Worth and Currency*

I fear the following might not interest anyone outside my own age group. As a post I recently read on one website from a young person has it, “I never like reading about when my parents were young.”

That this one is also about different kinds of faith may give it even less appeal.

Still, as our economy has continued to show upward motion that mainly helps stock holders, and then sputters because there aren't enough new jobs, and then evens out and goes through the cycle, again helping stock holders, I feel I must write about a song I listened to back in 1972. It’s a Don McLean song called “The More You Pay, the more it’s worth.”

Today, I hear people refer to Don McLean derisively as a “one hit wonder.” They don’t know, of course. And attitudes in popular culture tend to reinforce the idea that “what you don’t know isn’t really important.”

I’ll just say that it’s not that simple with McLean. Today, certainly, he is remembered, if at all, for the songs “American Pie” and “Vincent,” the latter a ballad about Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh, a song Simon of American Idol fame once referred to as “pleasing the grandmothers.” But McLean actually made four very good albums “back in the day.” Some of the songs seem a bit dogmatic now, but some still have great insight.

After American Pie and Celebrity

One of them was released after the American Pie album and included a story song about a faded celebrity, a person of “minor talents,” a former Saturday matinee singing cowboy star. Now I was one day to become an English major, and I remember wondering, “Is McLean drawing on this 'Hop-Along Cassidy' type to explain how his own popular work and the work of his peers would one day appear?” 

Deep, I know, but hey, this was the early '70s. And here was a singer-songwriter, whose song “American Pie” had left him struggling with fame and all of the hyperbolic acclaim that brings. While most today would lust after that fame, real questions must eventually come—some of the questions McLean raises in his post-American Pie songs.

Set in this collection of songs about love, nostalgia, faded celebrity, limitations (minor talents), and self-deception, one song called “The More You Pay, the more it's worth” chronicles a horse auction where a horse is practically given away. The song is harsh, with “The more you pay, the more it’s worth” repeated in the chorus. But at the end, a quiet diversion in a different chord sequence almost whispers, “And where was the boy who rode on her back, his arms holding tight around her neck?” Quietly, an after-thought raises the real question: Is payment the only determiner of worth? Where was the boy—now a young man—who could speak to another kind of worth?

After the Romance

This song is the work of a romantic sensibility, of course, and certainly very much part of the early 1970s. It audaciously questions the value system of this world, buttressed as it is (not too thoughtfully, I would imagine Don McLean would think) by money.

But what else is there for us to base our worth on? Where I live in California, cars, expensive clothing, the right neighborhood, the cool neighborhood, all speak to this, because it is very easy to be cynical and value only those people who can help you further your career.

I fit none of this, never have and probably never will, even as the cultural determiners of worth come and go. For young people, it’s friends—I had few growing up. For adults, it's ambition, achievement--I question my “achievements,” wrung from “minor talents,” every day.

Christians argue that God also has a value system. In my twenties, I sometimes thought that Christians themselves weren’t too interested in those values, or perhaps didn't seem to understand them. It seemed--sometimes it still seems--that grace is so free that we can't possibly understand its value. It can't possibly be real or deserved or can't possibly help anyone. So some Christians I know run around doing certain things, as though they are going to earn something more than others have. Others--this is more like me--don't care to allow it to work. 

The main idea seems to be that God has placed our worth—everyone, from the most broken and most self-righteous and most addicted to the most deceived to the most religious—in terms of the life of His Son.

“The more you pay, the more it’s worth.” Whatever our own innate sense of economy or value might be measured by—usually today it’s a matter of money or celebrity, or now, the new measurement, metrics—it seems there is an even deeper bottom line. I can still hear the voice of Don McLean reminding us of some lost, forsaken worth, asking, "And where was the boy...?"

*A slightly different version of this blog was previously posted in "Run the Path in 2010.

Rules, Desires, Literacy, and Goodness

Broad, leaky title for a blog, I know. But this one is easily captured in something that happened on Facebook recently (does anything really “happen” on Facebook?) and boiled down to that second term, “desire.”

A friend had posted a provocative statistical map on his Facebook page showing how few high school and college graduates continue to read after graduation. The statistics are abysmal, and as a teacher, my friend expressed concern with getting his students reading.

As an occasional poster on his page (and even more rarely, an occasional “wit”), I joined the fray. I wrote, “We need to teach our students to be ‘life-long’ readers for pleasure.” As soon as I posted this, I added, “…or we pass a law requiring all Americans to read at least two books a year.”

Alongside the IRS we could institute the BRS, or Bureau of Reader Services, and for reporting purposes, all citizens could make use of the old “book report” genre they had forced on them in grade school.

And then, dull wit expressed, I sat back and realized that the either/or dilemma I’d captured here equally applied to other issues than reading—certainly religion and dieting as well.

Many people, after all, say they want to read more. They say this, anyway, though it is usually because they think reading will be good for them in some vague sense—not so much because they seek a dialogue with different or greater minds than their own. They say they want to read more like I say I want to lose weight. What we get instead, when we don’t find the desire to read or eat right and exercise, is the rules.

Rules and Desire

The intention behind any rule, of course, is not ever oppression, though that’s how it sounds at first. The bullies at the pool are told to stop pushing younger kids into the water. One usually hopes that continued conformity will teach love for the law, but let’s be real.

As for me and my new proposed literacy law, I’m fine with it, of course. I’ve usually read my second book by the tenth of January. I like to read, find it pleasurable in a way I imagine great saints find pleasure in God. No rules are needed to force my nose to the text.

The rules are there for people who lack desire or to check desires that run in other directions.

This—the ruled state—is the state I imagine is found in most churches, synagogues, mosques, and high school and college classrooms. As the Misfit says of the grandmother at the end of Flannery O’Connor’s story, “She’d of been a good woman had there been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

This isn’t really about killing ourselves to be good. It’s about desire, about finding pleasure in what is good. People of faith refer to this as being given a "new heart." Most of the time, we don’t find this sort of grace, and so it takes some kind of faith on our part to consider that though we can’t see it at the moment, putting others before ourselves now might actually lead to feelings we’ve never had before.

In literacy terms, it's having faith that in finishing the book, we’ll find something worthwhile we couldn’t have imagined on choking down those first few pages.