My Blood Runs Cold, My Memory Has Just Been Sold…

In the summer of 1975, trying to beef up my college-bound credentials, I took a biology class at Arcadia High School, taught by a self-satisfied, sandal-wearing ex-hippy whose name I can’t remember.   I may not remember his name because, unlike the rest of my teachers, he didn’t seem very anxious to teach very much of anything, much less impart an excitement for learning.   Let’s call him Mr. Sanders.  He was just a quiet guy in his late twenties with Art Garfunkel hair and a teaching credential and a box full of Scientific Americans. To pass the time, he told us to dig through the magazines and read the last 15 minutes of every class.

I think it was Steve Chaput or David Allen or Steve Rados who discovered that about one out of every 15 Scientific Americans was actually a Playboy.   A few weeks later, when Mr. Sanders wondered why certain issues seemed to be more in demand than others, he registered only slight embarrassment at the answer.    He appeared to have been given one ruler for measuring his universe, Darwin’s theory of evolution, and he glumly applied it to everything, including the bright-eyed kids before him.   When confronted with a roomful of teenagers — young men snorting about the centerfolds and young women disgusted by the snorting — Mr. Sanders seemed to be pondering the genetic pool, that and not much more.  The bell rang and nothing changed. It was the same four tattered boxes of Scientific Americans and Playboys the next day.

A few years before this episode of soft-core apathy in public school places, I would return home from Jr. High school to watch the afternoon lineup of re-runs, which included The Rifleman, Father Knows Best, and Ozzie and Harriet.   Ponder those story lines for a moment, and compare them to Deadwood, Glee, and Desperate Housewives.  Did Chuck Connors ever have to wind his way through an alleyway full of F-Bombs, to outrun a killer wearing nothing but boots and cartridge belt?    Did we ever have to watch Wally Cleaver fending off a Eddie Haskel advance, much less endure man to man makeout?    Did Wally Plumstead ever drive a girlfriend to an abortion clinic?

The entertainment, four decades ago, was no less engaging.   People still had problems. Cattle thieves stole.   Hearts were broken.   Murders went unsolved. Jealousies smouldered.  Corruption raged.

But the story didn’t have to be propped up by quite as much cleavage.   The central conflict didn’t require throwing your best friend’s wife down on a pool table after hours.   An inventive plot didn’t demand that every pervert have his day in the sun, followed by the obligatory civil rights after-glow.

Culture either moves uphill slowly, or it slides downhill quickly.   I know why it’s difficult finding the audience for Courage, because I make no apologies for the mission:  I’m pushing the audience up the mountain.   I’m asking them to process different cultural assumptions, to strain for baroque language, to feel the weight of far less tolerant criminal justice, and I’m asking them to walk in a world where the spirit dwells, and not just Darwin.

Because that’s what happened to my old biology teacher, and a thousand others like him. They lost their souls.  They were given only probability analysis as their god and sex as their sacrament, so the world became far less mysterious, far more cruel, and far less beautiful.  That’s the reason Jon Stewart has to turn Benjamin Franklin into a rutting buffoon.  When confronted by an age that valued courage, an age that looked tenderly on their posterity, an age that actually used phrases like “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor,” the soul-dead demons of the modern age howl out their misery behind a joke.