Edition
7
I do wish they’d stop shooting all my
heroes down in flames, especially when they’re not here to defend
themselves. I was alarmed when potshots were taken at Kennedy,
bringing him down from a savior of our nation to a pampered and
oversexed playboy, using the White House as a personal brothel.
Then over the years Jefferson was diminished somewhat by bringing
forth proof that he had sired children with one of his slaves,
and on and on. I already had known Grant was a raving drunk;
I have his sword in my living room. It had been given in
the heat of battle to my fallen grandfather by the General himself.
At least that’s the story I grew up with.
But now, yet again comes someone who
can’t defend herself: Margaret Mead, who died in 1978.
I clearly remember reading her early on in college, if only because
my friends whispered there were some pretty sexy goings-on in
it and at that age I rushed after any information I could get
on sex. But now, some sixty years later, scholars have named
her observations on the transition from childhood to adulthood
in the Samoan culture as laid out in her Coming of Age in Samoa
as the worst nonfiction book of the past 100 years.
Ah, heck. If her writings held any value
at all to a budding 19 year old, it was the fact that someone
was saying there were boys and girls somewhere in the world free
from the hang-ups of their Western counterparts and, besides that,
sexual promiscuity was common. I wasn’t going to use her
'facts' as an excuse to party. It just freed my mind a little
of the guilt from what I was feeling making it more natural as
clearly it was. Sex education in the 50’s was a joke as
we all now know. The poor teachers were clearly out of their
depth and totally embarrassed imparting what little prurient knowledge
they had. My class was taught at first by two unmarried
ladies, rather like priests giving premarital classes. Kinda
ran the gamut on that one, didn’t they.
But I guess I came out all right, or
at least I think I did. No one’s complained yet.
