Music and Politics: U2 and the Country of Adolescence

At the end of spring semester, I know it’s coming. It’s most often an honest question from both colleagues and non-teachers alike, though sometimes the latter’s fascination with “summers off” borders on an obsession. Still, in whatever form, the question still comes: “What you got planned for the summer?” Even though I answer this question more assuredly as a college teacher than I did as a high school teacher, this year I find myself fishing for an answer that will satisfy. “Some grad school work; reading and writing of course; parenting.”

Then there’s this: I hold tickets to two concerts this summer, both of them for U2 concerts, in separate cities, and a significant portion of our summer plans revolve around these events. Even though U2 has a certain amount of credence in Christian higher ed circles, thanks especially to “Christian themes” in their lyrics and Bono’s global activism on behalf of the poor, I still feel apologetic, still feel beholden to the critic in me that says things like “Rock concerts are so low brow”; “What are you, a groupie?” and “U2, what genre is that, nursing home rock?”

To be fair, U2 has aged pretty well and for that I’m, well, proud of them. While many bands fade with a decade or burn out in the night sky that is rock and roll, U2 has remade themselves a couple of times and has continued to grow to the point where they have become a significant global influence. The reason I’m proud of them, of course, is that this ultimately reflects positively on me as a fan. After all, I discerned all of this as a teenager, selecting them from the wasteland of 80s music as a prophetic voice in the postmodern rock and roll landscape.

Whatever.

In reality, I latched onto them when I was, as they say, pretheoretical, at the ripe old age of 12 when my 17-year-old sister got The Joshua Tree for her birthday. Was she the prescient one? Considering that she was split at the time between the singles “With or Without You” and Cutting Crew’s forgotten “Died in Your Arms Tonight” that also seems doubtful.

No, if I’m honest with myself, my love for U2 is probably akin to almost any adolescent fascination with rock music. But I reserve the “almost.” Throughout the years, U2 have climbed the charts with such varied songs as “With or Without You,” “One,” “Numb,” and “Vertigo”; they have fostered fledgling faith with songs like “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” and “The First Time”; they have given voice to our collective sense of tragedy—see their post 9/11 Superbowl performance—and triumph—see “The Saints Are Coming,” and they have shamelessly plugged Amnesty International and Jubilee 2000. The point here is that U2 have moved fans beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks from many of us.

While I could argue that it was in the area of fledgling faith that U2 have most impacted me personally, as I drive off toward U2 sightings this summer, I credit them most with my own, well, political awakening.

How to explain the political atmosphere in the early 80s in the Middle America where I grew up? Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer from the South who talked slow and thought slower; Ronald Reagan was a movie star from California whose slick hair matched his slick talk. More importantly, one of them was a democrat who we never voted for, the other was a republican who we always voted for, but, most importantly, they were as unreal as the other superhero programs that came to us through the TV including Dukes of Hazard, Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Dallas. This was proved when Reagan was shot, the footage playing over and over again in chaotic slow motion.

No, politicians were far away from us, if they existed at all, and the only way they really touched us was in the same way the air touched us, in a way that you don’t really stop to consider—or need to.

So, when dad started taking me to neighbors’ farm auctions where a mob assembled and took turns raising white notecards to take away that neighbor’s stuff, why blame the air? When I drove dad’s prized tractor to the local consignment auction and dad was prescribed lithium, was that the air’s fault? When mom and dad whispered in the kitchen and in the bedroom and told me and my sister that dad was going to California to work for a season and that we might join him there if he liked it well enough, the air had nothing to do with it. This was nothing historical or political, even when it got some press and its own name, “the farm crisis.” This was just the way things happened to go, the air you happened to breathe.

But when people questioned the air, organized into groups that pointed out the air quality, that was something evil. One story was about a group called “Groundswell,” who went around to these farm auctions and intimidated would-be buyers, real thugs in my mom’s version of the story, thugs who would threaten to rough you up if you took your neighbor’s stuff. “It was the bankers who were the real enemies here,” went the thugs’ line of argument, “so if we drive auction prices down to nothing, what would they do? They’d have to let us stay on the land—after all, we’re all in this together.” While this sounded like good logic, my parents made clear that it was really the devil’s reasoning.

Because, of course, politics in Middle America in the 1980s was also bound up with—although separate from—God. A good God had instituted a land of the free, home of the brave, and He would see that it was governed by the people and for the people, and while the government was like God’s screw-up nephew, it was nonetheless instituted by God and therefore none of your business.

The next step from “Groundswell,” the connecting argument went, was what happened thirty miles up the road from our farm, where two bankers were lured out to a farm and shot dead by the farmer and his son. No, it was either breathe the air or commit murder. There was no middle ground.

It was in this context that I heard “Bullet the Blue Sky” for the first time, a song my sister and I couldn’t make heads or tails of until we read in Time Magazine that Bono had written it while in El Salvador, about the conflict there. Conflict? It was in this context that we heard “Pride (In the Name of Love),” a tribute to Martin Luther King, a black man from the 1960s. 1960s? A black man?

Then, in the fall of 1989, my sister got me the movie Rattle and Hum, a rather unremarkable rockumentary, according to most critics, filmed during the American leg of the Joshua Tree Tour. Of course, I loved it as one loves anything that calls to one from the country of adolescence. The pinnacle of the film is a performance of “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” at McNichols Arena, in Denver, Colorado, on November 8, 1987. It’s filmed in dingy black and white, as is much of the film. Bono is bare-armed, sweaty, wearing something that looks like sweat pants and a sleeveless vest. His shoulder-length hair has, well, the perfect body to it. It’s roughly my wife’s 80s ‘do without the wings. Cool.

“Well here we are the Irish in America,” Bono begins. The crowd screams. However, this is not the “look at us, the greatest rock band in the world moment” that Bono is prone to. No, Bono, still true to grandiose Bono fashion, is going to lecture the crowd at a rock concert about Irish history. “The Irish have been coming to America for years,” he intones, “going back to the Great Famine, when the Irish were on the run from starvation, and a British government that couldn’t care less.” The Irish are still coming to America in 1987, Bono goes on to argue, “a lot of them are just running from high unemployment, some run from the troubles of Northern Ireland, the hatred of the H-blocks and the torture, others from wild acts of terrorism like we had today in a town called Enniskillen, where eleven people lie dead, many more injured, on a Sunday, Blood Sunday.”

My dad was a news watcher. In those days the violence of the IRA was pretty high profile. I had seen footage of grim, beleaguered-looking people juxtaposed against bulked up military personnel with machine guns, and I had seen rubble in blind streets set against dingy skies, the aftermath of bombs.

The song proper starts with Edge’s simple guitar picking, an ascending and descending pattern that’s meant to be haunting—and succeeds. When Bono sings, “I can’t believe the news today,” it’s perfectly fit to that day in 1987. Bono’s vocals are elegiac, this is a dirge, and the sorrow in this performance lingers through multiple verses, longer than the album version of the song. When the drums and bass do kick in, they come in hard and fast and we launch almost immediately into Edge’s guitar solo, which is so sharp as to be grating, searing.

Then, while the band goes into a holding pattern, Bono goes on an impassioned rant, remarkably coherent and, to one viewer at least, almost poetic considering the circumstances. Very early on, the rant denounces the violence of Enniskillen with a convincing if startling “Fuck the revolution!”—which you can imagine really got one adolescent’s attention—but it gets more sorrowful and reflective from there. It ends with Bono engaging what I imagine to be a relatively clueless Coloradan audience in a call and response that begs for an end to the violence. “No more!” he screams, and they echo over and over, and at one point his voice overpowers the Mic, before resolving into the song lyrics, “Wipe your tears away.”

While the rant is done, the song isn’t. There’s still hope to go in the song: Edge’s high octave picking seems like sunlight piercing the darkness surrounding the McNichols stage, and, while the driving guitar returns and the song ominously promises, “The real battle yet begun…” the phrase finishes with, “We’ll claim the victory Jesus won on…Sunday, Bloody, Sunday.” In the McNichols version, this phrase is almost downplayed, you have to know the lyrics, as if the lads don’t want the resolution to the violence that is the condition of the world to seem too cheap, too easy to pronounce, with or without Christ.

No, I didn’t think about all this then. I was an eighth grader. Watching this scene unfold, I simply got goose bumps. This was something that meant something. This was how words could take a stand on something—could affect something? Maybe. But could move people, I knew, because they moved me. However, I would certainly hide this from mom and dad because, no matter what the circumstances, they wouldn’t understand the F-word.

Of course, there were other things that endeared the performance to me beside the politics: the F-word made it contraband; the fact that most of my friends listened to Motley Crue, Poison, and Warrant drove me to the imagined high road that was U2; the simple adrenaline of the song even meant that the performance found its way to becoming a pre-game ritual before JV basketball games. Weird.

Still, world news was never quite the same again for me. Revolution, protests, violence, elections—these things mattered, I came to understand.

Years later, as a senior in college, on a study abroad semester, as a passenger on a bus, I would pass through a border with machine-gun toting guards armored to the hilt, protecting a fenced and barb-wired compound that marked the beginning of Northern Ireland, and I would pass, quite unexpectedly, through the town of Enniskillen, would want to stop and get off and look at the place, the monuments and placards remembering the dead. Instead, with that emotion from the country of adolescence washing over me, I would recount the song and Bono’s impassioned speech, word for word.

Years after graduating from college, with the critical thinking skills that I paid handsomely for, I also learned about the wave of factors that drove my family out of farming in the eighties—factors that ranged from ideas like “manifest destiny,” to politics like the Cold War, to policy that valued efficiency and technology at the expense of people, to poor personal choices—and I would come to understand the profound importance of a movement like “Groundswell.”

So that’s my justification for my summer plans. As I ride off toward major metropolitan areas to see the lads from Dublin in mammoth stadiums full of wealthy middle-class thirty- and forty-somethings—sometimes with their children in tow, as I saw during the last tour—who’ve paid handsomely for their tickets—one blogger says the mean ticket goes for $159.72, even though my tickets are the cheapest and in front of the stage, a place reserved for members of U2.com (yes, it’s that bad)—I do so because they still call to me from that magic country of adolescence, but also because they called me out of that country and taught me that words matters, that a stance on something and willingness to speak out about it matters.

Recently, in a concert in Mexico City, Bono addressed that country and its partner in drugs and violence, the United States. “Why is it that all we hear on the news is how drugs are smuggled through Mexico to the United States?” Bono reportedly asked. “And we don’t hear about all the automatic weapons that are being smuggled into Mexico from the United States. Nine thousand registered arms dealers on the other side of the border. Nine thousand.”

Of course, there’s room for significant critique of Bono’s ego, his politics, and his concert diatribes crafted specifically for the local audience. But words and politics do matter. They should matter to us, and we should teach them to our children. As U2 ages—I half expect Bono to come on stage with a walker this summer, but no, that’s much too undignified for him—I wonder about the future, about who will arise to arouse a generation to the condition of world events. Coldplay, of course, is the heir apparent, a wildly popular band with a slightly younger demographic. However, at least among college students, the music scene is increasingly fractured: a band’s shelf-life is shorter than Wonder Bread genres and subgenres explore market niches that seem to attack the monolith that used to be pop music; “albums” themselves are almost a thing of the past, replaced by singles you consume off the ITunes dollar menu; then again, Lady Gaga comes out with a worldwide promotional package for her new album that has her posing on the cover of every magazine, visiting every talk show and sit com she can, and pairing with every popular form from FarmVille to Starbucks in an attempt to seemingly take over the world itself. In this landscape, the idea that we could take a band—a media construct—seriously, that it could, as I have claimed, “call us out of the land of adolescence,” seems laughable. Global popular culture in any form seems increasingly distant from political realities. In fact, politics seems increasingly distant from political realities.

Maybe, then, my U2 fetish is a sign of my own age. In a world of uncertainty, I cling to what I know, to the good old days. Granted. Maybe we’re at the point where U2 can’t do what they used to anymore. Maybe they’re permanently part of that scrap heap known as classic rock.

Still, I stick by what I said earlier. Recently, my wife had a facebook friend write to her, “Tell your husband thanks. Twenty-one years ago, he introduced me to a little Irish band called U2.” The point here is not my proselytizing on behalf of U2—although I do think it merits some back stage passes—but that for generations of fans, U2 have moved us beyond just the effect of adrenalized rock to something more aware, something perhaps more active, something definitely more fully human. And for that, I think, they do deserve some thanks. One could do worse, it seems to me, than be a lover of U2.

A tree is the perfect foil to gravity; gravity and its insidious ability to make that sweet pull downward at the end of the day seem like desire.

Fruit falls from the branch, as do leaves, so we know at least that a tree too is subject to the law.

But with all its force and strength a tree goes unequivocally in two directions at once. Poised at ground level, it finds the air above free and unexplored and the earth liquid with possibility. The greater the pressure gravity exerts upon it, the stronger and more obstinate it grows. A tree refuses any single, overweaning influence.

While living in complete compliance.

As one who is called both to the centre of the earth and to the sun.

All of that isn't much more than an observation, sweet one, a thoughtful one, but not much more, really. And yet, it sticks to me, heart and soul. The image is something I can't get out of my vision.

From a business point of view, it really has no market value. It can't employ anyone; I could put it on a t-shirt and try to sell it, but it's probably too long. I can't affix my having read it to my resume; nobody would hire me because I like it. I can't sell it, really. It's only a loving observation about trees, but it's one that I can't quite shake because, in some odd sense, this morning I'll look out at the trees on my yard in a way that's slightly different; I'll see them as creatures, like me, growing between time and eternity--look at that last line.

It's from Naked Trees, a series of prose poems by John Terpstra. He wrote it, I read it, and, my guess is, it isn't doing either of us any good financially.

But I feel rich, if I use rich as a metaphor. I'm richer for having read it. Thoreau might say that my bank account has grown, my portfolio is stronger because more diverse, and, I'm considerably better off if I see trees all around me as co-habitors God's own blessed world.

It's that kind of wealth of soul that attracts me to literature and has for more than 40 years. Observations, reflections, stories and poems--I'm vastly better off having read them, having found myself in them, having discovered my place. When I bike to school past those huge old lindens north of the house this morning, I'll feel just a little more well-heeled.

And now the question is, when I get to campus, can I sell that to students?

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John Terpstra, a fine poet and non-fiction writer, will be visiting those very students in a week or so, and I've created a blog with all kinds of similar Terpstra reflections and observations, which you can sample, freely, simply by going there--terpstradordt.blogspot.com. Who knows, maybe you'll get rich. Just click on the the pic at the top of the column to the left.

Morning Prayer--a poem

The speaker in this morning's poem from Writer's Almanac is kind of a scold--maybe that's why I like him, or her. Once he or she identifies himself or herself, he seems more than ready to stand up and hold forth in manner of the prophet Jeremiah.

That tone of voice is in me too as I start the year with another gang of kids who are all, so noticeably, yet another year younger. I feel more and more, well, grandfatherly, more and more as if I ought to just shut the notes and deliver a sermon about what old men know and young kids sure as heck don't. This morning's poem makes me want to raise a pointer and preach. Listen.

Drugstore by Carl Dennis

Don't be ashamed that your parents
Didn't happen to meet at an art exhibit
Or at a protest against a foreign policy
Based on fear of negotiation,
But in an aisle of a discount drugstore,
Near the antihistamine section,
Seeking relief from the common cold.

See what I mean? He uses the command form, in the negative too. Don't do this, don't do that. Don't be thinking you somehow lack privilege or stature or romance, he says. Just don't, because you ought to be proud. . . Listen.

You ought to be proud that even there,
Amid coughs and sneezes,
They were able to peer beneath
The veil of pointless happenstance.

Same voice. You ought to be taken with the fact that your folks could climb above their silly serendipity and see that somehow the man or woman they'd somehow run into with the cough syrup was, potentially at least, some thing much bigger and better than sore throat relief.

Here is someone, each thought,
Able to laugh at the indignities
That flesh is heir to. Here
Is a person one might care about.
Not love at first sight, but the will
To be ready to endorse the feeling
Should it arise.

I really should run this poem off and show it to my students. Don't know if they'd get it, but it would be good for them. Don't be disregarding who you are or what you come from because the fact is that somebody back there was alive and kicking and paying attention, and that's a good thing because. . .

Had they waited
For settings more promising,
You wouldn't be here,
Wishing things were different.

Yeah. Take that, kids. This little verse has the voice of a Calvinist. Quitjerbitchin'.

Why not delight at how young they were
When they made the most of their chances,
How young still, a little later,
When they bought a double plot
At the cemetery.

Ouch. I'm 62 and we haven't made such plans.

Look at you,
Twice as old now as they were
When they made arrangements,
And still you're thinking of moving on,
Of finding a town with a climate
Friendlier to your many talents.

Maybe I better cool it on the retirement plans.

Don't be ashamed of the homely thought
That whatever you might do elsewhere,
In the time remaining, you might do here
If you can resolve, at last, to pay attention.

I don't know that my students would get it, but, dear Lord, I do. Think lillies. Pay attention.

I believe, Lord--help thou my unbelief.

On Revelation 5 and Reading Literature

“You are worthy to take the scroll and open its seals”


With my son, I read Revelation 5:11-14 as part of the opening of worship at our church last Sunday. This time of year, worship services and my preparations for teaching literature converge. I mine sermons for teaching ideas, my prayers veer into to do lists, and every scripture is a text I might be teaching. Sometimes, it’s a fruitful distraction.

Here’s what I thought as I prepared, delivered, and reflected on part of John’s vision.

One way (not the only way) to read the book of Revelation is to see that it tells us very familiar things, but it does so in memorable, striking (okay, even weird) ways. And those ways have largely to do with images (scrolls, golden bowls, seven eyes and horns, a Lamb with its throat slit). This view respects the good old Reformed principle of interpretation which says that Scripture interprets Scripture: one book/passage/text is explained by/reinforces another.

So what does Revelation 5 tell us that’s old news—even if it’s good news?

• Jesus is Lord (10,0002 angels worship him; “To him who sits on the throne . . .”)
• Jesus is Savior (“Then I saw a Lamb”; “You are worthy . . . because you were slain”)
• Our universe is careening towards fulfillment, a consummation in which God is all in all and the universe unites in worship and praise (vss. 13-14, mostly)
• Whatever will be, our God reigns (the entire passage)

These truths—call them doctrines, if you will, or gospel—are presented to us as a kind of drama, as a story that involves a weeping man, a scroll, the appearance of a Lamb on a throne, loud voices, numberless creatures.

A couple of literary responses suggest themselves. One is that reading the chapter is a kind of experiencing of those doctrines—a participation through words and images of what those truths feel like. I take it as part of the high calling of literary studies that Scripture employs this kind of approach.

A second is that images tell the truth, that fiction (story) is as true as precept. I’m not implying that Revelation is made up, that it’s fiction. But it’s not a Pauline discourse on Christ’s supremacy; it’s a vivid illustration and engagement with those truths.

What’s the point? First, that studying literature—being attuned to images and story—brings in a harvest of rich reading of Scripture. My literary reading enhances my ability to read Scripture. And, second, as implied above, Scripture, by its method, sanctions a literary approach to truth. Telling a good story, wrapping a truth in vivid, allusive metaphors is a way to tell the truth. And engaging with a literary approach to Scripture as well as a truth-seeking approach to literature is a way to join the “four living creatures” who say “Amen” and fall down to worship the Lamb on the throne.

The Soul of an Indian

A Dakota man, in fact a direct descendant of Charles Eastman, said at a conference I attended last week that he carried his great-grandfather's book, The Soul of an Indian, with him wherever he went. Then he reached in his pocket and pulled it out, a book I've never read.

So I listened to The Soul of an Indian yesterday on the way to Chicago and loved it. I'm not silly about such things. What Charles Eastman describes as the religion of Native peoples may well be a bit over-the-top in its generous portrayals; it struck me as being--how shall I say it?--a bit "golden-age-ish." But then who am I to judge the authenticity of another person's spirituality or portrayal of such--red or yellow, black or white? Nope. Yesterday, I just listened.

There's a line that's just a paragraph or two into the book that's really stuck with me, although other things have as well: "The religion of the Indian is the last thing about him that the man of another race will ever understand."

That strikes me as absolutely right. I don't honestly know why I've become so fascinated by the stories of Native America, although it may have something to do with the fact that I live in Sioux Center, in Sioux County, which is 12 miles east of the Big Sioux river and about equa-distant between Sioux City and Sioux Falls--and yet I don't know that in the 40 or so years that I've lived here I've ever yet encountered a Sioux Indian. For that, I've had to head north and west and south.

I've spent long hours reading about the Sioux Indian wars, about Navajo and Zuni histories--novels and chronicles, new and ancient. But what Eastman says struck me totally as true: after all that reading and travel, I don't know that I still understand the traditional religion of Native people.

When we visited Japan several years ago, I read a great deal about the Japanese and decided their faith was vastly too difficult to understand. Here you have a people who, in some ways, have few of the vestiges of what Western folks would consider "religion." A corner shrine in one part of the house maybe, somewhere in the community a temple--but no family alter to speak of, no Sabbath, and few rituals. Yet, travel books make it very clear that religion is central to Japanese life.

This morning I got an e-mail from an old friend, one of those viral things you're fully expected to pass along to all other concerned American citizens. It's deeply anti-Islamic, a screed that promises all of America will morph into Detroit in a decade or so if good people don't stand up and vote the scoundrels out. It's a Christian thing. Of course, it's a Christian thing.

Eastman says in The Soul of an Indian that Native people couldn't really understand what the missionaries were talking about when they brought "the white man's religion" because so many white people they met didn't appear to share the love and peace and moral character that this Jesus guy preached.

All of which leads me to believe that Eastman was only half right. Let me edit the argument this way: "The religion of the Indian [add: any human being] is the last thing about him [add: or her] that the man [add: or woman]of another race [add: or tribe or fellowship] will ever understand."

You don't have be aboriginal to be misunderstood. Most of the time I think I don't understand my own faith.

At the college where I teach--a deeply confessional place, really--I've had wonderful students, students I really, really loved, who graduate to becoming sanctified disciples of Jim Wallis on one hand, or Glen Beck on the other. It's hard to imagine their brothers in the Lord.

I loved The Soul of an Indian, but I bet I'd love The Soul of a Christian just as much, as long as it was written as generously as Eastman's portrait of Native spirituality.

Telling the truth--at least about white Christians, my people--would be a whole lot thornier, or so it seems to me.

____________________

Charles Eastman's life is quite incredible. The son of a white military hero and a Dakota chief's granddaughter, he was raised Dakota, but taken by his father into Christianity and reservation life once his father returned from the 1862 Dakota War. He graduated from Dartmouth and Boston College's School of Medicine and served at Pine Ridge in the years surrounding the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. HBO used his life selectively for a TV movie titled Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. He married a woman almost as interesting as he was--Ellen Goodman, who taught school at Pine Ridge at the same time he was there. I used Ms. Goodman's character as prototype for a character in my own novel Touches the Sky. Eastman wrote 11 books in an attempt to allow white America to better understand Native people.

Little House on the Capricious Prairie

I know my parents took us to Walnut Grove when I was growing up. It was during our Minnesota vacation. We stopped at Walnut Grove on the way to northern Minnesota where we waded in the headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca and visited the iron range, even taking a shaking, screaming elevator miles down an old mine shaft, our ears popping, the tour guide making us look for our hands in front of our faces to no avail before he allowed us to turn our lights on. The whole experience emphasized to me something I’d been only faintly alert to before the trip: adults enjoy intimating to kids the subterranean horrors of hell. I know we stopped at Walnut Grove because I’ve seen a picture of my sister and me in front of the Laura Ingalls’ dugout sign, her in a bonnet and me in shorts. It made that big of an impression on me.

I’d never read Laura Ingalls Wilder until I had a daughter of my own. Growing up, I was sure all those books were for girls. My sister read them. All. She also had to be done with supper on Thursday nights to watch the new episodes of the TV version of Little House on the Prairie. Clearly, girls playing dress up were the center of the show and their parties and dating were the driving force of the plots. Later, when the re-runs ran after school and I saw little Carrie fall in the same spot on the grassy California hills with sunflowers every day, it solidified why Laura Ingalls Wilder was not for me. Through high school “Walnut Grove” was significant because it came at the end of “Westbrook-Walnut Grove” or WWG, a rival high school down the ridge to the east.

I got literary in college, then came back home, then had a daughter to whom I began reading Laura Ingalls Wilder, books filled with crayfish and leeches and wolves, with prairie fires and locusts and snowstorms, with expansive skies and tall grasses and creeks that looked nothing like the sundrenched settings of southern California from the TV show. “I thought they were girls’ books,” I confessed to my oldest sister.

“No way,” she retorted, about twenty-six years too late. “And Farmer Boy is the best one.”

Farmer Boy, it turns out, is about Almanzo Wilder, Laura’s real-life main squeeze. On the show, he was played by Dean Butler, and since we would be returning from Northfield on the weekend of the Walnut Grove annual pageant when Dean Butler was to make an appearance, we decided to surprise my daughter, take an alternative route home that ran through Walnut Grove, and stop for autographs and the pageant.

Mr. Butler was scheduled for autographs from 7-8, so we left Northfield, sight of a famous Jesse James robbery gone terribly wrong, at 4:45, leaving us 2:15 to descend to the Minnesota river valley at Mankato, sight of the greatest mass execution in U.S. history, before emerging from out of that same valley at New Ulm, sight of one of Minnesota’s most famously ethnic settlements and our very own Octoberfest, through Sleepy Eye, a town ironically complete with a billboard picturing the Dakota leader of the same name, and out onto the beginnings of the Great Plains, the easternmost sliver that was originally tall grass prairie but where today the tyrant maize has mainly colonized the land and, at the time of travel, was just beginning to tassel.

We were, I suppose, somewhat ironically retracing the trip that Pa Ingalls had made after he’d lost the crop to locusts one year in Walnut Grove when he headed back east to Mankato and then beyond to find work. Even in a Toyota Sienna minivan, however, I found the distance unpredictable, more expansive than it looked on the map. All that space, especially once we emerged on the high prairie west of New Ulm, was still a long crawl on the face of earth. I drove and watched the time and ate strawberry Twizzlers and gauged whether or not we would catch Dean Butler.

We turned into Walnut Grove at 7:32, ran down the power windows to ask some people outside the museum whether Dean Butler were not signing autographs out at the pageant grounds. He was. We followed the brown signs one more mile west, driving right over the sudden thicketed ravine that was marked Plum Creek, then half a mile south and pulled into the grass field parking lot on the line marked by the street sign “Mary.” 7:35 on our clock that was 8 minutes ahead of satellite time (via cell phone). By the time we hoofed it over grass clumps to the ticket windows, it must have been very close to 7:30 on the dot.

Sure enough, there in a cordoned-off chunk of field sat a graying man in his fifties, the autograph line snaking back and forth with wood stakes and plastic runners, about fifteen people in line. “We made it,” my wife and I grinned at each other. That was before we realized that they’d closed off the line.

“He’s got to finish and go see the actors backstage,” the lady blocking the entrance told us. “He’ll be at the museum tomorrow from 9-10.” Like that helped us. This seemed all too Hollywood. Chances were he’d go back to his RV tonight and be inebriated tomorrow.

Our two boys were getting antsy so I bought our tickets--$10 a pop for anyone 5 and over; thank the maker my youngest is 4 for another two weeks—and took them in while my wife and daughter waited for a last chance at an autograph. We spread out our blankets on a hillside behind wooden folding chairs that were all reserved tickets just as a local mixed ensemble began singing some gospel and old country and western songs. They stood on the “stage” made of grass and lit by flood lights from a framework above. Stage left was the Livery Stable and Olson’s Mercantile; stage center was a sort of barn-like structure partitioned off on our side by large white sheeting; and stage right stood a mound of grass with a door in it that represented the famous Ingalls dugout as well as a pond landscaped with rock that represented Plum Creek itself.

Right away when we sat down we heard the rumblings. All day we’d ridden at the edge of cloud, a great mother ship that had been threatening all day, closing off the expanse of sky to the north. We had dipped out of it at Mankato but then driven back into it as we turned northwest toward New Ulm. We’d watched it all day, as one does with weather on the prairie, watching each day’s fate unfold on the great canvas of sky. Now, the cloud had knotted itself into an angry little system.

By the time my wife and daughter showed up—they’d gotten an enthusiastic “Hi” out of Dean Butler but no autograph—things were more desperate. Soon the announcement came: There’s a shower to the east of us; please go to your vehicles to wait it out and it a few moments when it’s passed we’ll return for the performance.”

So we moved to our van on Mary row, abided the humidity, inhaled the breath of cool brought by the wind cloud, felt our breast bone shudder at the deep thunder, before finally absorbing the wind-driven sheets of the storm proper. We could see the hem of the cloud just to the northwest, where no doubt a northwesterly would be driving cooler, drier air. But to our southwest, the storm continued to pile up in deep, slatey grays that meant more rain. This is what it means to await one’s fate on the prairie.

And hunker down and wait we did, like good prairie squatters. Eventually the northwesterly did win, but by the time we got back to our seats it was after 10:00, blustery and cool. We snuggled under our blankets as if it were fall.

The pageant itself proved to be a greatest hits of Laura Ingalls Wilder. They drove impressive horses and wagons through several times; they raised a church; they projected locust outlines on the white sheets; Laura and Nelly fought; they produced a line of fire through the grass that especially impressed my youngest son who plugged his ears and strained his eyes wide; and they did a country danced that impressed my daughter.

One of the themes the pageant focused on was Charles Ingalls’ wanderlust which took the family from Wisconsin to Kansas, back to Wisconsin, then over to Walnut Grove, down to Burr Oak, Iowa, back to Walnut Grove and then finally west to De Smet, South Dakota. In the pageant, Ma Ingalls is especially wearied by his movements; it’s something my wife has also commented on in our reading of the tales.

Then again, hanging on to a chunk of the prairie is no easy task. This same weekend I had finished Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, the story of the Larry Cook family’s acquisition and loss of a farm of those significant measurements. In the novel, Cook’s grandfather bought the Iowa farm, sight unseen, only to find it completely under water. Once it was tiled out, however, the land was a gold mine, and through shrewd bargains that, typical of small communities, made them no friends, the Cook family consolidated the land into the monumental figure that gives the book its title. Despite the family’s seeming success, however, doom hangs over the farm like a capricious prairie storm. One of Larry’s daughters, Rose, is recovering from breast cancer; another privately counts her miscarriages that are caused, the book suggests, by the chemical run off deposited in the drainage wells. After Larry signs over the farm and the sons-in-law chalk up debt in the spirit of early 80s expansionism, the storm breaks within the family, within the community, within the economy. There is no hiding from fate on the prairie. It’s there, you wait for it, and it takes you. By the time this storm passes, there’s nothing left. The legacy of the Cook family on Iowa prairie ends at a meager four generations.

In his book Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie, Richard Manning would have us believe that the prairie is ultimately capricious, that we shouldn’t exactly put roots down on the prairie, that it’s meant for nomadism, movement, flexibility. His models, of course, are Native American tribes, as well as the failed attempts at settlement—the filling and then emptying—during the push of Manifest Destiny throughout the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

Of course, Manning has in mind the far west of the Great Plains, which he proposes be returned to the Buffalo Commons. The tall grass prairie of Iowa and elsewhere has made for some of the richest soil in the world—certainly that’s not a place for nomadism, is it?

There are those who would argue that small towns on the prairie have never been supposed to “make it,” that our number one export is young people, that we live perennially on the verge of dissolution. As small towns continue to dry up or cling tooth and nail to existence, as the countryside continues to empty, it strikes me that perhaps we’ve been a bit too hard on Charles Ingalls. Perhaps his movements were all very natural, perhaps they were what were called for on the prairie, perhaps we still don’t know this mysterious place we live on which rolls beneath us on the wind, as capricious as the sea.

We rolled out of Walnut Grove at 12:30. It took one hour of driving along what they call the Coteau des Prairies to get home. I probably last visited Walnut Grove when I was 8; I’m now 34. Lord willing, it won’t be another 26 years till I’ll go back. Then again, it may just depend on which way the prairie winds blow.

Drinking from the World Cup

I was mad, again, after the last US World Cup performance. I say “again” because I’ve felt this way before about US soccer before but even more so about the game of soccer as it continues to take root in US—I almost said “American,” as if we had a monopoly on that term—soil.

I think I’m well-positioned to discuss US views of soccer for a couple of reasons. I cut my teeth on baseball as a young child, fell in love with basketball as an adolescent, and feel religious charisma about football as an adult. However, I also played soccer in high school. For four years. Without learning how to make a move with the soccer ball. They put me in goal with my hand-sports background, but I didn’t really understand that position either.

Then in college, I went to England and regularly watched the BBC’s Match of the Day where I regularly saw people do things with soccer balls that I had never imagined, running and contorting with the ball dancing on their toes, orchestrating passes I couldn’t imagine, (I’m mixing sporting terms) and shooting pin-point lasers past goalies launched Spiderman-like through midair. It truly could be a beautiful game. So I understand what the game can look like though I am by no means a connoisseur.

I also understand what the average American fan does not see in the sport. This skeptical attitude is typified by the recent commentary I heard from the disembodied egos that sally forth on talk radio. One of these males caught in permanent adolescence mentioned how he wouldn’t cross the street for an MLS game, but he could appreciate the fair weather fan support of the World Cup; how soccer couldn’t hold a candle to NFL football, but it was a feel good event akin to the Olympics. I thought these statements were true as far as they went but also typical of a certain American-centrism or even arrogance.

But perhaps I’m being a bit unfair still. What is it culturally, I wonder, that prevents soccer from being passionately embraced in the US like it is in much of the world? What is it about American—sorry, US—soil that produces such putrid soccer plants?

The lack of scoring is no doubt an issue, especially for my generation (X) and younger. We like scoring and a lot of it. We have the NBA to blame here generally and Michael Jordan specifically. I remember when Jordan went off for 63 against Boston, for example, but try to forget that the Bulls as a team lost that game and the series, that it wasn’t really even close, because the Bulls were the far inferior team. Besides, eventually Jordan made the Bulls a champion with his scoring (This is a lie). Today, too, the biggest stars are the scorers, the players that can take over a game, the players who don’t seem to need a team: Kobe, Lebron, D-Wade. (Note: Kobe has won championships on near-All Star teams; D-Wade barely won one when he had Shaquille O’Neal and a significant supporting cast who were summarily sold off after they won, and Lebron hasn’t come close with his supporting cast of pick-up players). Still, the scoring—and the scorers—are what we want.

Yes, soccer, too, focuses on the stars, and the best players can weave and dance through the lines of defenders and then celebrate their own genius. However, the supporting cast invariably gives rise to those goals, with the fullbacks and defenders doing we-know-not-what in the back row, passing the ball across the field and back across the field and then up to the midfielders and back, like an incredibly slow and lethargic foosball game. But if the so-called stars in soccer can go entire games without scoring, are they really stars? Consider Wayne Rooney in the current World Cup. Proof enough that soccer is not dependent on individuals, on momentary, shooting stars.

In the background of this issue of stars and scoring, though, is control. We Americans like control bordering on dominance. Note that the three major sports are all hand sports where the ball is held or controlled closely in the hands. In football, “turnovers” including “fumbles” and “interceptions” are the most cataclysmic events and the ones that can get you benched the quickest. Of the three, baseball depends on loose balls perhaps the most, and even then the ball is held for most of the game and the best pitchers have the most “control.”

By comparison the control in soccer is much more haphazard. Yes, the best players seem to have the ball “tied to their toes,” but any game that celebrates “a good touch” is not predicated on control. Pin-point pitches in baseball are by necessity more precise than fifty-yard passes in soccer because they’re hand-based and not foot-based.

And so we come back to my consternation with the US soccer team’s last performance where they seemed out of control, discombobulated, and uninspired. It wasn’t just that they didn’t score; it was that for most of the game they seemed unworthy of scoring. They didn’t play well enough as a team which didn’t give rise to chances for individual scores. There were too few chances. It was as if Kobe Bryant didn’t take a shot in the championship game.

This led to a feeling that I, as an American, loathe: a sense of fate or predestiny, a sense that one individual could not overcome the forces facing them. I knew Landon Donovan could not suddenly break loose for five goals, and this angered me. Above all it is this sense of fate, I want to argue, that makes soccer repugnant to the average American fan.

An equal but opposite sense of fate exists in any given soccer match when one team outplays the other but for one mistake, when the worse team scores a goal or the referee makes one poor call and the better team loses. Again, this adds a sense of unpredictability about soccer, a democratic element to soccer, that we in the US really can’t stand.

This democratic element is really an interesting one. American football, some have said, is the ultimate team sport, where each player must do his part to achieve the end goal of a play. Each player must know all the plays and his small part in each of them, but the division of labor is clearly drawn between the “skilled” players, those who handle the ball, and the “unskilled” players, who almost never handle the ball, and also extreme specialists who only get on the field only for a couple of plays a game.

By contrast, soccer is much more democratic. All the players, including the goalie, although he does have specialized skills, must have a similar package of skills. There are no “unskilled” players and no absolute specialists. The players must play as a unit, as one organism all the time or suffer breakdowns that can mean goals and therefore losses.

The supposed “team” element of football continues onto the sidelines, with umpteen coaches and specialists, and up into the press box, with more coaches watching cameras and analyzing statistics. It’s a technological sport, dependent on dead time between plays for slow motion replays from several angles, and aslo dependent on instant replay for its most important officiating calls, which offer more dead time for replays and, most importantly, commercials. In short, soccer is not dependent enough on technology, on commercials.

Finally, there’s the military implications of soccer. I’m tempted to say that we want the same thing from our sports teams that we want for our army, our government: control, dominance, shock and awe. Remember the first “Dream Team” of USA basketball? The All Star team that decimated the likes of Angola, reasserting our dominance in our own sport? It was a moment in Olympic sport, I think, when the average American fan, the forty-year old in extended adolescence, breathed a collective sigh of relief.

It was a moment not unakin, I want to suggest, to the first Gulf War, when we could track the progress of the US army into Baghdad throughout an evening telecast and watch as our smart bombs were guided, video game-like, into key military sights of the Iraqi capital. Very rewarding.

We’re not interested in soccer, I’m saying, because it’s not our sport. We didn’t think it up, we don’t own it, we can’t dominate it. It’s an establishment sport, played by the original colonizers in countries with often deeper, richer histories than our own; it’s a guerrilla sport, played by the colonies in countries much more impoverished than our own, where any street kid could conceivably kick a ball around and become the leading player in the world.

But still, US fans stick around to watch the US in the World Cup just in case we would rise to world dominance. That is what the average fan is interested in: transcendence. Then, when the US falls apart against Ghana, the average adolescent fan gets angry, wonders why soccer is such a stupid sport.

After 9/11, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek called the United States to truly join the world community. He claimed that US shock that something like 9/11 could happen here, to us, was exactly the point: that we had spent too much of our time in recent history insulating ourselves from the world, pretending like we were immune to world problems, had not been active enough throughout the world trying to make sure that something like 9/11 would not happen anywhere rather than just trying to make sure it didn’t happen here. In some ways Zizek’s essay, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” tried to do the same thing in politics that Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac did in ecology: try to move us from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’m not sure that the World Cup doesn’t give us the same opportunity in sport. This year, we came to the table of the world’s sport with a worthy offering, equaling the result of several global soccer powers including England. The fact that we bowed out of the round of sixteen with little resistance should not make us so much mad about our lack of success as it should make us humble before the game, humble before the powers that must coincide to achieve success at the game, and simply grateful to be a member at the table.