The suburbs were molded, plastic ambition; nylon bedrooms in boxes for the farmless and popcultured. They crawled out of the Great Depression, walked away from World War II and escaped on Eisenhower expressways. They were the gallery and grave for mid century design — the great stuff you’re thinking about and the crap that we plow into landfills. The suburbs danced polychromed wallflowers in the age of disco — but by 1986 they were the whitest breakdancers on Earth — sticking as they tried to slide — while their urban contemporaries flowed on waxed floors flooded with warm margarine. They wore mirrored sunglasses and puffy, silver coats, rode day-glow skateboards and talked on wireless telephones (powered by nickel cadmium batteries) while grilling animals.
High school students wrote terrible essays, with pencils that featured large rubbers in the shape of Space Shuttles. They used Reagan vocabularies to argue that Sean Connery was the best Bond and William of Baskerville — even though they never actually smelled that particular Rose.1 These papers were always first drafts, masquerading as thirds; precisely three pages of fat spacing, with breaded summaries fried into anemic remainders, below simple sugar bodies. They tried to think of words like semiotics and postmodern but the only words that ever came were neon Pontiac and Firebird, floating on clouds of smoke.
The Super Big Gulp had finally landed at the local 7-Eleven, it was on the news the night before and Chuck was in line behind a half dozen grown men and a few twelve and thirteen year olds, curious about how it would work to hoist two pounds of Coca–Cola around with you all day. He wondered how long would it take to drink and whether the wax coating on the paper cup would hold up that long. Had they waxed the seams after the cup was fabricated? Would the massive glucose spikes and eventual crashes affect your ability to hold the cup? And how about these little kids — were they strong enough to lift it, and would they drop it as their sugar levels plunged? While the citric acid in the clear sodas shouldn’t be much of a problem, would the phosphoric acid in dark sodas rot our teeth out before we get to the bottom of the first Gulp? Chuck was calculating the proportional pH difference between various flavors when a man in a stocking cap peeked around his right shoulder and asked “Have you ever had a colonoscopy?”
Christina was still thinking about the guy with the high waisted jeans and the white long sleeved shirt tucked into it. He had taken his white paper register receipt, with the red stripes that indicated the roll was nearly empty, crumpled it up to his fist and deposited it into her aunt’s hand without a word. “Why would someone be that rude?” She hit a speed bump, hard, and looked down to find her Christmas fuchsia WM-4 smashed against the curb, disconnected from its headphones. The dot matrix, textured, metal play button lay three feet from the black, granite colored riser it used to project out of. She should have been afraid the same would happen to the now unattached headphones, or her bicycle, or her face; but she fixated on the twenty-seven pieces her new Walkman was divided into by the collision. The tape door was cracked in two, with the window about to subdivide by delamination. The pulleys and motors and circuit boards spilled out like guts, stabbed by bicycle bayonets. The top surface was intact, with the green bezels still outlining the two 3mm stereo headphone ports. The only damage there was that the METAL/NORM selector button had popped off. The battery tray, designed to hold 4 AAs, had been turned inside out, with the paper sticker detailing the serial number holding on by a corner. 108396 would go into a box to be repaired, but never would be.
Her older brother, Kevin, wanted to stab his professor in the throat with his fork. Their parents told him he had to go to college, but he wasn’t up for a lot of reading; so an associates degree in culinary arts seemed like a great idea at the time. But he soon found the reading his friends were doing in their university courses seemed a lot easier than scrubbing deep fryers and having to memorize and modify batter recipes — and possibly more enjoyable. This Eatiquette class (SCCA — 302) made him crazy; food wasn’t the most punk rock field to go into in the first place; but doing it all in a particular way — with skirted tables and eight pieces of flatware, and having to read dense excerpts from The Civilizing Process2 — was making him nuts. They were forced to serve and eat entire meals this way, in uniform, exchanging anachronistic niceties in a post Back to the Future America. Everyone seemed to love it but him. “If that asshole motions for me to take my elbow off the table one more god-damned time I am going to light him on fire with his Zippo.”
Across town, their chubby thirteen year old cousin closed the door of his bedroom and pushed a small chair in front of it, but not so tight that it would seem that he’d trying to keep anyone out. He used an unmailed envelope that read Hillsboro, Oregon 97123 as a bookmark, marking a page toward the back of the July issue of Playboy. He turned the magazine open to find one of the sexiest ad sections he’d ever seen. It’s not that he wasn’t interested in Lynn Austin’s centerfold, or the cover girl (Carrie Leigh,) or the Salvador Dali painting of a Playmate — it was the spiritual redemption on offer in a particular advertisement. A photograph showed a man taking off his shirt, arms above his head, the muscles on the left side of his body in shadow, the right side etiolated by a floodlight. The background gradated in the opposite direction, with the right side of the rectangle filled with solid black, fading to near white on the left. He imagined his belly shrinking to match the near X frame of the model’s, and he had become sure that the only way to achieve this dream was to perform the “twenty-four traditional iron pumping exercises, each correct in form and balance” on this compact steel, wood and rubber unit, that “fits in the corner of your home.” Tucked into the page was the free brochure and VHS tape he’d received by calling Soloflex® at 1-800-547-8802. But, while he’d already stolen the numbers from his mother’s credit card, he hesitated before completing the order form — unsure as to whether or not to order any additional weight straps.
“Am I the only one here who likes to read with my headphones on?” The Suzzallo library was a church of books — tall, college gothic, lit like a movie about the middle ages, with tables like pews and chairs made of rock wood. It was silent, but creaked like the dead. By noon, most days, it was packed with the loudest people in Seattle. Marcia Pazzi’s headphones went silent as the heads in her MW-F73 Walkman flipped to play side B of her Pretty in Pink soundtrack. As the tape started spinning again, decoding magnetic signals, sending electrical impulses to tiny full range speakers packed in foam pads, she continued her research for ARTH382. “...artists of all times, at their most inspired, have transported to a heavenly transfiguration precisely those ideas that we now know to be false: artists glorify mankind’s religious and philosophical errors, and they could not have done so without believing in their absolute truth.”3 She was pretty sure one of the errors was the idea that one could only understand something in the absence of everything else — that one could better concentrate on reading if they were in silence. She scribbled furiously into a purple clad notebook — imagining the fights this passage would cause when she laid in on all the studio art majors.
A father hunched over a pantograph machine, tracing a large, precise ligature with a stylus. With each curve or dip or stop, a motor connected to a reducing arm ground away a tool steel blank with a conical mill bit. He kept it well lubricated, with an oil that flowed like cranberry sauce. He was humming Smuggler’s Blues4 to himself, thinking about what Lawrence Fishburne’s prison guard said to Philip Michael Thomas’s prisoner.5 “Back to the jungle” is exactly what his tenth grade English teacher had said when she recommended him for expulsion. It had been a decade since that typed declaration dried, but he could still taste iron in the ink and the blood that flowed from it. The machine room buzzed to his busy, liquor-addled hum. Every few minutes he would let his foot off the rheostat controlling his instrument, check his well-lit progress under magnification, and then continue grinding until the stylized letters, PMD, read backwards in the end of the gray blank, with a precision that only 10X optics could verify. He had gone far too deep, and he could see it — but he couldn’t feel it.
A band practiced in a newly erected mini-storage complex, the doors half-closed to keep the guy in the cabinet-making unit from complaining. This wasn’t one of those bands that needed you to help them come up with a name; they weren’t a MeToo trio, looking for a formula or just playing out to get laid. They also hadn’t known each other since they were twelve, and none of them were siblings, and they didn’t have a plan. They had notebooks, they had parents who were struggling an average amount, and one of them was going to be starting grad school the following fall. On one of the notebooks was Kevin’s name, schizophrenically ornamented with spirals and darts — overlapping and occasionally mirrored Ks and Ps, mixed with Vs, surrounded by frames of foliage. Venus screamed “Nancy, leave me alone!” three times before the drummer decided to beat out an unplanned solo.6 Her irises were Spirograph textured Crayola blue, surrounded by tan skin, chromed with purple shadows — fabulous and bored. There was no one to be dressed up for, but she wore a black fishnet shirt over a white tank top, rolled jean shorts over cow print leggings, a necklace made of a blood pressure cuff with gauge, bulb and tubing, and a pair of metallic red KangaROOS. As the solo ended, Venus bent over and pulled something out of her shoe’s pouch.
Three Texan brothers played guitars and sang in Members Only jackets, seven years past their prime, sweating through tit pockets and unbuttoned collars, a few minutes from giving their large, bronze belt buckles a salt ammonia patina. They sang “Trying to be a hero, winding up a zero can scar a man right down to his soul, Living on the spotlight can kill a man outright, ‘cause all that glitters is not gold.” The eldest, Larry, had never read Aesop or Chaucer or The Merchant of Venice or heard Bob Marley’s Get up, Stand Up. He’d heard Stairway to Heaven — perhaps he just hadn’t copied it down quite right. He wore a white shirt with the American flag on it, and between songs started talking politics. “...Of course, me saying this will automatically brand me a racist. After all, a racist is anyone is winning an argument with a liberal.” He would strum his electrified acoustic guitar, harmonize with his brothers and wink at fans through the gradient brown tints of his glasses while tapping his boot. “When you put it on...something happens to you.” Donna was in the audience, thinking about what her grandmother would say. But she was also thinking about the hand on her hip, the color of the floor in dim light, the strobes in dry ice, about the last meal she ate, all the work she had to do on her research paper, the taste of Methedrine and whether or not exit 168B on the I-5 would be closed after the concert.
Waiting on the curb outside the Piazza del Duomo, E waited for a cab to take him to the airport. The sun was out, but it was raining and the diagonally rowed brick street had puddles of standing water. People were carefully avoiding walking into the water, but the cars brought them splashes. E thought of N’s “When we see a waterfall, we think we see freedom of will and choice in the innumerable turnings, windings, breakings of the waves; but everything is necessary; each movement can be calculated mathematically.”7 He was surprised that he could recall that quote in English. Evidence of Milan’s restoration was everywhere, finished and in progress, and E noticed that the rain made the pink face of the Palazzo Carminati a little redder. By dusk, the east facade would be lit in neon — advertising not so much to the Milanese, but to the tourists that came to Northern Italy to shop for luxury goods within sight of the Alps. The storefronts that currently occupied the Carminati had redecorated significantly as the decade went on; while the city was primarily restoring things to their Renaissance glory. These shops were cutting their doors at odd angles, laminating counters with purple Formica with zigzag confetti and hanging lime green signs with bold red lettering on them. E flagged a Radio Taxi, which abruptly changed direction to pick him up. The pastel blue and white 1950s FIAT Multipla seemed to bounce a bit on the bricks, displacing water in small, cascading waves as it approached. E had already gotten used to the fact that the Multipla looked like it was going backwards, that the driver would be at what looked like the back, a face that would hit air like a brick wall. The driver opened his door, which was hinged backward, and started packing E’s few small cases into the back through the large passenger doors. As he stepped into the cab and sat in its pink and green seats, piped in silver, E was glad to be done with Memphis, though he wasn’t quite sure it was done with him. He knew that the students in Seattle were going to ask him all kinds of stupid questions. Students always want him to talk about how he manages to keep everything fresh, to anticipate the new trend. At this moment he was pretty sure he was going to tell anyone who asked to “vaffanculo pezzo di merda.”
Chuck was stacking buckets on a shelf, considering the rhythm of white, grey, white, grey, small, two large, small, two large, grid. The only disruptions to this organization were the repackaged materials he’d scavenged into pink, yellow and orange buckets, with less reflective finishes. One of the buckets fell, from the middle shelf. As the small, white cylinder rolled down the slightly graded concrete floor, he noticed the gel it contained spraying out of a now cracked lid, making a sideways, slow motion crown. The bucket passed the rolled up door and into bright sunlight, before coming to a stop at a small pebble in his asphalt parking spot. As he peered over it, disappointed as only an overeducated and underachieving man can be, he saw the future: a blobby mass of cured, translucent plastic. He grabbed a screwdriver from his workbench, dipped it into the cracked bucket to gather a load of gel and watched it solidify as it dripped onto the asphalt — light arresting the viscous fluid as it fell. Back at the bench, he filled an upside down orange lid with this same photopolymer.8 He grabbed two plastic letters from an alphabet used to teach his daughter to read some years prior, placed them on top of a sheet of glass from a small frame (that he hadn’t gotten around to placing a photo into,) and laid them on the upturned lid. He sprayed the gel with light from a 4 cell Mag-Lite for 30 seconds, removed the glass, and touched the contents. Everything that was soft moments before was hard, save the still goopy shadows of the letters V and P.
Sun blanched the once-magenta seats closest to the window, so much that the piping on the back of the vinyl cushion had nearly disintegrated. Maggie settled into the padded cast-iron seat and swiveled to face her tray. Out the window was a light blue Chevy Luv pickup truck with a sticker she could just make out as “Like your Freedom? Thank a Vet.” She turned back to her book, “Individuals are elements of classes of individuals, classes of individuals are elements of classes of classes of individuals, and so on,”9 but then found herself staring at the cardstock box of fries which seemed to show a little too much white and yellow striped interior. “Fucking kids” she muttered, as she leaned to her left side and disengaged two rubber straps at the top edges of a tall, narrow, red, plastic box, textured as semi-skin. She grabbed the red, soft-edged handle with her left hand and pulled a manual typewriter out of its integral case. The device was a second hand gift from her aunt, Shelly Pazzi, who had nearly entered the freshman class of 1970 at the University of Washington. S was the baby sister of her family, with fifteen years between she and Maggie’s mother. S had been given the typewriter as a congratulatory gift when she was named valedictorian of the class of 1970 at Mount Si High School. But in the months between her graduation and orientation, S had fallen in love with a boy from a neighboring town — and she put off her entrance to UW for a year. That was sixteen collegeless years ago now. Maggie placed the pristine crimson Olivetti Valentine next to her tray in the empty restaurant, loaded a sheet of 20# Mohawk and got to work on her first essay by smashing fry grease into the white on black keys.
In 1986, you could still find motor oil in paperboard cans although rounded polyethylene bottles were becoming the norm. They were a little bit cheaper, and since people didn’t follow the manufacturer’s maintenance schedules, they didn’t tend to fly off store shelves. The Clark service station at the corner of Walton and Sashabaw was owned and managed by Joe P — who loved golden crosses, but wouldn’t have plastic bottles in his place. Joe had a big mustache, a gravelly voice, and considered himself to be a very ethical and principled person, despite occasionally sticking the emission testing probe in the tailpipe of a different car than the one his customer brought him to be inspected. While this could have been used as a lucrative technique to unnecessarily replace good catalytic converters or smog pumps and charcoal filters with new ones, Joe was more interested in getting his customers passing grades their cars hadn’t earned. And, as a result, his business did three times the number of oil changes, radiator flushes and new tire sales than any of his competitors. Once a week he would dump the used motor oil in the field just east of the store, and burn the paper cans (still wet with brown Quaker State and Valvoline) in a large drum, all the while imagining burning the body of his ex-wife.
While booze, the USSR, pot, MTV, integration, the IRS, crack, AIDS and crystal meth were scaring the shit out of everybody, most people died bad early deaths because of their wealth. They were working more, earning more, eating more and stuffing it all into their arteries. Pepperoni pizza became the staple meal of the nuclear family, and they washed away thoughts of calories with Tab and Diet Coke. They did cycles of Deal-a-Meals, Jazzercises and jogs with cycles of Absolut, McDonalds and Jeopardy. Most of what they took in just moved through, but some of it stuck — and mountains of Raisin Bran before hours of Jet-Skiing couldn’t pass it. “Our history is an aggregate of last moments.”10
“Every American is entitled to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Trivia,” the advertisement read, near the bottom of the page. A man dressed in a baggy white coat looked over the full page, thinking about the six new card sets being described, and how many more sets he’d have to develop before the end of the decade. He flipped through the rest of that issue of Time, closed it and placed it on a relatively empty shelf, crowded with photographs of his children. Three different complete encyclopedias interspersed various recordbooks, factbooks, novels, biographies and periodicals on the other shelves. A copy of the April 14 issue of the New York Times was splayed on his desk, with the words “any alleged theological justification for discriminatory measures or, worse still, for acts of persecution is unfounded”11 underlined. He had come on board at the firm as they were about to launch what would become the defining game in a decade that was defined by games. Video games may have been the most disruptive category for children, but Trivial Pursuit was the crowning pseudosmart pastime for the adult middle classes. “How do we handle controversial subjects?” he asked himself, while flipping through the Selchow and Righter company telephone directory. When he pressed #934 he heard a busy signal.
Shelly could count back change, but she couldn’t tell the difference between Dire Straits and Men and Work. She was patient, funny and competent — she knew the extensions for every department at K-Mart by heart. She would feign excitement during every blue light special, and happily organized Michael Jackson, Tina Turner and Bon Jovi clad school folders on the endcaps when she didn’t have a line of customers. But she hated the new registers. The NCR Tower architecture was difficult enough to adjust to, having stripped away from the representative the skill of reading a price tag, in favor of scanning a printed barcode. But the NCR-3360 was infuriating. She sat in on a presentation before they were installed and was given a round white button with a black silhouette and the word “panther” on it by the technical representative. “Am I supposed to love this thing so much that I would wear it as jewelry?” she asked, but was not answered. She thought about what her mother would say to her if she complained about the new systems at Thanksgiving dinner. Her younger coworkers had no problem adjusting to the new systems, but Shelly just couldn’t find what she was looking for, “this thing has a million buttons.” To her knowledge, the 3360s never made arithmetical errors, but she couldn’t bring herself to take direction from a CRT’s script — she insisted on returning remainders in the same way she’d been taught in her home economics class at CHS: “And twenty-five makes twenty.”
The Alaskan earth shook like a snapped towel, leaving everything in the path of this particular shudder momentarily weightless as the sound-breaking seismic wave unmoored things from their foundations. Soil on Atka Island was liquified in the summer and tiny tsunamis meowed around the Pacific. The mini storage facilities at the research lab were a specialized form of pole building: thick, treated columns buried and either cemented in or set on concrete pads placed into the bottoms of eight foot deep postholes. A simple lintel header system, called a truss carrier, connected each of these vertical beams. Horizontal runners spanned the gaps below the carriers, placed every few feet, to which the painted steel cladding was attached. As the building fell away, thirteen crates in unit 14A were exposed for the first time in a year. Stacked three across, five deep and two high — some of the barrels in the upper row started to tumble as the debris landed on them and one of the lids burst off. A man in a wheelchair, with legs long since amputated from a bout with bilateral bone cancer, dusted off his 82nd Airborne hat, lit a cigar and dropped it.
Pearl had been dying her hair since she was in her late twenties. She was now past fifty, with a late mid-life bouffant the color of jet. She hated every second of dealing with teenagers. Her semi-office contained a silver and green Praxis 48 typewriter, an AB Dick 217 spirit duplicator with a broken platen, an orange Steelcase Tanker desk, a bookshelf that sagged under the weight of twenty-two 3” three ring binders (with typed label cards in their spines,) a commemorative glass Christmas cup from Arby’s filled with yellow hexagonal pencils, a framed photograph of her daughter held up on her desk with a kickstand and a custom made plaque on the wall that displayed a duplicate copy of a Masters of Ed diploma from Wayne State University. It was signed by the Provost with facsimile signatures of the president of the university, as well as a few deans and the chair of the elected board of governors. This diploma referred to Pearl’s boss, Ron Kuski. Her mother commented on it the few times she visited, she was disappointed that Pearl hadn’t finished her first semester at OU. She opened the bottom of her three drawers, pulled out a pistol with three arrows on its grip from a cleaning fluid soaked rag, and calmly stuffed it into her purse.
Jim Pazzi waited in a hallway for word on his wife’s condition from the nurses, most of whom were at the ends of fourteen hours shifts. Norfolk county had recently passed an ordinance that had the effect of banning smoking in all medical facilities, but his brothers and their wives smoked him out of the waiting room anyway. At the east end of the hall, away from the patient rooms and nurse’s station, he studied a framed image on a tan papered wall. A small march of women held mostly illegible banners, wore hats, and had on what appeared to be white sashes atop their black coats. The only words Jim could make out in the old black and white photograph were “NO 5, B ISRAEL, PITAL, O T 1911,” each on separate lines. Beneath the image a small brass label, nearly covered in oily fingerprints, read “The Beth Israel Hospital Association received the greatest part of its initial support from the Greater Boston Jewish Women’s Auxillary, who pioneered the struggle to establish a hospital to serve the needs of the growing immigrant population.” His grandmother had been a part of a similar organization when she was growing up in Detroit but they were committed only to the Catholic immigrants. Jim saw a nurse coming toward him and he decided that he would do whatever the doctor recommended, including aborting their fetus if it meant saving his wife, Abby.
MG waited at a brown table, surrounded by glass, bombarded by radiation from the Burbank sun. He was wearing a cornflower blue shirt with a light checkered pattern beneath a slightly reflective black sport coat. His glasses were folded next to a small notebook. The VP of corporate affairs was now twenty minutes late, and MG had to tell the receptionist for the third time that (although he loved coffee pots) he did not drink coffee, and was fine waiting without refreshments. He smiled the whole time, his right hand incredibly steady, holding a simple disposable pen, making sketchy marks. His lines were nonsense until they were brilliant. What started out as a series of stuttering, wavy lines were layered together until clear, subdivided rectangles with six pomoerotic dwarves appeared, hands above their heads. They held up the hypotenuse of an obtuse triangle with a smaller dwarf inside, holding up the vertex. That, in turn, supported a rectangle, and an ever so slightly tilted dome in one point perspective, with the vanishing point on the horizon line. The executive walked into the room and MG rose to greet him, confident that he could use the VP’s lateness to his advantage.
“When we complain, we remain. When we whine, we stay behind. When we praise, we raise,” a middle aged man in the TV said, moments before he introduced his daughter to the studio audience. Tammy Sue’s hair was darker and bigger than Tammy Faye’s. It covered her entire forehead, her shoulders and most of the set she was standing on. “If you’re looking for that special something, and your heart is on the ground, only one Grace can be found” she lip synced, emphatically, but still unconvincingly. The microphone was far too small for her to completely hide behind. Unseen background singers tried to fill the empty space, Tammy Sue kind of clapped, and drum machines kind of kept the beat. As the horrid music finished, and the camera returned to Tammy Sue’s father, still seated on a pink, white and blue floral couch, he started talking about the calls and letters of support he’d been getting in the past few months. Jim Bakker recently lost weight and had a full head of sweaty hair. The top two buttons of his shirt were unbuttoned under his textured white jacked with large shoulder pads. “I think the enemy planned this at the time that we would be down, when we were just getting back up again, getting ready to minister. We have no one else to lean on.” The two Tammys leaned in to hold him, and a woman in Royal Oak, Michigan on her white linen couch giggled.
A man sat in his office, staring out of his window onto an old factory floor, 15 feet below. The shop was divided into a number of different zones; closest to his office was a large space that the Marketing department was using to prepare for upcoming public demonstrations, the area beyond was a bay dedicated to Beta III vehicles that were being prepped for EPA and DOT inspections and the remaining eighty percent of the plant contained rows of numbered parts bins waiting to be moved to the assembly lines. In the Marketing area, three identical triplets in shapely white jumpsuits were in the middle of removing plastic panels from a new mid-engined, 2-seat commuter car that was undergoing a set of mid-model aesthetic changes. They stacked the flame red reaction-injection-molded polyurethane panels on a rack and replaced them with Talbot yellow panels that included a fastback roofline. The man wasn’t staring at the triplets, or thinking about how much they looked like his daughter, or their team of makeup artists, choreographers and wardrobe specialists. He was looking through all of them, past the stage, into the concrete floor, organizing part numbers, vendor contact names and engineering revisions into labeled storage bins in his cortex. Some contained facial expressions and receipts remembered from Christmas gifts given to his step children in prior years, others held the names of actresses that he had entered into a notebook when he was in his teens. At this moment he was thinking about the bits of the ROM in the tube-launched, optically tracked and wire-guided antitank missiles he’d developed a few years before he’d joined the Pontiac engineering department. “What is the consequence of having all this information stored in such close proximity?” A television was talking behind him, showing the mugshot of a man in a suit with the DOB 10 7 43.
To Whom it May Concern,
I am writing in response to a May 13 editorial that appeared in Catholic Answers, with the title “Not Pretty in Punk.” I found Father Nagel’s argument to be a medicine for our ailing nation, and have been hand copying this article out as a kind of verbal vaccine, and sending it to each of my children and grandchildren — with the request that they discuss this important topic, to inoculate them against these evils. I am a proud 1938 graduate of the School of the Shrine of the Little Flower, and I found this erudite warning about the infectious nature of popular films on our children to be very much in line with what Father Coughlin taught us. As your readers doubtless know, by the 1930s the Father had come to see his earlier support for liberal policies as the sins that they were — and he taught us to avoid the false promises of socialist ideas that were not in the best interest of the moral class, and which were too friendly to Israelite bankers. Father Nagel echoes these same concerns, “These unreading, unshaven, unrepentent teenagers with their fishnet fabrics and their violent haircuts are victims. They are not victims of neglect, nor their own free choices, but of coercive pushers of a bankrupt culture desperately looking for fresh currency.” He is right to compare films of this kind, and the people who watch and follow them, as living in a ‘highly textured wilderness mirage.’
Some people say these are just benign choices of clothing, and music and films, but culture is the basis of ethical behavior. What they learn from Cindy Lauper, Molly Ringwald and Vivian Westwood is to scream and cry and pose when they should be studying, listening and practicing those skills that will make them useful as mothers and knowledgeable citizens and lay ministers. Instead, they are given the Centurion’s spear to stab our Savior. Let us lobby our schools to again provide moral education for all of our students, not just those who happen to have been lucky enough to be born Catholic, or to find the one true Church in their childhoods. Father Coughlin gave the commencement address to my granddaughter’s graduating class in 1978, and I will never forget a word of his remarks — among them, “It is the State which educates its citizens in civic virtue, gives them the consciousness of their mission and welds them into unity.”1 I am so happy to read that there are others left in our great country who recognize the diseases that infect our youth, and are preparing ointments to save their bodies and souls.
Fiat lux,
Donatella Pazzi