Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Pegged for life

Commentary by Betty Bell

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I dialed the radio from one side to the other and couldn’t find Rush. I thought he was global. So I settled for NPR and caught a book review of "Father Joe, The Man Who Saved My Soul" by Tony Hendra. Now that I’m out there past the middle of the plank with the rest of the Advanced Middle Age, the notion of saving my soul seemed relevant.

I checked out Hendra’s book at the library, and early on he tells of attending St. Alban’s school where, at age 11, he sat behind Stephen Hawking; yes, that Stephen Hawking. The thuggier kids, Hendra’s bunch, "persuaded" Hawking to do their math homework every day and the thugs got splendid grades until exam time when only Hawking shone. Even as a kid it was obvious Hawking had been dealt an otherworldly mathematical gene that allowed him to become one of the brighter stars in physics.

Next, a strange thing happened on the way home from work when I was halfway through the triangular short cut that I take to eliminate a corner. Instead of looking to the mountain, and looking to the sky, and saying glory-glory for the day, my inner billboard lit up with: The sum of the sides equals the sum of the square of the hypotenuse.

"Lordy, Betty," I shouted in my head, "that’s the Pythagorean theorem, "

My sole encounter with the Pythagorean theorem was the dreadful time in high school when I was in Mr. Barnhill’s geometry I class. Geometry seemed to me to be utterly otherworldly, utterly Stephen Hawking. I’d resigned myself to getting a D, but a miracle happened during a dream the night before the exam when my guardian angel hovered close to my ear and whispered, "You’ve got one chance to save your bacon, Betty. Memorize the Pythagorean theorem." And while I ate my Wheaties next morning, I did, even though it was as otherworldly as the Latin prayers we spieled every day in grade school Catechism. Don’t ask me how memorizing the PT saved my bacon, it just did. The PT was the biggest thing in the exam and I had it wired, and my C-minus felt like an A.

I looked up Pythagorean theorem in the dictionary when I got home, ready to be pleased about my verbatim memory, but lo, it was flawed. Actually, the PT is "the sum of the squares of the length of the sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the length of the hypotenuse." I had to look up hypotenuse, too.

I’m not just rambling here, pilgrims. If you connect the couple of dots I’ve dabbed, you’ll see this big picture: We enter the world endowed with a set of quite specific genes hanging on our double helix, genes we don’t get to choose, but genes that are going to lead us by the nose all through life. We’re born we’re the way we’re going to be.

This is a particularly timely insight during this particularly divisive election cycle. How it translates is we’re born either conservative or liberal ... either Republican or Democrat ... either Bushie or anti-Bushie. We might as well expect the Pope to vote for Kerry as to expect the rest of us to buck our genes. Genes are why only conservatives read William Bennett and William Kristol and Peggy Noonan; genes are why only liberals read Al Franken and Michael Moore and Molly Ivins. We’re not gened to even fathom a different point-of-view.

Look on this insight joyfully, as I do. When it sinks in that all the red state rednecks and all the blue state bums can’t help the way they are, we can turn ourselves into proper civil citizens right on through the election.

I’m starting my personal civility transformation with John, an eloquent spokesman in the gene pool of Bennett and Kristol and Noonan. John is what he is, and so what if that’s radically conservative. More important, John is also friendly, articulate, good-looking, industrious and talented. John’s a lovable human being, and it’s probably a mortal sin that I didn’t see it until now.

From now on every time I read one of John’s hard-right letters to the editor, my pulse is going to stay steady as she goes. And the next time I see him I’m going to grab him in a big bear hug and just hope I don’t scare him half to death. And I’ll never, ever, let-on that I’m seriously grateful I didn’t get his otherworldly conservative gene.

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