Holy Hullabaloos, The Blog

Deleted Footnote: Justice Breyer's Giant Brain

Here's another in my series of deleted footnotes from Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars.  In this one, I've just finished talking about the Supreme Court's decision upholding the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas Capitol grounds in Austin.  Justice Breyer wrote the controlling concurring opinion in that case, and, as I explain in the book, although his opinion "is about as clear as a bowl of oatmeal," it would seem that certain factors, such as the monument's long-standing history (it had been put up 40 years prior to the opinion) "played a deciding role in his enormous brain."  In the original draft, there was a footnote attached to this sentence:

"Justice Breyer's brain is so big that when I was clerking at the Court, a friend of mine and I used to hypothesize that the only way he could actually move his head was by using a complicated series of invisible pulleys and levers that were surreptitiously installed in the courtroom, hooked up to his skull, and controlled by foot pedals underneath the bench.  This hypothesis, however, remains unconfirmed."

Amazingly, this footnote got through the first set of edits.  The last edit, however, caught it.  I think my editor said something like "huh?" and struck it out.  Probably a good idea.

Deleted Scene: Tomah, Wisconsin--part II

Part I here.

When Kuderer and I arrived at his front door, I have to say that Bishop Miller did not look happy to see me.  He was polite, and he shook my hand, but he was clearly not psyched about having some stranger show up with a bunch of questions about the Amish educational system.  He was a big guy, kind of Santa-like, with a long white beard, glasses, a blue shirt and suspenders, and no hat.  What’s up with the no hats, I wondered?  Can’t I talk to someone with a hat?  We talked in the foyer of his big white house for close to an hour, and although there were several chairs available, one of which he sat in, we were not invited to sit in them.  The conversation was really odd, because Kuderer asked most of the questions, and even when I interjected one here and there, he would mostly address her and not me.  So most of the time I was basically standing in the corner feeling like a potted plant and wondering if my back was going to crack in half from being on my feet for so long.

 

We started with some small talk about family.  Miller, it turns out, has sixteen kids, 125 grandchildren, and over 100 great-grandchildren, almost all of whom live right near him.  I mentioned that I have one son, and he shot me a look like I was the most pathetic person on the planet.  Kuderer then brought up the Yoder case, and Miller remembered it.  “It was their lemon,” he said of the New Glarus Amish.  He remembered going down to New Glarus to help them build their first Amish schools, and he recalls being interested in how the case was going to turn out, but he didn’t think it had been all that big a deal.  The authorities somehow never bothered them in Cashton, allowing them to have their own schools and not forcing them to send their kids past eighth grade.  He explained some interesting stuff about the Amish schools in Cashton. They teach mostly reading and geography, with very little science.  They teach in English, even though they speak German at home and preach in German as well.  If they have special needs kids, they deal with the kids themselves, without getting any money from the state, which makes them very different from the Jews in Kiryas Joel.

 

Kuderer asked Miller if any kids ever ask to go to high school, and he said no.  She followed up by asking what would happen if someone did want to go to school after eighth grade, and he said that such a thing has never happened.  I brought up the oceanographer thing, and this brought what seemed like a sort of knowing smile to his face.  He didn’t really respond much.  “He was looking at it the way a lot of people would,” he said.  “The way you’re brought up pulls back on you.  You can change, but . . .”  Clearly he was not much interested in defending his community’s educational system to an outsider like me.  Though I was disappointed, I can’t say I was surprised.  I wouldn’t have wanted to justify my educational philosophy to an intruder either. 

 

Kuderer quickly steered us off the uncomfortable topic by bringing up a local zoning controversy that affected both of them, and they commiserated over the government’s attempt to regulate their businesses.  This gave me an opening to ask about the Amish’s involvement with policymaking and law generally, and Bishop Miller said that his community has from time to time become involved in various public issues by speaking at meetings and whatnot.  That was kind of interesting, I thought.  I asked whether he would be willing to fight a burdensome regulation in the judicial system, or whether he would just submit to the regulation or move, and he said that while it’s true that the Amish “don’t like the lawyers,” the public usually takes over to help the community.  He doubted very much, for example, that a policeman would come and take him away for breaking a zoning law.  This was probably true, and it goes to show that things have come a long way from the days when Adin Yutzy had to worry about going to jail for not paying his fines.

 

We ended by visiting Miller’s woodworking shop for a few minutes, where Kuderer picked up some really snazzy bread boards to sell in her gift shop (I bought one).  It was a wild place, with all sorts of crazy looking machines everywhere, all apparently powered by a complicated pulley system driven by oil or gas or something (I couldn’t really follow the explanation).  A license plate on the wall with a picture of a horse and buggy on it read, “My Hobby is Driving Me Buggy.”  A well-worn Bible sat on a workbench next to an ancient Putnam Fadeless Dyes box.  Miller showed us some wooden toys he had made for sale; they were car-carrying trucks, which seemed like a really funny thing for an Amish guy to make. 

Deleted Scene: Tomah, Wisconsin--part I

As I've previously noted, from time to time I am going to post some material from Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars that did not make it into the final version of the book.  It's going to be sort of like those deleted scenes you can watch on movie DVDs, except that this is for a book, not a movie.  Not that this couldn't be a movie or anything.  Can you imagine what a great movie it would be!  Like a romantic comedy, or a slasher thriller?  Who would play me, I wonder.  Maybe Ed O'Neill from Married With Children?  I don't know what I'm saying, sorry.

Anyway, this scene takes place in a little city called Tomah, Wisconsin, and the nearby town of Cashton, which has the largest Amish population in the state.  I was trying to learn a little bit more about the Wisconsin Amish, because one of the biggest church/state cases in US history involved a challenge by a few Amish families to the state's compulsory education laws.  The Amish families didn't want to send their high school aged kids to school, and the state fined them $5.  The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Amish won.  I spent a week in New Glarus, Wisconsin, and talked to the one Amish guy left in the town (his name was Jay Kramer; I called him on his cell phone), and I also got to talk to the one remaining plaintiff from the case, which happened about 40 years ago.  Those scenes are in the final version of the book; this one, from Tomah/Cashton, was cut.  It's kind of a long scene, so I'll split it up into 2 or 3 parts.  Today, part one.  Enjoy.

    Staying in New Glarus was great, and talking to Jay Kramer had been illuminating, but I felt like I needed to see a larger Amish community and talk to someone there if I was going to get a better picture of the Wisconsin Amish, so we headed north a few hours to Tomah.  Tomah is known throughout the state for its cranberries, though I’d like to point out that the giant cranberry sorting machine that sat in the lobby of our motel/water park actually came from Cape Cod.

    We chose Tomah because it’s the largest town within easy driving distance of Cashton, the state’s largest Amish settlement.  I had an appointment with an English woman named Kathy Kuderer, a long-time resident of the town and good friend of many of her Amish neighbors, who runs a constellation of nice gift shops called “Down a Country Road” and gives tours of the Amish settlement for interested visitors.  Usually she brings tourists out to see Amish at work making crafts and pies and whatnot, but for me, she arranged a meeting with an elder named Gideon Miller, who was one of the first Amish to come to Cashton from Ohio back in the mid-sixties and is currently one of ten Bishops in the community.

            On my way from the Cranberry Lodge to Kathy’s place, I came up behind my first horse and buggy, right there in front of me, galloping along at a modest clip on Route 33 East.  I really didn’t know what to do, and I had a little debate with myself there in the front seat.  My first thought was to just follow a little bit behind the horse.  Then I realized I would be about six hours late for my appointment with Kathy.  The horse was going fast, for a horse, but it was no match for my Chrysler whatever it was.  For a minute I weighed the advantages of following behind the horse anyway, since it would make for a funny story, against the disadvantages of missing Bishop Miller, and I decided I had to pass the horse.  I drifted into the left lane and passed the buggy as slowly and smoothly as I could, swerving suddenly to the right and blasting my horn only once to scare the crap out of the horse.  All in good fun, I figured.  No, no, of course I didn’t do that.  I passed the horse gently and within seconds I could no longer see it even in my rear view mirror.

            According to Kuderer, she set up her gift shop/tour business a while back at the urging of the Amish themselves.  The Amish were starting to hurt financially, and they wanted some way to market and sell their products.  By charging people for a tour around the settlement and then offering Amish-made crafts in her gift shops, both she and the Amish could benefit economically.  It’s kind of a weird operation, I suppose, bringing tourists around to see her friends for money, but there’s clearly a market for it, so who can blame her?

            As we drove out to Bishop Miller’s house, Kuderer explained a little bit about the Cashton community.  It’s big, about three hundred families, which means probably close to 2,500 people since, like the Jews of Kiryas Joel, each family has a million kids.  The community is very old-order, which means that it is highly conservative with respect to the technology it uses and other rules.  The Cashton Amish don’t use cars or electricity or phones, and the women don’t cut their hair from the time they’re born until the time they die.  While Kathy was telling me all this, we suddenly encountered a car on fire at the corner of Knapp Valley Road and County Road D.  Kuderer asked me to stop so we could tell the woman whose car was on fire that her car was on fire.  People from Wisconsin are so friendly!  If it had been Boston, we would have laughed and driven by without a word. 

Holy Hullabaloos Deleted Footnote #1

So, you know how movie DVDs sometimes have those "deleted scenes" you can choose to watch, just in case you really need to see some parts of the original movie that weren't deemed good enough to make it into the final cut?  Well, I've decided to do the same thing with Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church-State Wars.  From time to time here on the blog, I will post a deleted scene or passage or footnote that my editors insisted that I cut from the final draft.  I also hope--if I can figure out how to do it--to include some video of me doing dramatic readings of these deleted materials, occasionally wearing a hat that looks like a turkey or no shirt.  As you'll see, the deleted passages and footnotes usually consist of ridiculous, self-indulgent babble which my editors rightly excised.  But luckily, for perhaps the first time in publishing history, you will now be able to read all of this ridiculous, self-indulgent babble right here on my blog.  What a wonderful day in publishing history this is!

The first deleted footnote comes from chapter three of the book about the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment and, more specifically, a case called Wisconsin v. Yoder, in which the Supreme Court held that some Amish families could keep their high school aged children out of school despite Wisconsin's compulsory attendance law, because the Amish believed that sending their older kids to school would violate their religious beliefs.  In the sentence to which this footnote was attached, I note that "Whenever people ask me to rank the top ten Supreme Court cases of all time, I always put Yoder pretty high up there. . . "  And now, the footnote:

* As you may have guessed, nobody ever asks me to rank the top ten Supreme Court cases of all time.  If they did, though, I’d be ready.  Actually I wouldn’t be ready.  I have no idea what I’d put on the list.  But I do know that I’d consider three factors in deciding which cases to list: how important the case was, how interesting the case was, and how correctly the case came out.  It’s kind of like when someone asks you what the worst song or artist of all time is.  The question isn’t just what is the worst-sounding song you’ve ever heard (we’ve all been to school musicals and heard some really bad, bad songs), but rather what’s the worst song that you’re sort of required to hear the most because it’s on the radio and other people insist on playing it, etc.  So it’s a combination of badness and frequency, rather than just badness alone.  My wife thinks that under these criteria the Eagles’ “Hotel California” is the worst song of all time, and I tend to think she’s right.

The Missing Painting of Justice Alito

When you finally get around to reading Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars next June, chances are you will quickly notice that the book lacks any paintings of Justice Samuel Alito with a small green bunny on his shoulder.  It may seem unbelievable, but it's true.  Trust your own eyes on this one, and if you still don't believe them, trust me: there are no paintings of Justice Alito with a small green bunny on his shoulder in my book.  It's not because I didn't try, I'll have you know.  I did paint a painting of Sam Alito with a small green bunny on his shoulder, and I did include it in the first draft of the book that I turned into my publisher; it's just that my editors didn't think it would be such a good idea to include it in the book.  To them, it seemed quite obvious that the book should contain exactly zero paintings of Justice Alito with a small green bunny on his shoulder.  I'm still not so sure, but I trust them.  After all, they've been in the publishing business for decades, and I've been in it for about, well, ten minutes.  So, the painting is out.  But, don't fear good readers.  Because of the miracle that is TypePad, I am able to reproduce the painting here for your viewing pleasure.  Enjoy!