A Meditation on the Diaphanous Nature of Transit and Transition, in Five Parts

I.

When I was younger, maybe six or seven, any car trip over four hours in duration was preceded, on my part, by roughly the same amount of preparation as goes into waging a small-scale war. The back seat of the family station wagon became a veritable bomb shelter, stocked with several lunch’s worth of food, a pillow in case I needed to sleep, several Nancy Drew books, and enough candy to send an entire kindergarten class into an insulin coma. All that was missing were canned goods and a gas mask — though, given my then-ten-year-old brother’s predilection for loudly announcing his flatulence, perhaps the gas mask would have been a good idea. Now, a seasoned traveler, I put decidedly less effort into getting ready for one of my routine treks between Ithaca and New York City: I make a sandwich and get on the bus, where I proceed to sit and stare out the window for the next five to six hours, all my worldly possessions in a knapsack clutched between my knees.
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Patrick Henry College, located in Virginia, has approximately 240 enrolled students with a mean SAT score of 1320. The school receives no government funding, and charges about $15,000 in tuition. Students can choose from four majors: Government, Classical Liberal Arts, History, and Literature. Home-schooled teens are encouraged to apply — that is, home-schooled teens who tend toward evangelical Christianity, because Patrick Henry College’s self-reported mission is to “train Christian men and women who will lead our nation and shape our culture with timeless biblical values and fidelity to the spirit of the American founding.” The school was founded in 2000 by Michael Farris, the president and founder of the Home School Legal Defense Association, as a measure to counteract the increasing push for pesky home-schooling regulations — such as requiring the teacher-parents to pass certification exams or have high-school diplomas.

Perhaps this isn’t what Ezra Cornell was picturing when he envisioned “an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” But underneath the superficial differences between Patrick Henry and our dear old Cornell lurk a wealth of similarities.
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We all play out many different roles in many different arenas; I am a student, a writer, a HumEccie, a friend and daughter. But according to sexual strategies theory (SST), the only role of mine that matters is that of a fertile vessel for sperm.

Not that many people have heard of SST, but most are familiar with what it theorizes. Coined in 1993 by Davids Buss and Schmitt, the term describes the popular behavioral-ecology-based idea that the supposedly distinct mating strategies of males and females are based on maximizing reproductive potential while accounting for differential investment. Women have a gestation period of nine months followed by a year or more of breastfeeding; men need only donate several minutes of their time to the conception of a child. SST states that, because of this, men compete with other males to mate with as many youthful, fertile females as possible, while women look for men with resources and status, aiming to rope in “good providers” who will take care of them and their children. It’s simply part of our biology, proponents of the theory say; billions of years of evolution have made us this way.
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At the 2002 Golden Globes, broadcast live on NBC, U2’s Bono, having just won the award for Best Original Song, said, “This is really, really fucking brilliant.”

It was the fuck heard ’round the world.

Despite countrywide outrage, the FCC’s enforcement bureau declared that Bono’s comment was neither indecent nor obscene because it was used not as a verb but “as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.” Within days, the FCC was condemned by the Parents Television Council, concerned citizens across the country, and even its own chair, Michael Powell, who accused his fellow commissioners of making the wrong decision.

Many of these same people probably thought it absurd when the Georgia Department of Education proposed banning the word “evolution” from the curriculum, replacing it with “biological changes over time” — as though eliminating the word would change whatever threat the concept could pose to Georgians’ ideological beliefs. Religious issues aside, the common belief that profanities are “bad” or even dangerous is no less ridiculous; I applaud the FCC’s ruling on the Bono issue and see it as the beginning of a realization that words alone cannot be evil.
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