Monday, May 12, 2008
Conquering small challenges, like programming the VCR, can lead to small miracles, restoration and taking our country back from the infidels.
Nov 21, 2003 | Last Sunday, I thought I had finally figured out why Democrats have so little hope that we can win back the White House next November: It's because 90 percent of us can't even program our VCRs. By the same token, 65 percent of Republicans can program their VCRs, or have underpaid servants to do it for them. No wonder they've been on such a tear.
I actually just made that last figure up; also, the first one. But how can liberals dare dream of a better world if we can't even tape our favorite shows? Of course we go around feeling weak and incompetent and defeated.
Trust me on this: It is how revolutions begin, with small triumphs that lead to self-respect and knowledge. If you give people food, you will feed them for a day, but if you teach them to program their VCRs, you -- well, maybe this is stretching the point, but still. Today the VCR; tomorrow, learning to clip the dog's toenails without making him bleed. Two months from now? A candidate we can all get behind.
If you are anything like me, the very thought of learning to program the VCR fills you with a sense of impending doom. Last week, when I first came up with this theory -- that conquering this one challenge could lead to small miracles and restoration and to getting our country back from these infidels -- I was in church. The problem is that I often get confused there, and think that truth and beauty always win out in the end; that we cry out for answers, and God gives them to us: Love everyone, breathe, show up, sit outside, dance, stop sucking your stomach in. Try not to kill anyone today. And dance around a little very day. Why? Because it helps. It is part of living: In African Catholic churches, people dance on the way up to communion, even the nuns.
I actually felt on Sunday in church that I could program the VCR when I got home, if I took it step by step.
It may have been the music: It feels like an audible floating of spirit in there, wafting me up out of my chronic self-doubt, changing the channel from the station that plays one song, called "Me, What I Want, and What a Fraud I Am." Many of the people I go to church with have been so roughed up by life, and yet they still sing with joy from the very depth of themselves, and this smoothes me, like a mother reaching out to smooth away the wrinkles of my clothes, or brush a crumb from my face. Their singing is a kind of mother to me.
Unfortunately, none of the choir had piled into the back seat of my car to serenade me on my way home and throughout this day. Ten miles from church, I started to feel alone and worried again. I tried to remember if I still even had the owner's manual, or where I might have put it, and my next thought was, This is so hopeless: I'm someone who's still impressed by telephones and radios.
We used to have a VCR that plugged right into the TV, which plugged into the wall cable. There was no cable box; I think the cable box came in around the same time Bush did, which I am sure is just a coincidence. And even I, who am the Elmer Fudd of technology, could program the last one. I mean, it took a while -- it took like two years. But two Clinton years; these Bush years are in dog time -- each year feels like seven.
Anyway, that Sunday, right before I arrived home, I remembered something that gave me some faith: that I survived the SRA reading program when I was young. Some people loved it, but for me, there were tiny flies in the ointment -- for instance, it destroyed my life and whatever shred of confidence and hope I may have had as a child. But it also taught me a technique I could apply when learning some difficult lessons in the world, on death, motherhood, romance, writing. I realized in the car that I could apply this system to mastering the VCR.
First I should tell those of you lucky enough to have escaped SRA what it was. It consisted of a file box about the size you'd store 45s in, with colored tabs separating reading materials and vocabulary words in order of difficulty. So the beginning lessons, the easier stuff, would be under the red tab, say; and then the next-harder material would be contained behind the yellow tabs. You worked your way all the through the colors, to the silver and gold tabs. You got to go at your own pace, and you got to check your own answers against the correct ones. It sounds so elegant and benevolent, but then again, so did fen-phen. So did Joan Crawford.
Some of my classmates seemed to enjoy their lessons, but I see now that this was an act of hostility. Whenever I started a new set of tabs, I felt like a cartoon character whose heart is pounding with fear and you can see it pushing like a piston out of their chest. The pressure was so extreme for me, the constant testing, the desperate need to succeed, the fear of failure, the sense of being on a tightrope about to fall. Everyone would see that I was a fraud -- not in fact one of the smartest kids, but one the dumbest.
I began getting migraines by first grade, when we started SRA, as the surface tension stretched too tight over that black hole of being a damaged, worried little girl. Brainstorms crashed through the crazy village of my mind, and I felt like it all might suddenly flare into nothingness. I'd have to leave my classroom to lie on the bathroom floor, so the cool tiles would mild down my headache, as Sam said once.
My teachers were really lovely, though, and they always stepped in when all hope was lost. They'd walk me through the dark mornings of the soul. But the catch was, if you somehow scrabbled and cheated your way through one batch of colored tabs, you were still not saved. It only bought you a little time. Then you had to start a whole new batch of material, behind the green tabs, say, and you would stare at it hopelessly, because there wouldn't be one question you knew the answer to, one vocabulary word you recognized, and you'd know you'd reached the end of the line.
I'm still getting over it.
Get Salon in your mailbox!