CONTROL STREAKS AND FREAKS

OCTOBER 5, 2024 – We awoke this morning to a wild and wooly day—in the wind department, anyway. The sun was emerging through light, unorganized cotton candy clouds, and the outdoor thermometer registered a balmy 56F, but the wind? It howled like an over-eager parent at a high school soccer match—not with mean-spirited shouting but a steady stream of cliches sprinkled with witty phrases that make other parents chuckle. Yes, this morning’s wind was a blast of ebullience, whipping the lake into a cauldron of rollers and breakers sweeping in from the distant southeast shore, which in the humid morning air looked farther away than on a clear, still late afternoon when the sun’s rays highlight ever detail.

While I made coffee then fixed and consumed my usual fruit-walnuts-Grape Nuts-honey-in-a-bowl breakfast, Beth, I realized, had slipped back to the land of Nod. Good, I thought. All too often her first words with the rising sun are, “I’ve been awake since three.”

I know many people with insomnia, in many cases caused by worry over things that can’t be controlled. I’m lucky not to suffer this malady. I carry no more, no fewer woes than most people, but I manage to compartmentalize the troubles that do weigh on my life. At sleep time, I herd all worries into an imaginary pen and secure the gate. Within their overnight confinement the snorting bulls, barking dogs, and erratic squirrels stir things up all they wish. Me, myself and I? We’re on the opposite side of the ranch house, windows closed and shades pulled to the ruckus. Within minutes we’re in deep slumber, dreaming far from the dusty, noisy, frenetic disturbances inside the worry pen.

During the day, of course, bulls, dogs, squirrels have open leave to do whatever they please outside the pen. Yet even when they find me in the not-so-secret garden some distance from ranch-yard central, I have my ways of dodging and hiding. This strategy generally works well enough for me to retain my illusion of . . . control.

Control. I think it must be a fundamental evolutionary impulse in all living creatures, particularly homo sapiens. The catch, of course, is that by its very nature, control is self-limiting. Since we all yearn for control, we’re all destined to achieve it but rarely and not retain it for long if we do acquire control.

Some people would vehemently disagree that they can’t control what others believe. I look at the zealots in Oklahoma, for example, who’ve included in an RFP for classroom Bibles, specs that only the Trump-endorsed Bible can meet. I view these folks less as religious fanatics and more as control freaks who want to dictate what others should think.

I mean, really now . . . really. How can a group of folks insistent on plastering the Ten Commandments and “Jesus Loves You—but only if you love our version of Him” next to the Pledge of Allegiance and portrait of a (hawkish) bald eagle wrapped in the Star Spangled Banner be in such close league with a carnival barker who makes NO attempt to hide his perpetual, unswerving narcissistic agenda that is antithetical to all the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene? There was a day in America when strident Christians would have condemned categorically a blasphemous adulterer whose lying and intemperate words and deeds were the self-brandings of an unrepentant sinner of the lowest order. Excoriations from the nation’s pulpits would have ended, not perpetuated, the career of the biggest self-server in the history of American skullduggery under cover of politics.

But that was then, and this upside-down world is now. Our national portrait would make for an amusing cartoon if we weren’t tethered to such a frightening possibility as the one we face in 31 days.

In March 2001 we castigated the Taliban for good reason when they blasted the Buddhas of Bamiyan—an UNESCO World Heritage Site—in Afghanistan; after 9/11 we feared the religious extremists for an ever greater reason. And now, less than a quarter century later, we watch—half of us in disbelief; the other half with nonchalance or in active encouragement—as a homegrown version of the Taliban rises in the heart of America, with franchisees in every state of the Union, their Christian nationalism game plan embedded in Project 2025, a blueprint for . . . control.

Whence came such a puritanical control streak? Not from Mecca or Medina or Kabul, it turns out, but from our very own history, reaching back to . . . THE PURITANS! . . . cultivated and leveraged by innumerable imitators and successors. And where did the Puritans come from? Oh yes, Merry England, which also gave us the Magna Carta and a prelude to representative government[1].

In short order and fundamental ways, America became a beacon for religious fanatics—control freaks—of all stripes and intolerances. The Pilgrims and Puritans were simply among the first. This bizarre feature of the American cultural and social landscape and now political arena took root and was cultivated religiously, as it were, by successive generations of control freaks. As its various sects provided “definitive answers” to life’s persistent questions; as its leaders, infatuated with their own need for control strove to gather ever larger flocks (and their purses) . . . Voila! You had not only “One Nation Under God,” but the idea of the entire flock bowing to the same man (it was never a woman) preaching fire and brimstone with an angry index finger in the air and an outstretched hand in the collection plate. The problem, however, was that as with all religions, schisms formed. One brand of damnation nonsense was in conflict with another sect’s form of condemnation malarkey.

Down in the OK state, a cadre of control freaks have boiled things down to “One God” (their version); “One Nation” (theirs); and “One Bird” (theirs).

The third element—the bald eagle—has morphed into an icon of irony, given that the control freaks’ Chosen Authoritarian, the Blasphemous Savior in Chief, doubles as the Naked Emperor (in Perpetually New Clothes).

All in the name of controlling the bleating flock.

But lest I get carried away trying to control my own narrative, I acknowledge that the flora and fauna in my tree garden view me with amusement. Today I spent many hours pruning countless white pine. Why? To enhance their appearance[2] (and protect their lower branches from being conduits for disease). “Enhance”? Ah, yes—control their appearance, just as the planting of hundreds of white pine seven years ago was part of an effort to control the land, control the environment that my species have always wanted to control—right into the ground, you might say, such that now our control of the earth has spun wildly out of control threatening in many ways the short-term health of our only home.

If only I could control the control freaks who seek to control the nation’s political agenda. If only in this Land of Liberty, I could Let Freedom Ring—but as I should deign the bells of my beliefs to ring. But I’ll settle for less; I’ll settle for a world in which the Ten Commandments are matched by the Beatitudes; where “Jesus Loves You—but only if you love our version of Him” is replaced by “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” and its Quranic equivalent: “And do good unto your parents, and near of kin, and unto orphans, and the needy, and the neighbor from among your own people, and the neighbor who is a stranger, and the wayfarer.” I’ll settle for a world in which the religious control freaks have less control and in which I have just a smidgeon of control over a 20-acre tree garden[3] scarred by the sawyer’s blade.

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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson

[1] In the traditional American high school and undergraduate history curricula, excessive credit was assigned to our British roots. According to the well supported thesis of Russ Shorto in his fascinating book, The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony that Shaped America, it was more the liberal Dutch, rivals of the British, who gave America the most lasting of democratic attributes, especially tolerance of all comers (i.e. diversity in all its aspects), liberal intellectualism and encouragement of commerce.

[2]Where white pine enjoy lots of sun and ample space to grow laterally, they tend to grow “out” as much as “up.” Pruning the lower third sets of branches (one tier representing a year of growth) encourages vertical growth. My goal for these trees is height, not width at the expense of height.

[3] Trädgården—the Tree Garden—covers approximately 20 acres within a larger parcel from which oak, maple, and poplar were selectively harvested eight years ago. In penance, I dedicated 20 acres for the cultivation of white and red (Norway) pine, the two dominant indigenous arboreal species before the Europeans hacked to pieces the great pine forests of the Upper Midwest (and other parts of the country east of the Mississippi). The harvested area, with expanded sunlight and seeded naturally by “sentinel” pine along the lakeshore outside the harvest zone, is now prime territory for pine “volunteers.” By exerting a measure of control—planting 600 nursery-cultivated two- and three-year seedlings—I intended to give tree garden a jump start. So far, so good. Many of those hand-planted trees now tower over my head.