After passing through the security checkpoint, with its barrel marked “Deposit weapons here,” I traveled a long tree-lined driveway on former farm land to bring the gifts of grammar and Shakespeare to men who were more familiar with street talk and hip hop than with the Bard of Avon.

When my daughter was about four, her older brothers taught her that when the house phone rang on Tuesday and Thursday evenings she should answer it by saying, “My mommy’s not here. She’s in prison AGAIN!” The boys thought it was hilarious. She just knew it to be true.

Point of clarification: I was not in prison, but at prison … teaching college classes.  A local university I was working for during the early 1990s conducted a degree program at a nearby men’s minimum security facility, and I drove there a couple nights a week to teach writing and literature courses. After passing through the security checkpoint, with its barrel marked “Deposit weapons here,” I traveled a long tree-lined driveway on former farm land to bring the gifts of grammar and Shakespeare to men who were more familiar with street talk and hip hop than with the Bard of Avon.

I was reminded of my prison days this week when the Kentucky General Assembly passed a prison reform bill and Governor Steve Beshear signed it into law. The new law will keep low-level, non-violent offenders out of prison by using more community supervision programs and providing better drug and alcohol counseling and treatment.

The Pew Center on the States, an organization that supported the new law, estimates that it will save Kentucky about $42 million per year, half of which will then be used to provide treatment programs and parole efforts. More important than the economical aspects of the laws is that it just makes good sense.

Since the 1990s, Kentucky has had one of the highest and fastest rising prison populations in the country. It’s one thing to incarcerate unrepentant thieves and killers, but quite another to lock up every young man convicted of drug possession under misguided get-tough measures that have sent low-level drug offenders to jail. At least 90 percent of the prisoners I taught were in on drug and alcohol charges, largely possession and some minor sales.

Working at the prison was one of the more fascinating positions I held in a decade of college teaching. My students at the prison were engaged and hard-working. Of course, they had been vetted through a good behavior program, so I was dealing with the cream of the crop. But, not only were they interested in what they were being exposed to in college courses, they were interesting to the teacher.

Besides having a penchant for bad boys, I am easily bored. After having taught scads of 18-year-olds freshly graduated from high school, who had few experiences to write about other than their senior prom or fraternity activities, it was refreshing – even exhilarating – to read student essays about drying out in methadone clinics or attending crazy rock festivals in Arkansas. One paper I received started off with, “I didn’t mean to kill my best friend, but I was drunk when I drove the car.” He was released on shock probation before the end of the semester.

I think I would have taught those classes for no pay, just as an antidote to the endless hours of mind-numbing essays I was subjected to in the on-campus courses I taught.

I wish the new law had been in effect for the men I worked with. Their lives were being wasted because of some bad decisions they made, often as a result of desperate socioeconomic circumstances.  And besides the college classes, I didn’t see any real efforts at rehabilitation.

A student who had been assigned to escort me to the parking lot after classes – a privilege earned through hard work and extremely good behavior – told me that, at that time, it cost the state $40,000 a year to keep him in prison for possession of cocaine, while it would have cost $10,000 to enroll and lodge him at a private college. We silently pondered the implications of that statement while I unlocked my car.

I only taught at the prison a couple more semesters. In 1994, Congress effectively ended many prison college programs, including that one, when it abolished the federal Pell Grant for prisoners, despite the fact that education greatly reduces recidivism and far less than 1 percent of the Pell Grant budget went to the education of prisoners. That broke my heart.

House Speaker Greg Stumbo called Kentucky’s new law the most important legislation to come out of the 2011 session. Sadly, most of the commentary I have seen about it focuses on the economic benefits to the state rather than the opportunity to rehabilitate. Still, I am hopeful that the new law will translate into educating and helping, rather than just punishing, young offenders.

That’s just the short list of what Rand Paul wants to chuck out the window. Do you really want the antichrist to get his hands on the Constitution? I don’t.

Kentucky’s freshman Senator Rand Paul is looking more and more like the antichrist. I know this because I learned it in a college political science class in 1974. No, my professor was not clairvoyant. He did not predict that a curly-haired optometrist would make his way to Washington to bury a Libertarian ax in our heads.

But he was emphatic about one thing. In fact, it is the one thing I remember in detail from the class: Do anything to avoid a Constitutional Convention and understand that anybody who proposes one is the equivalent of the antichrist because serious disaster can follow in their wake.

Rand Paul is calling for a Constitutional Convention, ergo … Rand Paul is the antichrist. And he has a sidekick – Kentucky state Senator David Williams. (One of those two politicians alone is scary enough, but when I think of them in collusion, I keep imagining Satan and Saddam Hussein in that South Park movie from a few years back.)

When the Kentucky General Assembly convenes in February, Williams will introduce a resolution calling for a Constitutional Convention to propose and ratify a balanced budget amendment for the U.S., and Paul plans to appear at the state Capitol to speak in support of the resolution.

Are you unsure what a Constitutional Convention is, let alone why it is undesirable? Don’t feel bad – you are not alone. A Constitutional Convention is a mechanism established in Article V of the U. S. Constitution as a means of amending the same said Constitution. There are two ways to change that august document:

One way is for two-thirds of Congress to agree on an amendment which then must be ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures.

The other way is for two-thirds of state legislatures to call for a Constitutional Convention at which an amendment would be proposed that three-fourths of the state legislatures would have to ratify.

To date, there has only ever been one Constitutional Convention, in Philadelphia in 1787, at which the attendees drafted the U.S. Constitution by which we now govern ourselves. It has been amended several times since then, but never by the convention method.

The problem with a convention, according to my old college professor, is that once you get the states together for the purpose of amending the Constitution, everything is suddenly up for grabs. There’s no way to confine the action to the single amendment that was the catalyst for bringing the convention together.

It’s like having a fight with your mate. The conflict starts off because, when she clips her fingernails, she lets the pieces fly around the room. But then she retaliates by bringing up the mud tracks he leaves across the basement floor when he comes home from a bike ride. Pretty soon, they are yelling about him rolling his eyes once in 1985 when she said she’d like a new couch, and they nearly come to blows over a camping trip 10 years earlier for which she forgot to pack the matches, which caused them to spend a freezing night on a mountain with no fire and his feet haven’t warmed up since. Once you start finding fault, it’s hard to put on the brakes.

Think of what might be lost if a group of ignorant and uninformed cowpokes masquerading as legislators got together with the power to change the Constitution. The Bill of Rights could be the first thing to get tossed out the window.

You think that’s a bit of hyperbole? Read a book called In Our Defense: The Bill of Rights in Action. In this 1991 publication, authors Caroline Kennedy and Ellen Alderman talk about the shocking number of Americans who believe the Bill of Rights is too liberal and about others who believe it has no impact on their daily lives. People who lack a sense of history or the ability to see the Bill of Rights’ relevance could easily choose to disregard it.

Paul has said he has “issues” with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He considers Medicare to be socialism. He wants to eliminate the Department of Energy and the Depart of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He proposes to gut the Department of Education, and to defund the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He wants to return protected National Park lands back to private interests.  That’s just the short list of what Rand Paul wants to chuck out the window. Do you really want the antichrist to get his hands on the Constitution? I don’t.

But it’s been worrying me, in the aftermath of last week’s slaughter in Tucson, that even though I believe myself to be a peaceful person, I idolize gun-toting, vengeance-seeking women who employ violence to exact justice. What does that say about me?

Even though I used to have deadeye aim with a pistol and once shot a giant mosquito on a clothesline post from across my yard, I am a peace-loving person. Really, I am.

And, despite the wrongs that have been done to me in my lifetime, I have never sought a violent revenge. In fact, I am generally very forgiving.  

Why then, I ask myself, is Mattie Ross my new hero of all time?

Mattie, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel True Grit, is a clear-eyed, straight-thinking, hard-talking 1870s Arkansas girl bent on exacting revenge for the murder of her father by the coward Tom Chaney. There is nothing cowardly about Mattie Ross.

Under the guise of traveling to Fort Smith to claim her father’s body, Mattie sets out to bring Tom Chaney to justice, since no one else seems inclined to do so. When she asks the sheriff where she might find a marshal to go after Chaney, he suggests several  – a good Comanche tracker, or a man who “believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake,” or Rooster Cogburn, “a pitiless man, double-tough, and fear don’t enter into his thinking.” Mattie asks, “Where can I find this Rooster?”

Mattie displays the titular “true grit” by insinuating herself into the journey she hires Rooster to take, insisting to a Texas Ranger also looking for Chaney that she will not be satisfied to have Chaney tried or killed for any reason other than her father’s murder,  shooting Chaney, and surviving a pit full of rattlesnakes.  

While she is not the first female character to become my hero, Mattie Ross tops the list. She is no swaggering beast, heroically charging after her enemies like Xena, the Princess Warrior. She’s just a girl who knows what she wants. Nor is she emotionally damaged like her newest literary sister – Lisbeth Salander, the girl with the dragon tattoo. Lisbeth kicks ass, and I love her for it, but Lisbeth’s insecurities are a bit pathetic when held up against Mattie’s confidence. Despite her deadly intentions, Mattie retains an innocence that we seldom see today.

While the novel is a cult classic, I, like many other people first met Mattie Ross in the 1969 film in which Kim Darby’s Mattie was overshadowed by John Wayne’s Rooster. I was too young then to appreciate Mattie’s sense of honor and justice, but Hailee Steinfeld’s portrayal of her in the new Coen Brothers version leaves no doubt as to the strength of her character and her primacy in the story. Now, I am more than a little bit in love with Mattie Ross.

It shouldn’t surprise me that I admire gritty women like Mattie, and Lisbeth, and Xena. I come from a line of them. My Great-Aunt Janie used to carry in her purse a loaded pistol and $6,000 rolled up in a sock. My grandmother was known to slip syrup of ipecac into my grandfather’s liquor to make him vomit.

But it’s been worrying me, in the aftermath of last week’s slaughter in Tucson, that even though I believe myself to be a peaceful person, I idolize gun-toting, vengeance-seeking women who employ violence to exact justice. What does that say about me?

Am I among the vicious, rancorous, acrimonious population setting an uncivil tone in our culture?

Am I a part of the problem that can result in the kinds of political violence we have been seeing in the past two years? As Frank Rich pointed out in the New York Times, just a short list would include the 2009 killing of three Pittsburgh police officers by a neo-Nazi Obama-hater; last year’s murder-suicide kamikaze attack on an I.R.S. office in Austin, Tex.; and the California police shootout with an assailant plotting to attack an obscure liberal foundation obsessively vilified by Glenn Beck.

Maybe I am.

I have to believe, though,  that Jared Loughner’s lethal attack on Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford’s public forum in Arizona is a far cry from Mattie Ross’s determination to see her father’s killer brought to justice, even if that meant shooting him herself. Lisbeth Salander only fights to protect herself and other women. Aunt Janie never to my knowledge used the gun. And Ma employed the ipecac to discourage Pa from drinking the whiskey that turned him to violence against his family.

Surely some degrees of vengeance and violence are justified, even in peaceful people. But, it makes me wonder…

It’s easy to think we support environmentalism, until it messes with our personal lives. … So I just go on, like many others do, waiting for someone else to save the world.

Water as hot as your hands could tolerate. Frothy mounds of bubbles from Palmolive or Joy.  Clinking. Giggling.  I have many fond memories of washing dishes, especially when my Aunt Lorraine was involved.  Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s house were family affairs seemingly designed to dirty as many dishes, pots, and utensils as possible. As the youngest females in the family at that time, Rain and I were usually assigned to the chore.

We would stand at Ma’s giant white metal console sink, while she washed and I dried.  If it was summertime, the back door would be open and curtains made from printed towels would be flapping in the breeze coming off the mountain behind the house.  Rain, who was only 10 years older than I, would sing popular songs from the radio and bump my hip occasionally for emphasis. It was fun, or so it seems from a distance of 45 years.

The only time it was more fun was when my mom washed and Rain dried. Then the job frequently ended with my aunt sharply snapping a dish towel at my mom’s butt, because Mom said it was the dish drier’s job to remove the food left by the dish washer. Thus, she didn’t work the dish rag too vigorously.

But, except for the good china and silver that gets dragged out at Christmas, who washes dishes by hand anymore? Not me. For the past 20 years, kitchen cleanup camaraderie has centered on loading the automatic dishwasher.

That’s why I was particularly interested in a story about dishwashers on public radio a few days ago.  When they started talking about people buying new dishwashers because their current ones were leaving grit and big splotches of whitish residue on their dishes, I was all ears! Our dishwasher has never been great, but since this past summer, it has performed atrociously, exhibiting the same symptoms the radio interviewees were describing. My mate and I were ready to buy a new one, but apparently it is not the dishwasher that is causing the problem – it’s the detergent.

It turns out that, back in the summer, dishwasher detergent manufacturers removed the phosphates from all brands. Seventeen states have banned the use of phosphates in detergents, because when phosphates get into lakes and streams they can cause eutrophia (an excess bloom of algae and phytoplankton), anoxia (a reduction of oxygen in the water), and a resultant death of fish and other marine animals. Basically, phosphates can turn a lake into a swamp – one pound of phosphates dumped into a stream can result in 500 pounds of algae. Since it was too hard to distribute phosphate-free detergent only to the states with the ban, everybody gets them.

But while phosphates are bad for natural waterways, they are great in your kitchen! They work as water-softening and stain-removing ingredients when added to laundry and dishwasher detergents. Without them, your dishes are likely to be streaked with a powdery residue, covered with grit, and littered with leftover lip prints. That’s how mine have looked for the past six months. Eeuuwe! I want my phosphates back, dammit!

But do I, really? I do want clean dishes, but I don’t want the Ohio River to turn into more of a swamp than it already is. What’s a girl to do?

We will face this kind of contradiction more and more as we are forced to try to save the environment. National action must be accompanied by individual action. One woman interviewed by NPR said she just goes to the hardware store, buys trisodium phosphate, and mixes her own dishwashing brew. That works well for her, but not so well for the fish. If we all did that, what would be the point of removing the phosphates to begin with?

It’s easy to think we support environmentalism, until it messes with our personal lives. I love the idea of tiny, gas-sipping cars, but I drive a Grand Marquis because I can’t afford a Prius.  I despise mountain-top removal, but I do love a well-lit room, even though my electricity comes from coal. I would cover my roof with solar panels, but it would take decades to recoup the investment with savings. So I just go on, like many others do, waiting for someone else to save the world.

Solving the dirty dishes problem is a little easier than buying a new car or heating water with the sun. I could just go back to washing them by hand, while singing pop songs with my mate and scrubbing a little harder than my mom did when my aunt was drying. It might even be fun.

Officer Sweet saw a carful of squishy bodies, graying hair, crochet supplies, and junk food. If we had been really visible to him, he might have noticed a few more interesting things.

There’s a photo of me, taken 49 years ago when I was in first grade. I am standing outside a very old, white clapboard school building, arrayed with many other children in tiers on steps leading to the front door. It is the entire group shot for the Harold Grade School, circa 1961. I look pretty much like every other child in the picture, except that I am wearing a handmade white organdy dress and pinafore because I have just been crowned princess for the Halloween carnival … and I have my hands over my eyes. 

There was a time in my childhood when I was convinced that if I couldn’t see you, then you couldn’t see me either. I guess I was feeling over-exposed that day, having been made a princess and all. I simply had to put my hands over my eyes and I was instantly invisible. It was a handy trick.

And then one day I discovered that I didn’t even have to cover my eyes to become invisible. It happened naturally when I hit middle age. If you are a middle-aged woman, you may have noticed the same phenomenon. Younger people don’t see us when we walk down a street. Few of us are on TV or in movies or magazines. Clothing designers assume we don’t exist. Even L.L. Bean has abandoned us, now knitting up skimpy little sweaters in synthetic fibers that have to be stretched across our sagging breasts, instead of the good sturdy cotton togs of yore.

But, despite its occasional downfalls, invisibility can be a freeing experience. We can slink around doing pretty much whatever we want without being noticed.

It paid off for me last week. I was driving northward to a weekend getaway with my girlfriends when an officer of the law noticed that my land yacht was doing 70 in 55 zone. He whipped around in the middle of the road and came after me, lights flashing madly. Imagine his surprise when he approached an empty car!

Well, not really empty. But when Officer Sweet looked in the window, all he saw were three middle-aged women, so it might as well have been empty.

I figured as much and was ready for him. When he said, “Ma’am, I stopped you for your speed,” I just smiled and said, “You know, we are really lost!”and then launched into a long string of “…and then we turned on 145, but it went two ways, so we turned around and tried to find 36 but I don’t think it goes this way and I don’t think we are ever going to get where we are going because it’s not even a real address – it’s just a bunch of numbers!”

That’s all it took to completely distract him. Well, that and my friend Lilith muttering from the backseat, “It’s getting dark. It’s going to be dark soon. Then we’ll NEVER find it!” Officer Sweet saw a carful of squishy bodies, graying hair, crochet supplies, and junk food. If we had been really visible to him, he might have noticed a few more interesting things. Eve and Lilith had been imbibing adult beverages on the drive northward and, as Eve was rummaging around in the glove box for my car registration, she was cleverly hiding empty beer bottles with her feet. The trunk was full of bourbon and peach brandy. I am certain there was an illegal substance in Lilith’s purse. And we were on our way to plan a political act of civil disobedience.

But that was all invisible to Officer Sweet! He went to his patrol car, returned with a county road map, and pointed out our next three turns. Then he told me he was obliged to give me a warning, but when I very sweetly asked, “Is there something I should do with this?” he just said, “Ma’am, it’s meaningless. I only had to do it so my superiors would know I am doing my job.” By the time I told him how lucky we were that he had stopped us, I believe he was convinced that he was not an officer of the law but a Good Samaritan. I avoided a ticket and got good directions (we really were lost).

I reckon I will accept the invisibility that comes with middle age and see it for the blessing that it can be. Just imagine what would happen if all women “of a certain age” were to join forces on an issue. We would be an invisible army that could take over the world! And we wouldn’t even have to put our hands over our eyes to do it.

Kentucky’s brand new freshman senator, Rand Paul, made a to-do list for his first day on Capitol Hill. He put it on his desk, where the winds of change blew it straight into my hands.

THINGS TO DO ON MY FIRST DAY IN MY NEW JOB:

Thank my opponent, Jack Conway, for running such a lousy campaign.

Schedule a chat with fellow Kentucky senator and godfather of the GOP Mitch McConnell, so I can explain to him that I wear big boy pants now and don’t need him thinking he can tell me what to do here on Capitol Hill. I didn’t need his milquetoast support for me during the campaign – after all, 28 percent of Kentuckians voted to send me here.

Find out if any gays or black people voted for me. If they did, I might have to rethink my rejection of the Civil Rights Act.

Create my own version of the Senate Ethics Committee, appoint my wife as chair, and have her monitor my behavior over the next six years when she’s not busy hosting Senate Spouses Tea Parties.

Memorize some facts about Kentucky, so that I can at least appear to be less of a carpetbagger.

Figure out why those elitist writers from eastern Kentucky are so intent on keeping all of their useless mountain tops, even though one or two ought to suffice. And, make them understand that accidents naturally do happen, so we don’t need to be spending all that money on mining regulations.

Convince my constituents that, even though the state ranks 47th in the nation in percentage of residents with a bachelor’s degree and has an adult illiteracy rate of about 40%, most people are smart enough to make their own investments when I help destroy Social Security.

Make sure the fundamentalist Christians who voted for me never find out that my hero, Ayn Rand, was a radical atheist.

Tie up that witch Nancy Pelosi and force her to her knees, where she will worship me and Aqua Buddha.

Invite Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly to watch me tie her up.

If she struggles, find some volunteers to knock her down and stomp on her head.

Go visit Daddy, so I can subtly lord it over him that I made it to the Senate, while he is only in the House.

Let Sarah Palin know that I can prescribe some real lenses for those fake Tina Fey glasses she wears to tone down her good looks.

Find the boys bathroom with the largest mirror for checking on my naturally curly hair.

What exactly is their problem with Nancy Pelosi? Could it be that they resent the House being led by a (gasp!) woman who is really, really good at her job? Am I accusing them of (bigger gasp!) sexism? Yes, I am.

Today while driving home from running errands, I saw a guy standing in the middle of traffic at an intersection, holding up a sign that said “Fire Pelosi,” referring, I presume, to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. That sign enraged me in a way that other political events this fall have not.

I have shaken my head in disgust at U. S. Senate candidate Rand Paul’s ignorant and uninformed comments about coal mining regulation, civil rights, taxes, and a hundred other things. I’ve ridiculed his opponent Jack Conway’s television ad that assumes some kind of litmus test for religion. I’ve gawped at Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell’s lack of knowledge of the Constitution. But, for some reason, none of those things has evoked the visceral reaction I had to the “Pelosi guy.”

I wanted to roll down my window and scream obscenities at him. The thought even crossed my mind to shift my car a little and just flatten him out on the street. I could have. My car is a two-ton land yacht.

You’d think Nancy Pelosi was running for multiple offices in every state in the union, to hear Republicans, Libertarians, and some thick-headed Democrats talk.  Half the politicians in the country, Kentucky included, seem to think they are running against her instead of their actual opponents. What exactly is their problem with Nancy Pelosi? Could it be that they resent the House being led by a (gasp!) woman who is really, really good at her job? Am I accusing them of (bigger gasp!) sexism? Yes, I am.

It didn’t help this morning that I was grumpy about doling out $40 to Staples for printer ink, a purchase I had been putting off for a couple of months. It probably helped less that I have been reading Big Girls Don’t Cry: The Election That Changed Everything for American Women, in which author Rebecca Traister examines the sexism that plagued Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign – everything from fellow candidate John Edwards criticizing her clothing to NPR correspondent Juan Williams chuckling over Bill Kristol saying “white women are a problem…we all live with that” to men saying they wanted to punch her in the uterus when they heard her voice. You can’t read Traister’s book without acknowledging that while sexism did not necessarily cause Clinton to lose the election, it absolutely was a factor in people’s opinion of her and in the media’s coverage of her.  And I think the furor over Nancy Pelosi stems from the same ugly source.

Elected to the House in 1987 and serving in Democratic leadership since 2001, Pelosi became Speaker in 2007. The New York Times calls her resolute, “one of the most focused, disciplined and on-message politicians anywhere.”  She has worked tirelessly, sometimes eking out one vote at a time, to pass the Democrats’ Congressional agenda, all while raising over $52 million for Democratic party and individual candidates.   But to hear her detractors talk about her, you’d think she was either a child or a warty-chinned antichrist.

The National Republican Congressional Committee fervently hoped for General Stanley McChrystal to “put her in her place” when she suggested that McChrystal should not give advice to President Obama in public. Karl Rove labeled her “silly” when she called for transparency in funding for opposition to the proposed mosque in New York.  Fox News thinks she’s a socialist because she doesn’t want to lift taxes on the rich. And Republican mouthpiece Rush Limbaugh referred to her as Mullah Nancy Bin Pelosi, saying she is no different from mullahs and imams who convince people to put bombs on their children. Limbaugh’s comment was in reference to Pelosi saying “we are not here just to self perpetuate our service in Congress. We’re here to do the job for the American people,” in regard to House members who were afraid they would not be re-elected if they voted for health care reform.

What’s that you say? Those things could be said about a man in office? Yes, they could. But what about newscasters and commentators saying that her shaking with anger is actually a result of Botox withdrawal, that if she got hit she might break because of her supposed plastic surgery, that she is incapable of facial expressions, that they want to see the hag twisting in the wind, that her photo could be used as a means of birth control?  Check out this video from Media Matters – it will make you vomitous.

Despite the remarkable fact that a woman almost governed from the Oval Office and another one serves as Speaker of the House, sexism is alive and well in the U.S. We forget that at our peril.

How could I make such a mistake? I have no idea. But given my own 40 years of believing a lie, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a growing number of Americans believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that President Obama is a Muslim or that he was born outside the United States.

It is so easy to believe something that is not true. I know this from personal experience. For most of my life, I believed that my dad did something he did not do.

The “memory” is crystal clear in my mind – I was about three years old, maybe four, and my family was at a pool behind a house in Florida, where we were living at the time. My dad was in the pool trying to convince me to jump into the water. I was running around on the deck of the pool, saying No, no, no, and he was promising that if I would jump in he would catch me. Finally I summoned up the trust necessary to run to the edge of the sparkling blue water and throw my little body in. But … he didn’t catch me.

For about 40 years, I held onto the sense of betrayal I felt that day, adding it to a long list of other fatherly deficiencies. But I never discussed it with him or anybody else who might have been there. And then one day, my husband casually mentioned the event to my mother in the course of a conversation. She was horrified to hear what I had believed all those years, because it wasn’t true! She was there that day in the glittering Florida sun. The man who coerced me to jump in the pool and then let me sink was not my dad but his cousin.

How could I make such a mistake? I have no idea. But given my own 40 years of believing a lie, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a growing number of Americans believe – despite all the evidence to the contrary – that President Obama is a Muslim or that he was born outside the United States.

In August, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 18 percent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim, and that figure is up 7 percent since 2009. A whopping 43 percent of respondents said they don’t know what his religion is despite the fact that the president has said he is a Christian about a gazillion times and despite the fact that many Americans wanted his Christian pastor’s head on a plate during the campaign. The number who believe he is a secret Muslim has risen by 9 percent in the past year.  Also in August, a CNN poll showed that only 42 percent of Americans believe Obama was born in the U.S., despite wide distribution of his American birth certificate.

I was reminded of my mistaken belief last weekend at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, where I listened to Meredith Maran discuss her new book, My Lie: A True Story of False Memory.  While working as a researcher during the 1990’s heyday of repressed memory discovery, Maran came to believe that she had been molested by her father. After accusing him and spending years being estranged from most of her family, Maran now believes that she had fallen victim to the cultural phenomenon of false memory, that her father never molested her. She has recanted her story and tried to make amends with her family.

It was the growing problem of falsehoods about Obama that inspired Maran to write the book. She believes that, in the same way many Americans are being influenced by Tea Party kooks to believe untruths, she was heavily influenced by the repressed memory researchers she was working for. Now she just wants to re-establish a relationship with her father, who is old and ill.

I wonder if some day the Birthers will come to their senses and recant their false beliefs the way Maran has. Somehow, I doubt it. But, then, I have been a distrustful soul ever since that day at the pool.

Too bad I can’t accuse Sarah Palin or Glen Beck and the other crazy-assed pseudo-journalists out there of planting false ideas in my head about who misled me into a near drowning. Alas, I have only the mysterious memories of a four-year-old to blame, and who knows what goes on in their little minds!

Why am I writing about a frivolous subject like shoes? I tried to write about some high-minded, political topic today. Really, I did. But then I opened the newspaper and saw that kitten heels have returned as the “new” fall fashion. …

 I do not have evidence to prove it, but I am willing to bet that nobody had to give shoes to men in New York City on 9/11/2001 when the Twin Towers were falling. Do you remember how, as thousands of New Yorkers poured into the streets, fleeing the wreckage and in some cases trying to walk home to Brooklyn or New Jersey, shoe store managers handed out sneakers to women with aching, sometimes bleeding feet?

Do you know why women needed the charity of shoes on that fateful day? Because they had gone to work that morning wearing the tendon-killing, movement-inhibiting, pointy-toed, spike-heeled torture devices that so many women mistakenly call shoes.

Do you know why men didn’t need such charity? Because they are far more likely to don sturdy footwear that distributes their body weight in such a way that they can not only walk, but actually run, when necessary.

This difference was brought home to me last spring in a less important but, to my self-centered way of thinking, equally dramatic manner when my car broke down in rural Florida. As a burly young man in a muscle shirt unhooked my car from his tow truck and deposited us in front of a broken down garage on a – I’m not kidding – dirt road in some back of beyond town in the panhandle, I realized that I was terribly and inappropriately shod.

While six grimy mechanics peered under the hood of the car, my daughter and I did a little fire ant dance in the dust. We, assuming we were embarking on a leisurely and uneventful drive home from vacation, were wearing shorts, t-shirts, and … flip flops. No need for constricting footwear in the car. The only walking we were likely to do would be ambulating from the back seat of my land yacht into a Cracker Barrel or a gas station restroom.  

Yet, there we were, watching a hot wind blow up little eddies in the dirt road as we punched family members’ numbers into our cell phones so that if we suddenly heard Dueling Banjos playing in the distance, we could hit one button and say our final goodbyes to loved ones, because we both knew we’d never be able to outrun marauding locals – not even the ants – in our flimsy foot coverings.  Emergency numbers were pointless, because we were so far out of civilization that rescuers would never have found us in time.

Was my mate in a similar situation? Noooo… he was reliably if a bit compulsively shod in his usual black sneakers and socks. Was he smacking at fire ants and god only knows what other insects crawling up his legs? Nope. He was comfortably peering under the hood of my car while pretending to understand what the grimy mechanics were talking about.

Ever the parent, I used the situation as a teaching moment, even though my daughter is grown. “Note to self,” I told her, “shoes can save your life.”  To divert her attention a bit from our plight, I told her about a book I had read some time back – Chris Bojhalian’s Skeletons at the Feast – a historic novel that follows a small group of people during World War II who attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich to reach the safety of the British and American lines. One of the female characters survives the Nazis only because she leaves home wearing a pair of boots instead of slippers. That is a lesson not to be taken lightly!

Why am I writing about a frivolous subject like shoes? I tried to write about some high-minded, political topic today. Really, I did. There were lots of options – Stephen Colbert’s “Truthiness” testimony before Congress, the Republican Pledge to America, the Vatican banking scandal.

But then I opened the newspaper and saw that kitten heels have returned as the “new” fall fashion. Do you remember kitten heels, those little shoes with one-inch pointy daggers attached at the back? Their more demure shape is supposed to look feminine, I think, as opposed to looking hot and sexy like a higher heel.

I don’t even know what that means, actually.  All I know is that whether women are teetering around on 4-inch spikes or wobbling on 1-inch nails, they are still wearing shoes that cause them to hunch around with their center of gravity thrown out of whack. What, exactly, is sexy about incapacitation?

Easy for me to say. What about my flip flops? They are neither sexy nor functional!

What is this dysfunction women share when it comes to shoes? I guess one advantage to pointy-toed high heels over flip flops is that you could whup some serious ass if you had to with a good sharp kick to the groin. Or you could just take off your shoe and pummel somebody with the spikey heel.  But when your enemy is bigger or stronger than you – like the tallest buildings in the world, for instance, or fire ants on a dirt road – you just need to be able to run.

Christians and Americans have been burning things since the days of their beginning…what makes Terry Jones different?

Whew, it looks like the world has been saved from certain apocalypse because Terry Jones – an egomaniacal preacher from a Pentecostal church in Florida – has decided not to burn a pile of donated copies of the Koran. Unless, of course, he changes his mind before today is over. He’s waffled a few times lately, depending on which figure of world-class importance was calling him on any given day.

If you have been conscious – maybe even semi-conscious – for the past week, you know that Jones planned to burn copies of the Islamic holy book as a protest against the actions of Muslim terrorists. He chose today, September 11, for reasons that are obvious to you if you have been conscious on pretty much any day for the past nine years.  He has also linked his pyromaniacal act to the proposed building of a mosque near the site for the now missing World Trade Center, and at one time said he would call off the burning only if the building site were to be relocated. For many days, the laser pointer of world media attention has been focused on his forehead. As a result, he has vaulted to public infamy in forms as diverse as being burned in effigy in the Middle East to having Secretary of Defense Robert Gates phone him with pleading messages from President Barack Obama that he is endangering troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Why this ignorant crusader for the Christian god has been imbued with such power is a mystery to me. Let him burn the Koran. Without the “all Jones all the time” press he has received, who would have known? The 50 members of his church? I hear not even all of them were planning to bring wieners and sticks to the party. So maybe 25 people would have whipped themselves into a frenzy in Gainesville, and then life would have continued. Politicians would have continued debating the mosque in New York, and terrorists would have continued to kill American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan but without the excuse of Terry Jones for doing it.

You should understand: I do not support Jones’ plan. I find it reprehensible. But the reason I find it reprehensible is that it is a crime against literacy, not that it is a crime against religion. I don’t think any book should be burned. And, as an atheist, I place no more – perhaps less – importance on the Koran, the Bible, the Torah, or any other “holy” book than I do on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Metamorphoses, Ulysses, or the Harry Potter series, all of which have been burned along with thousands  more as one form of protest or another.

So, it pains me to add to the millions of words dedicated to Terry Jones’s bonfire, but two comments I heard in regard to it are stuck in my head like the earworm you get after listening to Cole Porter’s Let’s Do It.

First, President Obama called it un-Christian and un-American, but he’s wrong. Christians and Americans have been burning things since the days of their beginning…what makes Terry Jones different?

Christians have burned everything – most notably people. By some estimates, more women were burned during the Witch Hunts and the Inquisition than Jews were killed during the Holocaust. And while we are talking about the Holocaust, let’s not forget that Hitler was a Christian.  Christians will even burn their own holy books when one sect disagrees with another’s interpretation or translation. William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament was burned by the Bishop of London in 1526, and Martin Luther’s German translation was burned by the Catholics in the 1600s.

The U. S. hasn’t behaved any better. During the 1950s, that most “American” of decades conservative politicians would love to return to, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration burned the works of psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich (who might have been a little crazy) and President Dwight Eisenhower’s State Department burned books that advocated Communism.  But, at least we don’t burn people, you say? Before believing that, you should do a little research into the “discovery” and colonization of the U.S.  Read Mark Twain’s essays on American imperialism. How many people do you think burned in the Native American villages that were torched so European settlers could plant corn? Think about Atlanta during the Civil War. How about all those villages in Korea and Vietnam?  Remember the famous photo of the little girl burned with napalm?

Those Christian and American values President Obama talks about are nebulous concepts that get toted out anytime one group or another wants to condemn the other.

The second comment that stuck with me came from a Muslim imam who was surprised when NPR’s Morning Edition host told him that 49 percent of Americans hold a negative view of Islam. In light of the especially negative news we hear about the Muslim faith, why would anyone really be surprised by that statistic?  If moderate Muslims want to improve the image of their faith, they should work hard to usurp the media coverage that goes to al-Qaeda and the more radical sects of Islam. They could make a public effort of encouraging their more radical brothers …

… to stop giving guns to little boys and promising virgins for suicide bombers.

… to unveil their women, give them the car keys, and let them seek medical care.

… to stop throwing acid on little girls who are trying to go to school.  

… to stop killing non-Muslims who publish cartoon depictions of Mohammed or burn copies of a book.

Terry Jones’s decision to burn the Koran may be ignorant and bigoted, but it’s not really un-Christian or un-American. If he really wanted to be radical, he would sit down with a copy of the Koran and the Bible and read them through from cover to cover to discover on his own the good and the bad in each. Now, that would be remarkable in our increasingly illiterate culture.