Another well-written, provocative essay by my liberal friend Harry.

Harry T. Cook [ 9/26/08

My immigrant mother rapped my knuckles when, as a kid, I said “ain’t” or “he done it.” My first-generation American without-benefit-of-college father gave me a Webster’s Dictionary for a sixth birthday present, and strongly suggested I read it from cover to cover and do considerable memorization. Leonard Clayton Bailey, my seventh- and eighth-grade teacher in a four-room school house, drilled my 14 classmates and me in the parts of speech and required us to diagram sentence after sentence until we understood the syntax of the English language. The aforementioned father insisted that I attend a different high school than the one to which most of my friends went because Dad’s choice still had Latin in the curriculum. As he said, “Gentlemen know Latin, and goddamnit, you’re going to be a gentleman.” Hic haec hoc huius huius huius; ille illa illud, etc. All that gave me fits, but it helped when I got to “The Aeneid.” For that I have Muriel McFarland Neeland to thank.

Though when I was 15, my focus was not exactly on the correct recitation of Latinate declensions and conjugations so much as it was on the girl who sat at the next desk: Peggy Lynch. While I was mooning over Peggy’s long brunette tresses one day, Mrs. Neeland shocked me out of my reverie by asking me to conjugate a verb. Which one I had not caught, so I turned to a friend and whispered, “What’s the verb?” He, too, had been day-dreaming, so he whispered, “Damned if I know.” Here was a golden opportunity. As I hadn’t thus far overly impressed Mrs. Neeland, I decided in the moment to play to what might be a more promising audience in Peggy. Thus did I stand and with a straight face say: “Damnedifiknow, damnedifiknare, damnedifinavi, damnedifinatus.”

Thereupon Mrs. Neeland, with lips tightly pursed in disgust, carefully marked an “F” in her grade book next to my name. Peggy Lynch looked at me as if I had insects crawling out of my nostrils. The result was that I fell back on trying to win Mrs. Neeland’s approval rather than Peggy’s affections, for which choice I was mercilessly taunted by a number of my classmates who thought I was taking Latin too seriously. They didn’t call me an “elitist,” although had the word been in their severely limited vocabularies, they surely would have done. I endured it all only to learn the truth about facility in the use of language with the occasional nuanced locution and polysyllable. The truth is that my high school classmates were right: It all amounts to elitism and therefore turns out to be un-American. At least I didn’t go to Harvard with Barack Obama, so I’m not as elitist as him – er, he.

I cannot say that I graduated last in my class, a distinction John McCain can claim, or was ever a C-student, as George W. Bush bragged about having been. Yet, despite the Latin, I was neither the valedictorian of my high school class nor elected to Phi Beta Kappa in my college years. It was in graduate theological school that I finally made the fateful decision to cast my lot permanently with elitism. Even though none of them was required, I took Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek and relished the work. I even won the 1962 Loundy Prize in Hebrew, further cementing my status as an elitist geek among my classmates. (By the way, only three others had competed for the Prize that year, suggesting perhaps that the choice was among Larry, Moe and Curly. Maybe the faculty cast lots.)

I carried my elitist geek-dom into parish ministry and discovered that I could just as well have studied Urdu, Hindi, Mandarin or applesauce for all the difference knowledge of the biblical languages has made. By and large the congregations I have served could not have cared less about the several words for “love” in New Testament Greek or about the freighted meaning of the Hebrew “shekinah.” One outspoken parishioner said to me some years ago, “Just give us the Word of God. We don’t care about the Word of Harry.” With one eye on the collection plate and the other on a few vacant pews, he urged me to tell a couple of jokes in my sermons and make people laugh. “Anyway, stop reading these books of yours and get out there and save some souls.”

Presumably his was already saved.

If, indeed, my biblical scholarship has been a liability to my ministry – which it has – then perhaps Barack Obama’s Harvard education and obvious acumen may be a liability to his candidacy. Putting it another way: Is it actually possible that a C-student President will be succeeded by one who graduated last in his class and chose as a running mate a reg’lar gal from Alaska who thinks the earth was created 6,000 years ago by her precious God who also wills the building of pipelines to somewhere, if not bridges to nowhere? Hic haec hoc and a bottle of rum.

READERS WRITE:

Michael Fultz: “McCain is running a campaign based on fear, which is nothing new, because politicians usually prey on the insecurities of the general public to be elected . . . Is McCain to blame for this? I don’t think so. McCain is a politician. He’s doing his job. The American public is where the fault really lies – the fact that a considerable percentage of the electorate would buy into this is absolutely scandalous.”

Judy Berry: “What do we have to fear? Fear itself, as you said. May you continue with your wonderful messages in a time when we most need them.”

Donnalyn Pascoe: “We here in Australia count on Americans like you to tell it like it is. We wish there were more courageous spokespersons like you and Bishop Spong. Keep on telling the truth, and don’t let the bastards wear you down.”

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© Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.

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