Puritans!!11oneone

Although some of you may see this assertment as incongruous with my last entry, I love Puritans almost as much as I love vampires. I mean in some ways they're similar! Pasty skin, black clothing, a fascination with young women. No? Well, it's a thought.
This week I have been reading The Wordy Shipmates, by Sarah Vowell. It is a humorous scholarly account of the Puritan establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and a consideration of Puritanism itself and why today it enjoys such bad press. Why is it a put-down to call the United States a Puritan nation? We should be so lucky. Many people today are dishonest, don't believe in much except the dollar (not even themselves), and couldn't care less what happened to their neighbor. 150 years before the so-called Founding Fathers set pen to paper, Roger Williams was pulling his First Amendment rights into the arena by the hair, and calling for religious freedom (his point being that the Jews and the Muslims and the Pagans should be able to practice their religion without being kicked or bitten, because they should be overcome to the truth by the Word of God, which is His true sword). So, not entirely there, but what do you want from people who are closer to the Middle Ages than they are to us? The Puritans worshipped two things: God, and learning. They established Harvard, and as one Archivist at the Massachusetts Historical Society remarks in Vowell's book, "killed in order to leave a paper trail."
However, Vowell approaches all these fine, buckle-my-shoe revelations with a tongue in cheek sense of humor that has me giggling. Oh, that saucy John Cotton! What a rogue!
" Cotton's sermon is titled, "God's Promise to His Plantation." [welcome to the 17th and early 18th centuries, era of a book titled: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who Was Born In Newgate, and During a Life of Continu'd Variety For Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, Was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife [Whereof Once To Her Own Brother], Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon In Virginia, At Last Grew Rich, Liv'd Honest, and Died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums. Is it a title? Or a short story? Anyway. Back to Cotton and Vowell.] He begins with one of the loveliest passages from the Book of Second Samuel, an otherwise R-rated chronicle of King David's serial killer years. Chapter 7, verse 10: "I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their own, and move no more." Sounds so homey, like that column in the real estate section of the New York Times about how people found their apartments. Until I remember that talk like this is the match still lighting the fuses of a thousand car bombs. " The Wordy Shipmates, p. 2

And so Vowell follows, mocks, and admires the true fathers and mothers of our nation. She interweaves their 17th century existences with the Rolling Stones, the Red Sox, and Sinclair Lewis. She laments that one of them missed out on TV political punditry, which was so clearly his calling. She explores their lives through her own experiences discovering the impact the plagues brought by the Europeans wreaked on her own Cherokee and Sequoya ancestors, and through her summer Bible camps, complete with googly-eyed sock puppet renditions of the Old Testament.

Read this if you want a good laugh, and a better understanding of what those crazy Puritans were all about, besides hanging all those witches in The Crucible (who were really communists?). I may be biased because this book features my apparently good-natured, but somewhat bumbling ancestor John Winthrop. I've discovered that my New England upbringing (if it hurts, you dislike it a bit, and you still feel guilty, it's good for you) is comfortingly rendolent of Calvinism, and in a nation where my white, WASPy blood has been here for 400 years and counting, it is nice to feel a sense of cultural heritage. Even if that heritage is tainted with indigenous blood, sexual repression, and the kind of overtly obsessive religious zeal that lead to one Puritan woman throwing her baby down a well so that, according to predestination, she could be sure she would be damned and didn't have all that suspensful waiting to go through.
Whose family isn't a bit odd, anyway?