The Boy Scouts of America: Always Prepared to Be a Dickwad

I know that I’m breaking no new ground with the revelation that I find most grown men who have maintained a connection with the Boy Scouts to be a little weird. Tree climbing and archery have their place, as do khaki shorts and red bandana neckties, just not in the lives of grown men who are gainfully employed. And let me add that my concern with the Boy Scouts has nothing to do with the pitched battle they have been waging with the gay activist community, as I don’t really have a dog in that fight: as far as I’m concerned, gay men can do what they want within the privacy of their own homes, and the Boy Scout troop leaders can rail against them in the privacy of theirs.

But I’ve come to the conclusion that a founding principle of the Boy Scouts of America is to inculcate a craven capitulation to all forms of authority in millions of American boys, effectively warping our entire culture and creating a national pathology.

My old boss Rick was by all accounts a “nice guy” in a nasty industry. He took the notion of doing the right thing very seriously. Whatever his faults as a leader and manager, he always tried to see that the folks in his department got a fair shake, and I appreciated that. He would organize annual departmental gatherings, sometimes to his mother’s old hobby farm, taking the entire office on a hayride, or to his summer home on Lake Delavan, where we’d go tubing off his speedboat on the lake. These were very wholesome affairs, very family oriented. More than at most jobs, my boss tried to convey the message that we were all in this together, that we could count on one another in a pinch, in short, that we were all friends. And it seemed to be a message that most folks in the department took to heart. Of my eight co-workers, five of them had been with the department for at least 15 years.

Unfortunately, Rick is also a lifelong volunteer for the Boy Scouts, which almost by definition makes him an abject toady who treats any and all instructions from his superiors as if they were brought down from Mount Sinai on clay tablets, and he expected his subordinates to do the same.

A couple of weeks ago, half the department was ordered into the conference room. They were told that cutbacks had to be made and that their services would no longer be needed. They were ordered to clean out their desks and vacate the building that morning. A one-month severance check would be in the mail. As it was the end of the month, health coverage was being cancelled that day at midnight.

Now, there was no skin off my back, as I had left my position about a month earlier to “pursue other interests”, as the memo says when you walk the plank into the vocational abyss. But I was ticked off, nonetheless, once I heard about the way the axe had fallen. I learned a long time ago that most folks at your job are NOT your friends. Corporations often spend a substantial chunk of cash to facilitate the illusion of camaraderie, but of course most of us know that it’s bullshit. But how hard would it have been for Rick to insist that the company use $50,000 or so to make sure that these folks were treated right, that years of service would be honored, that insurance would be extended? Or, failing that, Rick could have taken $20,000 of his bonus money to see that the those who worked with him all these years were left with at least some kind of a cushion. At the very least, he should have found a better way to break the news than simply ushering them into the showers and turning on the gas.

It took my buddy Jason, one of those to lose his job, to point out the relevant variable: “Hey dude, the guy’s a fucking Boy Scout. That’s all you need to know.”

Having suffered through three years in the Cub Scouts in the early Seventies, I thought back on what I remembered of those days. The highest rank I achieved was that of Webelos, which is an acronym for We Be Loyal Scouts (a scout may be loyal and trustworthy, but I guess being grammatical is not on the list).

There is a Scout Law we had to memorize at the meetings between mouthfuls of cupcake. There is also a Scout Oath, which is basically redundant, as the gist of it is that you are supposed to follow the Scout Law. And the Scout Law is not really a law at all, but a list of a dozen adjectives, stating that a Scout is Trustworthy, Loyal, Helpful, Friendly, Courteous, Kind, Obedient, Cheerful, Thrifty, Brave, Clean, and Reverent. A lot of these adjectives are pretty redundant themselves: “loyal”, “obedient”, and “reverent” all driving home the point you should unquestioningly obey all forms of authority, while “friendly”, “courteous”, “kind”, and “cheerful” underscore that, even in those moments when you aren’t under the direct purview of your superiors, you should take care not to be a general pain in the ass.

Looking back at it, this is exactly how Rick ran our department. In his mind, I’m sure he thought that he was taking a principled stand, jettisoning his supposed “friends” and co-workers without any kind of a safety net, since his boss assured him that the cutbacks needed to be made and that they were following company policy.

In fact, I bet Rick thinks he deserves a merit badge.

California Uber Alles

I recently got back from California and, like I imagine is true for a lot of folks who have left the land of their birth, I identify more and more with my home state as the years go by. Don’t get me wrong, I am still ambivalent about the place, and I think that L.A. is one of the most unlivable cities on the continent, but there are a lot of things that I love about it, too.

Most important is music, which after all is the lynchpin of the human experience, maybe the only thing, with the possible exception of Hegelian logic or the scientific method, that has redeemed our species, and which would be Exhibit A if mankind ever had to defend our existence before a cosmic tribunal.

I find it comforting when I’m in Southern California to hear Green Day coming through speakers at the local supermarket or hamburger joint. Unlike in the Midwest, I can go an entire week without hearing a single classic rock song in the public space, serving as the background for our collective lives. Sometimes I think that purgatory may consist of an unwinding of all the crappy songs trapped in the recesses of our memories, that God won’t let us pass through the pearly gates until all the dross we’d heard blasting through the speakers at crappy bars or poker parties has been unwound and expunged into the ether. I know that if I were an all-powerful deity, I certainly wouldn’t let even the faintest memory of “Peaceful Easy Feeling” into my heaven.

I don’t think that the pop music is objectively superior in California, but it is different, less fuddy-duddy, less stuck in the muck of the Baby Boomer. One of the things that drives me crazy living in the Midwest is how a lot of folks assume that the music made by people born and raised in other parts of the country is actually indigenous to my native land. So here is a brief primer:

The key members of the following bands are NOT native Californians: the Doors (Jim Morrison: Florida; Ray Manzerak: Chicago); the Eagles (Don Henley: Texas; Glen Frey: Michigan; Joe Walsh: Kansas); Steely Dan (Donald Fagen: New Jersey; Walter Becker: New York); Guns and Roses (Axl Rose: Indiana); Poison (the singer is from Pennsylvania, the lead guitarist is from New York). Most of the cornball country balladeers, noodling instrumentalists, and overwrought hair bands that have plagued the “L.A. music scene” for much of the past forty years were the products of other parts of the country. I guess it’s the burden of growing up somewhere that people want to move to, which is all fine and good, but don’t try to hang these gaggle of stinking musical albatrosses around our necks: blame New York, blame Indiana, blame Texas (generally the best option, no matter what the malady). Most native Californians are used to the tawdry shenanigans of these folks; “inlander kooks”, we used to call them on the beach, as we put up with the spoiled detritus of less enlightened climes, spending Daddy’s money on Marshall stacks, overpriced hair stylists, and tainted blow.

The following bands are native Southern Californians: the Beach Boys, Van Halen, Oingo Boingo, the Germs, Social Distortion, No Doubt. Fast, loud, but melodic, that’s the Southern California sound. Are No Doubt superior to Guns and Roses? Maybe not, but at least they are indigenous to the culture, a mixture of rock, punk, ska, and R&B, not the overblown country guitar shit that passes for “classic rock” in most of the country. Thirty seconds watching Axl Rose, from how he walks to his ignorant racist rants, and its clear that he is pure hillbilly. Keith Morris and Brian Wilson: just by the slant in their voice or the glide in their strut, you can tell that these dudes grew up on the beach.

Back in 1979, the Dead Kennedys parodied Governor Jerry Brown’s run for the Presidency with the song “California Uber Alles.” It is a pretty funny parody of hippy fascism, imagining what would happen if they actually took over the country, when the suede denim secret police would come for your un-cool niece. While I appreciated it on the level of satire, I also saw it as a call to arms, It was a time when you risked getting jumped on the boardwalk by a bunch of dumb jocks for the cardinal sin of dying your hair yellow and wearing an earring, or maybe a bit of eyeliner. And here was a song that, even though it was outwardly about politics, was secretly about something much more insurrectionary, namely the right of self-determination. I took it as an anthem for all of us California beach kids trying to be ourselves. “California Uber Alles”, Jello Biafra screamed over and over to the throbbing bass, “Uber Alles California.”

Fuck the Eagles. Fuck Led Zeppelin. And fuck all the stupid pot smoking jocks that listened to them. We were a bunch of California beach kids, and we were going to do things our own way. California Uber Alles.

Jello Biafra took exception to the fact that some SoCal skinheads had taken to shouting the slogan while sig heiling at shows; Jello couldn’t handle the taint of being associated with anything that politically incorrect, so he quickly tamped down any notion that the song was anything but a political parody. You see, Jello wasn’t from Southern California; he grew up in Boulder. I still consider him an adopted Californian, the same as I do with X. Unlike Don Henley or all of those Hollywood hair bands, Jello and Exene didn’t come to L.A. to live out their warped Middle American dreams, they came to California to actually become one of us. And I love them for that. But they never understood how much their music meant to us as a cultural statement. They blanched at all the anger, and the idiocy, and the blood at shows, not seeing that the source of it was the same youthful adrenalin that fueled our ecstasy, our belief that the world could be anything we wanted it to, that we could be free.

California Uber Alles… Maybe it wasn’t the best choice of words for folks to glom onto. And maybe California is not an objectively superior culture. But it is mine, even after 20 years in the Midwest. Chicago may be my home now, but there is part of me that will always feel most at home hanging out in West Newport, listening to some ska coming from one of the beach bungalows, diving in the surf, lying in the sun. It just wouldn’t be the same if the neighbors were playing Reo Speedwagon.