[nota bene: This is a series of personal recollections. My memory is horrible and I vouch for no specific facts or dates; any event I describe occurring I do vouch for, although the specifics of it and when it happened are up in the air.]

Picture the sort of person who will make a weekly habit of beating off to clips of Winston Churchill saying famous things, demonstrating what his admirers mistake for resolve. Put a khaki shirt on him - a paramilitary affiliation, appropriate enough for this Little League fascist. Keep this image in mind. You’ll need it later.

The Boy Scouts were set up out of a megachurch, called - simply enough - Central Christian Church. The Boy Scouts have various classist and authoritarian instincts built into their organizational structure; they are centralized under a single leader, the Scoutmaster, answerable to nobody, and surrounded by lackeys with positions of responsibility unaccompanied by authority. It is the perfect way to teach boys - and their fathers, for that matter - that life, and especially adulthood, is a succession of increasingly burdensome obligations to authority without any personal autonomy; the only possible reward is a larger number of bulliable subordinates. And like good evangelicals, their contempt for women was boundless. The Promise Keepers were in vogue at the time, and their vague, self-congratulatory vows not to beat women for being filthy, stupid animals seemed to stop well short of letting women do anything constructive.

My mother was a cub scout leader, see. My father got involved when he could, but he completely lacked the time - had a busy schedule. And my mother wanted us to have something like the Cub Scouts - complete with camping, useful skills, and opportunity to socialize - in our lives. She ran the den out of our house most of the time, and all concerned were very pleased with themselves.

A succession of moves lead us to a number of boy scout troops. The megachurch one lasted us the longest; it was the one that, as the homophobia rocked the organization (and my parents, who respected Gore a great deal, were bombarded continuously with Bushie urban legends, shitty jokes, and other bullshit spam), drove first me and later the rest of my family out of the Amerikaner Hitlerjugend. (That and I was never particularly good at the bondage stuff.)
To be completely even-handed, this characterization is only fair where you will find a man like I described earlier, the fat balding middle-class mother of the Fatherland. Friends of mine observed evangelical Scout leaders boffing ‘non-denominational’ speeches and moments of contemplation (prayer, of course) so badly that they excluded Jewish scouts, let alone anyone else - but that was in solidly democratic Pittsburgh. And in some troops - fairly rare, fairly small, and usually fairly new - this general trend got bucked. Some of the people I miss the most in this city are the ones we lost contact with after we moved to New York; they were a lovely Hawaiian family who, as my family had, ran a cub scout troop and decided to go whole hog afterwards. Lacking the shared tutelage in sociopathy the polite society of the Midwest demands, these people were some of the kindest I’ve ever met and ran a troop basically like our cub scout den with much better resources.

In general, though, this is not true. Out West, the only part of the country that saw Repo Man and didn’t get it, where Reagan and all the other self-reliant rags-to-riches singing cowboys are still a sort of real creature said to roam the rugged hills on clear nights, any well-organized Boy Scout troop is bound to be closer to Baden-Powell’s original classist, imperialist (and, avant le lettre, fascist) vision of the Scouts than any of its other American counterparts. You don’t just fail ‘morally straight’ if you get a man off. You fail ‘morally straight’ if you get a woman off.

Ever.

My preposterous diversions aside, I would like to share two bits of specific experience from my time with the Boy Scouts; one is a specific story, and one is more general.

1. My mother was, as I said, a Cub Scout leader. She participated as closely as she could in the events, as she had done with us as Cub Scouts. Some troops received this very well. Others very poorly. The Central Christian one - poorly. From the word go, her efforts to get involved were continuously met with condescension and dismissal. This particular troop preferring to have parents involved, she quickly discovered that they didn’t want to take ‘their father is very busy and was never particularly involved in all of this’ for an answer. After the first couple of meetings, it became clear that they strongly preferred she remain with the wives; she felt stir-crazy among a bunch of women who were willing to sit around and do nothing for a couple of hours because their husbands had important man business and yet wanted something to look at from time to time. When it came to merit badges and tutoring, she was politely declined to teach anything she had direct involvement or interest in - and, finally, approached for something to do with domestic economy. By that point, she was off-put enough by their having decided that, among others, some guy who had once painted his own pickup truck was a better choice than her (a professional artist before she had kids, for Christ’s sake!) for Art.

She did her even best to talk to the leaders and other men about scouting and leadership; and even though my father’s Scouting experience since his teenaged years was largely limited to helping at meetings and absorbing from my mother, they’d almost completely ignore her if he were available instead. When you hear the word ‘objectify’, it’s worth remembering that it isn’t just about sex. An object can’t teach your boy and an object can’t share your happiness or sorrow. For half of the room - maybe more - it made about as much sense for my mother to do what she wanted to do with the scouts as it would if she were a dog. The only time one of them ever really brought it up, the reaction was a polite tight-lipped disengagement, followed by privately attempting to share a bemused chuckle - ‘Ha! Dames.’ - with my father. I don’t think he ever had another thing to do with that troop; if you can tolerate your spouse being treated that way you don’t deserve to be married, and can hardly be called a human being.

2. I told you that story so I could tell you this one. In early 2001 (as you will soon see, thank God for small favors - two years later and I don’t know if I would have come out of this alive), one of the fat, pious middle-aged men, no doubt a divorce with strong opinions on feminazis and political correctness, got us to perform a little thought experiment. Here is where the image from the beginning is necessary: imagine this man talking. According to this experiment, we live in Saudi Arabia. (Not ‘we are Arabian’, because I don’t think that would have parsed for a man like that or any child that age.) In Saudi Arabia, one is beheaded for refusing to publically convert to Islam. (I can’t recall if he used some variant meant to express imperial contempt - ‘Mahometan/ism’, ‘Moslem’, etc. - but I’d give that about even odds. This was before that became politically useful.) Off to a wonderful start, isn’t it?

As this thought experiment goes (I spare you the actual story; it was told with the sort of quietly ridiculous pompousness and tragedy you’d expect, and treated in the utmost seriousness, as a day-to-day reality rather than a contrived exercise in self-persecution) the Interfaith Persecution Squad (the hardest-working government agency in Evangelical World, and also the only one they like) has discovered that we are Christians and unless we will proclaim public loyalty to Islam, off with our heads. (Luckily, no Muslims in that troop - but it took him a minute to realize ‘we are Christians’ didn’t exactly work for the Jews and Catholics involved, so ‘not Muslims’ went there instead.)

As you would expect, the result of this was pretty predictable. As he asked the boys, generally older than me but only by a couple of years, whether they were willing to accept being killed before claiming to be a faithful Muslim, they eagerly volunteered for death. Then it came to me.

My response was long, compared to the other brief and happy commitments to murder. I didn’t bother going to loggerheads with the fathead over his rather strained concept of religious tolerance; instead, I took the thought question on in what was at the time our shared foundation - Christianity. I thought executing someone for their religion would be a terrible burden on the conscience and soul of whoever was involved; that God had a plan and a teeming abundance of love for all people; and that God knew us by our character and our deeds rather than by our words. Each of these was a serious argument against willfully condemning a man to destroy me in the service of an evil law; taken together, they make the act unconscionable. Until the harsh situation passes, there is no God but God and Mohammed is his prophet.

This answer somewhat threw him for a loop. The exercise is pretty typical of militant evangelical pedagogy; it contains all of the familiar elements - inescapable religious persecution (and the complete impossibility of religious tolerance); dusky heathens as a lethal instrument of Satan; and complete disregard for the actual content of Christian scripture or theology, all in the service of steeling the resolve to religious self-annihilation. It’s the sort of ideological test I’m guessing almost every suicide bomber has been posed by authority figures at least twice by his first nocturnal emission.

I don’t know where in the Hell he planned to go from there, even if everyone had hooah’d eagerly at him and signed up for a suicide mission then and there. My guess is that he would proceed to berate our demographic cohort - that is, the ones whose indolent heathen parents lack the money or the iron will to send their children through a parochial school, or homeschool them as if at one - for having been robbed by the secular humanist public school brainwashing program of their resolve to stand tall and proud of their religion and culture, et fucking cetera. At the very least, he would probably have made a couple of vague comments about duty, honor, courage, and resolve, and uncomfortable with his increasingly obvious erection, would quickly have changed tacks to avoid an uncomfortable evening of stares at his pathetic groin - most probably, he would have made some kind of smarmy, vicariously self-aggrandizing comparison to our woggish peers and left that at that. Three fingers to the hat of the brim, attention; two.

He was ready, I guess, for an answer like ‘I don’t want to die for religion’ or ‘Jesus isn’t important enough to die over’. Those answers would have provided him with a basically socially acceptable venue to berate boys a third his age, because a secular humanist terrorsymp is fair game no matter how young. Like any other modern right-wing evangelical, he wasn’t ready to deal with his system of paranoia and martyrdom falling under fire from someone who was more interested in Christ as a moral teacher than as a space wizard. As I’ve said before, one of the most disappointing things about growing up in a genuinely Christian household is how lonely it is; more than two thirds of the country claims to believe what my family believes and maybe one in twenty actually does. People whose only brush with morality is the understanding that God will beat them if they don’t have it wonder how you can have morals without God; a better question would concern those who have God, or at least very fervently have what they call God, but don’t have any morals at all. These people are the preponderance of Christians and especially evangelical Christians, and it does not trouble them that their desire to fight a doughty crusade against the dark hand of religious persecution and subjugation in third-world countries (in which, in reality, they would have more legal rights than the natives do to begin with) is so arrestingly hostile to the most basic part of their ostensible moral credo that it’d be easier to shove a practicing Sikh into the brotherhood of Christ.

He got red-faced and stammered a little, and took a couple of more answers from other boys before growing uncomfortable and turning us over to the Scoutmaster again. My parents caught flak for it (behind my back, obviously - gossip being perhaps the most precious of the Christ’s values); several people were alarmed at the prospect of having someone who would knuckle under to religious persecution, who refused to take it seriously, who was ashamed of his faith, and whatever else it was they would have mumbled about the little Popish asshole who tried to play preacher during a beautifully simple and scriptural wog-fear exam. My parents did not immediately accept the line of reasoning, but (our family having a custom of refusing to even slightly acknowledge solidarity with anyone hostile to any member - a sometimes nasty habit, but an effective one) did not say anything about that. My father had little to nothing to say at all, because my mother immediately understood what exactly was to be said about the whole exercise.

That is, that she was proud of me for deflating someone so full of shit and hot air that he would demand that a room of teenagers martyr themselves - and then act pious about it.

Of course, these people being who they are, I don’t think the embarassment for them was more than momentary. Soon it was back to business as usual; had the exercise taken place three years later, it would be set in Iraq - and there’d be even odds whether it was being given in English or Arabic.