by Selina Meyer
As it happened, both family fortunes were largely wiped out in the Great Depression when my paternal great-grandfather’s bank went under (despite his last-minute plea in the fashion of It’s a Wonderful Life for his friends and neighbors not to withdraw their savings, which led to his lynching), and the Belair-Edison real estate holdings vanished almost overnight when Mother’s family hired a team of local arsonists to burn them down for the insurance money in a series of fires that killed eighty-eight. (The arsonists, though extremely reliable in matters concerning arson, proved less reliable partners from a business standpoint and wound up implicating my maternal great-grandfather and his relatives, who narrowly escaped being sent to jail.)
So, by the time the parents met, both families lived in reduced circumstances, and the debate about which one stood higher on the ladder of social distinction had become somewhat academic. That does not mean, however, that the matter was laid to rest; to the contrary, in proof of some deep aspect of human nature, it raged all the more vigorously now that the stakes had all but disappeared.
But, as I say, I never saw my parents fight about lineage or anything else—but neither did I see them hug, and I believe that, even from an early age, I would have been disgusted if I had. By the time I was old enough to think about whether or not they loved or even liked each other, they had been leading largely his and hers lives for a decade at least, with Daddy traveling on business or working in the stable he had converted to an office, and mother largely preoccupied with her show dogs and television programs.
What memories I have of my very earliest years are fragmentary and probably mostly drawn from photographs as much as genuine recollection. In the photos, I stare at the camera, unsmiling, at home, on my pony Chicklet, at my birthday party, on vacation at the beach, alone, with my parents, or surrounded by cousins and friends. Although the circumstances changed, my expression never did—proof, I think, of a naturally serious demeanor and a disdain for frivolity that has allowed me to focus intently on the things in life that really matter as opposed to the bottomless distractions of family nonsense.
In the fullness of time, it has occurred to me that perhaps I was an unwanted child, the result, for example, of a drunken encounter where my father, after celebrating the filing of an especially fraudulent tax return, forced himself upon my unwilling mother, who was drunk for some other reason and either powerless to resist or oblivious. But there is a difference between being unwanted and being unloved. If, in fact, I was conceived in the manner I have suspected, then I have the comfort of knowing that my father loved me so much that he made my mother pregnant with me despite her passive, or possibly active, resistance. Daddy forced me into the world in the same way he forced himself on mother, and what greater love is there than that?
It may surprise hopelessly bourgeois and conventional readers that I regard this “origin story” as a source of strength rather than an excuse for self-pity. I knew plenty of kids with families that, at least outwardly, appeared loving and cohesive, and they were, invariably, not the kind of children I wanted to play with or found interesting. My friends, though few in number, were drawn chiefly from the more select group of children of divorce or from families that didn’t waste time with too many activities or too much supervision. We were emancipated from an early age, left blissfully to our own devices, trusted to make adult decisions about when to do homework, when to watch television, when to go to bed, when to come home, when to wake up, whether or not to go to school, and what brand of cigarettes to smoke. Needless to say, we were envied by our neighbors and classmates who had the kind of parents who were always dragging them to playdates, parties, and miscellaneous activities. The furnished basements of my fellow “unloved” “misfits” were in fact the crucible in which my adult personality—strong, independent, curious—was forged.
For most of my childhood, we lived in a large house surrounded by acres of open countryside and leased farmland. On Saturdays during the fall and spring, the local fox hunt, the Berkeley Hounds, would ride through our property and, whenever possible, Daddy and I would ride with them. Although I take what I regard as a “common sense” position on gun control and animal cruelty, I think that, in its own way, there’s nothing more all-American than fox hunting. It combines a love of the outdoors, a reverence for tradition, and a determination to eradicate vermin, but does so in a colorful, entertaining, and tasteful fashion. Anyone who has hunted for foxes on horseback knows that there is nothing more exciting than watching a pack of hounds (perhaps assisted by terriers if the fox has gone to ground) corner a wily vixen or dog-fox after a long chase and tear it to pieces. Maybe it doesn’t sound beautiful, but I know if you could see it, you’d agree with me. Some of my most joyous memories from childhood are when, after a successful hunt, I was presented with the fox’s tail or, in one case, its head. I still have that head somewhere. Must remember to check.
Our property had some of the best coverts in the county, and as both a property owner whose land was hunted and also at one point (until there was some misunderstanding about the allocation of the hunt fees) a Joint Master of Fox Hounds, Daddy had the responsibility for cubbing in the spring, which is the process of digging up the nests and killing some number (usually half) of the young foxes to help ensure that only the most intelligent and energetic animals survive—applying evolutionary pressure on the fox population as a whole. While other girls may have spent their time with their father at a museum or on a bike ride, I was engaged in the far more enriching pursuit of digging up baby foxes and chopping off their heads, usually with the sharp edge of a shovel.
One of my great regrets is that I didn’t do more to promote fox hunting and other field sports when I was president. Whether or not you approve of hunting, I think everyone would agree that fox hunting in particular builds character and that character is something that is sadly lacking among the great majority of Americans. I am proud, though, that the two attempts I spearheaded as vice president to secure the Olympics games for U.S. cities (Tucson’s bid in 2012 and Cincinnati’s in 2014) incorporated fox hunting in its classic form as well as drag, trail, and bloodhound variants as the centerpiece of the American bids.
Whenever I speak to schoolchildren, I stress the importance of reading. Reading is important, I tell them. Always read. When you can. I used to read. Do you feel bored? Then you should read. You’ll never be bored if you have something to read—as long as you pick something interesting to read. Who can help you make sure that what you have chosen to read is interesting and not boring? A librarian can help. What about a teacher? Yes. A parent? Sure, also a great idea. The point I try and make with the kids—be they younger kids who are just learning to read in kindergarten, older kids in elementary school who are awakening to the joy of reading an interesting, non-boring book, or older children who have decided that all books are boring and need to be persuaded otherwise even if that effort will ultimately prove fruitless—is that there are lots of great books for readers of all ages, and so it’s very wrong to think that all reading is boring. Yes, some books are boring. I don’t think anyone who has read a lot of books or not read very many books but made poor choices about the few books they have read, would disagree. What are some good tactics to cope with a boring book when one encounters one? Well, there is no foolproof method. You should probably try and stick with it for a while. But one thing you should avoid, I tell kids, is looking down the page to see when the particular section they are reading that may be boring might end, as indicated, for example, by the indentation of an upcoming paragraph. This tactic for relieving the boredom associated with a boring passage will very often end in heartbreak when the reader sees that, in fact, the boring passage they are reading does not end before the page and could, for all that they know, continue indefinitely, belaboring whatever boring point is being made, perhaps all the way to the end of the book, or even, in the sort of nightmare scenario that will inevitably flash across the wandering mind of a bored reader, beyond th
e end of the book, boring the person reading the book forever until the end of their life or maybe even beyond the end of their life, across eternity until the heat death of the universe and—who knows?—even beyond that into the realm of alternate universes and their infinite receding event horizons. Religion offers an alternate cosmology in which the clearest understanding of astrophysics about the extent of time and space is subsumed into some even vaster concept of the infinite of infinities—to wit, the mind of God. And yet it is within the powers of a boring book to bore even the mind of God, as God well knows.
Children need to learn early that writers are habitually deceptive in luring unwary readers into their many insidious traps. The most common of these is to entice the reader to buy the book through clever art direction of the cover, or though laudatory encomiums by literary luminaries or other celebrities on the back cover, and possibly, when things go exceptionally well, by appearances by the author on television programs or on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Don’t be fooled! Just because a writer has the minimal talent necessary to make their book sound semi-interesting during a conversation with the overly obliging La Gross, that doesn’t mean their book is actually interesting. The promotion of books by people like Terry Gross is, quite simply, a trail of tears, leaving in its wake as many frustrated and angry book purchasers as it does satisfied ones—perhaps many, many more.
But, of course, the most soul-destroying of the cynical writer’s tricks for convincing the guileless reader that the boring part of a book they are reading may be coming to an end is by dividing some exceptionally boring upcoming part of the book into paragraphs that will suggest that the author has changed his or subject and, it is to be hoped, moved on to something more interesting. And yet when the unwary reader actually begins reading the new section, it turns out that the writer has not moved on at all, but has simply deceived the reader through the paragraph-indentation trick or other punctuation gimmicks, and is, in fact, just rehashing the same old dull and obvious point about, perhaps, something that every sensible person would agree with and really doesn’t require any sort of elaborate song-and-dance argumentation but which the author is attempting to utilize to garner some kind of unearned praise for appearing to be intellectually or artistically courageous when, in fact, they are just a garden-variety lazy weakling and bore who has attempted to foist a broader impression of themselves as an artistic pioneer in order to be invited to parties where sycophantic throngs will gather ’round to lap up the meaningless drippings from mouths intoxicated by twenty-dollar-a-bottle pinot noir, an overrated wine that most people seem to like for its lack of flavor rather than for its active possession of one.
The point is that I have always loved reading and often used to steal away to read books borrowed from my parents’ extensive library. Lots of funny stories having to do with that.
Did I have a conventional girlhood? Most definitely not. Would I have traded it for anyone else’s childhood? Not for all the world.
CHAPTER TWO
Confessions of a Popular Nerd Athlete—School Days . . . and Nights!
It is well-known that I have often been called “The Education President.” Am I ashamed of this? No! Quite the opposite, in fact. I am proud to have been called “The Education President.” Of all the many issues that a president can concern him- or herself with, I think a very good case can be made that education is one of the most important. Don’t believe me? Well, let’s try a little exercise: What do you think is the most difficult challenge we face in the world today? Maybe, for you, it’s jobs. Well, you can’t get a good job without an education, now can you? I mean, some good jobs, sure. Working turning a crank in a factory for a few months and then faking an injury that entitles you to both a settlement in a lawsuit and a lifetime of disability payments could be considered a good job, I guess, if you want to get paid to spend your life fishing or watching car racing on television, and you don’t need much education to fake an injury, one would think. And I suppose, in that case, your crooked lawyer would fill out all the forms for you so you wouldn’t really need to know how to read and write or express yourself particularly well.
But that’s an isolated case. An exception that proves the rule, if you will.
Let’s pick a different policy arena in which to prove the importance of education. How about climate change? You can’t do anything about climate change if you don’t have an education. You’d need to be a physicist or maybe a chemist to figure out what to do about that. It’s a huge, interdisciplinary problem with many facets, so biologists and biochemists also have an important role to play. Geologists a bit also maybe. Archaeologists not so much. And the algorithms that predict complex interactions in the upper atmosphere require the input (no pun intended!) of computer scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians who, like economists, are considered “poor man’s scientists.” All of these different highly educated people—not just men but also women, too!—have to work together to solve the problem of climate change. Now, to be fair, while these scientists seem to be pretty good at identifying the problem, it’s not as if they’ve been terribly great at coming up with solutions, despite all their education.
Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the best example either. Doctors! Doctors need education. Think about the life of a doctor. Pretty much your entire working life is spent writing. Doctors write hundreds, if not thousands, of prescriptions every day, so there’s simply no way you can be a doctor if you don’t know how to write. I think we all wish doctors could spend a little more time learning how to write clearly so that a prescription for, say, sleeping pills isn’t filled incorrectly by the idiot pharmacist so that you wind up with a strong laxative or something. That happened to someone I know, which resulted in her inventing (but tragically failing to trademark) the expression “sh-t the bed.”
Here’s something they don’t teach you in school but is really worth knowing: Take anything a doctor tells you with a giant grain of salt, because I have learned that more often than not they’re just lazy clueless losers like everyone else.
Pharmacists are supposed to be educated, but a lot of the time it doesn’t seem like they are or, if they are, it seems they weren’t educated very well. Don’t take this the wrong way, but a lot of them also look like they learned how to do pharmacy in Korea or the Philippines or someplace like that, and God only knows whether they value education as highly in those countries as we do here in America.
Here’s something you may not know about pharmacists: The arts and sciences of pharmacy are the second most popular thing for inmates to study in prison after—you guessed it—the arts and sciences of locksmithing. Look, I guess anything’s better than giving prisoners even more time to do pull-ups, lift weights, and toss around the medicine ball so that they can become even scarier and more dangerous than they were when they got sent to jail. And as the daughter and ex-wife of men who, due to misunderstandings both on their part but also on the part of law enforcement, very nearly went to jail on a number of occasions, I am a firm believer in second chances and in allowing people to pay their debt to society and get the whole thing over with rather than spend a fortune on legal bills.
All of that said, one kind of education I’m not a huge fan of is teaching prisoners how to pick locks and make drugs. Let me explain my reasoning here. Two of the activities that land people in jail in the first place are burglary and robbery and, if we want to reduce recidivism, I think we should make it harder for criminals to reoffend rather than making it easier by teaching them how to open locks better than they did the last time, when they got caught. The same goes for pharmacy. I mean, on some level, I get it. If we teach prisoners how to make their own drugs or give them better access to drugs by helping them get jobs as pharmacists rather than having to buy them on the street, which can often be a prelude to crime, we might be able to reduce drug crime or, at least, improve the quality of the drug crimes in this country. But I happen to think that it might be best if we tried to keep them away fr
om drugs altogether and leave pharmacy work to Koreans and Phillipinesians. Besides, how do we know that inmates who study pharmaceutical dispensation in prison are going to actually try and get jobs in legitimate pharmacies such as Rite Aid, CVS, or, my personal favorite, Walgreens? If those pharmacies were not as deeply committed to second chances as perhaps they should be, then they might not want to hire former drug criminals to be their pharmacists. That would leave these prison-trained pharmacists with nothing to do except manufacture crystal meth in their bathtubs at home—crystal meth that, by virtue of the taxpayer-subsidized prison education, might be far more potent than their competitors’.
The one area of prison education that I do support wholeheartedly is legal education. It makes simple common sense that the best lawyers—the best criminal lawyers at any rate—would have at least some prison experience. The same goes for judges, though probably not Supreme Court Justices because, as with everything, there is a limit.*
My personal passion for education was fostered through my own personal experience with education in the course of being educated myself. My formal schooling was undertaken at a series of private schools, first Miss Hamly’s, then Miss Dotson’s, and finally Miss Pakenham’s, a small all-girls boarding school with a strong emphasis on character-building through equestrian activities. Miss Pakenham’s has been in the news lately, not, thankfully, because of a sex scandal like so many other top-flight boarding schools, but rather because of a “lack of sex” scandal, in which a sexually frustrated senior sued the school for failing to instill in her the sort of social grace and flirting skills that would enable her to meet and engage in sex with suitable or even unsuitable mates. All I can say is that things were quite different in my day, back when old Miss Pakenham (the original Miss Pakenham’s great-granddaughter) was still alive. She made very sure that her namesake institution maintained exceptionally high standards in all areas of instruction, not just garden-variety “readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithm’tic” pedagogy but also etiquette, ballroom dancing, and the other skills that fell under the overall heading of “grace and ladylikeness.” While it may seem out of step with contemporary values, Miss Pakenham placed a constant emphasis on how to make oneself attractive to members of the opposite sex in order to find a suitable husband. I sometimes wonder if young women today couldn’t use a little more of Miss Pakenham’s brand of education.