What's So Great About the BC Clark Jingle

As anyone from Oklahoma call tell you, the holiday season hasn't started until we begin hearing the ubiquitous, seemingly timeless BC Clark Anniversary Sale jingle. Indeed (and this is no news to anyone in the Sooner State) the jingle is a legitimate Christmas Carol in Oklahoma. A simple YouTube search leads to videos of people singing the song in the mall (this clip, I was surprised to discover, contains a very short clip of a high school girlfriend of mine), elementary school students, and a college chorus from OCU singing the song in concerts, Okie celebrity Megan Mullally singing the jingle on Jay Leno's show, and Oklahoma Baptist University students singing the song in chapel. The fact that this is not our state's official Christmas carol can only be seen as an oversight by our state legislature.

It might be easy to look at this phenomenon as a sign that Christmas is indeed an over-commercial holiday, or that even our holiday memories are commodified. One might say, "hey, their favorite Christmas carol is a jingle for an incredibly expensive jewelry store. That says everything I need to know about this rotten X-mas stuff. Bah, humbug." But I see it rather differently.

When I was at Harding, Christmas-time would roll around and, separated from home, we would begin to walk around the campus singing the jingle. Invariably, we would do this in a group of people from all over the country singing Christmas carols, and the song would make an appearance. As those of us from Oklahoma chimed in, folks from other parts would look at us askant as we skipped through the well trodden 32 seconds of the Okie classic. And, for those of us longing for home, the song was a way to connect.

The song was, in fact, how we found one another. You always knew the Oklahomans by the jingle. With admitted hyperbole, I would compare our singing of the song to ancient Christians meeting one another in the streets and asking "are you of the Way?" When you heard the song, you knew you were among brethren.

The point is, and this what makes the jingle so great, in a world where so much is becoming homogenized and where regionalism is dying, the jingle and the tradition it has spawned are profoundly local. A 32 second TV spot in the 45th largest TV market has somehow managed to become a social glue. Knowing and singing the song gives those of us from Oklahoma a sense of inclusion, and ties us to the history of our people. It is what, in a strangely cohesive way, seperates Us from Them. No matter where in the country we run into another Okie, we can sing the song and we can know that we are neighbors; we are "of the way."

Brown in Oklahoma: the Frightening Social Statement of the 2010 Elections

With this year's election having ended, it is time for the post-mortem to begin. I have little doubt that some who read this post will take it as evidence that I have finally slipped to the left. I will be especially pleased when one of you accuses me of pulling the "race card." I have been extremely vocal about the state questions and political platforms in this year's campaigns that I see as obtusely closed-minded and transparently racist. And to my chagrin, though not to my surprise, I have seen all of these measures and people win. So, in this post I will look at these measures, what they mean, and what this election should teach us about who we are as a people and as a state.

SQ 751: English-Only

This is the question that, as a Composition and Rhetoric student with a devout interest in literacy, I have been most interested in and vocal about. State Question 751, which passed by a margin of basically 75% to 25%, makes English the official language for state business transactions. By law all state documents will now be printed only in English.

It's important here to note that I spend four days a week surrounded by language experts - English experts at that. And yet, I do not know of one of us who thinks that anything like SQ 751 is a good idea. Of course, no one thought to ask the experts about this. If they had, we could have told them all about the practical dangers of such a law. As literacy experts, we could have explained to them that speaking a language and writing a language are distinctly separate, even if related, processes. Doing one does not guarantee the ability to do the other. What this means from a practical standpoint is that legal immigrants with perfectly sufficient spoken English may not be able to read it a bit. So SQ 751 has put legal and tax-paying Oklahoma residents in a situation in which they may not be able to fill out Oklahoma Student Loan Authority forms, Sooner Care forms and applications, Driver's license tests and other state documents. Thus, we've blocked access to opportunities and services that spur the upward mobility that we pretend to privilege in what we mythologize as an open and free society.

We could have told them these things, but they never asked us. That's because the actual issue of language was never the point anyway. Instead, this has been yet another example of what John Trimbur has called the discourse of literacy crisis. This is the populist belief that the English language is in crisis and that the result, if not remedied, will be cultural dissolution as well. As a recent case in point, News 9 broadcaster Kelly Ogle, in his consistently asinine segment "My Two Cents" asserts that, "the English language is the common thread that will keep this country from fragmenting into competing ethnic communities" (Ogle). I should add here that he is responding (and disagreeing with) a woman who is angry that her child should learn the Pledge of Allegiance in Spanish. . .in a Spanish class.

Of course, such an argument assumes that 1) we're not currently fragmented into ethnic communities, and 2) that English- only legislation has anything whatsoever to do with cultural unity. Both of these are highly dubious claims. The persistent narrative that allowing a multiplicity of languages will lead to linguistic chaos, which will lead to cultural and political chaos is, rather than an actual realizable fear, according to Trimbur a displacement of real fears about middle class loss of status. In her article "When I close my Eyes, I like to Hear English" Amy Dayton-Wood, citing linguist Jane Hill points out that the "lack of specific, technical features of language. . .reaffirms the view that language itself does not motivate these crises." Instead, as Trimbur says, "the threat is not that of linguistic chaos but of blurring the lines between 'us' and 'them'" (Trimbur 279). So these crises and the policies that grow out of them re-assert a cultural hegemony that privileges those of us safely in the middle class at the expense of those who came here believing in our cultural myth of America as "Land of Opportunity." It instead becomes the Land-of-Opportunity for those of us who already possess the right language. And so SQ 751, and policies like it are really about protecting "us" by shutting "them" out.

Arizona Law as Oklahoma Platform

If SQ 751 had the unstated goal of shutting "them" out, this goal became explicit among politicians who campaigned by expressing their support of the Arizona Immigration Law. On the surface, it may seem odd that Oklahoma politicians should take a public stand on an Arizona issue, until one realizes that the implication is that, if elected, these politicians would enact similar legislation here in Oklahoma.

I'm a bit more sympathetic to those who place importance on protecting standing immigration laws than I am to SQ 751. Despite thinking that our immigration laws are bad laws in need of liberalization, I can appreciate the view that these laws are still the law of the land, and should therefore be enforced. However, the way some politicians handled this issue is troubling and telling.

One radio ad in particular, funded by the Senate Majority Fund invokes highly charged language, asserting that "Oklahoma is being invaded," and is "endangered by an outside force," dangerous criminals who are "threatening our citizens” (SMF). Such rhetorical moves function by characterizing immigrants as an invading army. They treat an issue of law enforcement as one of war. Thus, the impoverished itinerate farmers, seasonal roofers, and service employees who cross our border are spoken of as if they were enemy combatants - clever Athenians who may build our houses only to hide in the attic waiting for us to fall asleep.

An Aside in 755

It may seem like a digression that at this point I will bring up SQ 755 which, by a 70-30 margin made it illegal for state courts to consider Sharia law or international law in state court decisions, but I will bring it around to make my final conclusions. Kurt Hochenauer, on the online version of the Oklahoma Gazette's opinion section rightfully criticized this law as being "pointless." This is because it is a basic legal principal in our legal system that court decisions are based on state law and the jurisprudence of past court decisions. Neither if these would allow consideration for Sharia law. Justification for the need for this law was the Great Britian has, in some instances, considered Sharia law and international law when prosecuting Islamic prisoners. Of course, since we broke ties with the UK's legal system more that 230 years ago (and 141 years before Oklahoma became a state), what they've done in their courts is totally irrelevant to Oklahoma state law. SQ 755 is a non-law that did nothing except to re-affirm that we don't like Muslims or their law and we don't want to be pushed around by the U.N.

Conclusion: Hatred in the "Bible Belt"

The common thread in these laws is that in effect (and, I would argue, in design) they delineate the state's official stance on who we dislike: Mexicans, Arabs, and Outsiders.

I find it sadly ironic that in the states most proud of their religiosity there also exist laws so specifically designed to express hate. Of course, we justify these laws with arguments about practicality. We simply can't allow this flood of immigrants; how can we support them all? I've also lately seen a lot of the common false claims that immigrants are bankrupting our society by taking advantage of free schools, and hospitals, and that illegal immigrants are receiving welfare, all claims that the National Center for Policy Analysis soundly disproves. The common line of reasoning, especially among people who begin their sentences with platitudes like “I’m all for legal immigration,” or “some of my best friends are Mexicans but. . .) is that "we would love to have an open society, we just can't afford to." Thus, we close ourselves off, we refuse to fulfill the promise of our nation, and we say "you're just not welcome here," despite our founding as a free and open society that would say “send us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. And worse than our failure to live up to our founding principles is that we do so even as we drive around in brand new extremely expensive cars with "Visit Church this Month" bumper stickers pasted to the back.

Cited:

Dayton-Wood, Amy. “When I Close My Eyes, I Like to Hear English: English Only and the Discourse of Crisis.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 10 Aug 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Hochenauer, Kurt. “What’s the Point.” OKGazette.com. Oklahoma Gazette. 6 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

“Immigrants, Welfare, and Work.” NCPA. National Center for Policy Awareness. 24 Jun 2002. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Ogle, Kelly. “My 2 Cents: Mother Angry Over Spanish Pledge of Allegiance Assignment.” News9.com. KWTV, 28 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010

“Senate Majority Fund.” YouTube.com. 26 Oct 2010. Web. 3 Nov 2010.

Trimbur, John. “Literacy and the Discourse of Crisis.” The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed John Trimbur and Richard Bullock. Portsmith, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.

Where Does a Burger Go When it Dies?

Apparently, it has become the cool thing to collect McDonald's hamburgers, leave them out, and document the progress (or lack thereof) as the burgers [fail to] decompose. The Daily Mail reports a story about artist Sallie Davies and her photo journal of a cheeseburger and fries meal that has lasted six months. And this Youtube video tells the story of a man who began collecting McDonald's burgers in 1989 to watch their lack of change. His story was featured in Morgan Spurlock's Eat This Book, which prompted Len Foley to start his very own "Burger Museum," and to create the Youtube video linked above (which climaxes with a list of trillions [an exaggeration] of chemicals implied to be inside McDonald's meals. . .but in an asterisked comment, Foley says that this is a list of pesticide residues from an FDA report).

It seems that many others are interested in performing similar experiments since Foley gives instructions on how to make your own burger museum and YouTube is flooded with videos of dry, shriveled burgers. But each of these share a similar methodology. Put a value meal on the kitchen counter (Foley warns at-home scientists not to put it in an air tight container because the moisture needs to be allowed to escape, one assumes so that it doesn't mold. Interestingly, for Davies, lack of mold is part of the evidence that something is wrong with these burgers) and wait. The fact that these burgers do not decompose, mold, or change form at all is, it seems, supposed to prove that this food is horribly dangerous. It is so full of chemicals, pesticides, and preservatives that even decomposers won't eat it.

Yet, there is one glaring problem with this evidence. One that is indeed so important that it makes this evidence, well, not evidence at all.

You see, when one eats a hamburger, it does not then sit on a counter top inside your stomach. Instead, you chew it, after which it is squeezed under fairly intense pressure down your esophagus and into a chamber filled with hydrochloric acid, potassium chloride, sodium chloride, and special enzymes. These chemicals work to dissolve the burger as the powerful muscles of the stomach mashs it into chyme, a process that in no way resembles sitting on a counter top.

So, in order to collect more valid results, I have performed an experiment which more closely replicates the conditions actually present in the body. Namely, instead of placing a value meal on the counter top, I placed it into a bucket of muriatic acid, a commercially available hydrochloric acid solution. I didn't design any way to replicate the process of muscular contractions that break down the food in an actual stomach. The little stirring that I did while trying to find pieces of the dissolving burger will have to suffice as a very under-stated simulation for that process.

In addition to achieving more valid result from my experiment, it (I am pleased to report) also took far less effort. Davies has had to take a photograph a day for 170 days, all the while having an aging hamburger stinking up her kitchen. I only took 12 pictures over the course of just over three hours. You can see my results on flikr. In short, the acid made quick work of the meal. . .and so does your body.

Placing a hamburger on a counter top and watching it [fail to] decompose proves exactly nothing, because it's not at all a valid representation of how your body works to dispose of food. The fact that this burger survived on a counter top does not mean that our body will likewise be unable to handle it. In fact, I didn't think about chucking a piece of counter top in there with the burger, but if I had, and if I had left it in there long enough, I bet it would have taken care of that too. Marvelous thing, the human body. We are wonderfully and fearfully made.

I'm not saying that we should all go out and start eating an all McD's diet. After all, Super Size Me alerted us to the dangers of that. Besides, it is fattening, it's high in sodium, and it tastes like what your body turns it into. What I am saying is that we must be more critical when we look at what people use as evidence. The fact that some phenomena is shocking to us does not mean that it proves anything. What we see in these blogs and websites and photo galleries is a fallacious (perhaps even unethical) use of pathos appeal. Because these stories and pictures elicit revulsion, they are used to support arguments that these items really can't support. Perhaps (well, almost undoubtedly) we should change our eating habits. But if we change based on this evidence, we have been duped.

Cavemen and Kindergartners: A Literacy Narrative

In response to research by literacy expert and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Deborah Brandt, our literacy class was asked to tell our story of how we became literate. I already had my story in mind because, having also been inspired by this research, I had just assigned a similar assignment to my freshmen. I'm writing here because I thought that the story I came up with would be fun to share, and to analyze.

First of all, allow me to qualify this story by saying that my memory is very imperfect, as the event in this post happened when I was only five years old. I have only a cloudy memory that has no doubt been colored by my also cloudy memory of being told the story later by my mother. She may be able to, but should not necessarily feel obliged to, correct any erroneous details. With my disclaimer out of the way, here is my first memory of performing a literate act.

I actually do not remember learning to read (I remember learning to love reading, but that's another post). My earliest memory of the act of writing comes from when I was in kindergarten (I think) and I was quite excited at having learned to write. I parked myself under my baby sister's crib, which must have seemed like a suitable hiding place, and wrote on her walls. In my memory, the writing was very colorful but I have no memory of what I wrote or what I used to write with. I only know, and I may only know this because of my mother telling the story, that I wrote my own name.

When my mother discovered the writing, I told her that it had not been me. Furthermore, I very logically told her that, since the writing was on my sister's walls, it must have been she who had committed this crime of literacy. Against this claim, my mother offered three pieces of evidence. The first was that Tina was not even a year old; she couldn't write. Of course, this proved only that it had not been Tina. It did not prove that it had been me. My mother pointed out that I was the only one of her three kids that had learned to write. Her final piece of evidence was ultimately the death knell of my story. I had written my name on the wall.

What's interesting about this story to me now is how well it fits into what Deborah Brandt has discovered, quite accidentally, in her research. She found that, while reading tends to be a very communal act where our earliest memories of reading are almost always centered around the family, early memories of writing often involve writing which is subversive or proscribed, and solitary (almost every literate person remembers having been read to by family members, but almost no one remembers writing with family members). It's interesting to me that it seems that I must have known that this type of writing would get me into trouble. After all, I chose to write under the crib, a place that seemed safe and cave-like to me. So, in an act strangely reminiscent of prehistoric cave art, I went to a lonely and secret place and wrote, what else, my name.

And this is the very curious thing about the way I chose to write. My act of writing was assertive because it was subversive; I broke the rules. Furthermore, it was my name that I wrote. Such an act seems to be a form of existential genesis. It was as if, by asserting my name, I was saying, "I exist. I have a name." And yet, I wrote it in a place where I thought it would be hidden from view, again, like a caveman who hides his art.

This is the curious irony of writing. It is an act of assertiveness, almost violence even - "here is what I am writing and you must read it. You cannot deny my name" And yet, it is an act of extraordinary solitude, and often loneliness.

Why You Never Research a Preacher's Story

As the son-in-law of a career preacher, and a regular church attendee, and as someone who teaches research, I know that preacher's stories aren't all they're cracked up to be. In fact, anyone who's spent any time in church knows that preachers' stories are illustrative fish tales. As literary texts, they belong structurally to the genre of myth. I don't mean "myth" in the popular sense of meaning "false." I mean that as narrative constructs, preacher tales work in the same way as other mythical works such as old parables, nursery rhymes, and (dare I say) the Bible. Myths are texts use common archetypal tropes in order to teach the hearer and they put their emphasis, not necessarily on the historical and chronological accuracy of the story, but on the message. In other words, myths privilege truth over facts.

So, having foregrounded this post with that, I should say that I don't particularly expect preachers' tales to pass the muster of rigorous research. Nevertheless, when I tried to find a quote from a preacher's story I recently heard (because I wanted to use it on facebook), I got a first hand look at just how shifty and shaky the literary form of the sermon illustration is. So today, just for fun, I will present to you a dubious sermon illustration followed by my own research and finally a bit of speculative questioning as to how a story (actually, more correctly, stories as we shall see) goes from half true anecdote to sermon illustration.

First, the story itself, from the best of my memory, as I heard it from the pulpit:

Harmon Killebrew, the baseball great, once told a story from his childhood about his father. Harmon was the youngest of four brothers, and his father used to play catch with his boys in the front yard. One day, a neighbor, who was known for his well-manicured lawns walked by and said to Harmon's father, "You'll never grow any grass if you keep playing on it like that." Harmon's father looked at the man and replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass; I'm trying to grow boys."

Here is the actual quote from Killebrew (which is quoted to death all over the inter-webz):

My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, "You're tearing up the grass." "We're not raising grass," Dad would reply. "We're raising boys."

The best context I can find for Killebrew's quote, without doing the kind of serious actual research for which I may have to log into EBSCO, is from a 2004 interview in with Killebrew in Baseball Digest in which he says:

"Dad used to work with my brother and me on different things that were important in all sports--football, basketball, baseball. One evening we were out in the front yard, and my mother came out on the porch and said to my father, "Clay, the boys are digging holes in the yard, tearing up the grass." And my father went over to my mother and very sternly said: "Kate, we're not raising grass here. We're raising boys."

Though it doesn't particularly diminish the quality of the quote, the elements of the preacher's story are markedly different. Where is the idyllic scene of playing catch in the yard? Where is the turf-vain neighbor who acts as something of a villain, and who we can imagine flaunts his "Yard of the Month" sign and yells at neighbor kids who stray into his grass? Can this story have gone this wrong?

First of all, yes, of course it could. If one has ever played the game in which several people sit in a circle passing a message around to see how much it changes before it gets back to the message's originator, than one can understand how these tales get so out of control. One preacher hears a story in a father's day sermon and decides he likes it. The next year, when preparing his own father's day sermon, he says to himself, "self, we sure did like that story we heard last year. Now what was it again?" and he does the best he can from his memory of a sermon he half listened to a year before. The youth-intern from the nearby Christian college hears his sermon and sacks it away for a few years later when he'll be the pulpit minister for the kind small congregation that hires brand new grads. And so on the story goes.

Of course, with this story, there is something else, an element of the story which lets Reverend Preacher off the hook a little. And that is this fact: this story is not original (or at least not singular) with Killebrew. Instead, there is another version of this story that involves college football great Amos Alonzo Stagg.

In 1965, just before Stagg's death, the football coaching great and champion of the cause of amateur sports had a bunch of kids playing football on his front lawn. A neighbor told Stagg that if he allowed the kids to play "the grass with never grow that way." Stagg replied, "I'm not trying to grow grass. I'm trying to grow kids."

So Stagg's story fills in the missing elements from the Killebrew story. In Stagg's story, we see the neighbor presented as a character instead of the father's own wife being used as the foil, and the quote is a bit more direct (substitute "boys" for "kids" and it's exact.) What I can't yet be sure if is what these stories have to do with one another. Did the preacher's story grow out of an accidental combination of the two, as if one of the preachers in the archetypal chain heard both stories and confused them? Did in fact one of these men (Staggs and Killebrew) steal the saying from the other? Reportedly, Staggs made his remark shortly before his death in 1965, by which time Harmon Sr. had been dead for twelve years. But I don't know when Killebrew started telling his version of the story. So did Staggs borrow from Killebrew's language when he made his remark to his neighbor, or did Killebrew borrow from Stagg's language when he began telling his own childhood story about his father sternly replying to his mother's concern about the yard? Or did in fact both men make remarkably similar statements, allowing for later preacher story confusion? I can't say for certain, as it is 0034 hrs and I'm tired of researching something that will be of no use to me in my dissertation. More on this controversy as I get bored enough to pick the research back up.