of the tyrannical school. We were regimented to the point that we were never let out of sight of the teacher, whom I will call “Mr. M”, not even for lunch. Education was a fierce forced march through curriculum with Mr. M threatening dire consequences at all times. This was going on at the height of the hippie movement, and I think these conservative Lutherans felt it was their duty to whack some discipline back into a young generation going astray. I went from the Sunday School Jesus to the stern, frowning, puritanical, pharisaical Jesus. I was not disillusioned about what had happened to my faith; I knew Mr. M and these people were wrong and perhaps a bit mad from one defining moment which came early in the year of my sentence. But I was the quiet kid who survived by keeping my head down.
The defining moment was when we were singing the morning hymn. I normally liked singing and the hymn was a simplification of the final movement of Beethoven’s ninth symphony to joy, a melody I still love. For some reason I don’t recall, I was sad that morning and let the others sing. Mr. M looked at my mouth, walked up to me and ordered me to sing for joy, “or else!” I complied, but in that moment I understood the nature of the theology and faith of that brand of Christianity. Compliance and conformity were holiness in that creed. I find this ironic in hindsight, because as good conservative Lutherans, they would have been quick to criticize the Catholic Church for Pelagianism, that is, for mistaking human action for grace. Yet, this is exactly what they did themselves; they defined holiness and being “saved” by how conservative you are dressed, how often you showed up for Sunday worship, and whether you used the correct Church English. They were flagrant Pelagians opposed to Pelagianism and they didn’t know it. I didn’t know what it was about their version of Christianity at that time, but I was sure even at thirteen years old, that this theology had little to nothing to do with the Jesus I read about in the Bible, that I had signed on with in that tepee. And finally, though I was smart enough to not laugh at Mr. M to his face, I was perceptive enough to think the stern order to sing for joy to be supremely and hilariously funny. As I said, Bugs, Rocky, and Bullwinkle had taught me the irony of absurdity. But I didn’t yet have a friend to share it with till I left that school.
I recall that the only light in that joyless cave was a Chicano classmate named Felix, who was probably put there for the discipline. But Felix was no real rebel or cholo. Felix was simply one of those irrepressible people who are delighted with life as it comes to them and act on impulse. For them, they can no more stop from laughing and finding the fun in things than they can stop breathing. There was no harm in Felix, no cruelty, and much real mirth. One of the tyrannies was that Mr. M would have us eat lunch in silence under his glare, while he played the absurd broadcasts of Paul Harvey on his radio. To this day I cannot bear to listen to replays of Paul Harvey—in the past whenever anyone insisted on turning him in, I left the room. But nature was on our side, and every once in a while, Mr. M too had to go and relieve himself. Felix would pop up the minute Mr. M was gone and change the station to the most popular pop/rock station at the time, KHJ radio. When Mr. M came back, he would be furious and demand to know the culprit who had let in the evil and anti-Christian rock ‘n roll, as he turned the dial back to Paul Harvey. We may have been obsequious slaves to the tyrant but we had enough collective spine not to give up Felix to punishment. Mr. M never figured it out, though I think he suspected correctly it must have been Felix. My best teacher that year was Felix—I learned much from him about courage in the face of tyranny and the ability to laugh when all the world seems dark.
I say Felix was my best teacher, but Mr. M taught me that year far more than curriculum. From him I first experienced the Conservative Narrative. I came to know it far better later in life, but even at this point already I could see it with something of an objective distance. I said above that I recognized Mr. M’s Christianity to be a little mad. Let me explain that in depth.
I won’t claim that I understood everything I’m about to say now, when I was in junior high. I still had a long road ahead of me at this point in my life. But this was my first experience with the Conservative Narrative, and though I was pretty ignorant, it tasted wrong to me. Perhaps this was because I knew my parents didn’t think that way. Whatever the reason, as I learned more over the decades, I never came to repent my initial distaste for it.
I call it a narrative because it was and is basically a story. Years later, when I was a college professor teaching critical thinking at Orange Coast College, I found it to be pointless to just teach deductive thinking in a mathematical way when what students really wrestled with were the arguments that swirled around their lives on a daily basis. And most of these arguments were ultimately political. I taught them that our thinking is not purely deductive. If anyone doesn’t know or recall deductive, it is what I call chain logic. I know A and B, therefore I can deduce that C is true, and so on. Every conclusion lies at the end of a series of facts. I told my students that it would be lovely if we all could live by pure logic like Mr. Spock from Star Trek, but that life on Earth was messier than it was on planet Vulcan. I taught them that all of us start our thinking from basic assumptions. And I defined assumption as something that you believed to be true but that you could neither prove nor disprove. When Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident” he was talking about what I called assumptions. In the case of vast political and philosophical positions like conservative and liberal, these assumptions are so far developed that they form a myth and a story. I have to be careful with the word “myth.” Most people today think it means the same as a lie. I am using a portion of Lewis’ definition of it. He tells us that “The experience [of myth] is not only grave but awe-inspiring. We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.” These are stories in which even the recitation of their mere plot hold transcendent and archetypal resonances.1
Thus Romeo and Juliet is myth, far beyond just the Shakespeare play or the Italian story he took it from. It is the eternal and quintessential story of the hopelessness and yet beauty of romantic love, and the fact that it often ends in tragedy. The story helps us understand what love means in all its beauty and pain. And this is what myth does for us: it explains meaning through a story.
What I first began to get from Mr. M and from Paul Harvey on the radio I would call the Conservative Myth as well as the Conservative Narrative. Paul Harvey was the Rush Limbaugh of his day, though he didn’t specialize in righteous rage like Rush. His style was dripping irony with long pauses that made me wish the radio had stopped working and that he’d blessedly fallen silent. No such luck.
I would go one step beyond Lewis and define a myth as a story from which people derive essential meaning. A myth tells you who