Tag: parenting

My Experience with The Back Rooms

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

Disclaimer about the Intended Audience

I’m posting this review in the spooky month of October, a long time after the movie came out. People who are big Backrooms fans have already seen the movie, watched or listened to reviews, and written or uploaded their own reviews. This essay is not for them. It’s for readers of my blog, who, unless I miss my guess, are not familiar with Backrooms lore and perhaps have not seen the movie.

Teens, and Liminal Spaces

The Backrooms was an independent horror movie made by a young director, but the director did not originate the idea of the backrooms (which I will now stop capitalizing). I happen to know a little bit about where the backrooms originally arose as a mythology. The reason is that I am a mother of teenagers.

Well before the movie came out, my teens had acquainted me with backrooms images and lore. Apparently, the phenomenon began with Internet accounts such as Creepypasta posting images of liminal spaces.

Liminal spaces, which always figure big in mythology, are “in between” spaces. They may be the beach (neither sea nor land), the threshold of a doorway, the wilderness between the borders of kingdoms, or the like. There are also liminal times–dawn and dusk. Humans have long had the uneasy feeling that liminal spaces and times are where we are vulnerable to encountering entities that we do not meet in everyday life. It’s when you go over the moors in the mist that you meet the fairies.

The Internet liminal spaces were generally of two kinds. One, indoor spaces that are actually liminal, such as hallways and stairwells. They are part of a building, but only marginally. They are not the areas where people live or work, but rather passages to get to those areas. Often, their very design makes them disorienting, like a hotel hallway with low light and an endless succession of identical doors. Typically, these spaces do not have windows whereby the viewer might be able to tell the time of day or where the building is located.

The second kind of Internet liminal space is an indoor space, usually for public use, that has been abandoned. This includes empty malls, empty hospitals, empty parking garages, and the like.

After a number of these images had been posted, the young people of the Internet collectively decided that they constituted a realm or dimension of their own, dubbed “the backrooms.” Commenters began to make up their own lore about the backrooms. You could “no-clip” into them by accidentally falling into the backrooms dimension. (No-clipping is something that happens in a video game when your avatar falls out of the useable area of the game.) People began to make up stories about teams that would go into the backrooms with a backpack of snacks and try to film and map them. The backrooms developed different “levels,” each more unsettling than the last. One level was nothing but an endless succession of hotel pools.

The deeper a person went into the backrooms, the more dangerous they became. The realm became less and less picky about adhering to the laws of physics. Also, although ostensibly empty, explorers would begin to glimpse movements and shadows out of the corners of their eyes. Eventually, the lore developed elusive monsters that inhabit the backrooms.

Given all this, you can imagine that my sons, particularly my youngest, were pretty excited when they heard a Backrooms movie was coming out. There was enough lore by this time to having the makings of a paranormal mystery/thriller.

Not Everyone Can See The Backrooms

One day, my youngest and I were in nearby Big City with enough time and money on our hands that we could see a movie. I was a little bit interested in Disclosure Day, but I was flexible to watch something else too. We drove through the movie theater parking lot and glanced at the posters. There were three or four posters for current movies, including Disclosure Day, and one poster frame that was just filled with brown paper. So, Disclosure Day it was! We parked, and approached the theater.

Whereupon we found that the “brown paper” was actually a poster for The Backrooms. It was patterned like the dingy yellow wallpaper that features in many of the backrooms hallways. It did have the title and so forth, but everything was in such low contrast and we hadn’t been able to see it from afar.

Naturally, we changed our plans and watched The Backrooms instead.

Quick Spoilery Summary

The plot of the movie was not at all what my son expected based on the lore, nor was it what the first five or so minutes of the movie lead you to expect. However, it has been praised as being well-crafted and character-driven, and not without reason.

After an intro in which we see people in hazmat suits exploring the backrooms and coming to grief, we meet the man who is going to be the main character, Clark. You can see him in the image at the top of this post, wearing on his face the look that all people wear when they first get into the backrooms.

In an important early scene, Clark is sitting in the small office of his therapist, Mary. As you can see from the image above, Mary’s office–and in fact all the “real life” scenes in the movie–are decorated in a sort of late 70s/early 80s style that is heavy on fabrics and abstract patterns. People’s clothing is the same way, so that even the “normal” scenes in the movie are slightly suffocating.

Mary, who is a self-help guru, walks Clark through the last argument he had with his wife, right before his wife kicked him out of the house. They role-play, and soon Clark is fully re-living the fight, yelling at “his wife” that she is lazy, that he is working his butt off for her, and so forth.

Right in the middle of this, Mary says quietly, “What are you feeling right now?”

Clark, confused, says, “Are you being yourself — or –?”

“I’m asking you. What are you feeling?”

Clark is unable to give an answer — at least, an honest answer, because what he is feeling is selfish rage. Mary, for her part, though she has just uncovered an ugly, sinful attitude from Clark toward his wife, does not have any other tool in her toolbox than “You’ve got to feel your feelings.” She is not equipped, for example, to call him to repent or point him to Christ.

Clark, since his wife kicked him out (“of my house!”), is living in his place of work, which is a furniture warehouse. He sleeps on the showroom bed and watches the showroom TV. His whole life is in a liminal space.

To advertise his furniture, Clark has his two twentysomething employees film him in the character of a pirate with a peg leg. He hobbles around the furniture showroom, trips over something, and cusses them out as they film him.

The electricity in the furniture showroom keeps glitching. This necessitates Clark going down to the lower level of the furniture store, which is even more backrooms-like, to the fuse box. Eventually, on the blank wall next to the fuse box which should lead to nothing, he sees the lighted outline of a door. He steps through this “door” and finds himself in a large, featureless, yellow room with fluorescent lighting and a large pile of furniture that resembles his furniture in the middle of the floor, with some of it merging into the floor. He has found the backrooms.

The next time Clark goes back to Mary’s office, he tries to tell her about these rooms he has found. He shows her the map he has started drawing. He’s very excited, and somewhat incoherent, and Mary assumes he has been drinking again.

Clark then bribes his two part-time employees to go into the scary realm with him, bringing an old hand-held video camera. Things don’t go well, and he returns without them.

Weeks later, Mary notices that Clark has disappeared. She drives over to the furniture warehouse, where she finds mail piled up at the front door. She lets herself in. There is the furniture, there is a cardboard cutout of Pirate Clark, but the lights are low and the place seems abandoned. She wanders down into the basement and discovers the door to the backrooms.

In the backrooms, she finds a large, disturbing graffito on the wall that shows a pirate monster eating people. She wanders on, gets herself into a dead end, and hears the approach of something large. Just when she is starting to panic, Clark appears. He says that he will save her. Instead, he chokes her until she passes out.

Mary wakes up in a small, dark backrooms facsimile of a kitchen, tied to a chair. Clark is sitting across the table from her. Also in the room are three other entities. They are human-looking figures similar to mannequins, but with their faces distorted as if from a blurred photograph. One of them is a facsimile of Clark’s wife.

Clark is eager to tell Mary all that he has discovered about the backrooms. His theory is that the realm produces imperfect copies of things that exist in real life, both places and people. He says he prefers the mannequins to real people, and demonstrates that he can stab one with a kitchen knife and there are no bad consequences. He says he likes the backrooms better than the outside world, feels that he belongs here, and intends to stay.

“That’s fine,” says Mary, “but could you please let me out?”

She asks what he wants. He says he wants to hear her say that he was right.

“Oh, you were so right, Clark, about this realm existing. I was so wrong! I didn’t believe you.”

“No, not like this,” says Clark. “I want to do the role-play.”

Clark takes the wig off wife-mannequin’s head and puts it on Mary. Now he wants to re-enact the fight scene, with Mary saying what he wishes his wife had said.

Mary tries, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Eventually, she starts telling Clark what she really thinks.

“You know why your wife left you? It wasn’t the drinking. It wasn’t the fighting. It was the whining! It was the self-pity!”

“I don’t want to change,” says Clark.

“Then don’t!” says Mary. At this point, she has given up on helping Clark through therapy and has admitted, despite her best-selling book and seminars, “I can’t help anybody.”

“I want to stay here.”

“Then stay! Just let me go home … please?”

Clark unties one of Mary’s wrists. Then a sound is heard approaching that causes the mannequins to startle in fear. The wife-mannequin runs to an acute corner of the kitchen and seems to be trying to climb out.

In through the narrow door squeezes a monster. It’s an 8-foot version of Pirate Clark, with a real peg leg and a distorted face with big teeth.

Clark greets the pirate. “This is my therapist,” he says. “She says we don’t have to change!”
The pirate picks up Clark and takes a big, gory bite of his neck.

While the pirate is killing Clark, Mary has untied her other wrist. She squeezes past the horror, through the very narrow passage, and out into the rest of the backrooms. Soon, the pirate is following her, dragging the body of Clark behind him.

Mary runs and runs, totally lost. At one point, she thinks she has escaped into Clark’s furniture showroom, but it’s just the backrooms version. The pirate catches her and is about to maul her, but Mary spots on the floor an item that represents what might be her only happy childhood memory. It’s a chunk of cement into which she and her mother once pressed their handprints. Mary picks up the memory and bludgeons the pirate’s face with it until he is temporarily incapacitated.

My Son’s Worldview Analysis of the Movie

The drive home from Big City was forty-five minutes, and it was not enough time for my son and me to settle all of our questions about The Backrooms. For example, we agreed in a general way that Clark’s mind and the backrooms got into a sort of feedback loop where it manifested his thoughts and desires. But there were hints of Pirate Clark earlier in the sequence of events, before Clark moved into the backrooms. What is the relationship between Captain Clark and the other monsters of backrooms lore? The jury is still out. I couldn’t quite follow some of the metaphysical distinctions my son was making.

What we did agree on was this. The role the backrooms play in Clark’s life are a picture of the progression of sin. At first, he’s scared to go in. He’s very cautious. Then, he tries to bring some other people into it (the employees), which results in their destruction. But eventually, he realizes the backrooms offer him a way to live however he wants, be in control of things, and escape consequences. When he finally admits to someone else that he doesn’t want to repent, and they give him “permission” not to, that’s when the sin shows up in full strength and eats him. After that, there is no Clark left, only his big, ugly sin.

My son came to these insights so quickly that I was really proud of him. It appears that several years of training in theology, literature, and worldview analysis from his classical Christian school have not been wasted.

The Lingering Effects of The Backrooms

The end of the movie is ambiguous about whether Mary ever gets out. She is “rescued’ by a team of people in hazmat suits. This is the team from the original lore. A man interviews her in a room that looks like a police interrogation room. It becomes obvious in a few minutes of conversation that he doesn’t know much about the backrooms either, and in fact he’s rather incoherent when he tries to explain to Mary what his organization even wants. The implication in the interview is that the “rescuers” are never going to let Mary go back to the real world, because she has seen too much. It’s also not clear whether their facility is located inside of, or outside of, the backrooms. It’s like when we “wake up” from a dream only to find ourselves in a second dream about waking up.

Though my son was somewhat disappointed by The Backrooms, he says that in the weeks since we’ve seen it, it has been growing on him. It was actually kind of a powerful story, and “it generates a lot of good memes.”

Would You Go?

Now that I have spoiled the major parts, would you see this movie? I did leave out a lot of important, tense, and horrifying details, so you could still get good and scared if you wanted to.

Name Archaeology

On By Jennifer Mugrage2 Comments

I have what might be good news for prospective parents looking to name their child. There are fewer total names in the world than you might think.

For example, here is an incomplete list of names that mean “John”:

  1. John
  2. Ian
  3. Evan
  4. Shane
  5. Sean or Shawn
  6. Jan or Yan
  7. Johan or Johann or Yohann
  8. Giovanni or Yovanny
  9. Ivan
  10. Juan
  11. Jean (male French name)
  12. Jane
  13. Jan
  14. Janet
  15. Janice
  16. Janelle
  17. Jeanne (female French name)
  18. Juana
  19. Jana
  20. Seana or Shawna
  21. Joanne or Joanna? Needs some looking into.
  22. Eva
  23. Evelyn or Evalynn?

And then there are the last names, everything from Johnson to Ivanova.

Here are some derivations of Mary:

  1. Mary
  2. Mara
  3. Maria
  4. Anne-Marie
  5. Marianne
  6. Marion
  7. Polly (a British nickname for Mary, apparently derived from a young child’s attempt to say it)

Margaret:

  1. Margaret
  2. Maggie
  3. Greta
  4. Gretchen (-chen is a German diminutive)
  5. Gretel

Elizabeth:

“Elizabeth, Betty, Betsey and Bess/all went together to seek a bird’s nest./They found one, with five eggs in it,/all took one, and left four in it.”

And that’s not counting Liz, Lizzie, Lisa, Liza, Elspeth, etc.

Derivations of Augustus, a Latin word meaning “great”:

    1. Augustus
    2. Gus (or, in the Bertie Wooster books, “Gussie.” For a man. I know.
    3. August
    4. Agus (an Indonesian name — via Holland?)

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All that to say, to my delight I recently discovered the origin of another popular name, Louis.

Apparently, Louis, a traditional name for kings of France, is derived from Clovis, a Frankish king in the 400s – 500s, who converted to Christianity and expanded his territory so greatly that he may be properly said to be the first king of France.

So, we have derivations of Clovis:

    1. Louise
    2. Lewis
    3. Lou
    4. Louie-Louie!
    5. Louise
    6. Louisa
    7. Luanne?
    8. Lula? Tallula?

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Imagine finding out that your name goes all the way back to the 400s. Or the first century (John). Or the beginning of the race (Adam).

Misanthropic Quote: Incommensurable

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Benson was not an unintelligent man, but he was a simple man. [His son] Ace was much quicker, and more widely read, and Benson had been aware of that gap for about five years now. Whenever he began his cautions against intellectualism, he knew how lame it sounded. He didn’t like it, but didn’t know what else to do, or say.

After their conversations, Ace would be unsettled too, but for different reasons. He would work through the arguments again in his mind, and could not see any alternatives to the way he had gone. And he was constantly mystified by the things his father would say and then go and do. The arguments were watertight, and his father’s thinking was not watertight.

And yet, now … an irrational desire to be irrational went over his head like a wave. He knew he had no moves. If he just surrendered, all would be well. If he continued to struggle, there would be nothing but … well, nothing but struggle. Struggle in every direction. A world of struggle.

–Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson, pp. 85 – 86

A Review, A Reaction, & A Chuckle over The Fourth Turning

On By Jennifer Mugrage7 Comments

The Big Idea

The gist of this book is that history moves in seasonal cycles. The authors spend a lot of time talking about how expecting seasonal cycles in history is the wisdom of the ancients, and that this has been lost to a linear conception of time that came from Christianity and got even more exaggerated during the Enlightenment. Linear time leads people to expect that things will just keep getting “more so;” that the future will look like an extrapolation of the recent past. As a result, people never expect a turn of history coming, and are always gobsmacked when it arrives.

As they urge readers to accept a cyclical view of history, the authors go slightly overboard and make it sound as if we should worship the circle. They point out circular symbolism in various myths. They say that a cycle is associated with the number four and feminine energy, whereas a line, or triangle, is associated with the number three and masculine energy. While this is not wrong, they then make it sound as if the idea of history as a line, moving in a particular direction, should be rejected and has nothing to offer us.

It’s not a big part of the book, but it is foundational and I found myself trying to integrate their view before I moved forward.

Should We Worship the Circle?

I believe that much of the symbolism they describe is correct. (Not all of it is, since the authors tend to cast a really wide net throughout history and literature, and then throw into the book anything they drag in that looks superficially similar to their thesis. But much of it is.) Seeing history as inescapably circular is an ancient, pagan way to view the world. And it does reflect something about the nature of humans and of creation. However, uncorrected, it tends to leave people fatalistic and trapped in the cycle. Exhibit A would be Hinduism. Christianity did indeed break people out of this endless treadmill by presenting a picture of history where the end is not like the beginning, where history moves in a definite arc or story from creation to fall to redemption to glorification. Of the many things that Christ did on the Cross, He broke us out of the endless cycle. That is why history fundamentally changed after His death and resurrection. You get different types of people, who think in different types of ways, and you get cultures that are Christianized developing in very different ways than any culture before them. Of course, one downstream effect of all this was that it made possible the Enlightenment, materialism, and what C.S. Lewis calls “the fatal serialism of the modern imagination.” These things aren’t good, but to put this in perspective, blaming them on Christianity is sort of like blaming your parents because you scraped your knee while you were on a trip that they took you on to Disneyworld.

Here’s how G.K. Chesterton put it:

As we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health. Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal: it breaks out. For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but is fixed forever in size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox at its centre it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

–Orthodoxy, p. 32

So, yeah. Although in the big picture, history is linear, cycles of development do still exist, both in human lives and in human societies, and we would do well to remember that and work within our nature.

The Seasons of a Saeculum

Briefly, they assert that history moves in cycles of just over or just under 100 years. These, they call a saeculum, following the Roman word for it. The seasons are:

  • Spring / A High: A time of building, strong families, and strong social cohesion
  • Summer / An Awakening: A time of spiritual revolution led by idealistic young people
  • Autumn / An Unraveling: A time when the values of the Awakening are applied to changing society, and things start to fragment
  • Winter / A Crisis: A time when the society is threatened by a series of shocks that often include war

(Fun fact, if you are into personality typologies, you can also make these seasons match the Four Humors: Sanguine, Choleric, Phlegmatic, Melancholic.)

Each season takes roughly 20 to 25 years. Each one causes the next.

The authors also identify four generational “personalities.” The personality of each generation is determined based upon their experiences in childhood and young adulthood. In what conditions did they grow up, and when did they come of age?

  • If you came of age during a Crisis, your generation is the Hero type: the can-do ones, prone to hubris.
  • If you came of age during a High, your generation is the Artist type: passive and conformist.
  • If you came of age during an Awakening, your generation is the Prophet type: fiery and moralistic.
  • If you came of age during an Unraveling, your generation is the Nomad type: neglected and cynical survivors.

Armed with these thought tools, you can now make applications.

The Applications

I appreciate the authors for not claiming too much for their rubric. First of all, they point out that these cycles are not precise in the time they arrive. This is an organic cycle, like the seasons. Some years, you might have a cool summer or a mild winter. Sometimes, seasons are delayed beyond what is usual. For example, the authors have a series of detailed charts in which they apply this rubric to American history. They say that during the Civil War, the Crisis came fast and didn’t last the usual 20 years. As a result, the cycle was shorter. That saeculum skipped the Hero generation. It went straight to the Artist generation of traumatized conformists.

Another helpful thing they say is that this year-like cycle in human history does not cause random events. There is still such a thing as chance, and as human will. However, a society’s reaction to events is heavily influenced by what season they are in. The United States did not immediately enter WWI after the sinking of the Lusitania, because we were in an Unraveling period. But we did immediately mobilize for war after the attack on Pearl Harbor, because we were now in a Crisis.

Finally, this cycle of history is not equally prominent in all societies. Because it has to do with changes in public attitudes, fashions, values, and child-rearing practices, in very traditional societies the cycle is muted. One generation is much like the last. When a society throws off tradition and allows its citizens a lot of social mobility and freedom to make their own choices, ironically that is when the cycle becomes a large factor in that nation’s history. It is for this reason, say the authors, that these seasons are particularly easy to spot in the United States.

It can be difficult to spot seasons of history in past societies (beyond speculation) when we know relatively little about them. Sometimes it’s pretty clear, as when we look at the cycle of idolatry-oppression by enemies-repentance-deliverance found in the book of Judges. We can also find many historic diatribes (probably written during an Unraveling) lamenting the loss of civic virtues.

O.K., so, with those caveats, if you are an American, you have probably been applying this rubric to the last hundred years in our country, which is super easy to do. Here we go:

  • Crisis: Wall Street Crash of Oct. 1929 through the end of WWII. Coming of age: the Great Generation, or what the authors call the G.I. Generation.
  • High: Late 1940s to early 1960s. Coming of age: the Silent generation. Beatniks.
  • Awakening: the “Consciousness Revolution,” late 1960s to early 1980s. Coming of age: the now-much-maligned Boomers. Hippies.
  • Unraveling: late 1980s to early 2000s. Coming of age: Generation X, or what the authors calls 13ers. Slackers.

The Great Generation are Heroes, the Silent are Artists, the Boomers are Prophets, and the Xers are Nomads. Tag yourself. I’m an Xer.

When It Doesn’t Fit Exactly

Now, how do we define a “generation”? It usually works out that once every 20 to 25 years, there is an identifiable new crop of young people. Hero and Prophet generations tend to be bigger, because of what’s going on around the time they are born. Hence, the Baby Boomers are Prophets. Artist and Nomad generations tend to be smaller, because they were born during a time when adults had other things on their minds (the Crisis or the Awakening).

Also, of course, the generations in a nation don’t necessarily fit with the generations in a given family. The authors point out that, often, it takes one big generation more than 20 to 25 years to reproduce, so that, for example, the children of Heroes are Prophets. The Prophets react against what their parents’ generation valued, but they get along better with their grandparents (also Prophets).

Here’s another example. My parents are Boomers. Now, the Boomer culture was rather anti-baby, anti-family, anti-settling down. However, my folks were not typical Boomers. They swam against the tide. They had six children, and my mom stayed home with us when we were small. They tried to raise us in a very pro-family way. So I was shielded from many of the things that my fellow Gen Xers had to deal with, growing up in an environment where kids were considered to “trap” their mothers, or with parents who divorced or went off to “find themselves.” However, I did pick up on the Gen Xer vibe of living in an unravelling society, being blamed for everything from racism to pollution to the hole in the ozone layer. When I read this line,

[O]ne student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.”

-p. 195

… I laughed. The fact that I found this funny, tells me that I am a true Gen Xer.

So anyway, I am a younger Xer. But because my parents had a large family, I have younger siblings who are Millennials (supposed to be the Hero generation; more on this later). Meanwhile, my husband’s parents are Silent generation (Artists). My husband has older siblings who are Boomers, and he is an older Xer. And because we waited a while to have children, our own children are … I guess … Zoomers? Who are supposed to be Artists? Or maybe Alphas? Who … I’m not sure what they should be, because this Crisis seems to be extending. Again, more on this later.

The Predictions, Accurate and Otherwise

The Fourth Turning, published in 1997, predicted that beginning around or shortly before 2005, America would enter a Crisis. There were a variety of things they thought could happen:

  • States secede or try to secede over federal taxes, causing a Constitutional crisis
  • “A global terrorist group blows up an aircraft and announces it possesses portable nuclear weapons.”
  • A government budget crisis leads to a government shutdown and a Wall Street crash.
  • A “new communicable virus” leads to quarantine, which local areas resist, leading to martial law.
  • War with Russia and Iran.

All these are taken from pages 272 – 273 of the book.

So where are we at now? Something that takes 25 years of your life might be too big to see, but I suggest the following. America’s Crisis era started on Sept. 11, 2001, with an unprecedented kind of terrorist attack, which led to big curtailments of freedom like the Patriot Act and the creation of the TSA, and to a number of wars. Then we had a housing market crash and financial crisis in 2008. Meanwhile, there were a series of incidents that, helped by agitators, caused riots in our cities. Police departments responded by being less active, and crime soared. People started to get freaked out, which led to the election of 2016 (nations tend to turn to a “strongman” in a crisis), which caused more people to freak out. The Crisis reached its climax in 2020 – 2022, with you-know-what.

So counting from Sept. 11, 2001, we are almost exactly 25 years into this Crisis era. According to the authors’ rubric of how these seasons usually go, we should be coming out of our Crisis soon, into either a new High with regenerated values, prosperity, and social order, or else into the total destruction of our society.

Which one do you think is happening? For me, I’m not sure. I see elements of people building new values and communities, but I don’t see any national consensus on these things. Nor do I particularly see signs of the Crisis ending.

To prepare for the Fourth Turning, the authors in 1997 recommended that individuals and families do the following:

  • “Return to the classic virtues.”
  • “Do not isolate yourself from community affairs.”
  • “Build personal relationships of all kinds. Face-to-face contacts … will become newly important.”
  • “Prepare yourself and your children for teamwork.”
  • “Maintain relationships of trust with your extended family … your household will function best if it is multigenerational.”
  • “Gird for the weakening collapse of public support mechanisms.”
  • “Generalists with survival know-how will have the edge over specialists who skills are useful only in an undamaged environment.”

These are all taken from pp. 318 – 321 of The Fourth Turning.

These are steps that are being, and have been, taken by many who think of themselves as preppers. and by people who are working and hoping for a cultural renaissance. I’m most familiar with those who are doing this within Christian circles.

The only blind spot that the authors seem to have is that they incurably think of the “teamwork” and “coming together” that must take place during a Crisis, as a national affair. They say “we” while thinking primarily of the national government. In the section on “preparing your children for teamwork,” they suggest not pulling your children out of government schools “if the schools are working.” While I have seen many people doing community building throughout this crisis, one thing I have not seen is a newfound trust in, or willingness to comply with, the federal or even in most cases the local governments. People have been coming together in “teams” to found and maintain private schools and other things like that, but not to join federal programs.

O.K., now for the predictions that didn’t prove to be so prescient.

Any book that makes this many predictions (even in general terms) is going to result in some howlers. For example, here’s the authors’ prediction about how the Silent generation would handle Social Security entitlements:

… America’s rising familiarity with the Silent elder persona will erode today’s support for across-the-board senior benefits. Unlike G.I.s, the Silent will not feel entitled. Their prior public deeds will not inspire them (or others) to lobby for a vast elder reward. … [The Silent’s] sense of guilt and instinct for compromise will compel them to give in some, relax their claims on young workers, and drain the electricity out of the third rail of Social Security politics.

— ibid, pp. 220 – 221

This — how to put it?– emphatically did not happen. I have heard with my own ears Silent generation members say, “We paid into the system for a lot of years. Now we need to get out of it.” When you set up a Ponzi scheme, no one wants to be left holding even a little bit of the bag.

They make a similar prediction about Boomers:

When the market hits bottom, millions of Boomers … will immediately have to make do with steeply diminished material consumption. Many will have no choice but to live communally or with their adult children… public spending on elder benefits will necessarily decline. … Congresses will debate massive cuts. To maintain G.I.-style elder dependence on the young, Boomers would have to wage political war on their coming-of-age Millennial children. It is a war they will not wage–and would not win if they did.

ibid, p. 284

Now, the retirement age has been raised, but other than that, I have not noticed any “massive cuts.” And from my observation, Boomers as a group have been perfectly happy to wage political war on Millennials. And they have won it, by convincing Millennials that the solution to their financial woes is more taxes and entitlements, not just for older people but for everyone.

I have not noticed a trend of Boomers moving in with their adult children, either. In the first place, they, not their children, are usually the ones who own homes, a situation brought about by entitlement policy applied to housing. In the second place, their children are often alienated Xers, and relationship isn’t the greatest (present company excepted). Finally, some Boomers I know are effectively the caregivers for their grandchildren.

In short, the collapse of the Social Security/Medicare system has come about more slowly than Strauss & Howe (or, frankly, I) expected. As an Xer, I did not expect to be able to retire, and maybe I still won’t, but my husband is approaching the age when he can start withdrawals to give us some breathing room, and there has not yet been a nationwide apocalypse. Color me surprised.

One more howler:

As they break into their twenties, Millennials will already be accustomed to meeting and beating adult expectations. Basking in praise… they will seek out [their elders’] advice … Every youth domain will become more mannerly, civic-spirited, and emotionally placid. In college, Millennials will lead a renaissance in student decorum and appearance, making profanity as out of date as the backward cap. … On the job, Millennials will be seekers of order and harmony. They will delight employers with their skills, work habits, and institutional loyalties. … Millennials will respond [to economic hard times] with a cheerful patience reminiscent of Depression-era G.I.s.

ibid, pp. 293 – 294

Look, I’m not here to slam on Millennials. I actually have a lot of sympathy for your generation. But there is no way this general picture describes the way things have gone with the Millennial generation.

Strauss & Howe are predicting that the Millennials will emerge as a Hero generation, because that’s what his historical scheme calls for. But this requires a lot more strength and resilience than Millennials, as a group, entered young adulthood possessing.

The authors did not foresee that Millennials would have been intentionally weakened by a number of cultural trends which were pushed on them by earlier generations. These include behavioral meds, and overpraising/participation trophy culture combined with identity politics culture, which gave complimentary messages that, on the one hand, you are so amazing and talented and don’t need to work to improve yourself, and on the other hand, you are a victim of history and society. Each of these messages is weakening; in combination, they are devastating. There is also the horrible sexual confusion that has been foisted upon the Millennial and Zoomer generations. This draws on the power of identity politics (being a sexual minority is an easy way to obtain an oppressed identity), and on the behavioral meds culture (giving powerful new medications in response to emotional distress).

What generation could emerge from such a gauntlet unscathed? It is no exaggeration to compare all these horrors to WWI, which wiped out a generation of young people and traumatized the survivors. These are not conditions that cause young people to “meet and beat adult expectations” in the positive sense, nor to “delight their employers.”

Perhaps Millennials are a Hero Generation in a new sense. If they are functional at all, it’s because they have won through an intense spiritual war. Perhaps we should think of them as veterans. Like veterans, they certainly bear mental and physical scars. But instead of coming back from a physical war and plugging into an existing social structure, they are having to re-invent the wheel in all the most basic domains of life: schedules, self-care, family.

And quite a few Millennials are a “Hero Generation,” itching for action, in the sense that they are committed Marxists who want to see the violent overthrow of society.

Others, like my younger siblings, are more like the G.I. generation after WWII, eager to get married, raise children, contribute to their communities, and build a wholesome cultural high.

The fact that we have Millennials going in these two very different directions makes me rather uncertain about how this Crisis is going to go.

I wonder whether what we have seen is what the author predicted on page 302:

If [the Crisis] ends badly, Millennials would bear the full burden of its consequence throughout their adult lives. If they come of age traumatized, like the Progressive youths of the Civil War, Millennials will thereafter attend to the details of suffering and healing as heirs to the Artist archetype.

It seems to me that our Millennials are behaving more like a “sensitive Artist” generation than like a “hubristic Hero” generation. This would mean that, as with the Civil War, America had once again skipped the Hero generation and gone straight to Artist.

The Prophet, born in the High, seeks vision; the Nomad, born in the Awakening, seeks realism; the Hero, born in the Unraveling, seeks power; and the Artist, born in the (prior or current) Crisis, seeks empathy.

p. 322

Reader, I Read-ed It

So, that’s the outlines of the book plus a few of my thoughts on it. Obviously, there is a lot more material in there. Some of it is really interesting (the parts that apply the seasonal rubric to the past). Other parts feel dated (ironically, the parts written in the future tense). Read it if you’re curious and want to know more. Meanwhile, what do you think? What generation are you? What do you want to do in the coming High?

Review: Sea of Monsters

On By Jennifer Mugrage5 Comments

Storytime.

Last year, I taught Ancient History to a group of third, fourth, and fifth graders.

One pair of brothers in my class were very knowledgeable, and very enthusiastic, about the Greek monsters, myths, and pantheon. This was great. Some of their “knowledge” was a little overly specific, however. They gave me to understand that they had learned all this from reading the Percy Jackson books, which were so good and I really ought to read them.

So, when I decided to spend a year reading Greek-mythology-inspired fiction, I added “at least one Percy Jackson book” to my reading list.

The library had a bunch of the Percy Jackson series, but curiously, not the first one. So I checked out books #2 and #3. Sea of Monsters is #2 in the series.

Having read it, I get the idea. It was enjoyable enough, but I don’t feel the need to read any more of them.

Riordan has done some nice, internally consistent worldbuilding where the ancient Greek gods, monsters, and even locations, move around the world depending upon where the center of Western Civilization is at the time. So, in the Bronze Age, they were based in the Mediterranean. Now, in modern times, they are based in and around New York City (with the ocean conveniently nearby). The titular Sea of Monsters, which used to be the entire Mediterranean, is now (spoilers) the Bermuda Triangle.

Percy (short for Perseus) Jackson is a son of Poseidon, who lives with his mother in New York City. During the summers, he attends Camp Half-Blood, a training camp for children of the gods. It is staffed by the centaur Chiron (who, in the original myths, trained Achilles — very appropriate). In this book, Chiron has been fired, and one of the camp directors is Tantalus. Tantalus spends the entire book chasing pieces of food (donuts, burgers, etc.), which flee from him so that he never gets to take a bite.

We also meet Hermes, a fit, middle-aged man in a jogging suit, whose caduceus has been transformed into a cell phone around whose antenna twine two small green snakes by the names of George and Martha.

You get the idea. The book is a lighthearted blend of ancient Greek characters with modern technology, slang, and what is supposed to be teen culture.

Like many books that are supposed to be relatable for tweens, it’s told in the first person. There is some generic slang (“Dude!” etc.), and many of the adult authority figures are clueless and/or careless about the teens’ well-being. These are the pitfalls of such books. The use of technology and slang runs the risk that the books will not age well. The portrayal of the adults, while it might facilitate the requisite adventure, does not encourage respect. Surely, there could be ways for the author to show teachers that actually care about their students, and still get Percy away from the camp and off on his own.

As a teacher, I’m also concerned about the portrayal of bullies in Percy’s private school in New York City. The idea that there is a vicious hierarchy in middle- and high- school is definitely a Hollywood trope. I’m sure this is true in some places, but in the schools I’ve been in (both as a student and teacher), the successful, “popular” kids were mostly very kind. Kids who are less socially adept (like I was) tend to be fearful and envious, and project their feelings of inferiority onto the “popular” kids. Stories like this are not helping them gain social confidence or believe the best about others’ intentions, as we are told to do in I Corinthians 13.

This book had some poignant moments, especially near the end, but the author kept it mostly lighthearted. The series is clearly building towards some big showdown, having to do with a plot by Kronos. If I didn’t have such a long reading list, I might finish it.

Knitting Project Finished: Black Otter Rex

On By Jennifer Mugrage3 Comments

They say, “If someone knits you something, they like you. If it’s made of black yarn, they love you.”

I love my teenaged son. He’s been asking me to make this knitted Black Otter Rex rabbit for years, ever since he was a rabbit-crazy little boy.

By the way, Black Otter Rex rabbits are almost unbelievably sharp-looking. Here’s what they look like in real life.

My son owned a black (not Black Otter) rex rabbit.

To make this rabbit, I used a pattern purchased from Claire Garland on Etsy. For the most part, it’s a really great knitting pattern. It starts at the rabbit’s nose and works back over its head, adding the ears as you go. Then, we do the black portions of the rabbit … down the back (with forearms attached but not stuffed yet), tail (stuffed and sewn on the spot). Then, we change colors and work back up the belly, to the neck and chin. Only the hind feet are knitted separately and then sewn on. Pretty ingenious! The pattern instructs you how to do so-called “short rows” for shaping in the face, upper hind legs, and belly. Then, you essentially just attach the front to the back, and stuff. The pattern includes plenty of pictures of the developing rabbit, with instructional dotted lines and so forth, so you can visualize what you’re doing. It also has multiple pictures of the finished rabbit, so you know what you are aiming for.

Now, about the few hiccups I had.

To get that beautiful color gradient, nearly all the pattern calls for you to hold up to four different colors of yarn together while knitting (for example, black, black mohair, petrol, and copper). These yarns that you are meant to be using are generally very fine (4-ply or mohair). Since I was working from my stash, I adapted this aspect of the pattern. I didn’t have “petrol,” but I assumed it was pretty close to black, so I just used my thicker black yarn on the sections that call for “black, petrol, and black mohair.” I did have white, grey, copper, ochre, and black, mostly in worsted or sport weight, though my black yarn was chunky. So, my end result was a little stiffer and a little less fuzzy probably than the original. Sometimes, having multiple yarns on the needles became a challenge when, for example, I was occasionally told to “knit three together.”

Making up, the part where you sew the contoured belly onto the contoured back & legs, presented a few confusing moments. I don’t know whether I mistakenly skipped or added rows in various parts of the pattern (it’s’ quite possible), but I seemed to have a lot more material on the back/hind legs than on the corresponding belly part, and I had to do some finessing to make it work. If I make this pattern again, I’ll pay special attention when I am knitting those parts.

Still, I’m pleased with the result, and so is my son. This rabbit has been at his side since yesterday, when I completed it.

Why We Can’t Just Give Peace a Chance

On By Jennifer MugrageLeave a comment

Storytime.

When I was a kid, I attended a no-nukes protest.

It’s true. My dad was a Protestant pastor, and also sort of hippie about some things. No drug use or sleeping around, but he liked to live “simply” (for example, keeping his old coffee percolator), and around the time I was a baby, he had become a convinced pacifist. That is, he had become convinced based upon the Sermon on the Mount (mostly) that for Christians nowadays, it is never permissible to resist violence with violence. And this went for nations too. For him, principled pacisfism was part of following Jesus.

So here it was, the mid 1980s, late in the Cold War (though we did not know it was late at the time). A no-nukes protest had been planned in a downtown plaza in our large Midwestern city. I believe it was organized by the city’s churches, because among other people, my dad had been asked to sit in a panel onstage.

I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I was excited to go along. It seemed like a good thing. It was pretty clear to me that us, or anybody else, getting killed by nukes was a bad thing, something that we would not want to have happen. I had heard gruesome stories about people’s eyeballs being turned into jelly when the bomb was dropped (by us!) on Hiroshima. This was in a book that we had at home called Peace Be With You.

As the family artist, I made the sign for our protest. I tried to draw the symbol from the cover of Peace Be With You, a dove holding a branch in its beak. I had never drawn a dove before, and I got the beak wrong, so it came out looking more like a parrot.

I don’t remember all the content of the rally, but two things stand out. There was a play about a couple who survive a nuclear holocaust and live in a tent city, only to get radiation sickness. And, I remember the final song.

With the panel of pastors still seated on the stage, a lady came up to give a moving musical number. The first verse was about the Statue of Liberty and how she represents to many people that they have arrived in a place that is free from oppression. The second verse was about the cross of Christ, and how, to the Christian, it means liberty from sin, death, and hell. The refrain was “the Cross is my Statue of Liberty.”

Horribly blasphemous, of course. It was trying to compliment the greater by comparing it to the lesser, which actually reverses the roles of greater and lesser, unintentionally offering a huge insult to Christ.

As soon as he realized where the song was going, my dad abruptly got up from his seat on the stage behind the singer, stalked off the stage in a huff, and marched me and my brother out of there before the rally ended. I’m still proud of him for this. As someone said (I can’t find the reference, but I think it was Spurgeon), “Even a dog barks when its master is attacked.” Referring to himself defending the honor of Christ, however inarticulately.

I think what the organizers were trying to convey with that song was, “We are Christians, and don’t worry, even though we are against nukes we still definitely love our country.” But it was ill chosen.

Although I now think the whole event was incredibly naive, I commend my dad for attending it and for bringing his kids. Kids need to have experiences where they go fight for the right alongside their parents, even if the cause later turns out to have been somewhat misguided. This sends the message, “We have certain values as a family, these are important enough to do something about, my parents are good people” and, above all, “I and my parents are on the same side.” Please, give your kids many experiences like this before they become teenagers!

So, why naive? Well, I can’t blame myself for not noticing this as a kid, but why in the world did we think we were the only people who objected to the idea of a nuclear holocaust? Surely that is something that everyone recognizes is bad? (Except, perhaps, the mullahs, I digress.)

And given that we were not uniquely intelligent or good such that we were the only ones who didn’t like the idea of people being annihilated by a nuclear bomb, it would make sense to connect the next pair of dots (#s 2 and 3) and ask ourselves, since 99% of people don’t like nukes, how is it that they still exist? Could it be that, once you have a nuclear standoff, getting rid of nukes is more complicated than just “getting rid of them”? Perhaps there are people who also don’t want an apocalypse, but whose options are limited?

By the same token, perhaps there are more obstacles standing between humanity and the cessation of wars in general than just a dearth of people saying, “We don’t like war.” After all, most people don’t like wars, including most people who fight them.

But we, the anti-war protestors of the Cold War era, honestly, naively, conceitedly thought we were the only people in our country who saw a moral problem with human suffering. And we thought it would somehow stop if only we were to stand up and heroically say, “We are against this.”

It didn’t work. And not because not enough people were against it. It turns out, just saying that doesn’t do anything.

I’m sure my dad’s generation would say that these antiwar protests were ineffective because “our leaders didn’t listen.” “Listening,” in this context, would mean disarming our nukes and other WMDs, and perhaps completely disbanding our military. After all, if every country did this, peace would flow into the empty space where the weapons used to be. And someone has to go first! So it might as well be us! Someone has to give peace a chance.

This made sense to me at 10, especially when it was coming from respected authority figures. Once we grow up, however, we have a responsibility to ask ourselves what could possibly go wrong with this scenario. And the answer is: a lot. Everything.

War is, unfortunately, the default state of human beings. When we are not at war, it is because a lot of people are working very hard to maintain a precarious balance where things don’t tip into war. Fortunate are we who live in a country or empire large enough, or strong enough, that all that work has paid off and we get to go about our daily lives, assuming that peace is the natural state of things. But it isn’t. It is not the case that wars don’t happen unless some “war monger” goes out and “starts one.” That would be nice, but it’s not what we have here.

There are multiple reasons for this. Until recently, I thought it was sufficiently explained by human beings being sinful, and full of fears, lusts, and cravings. All of that is certainly a huge factor. We usually see wars explained as being caused by “fighting over scarce resources,” but I think that materialistic explanation is far from sufficient. Wars have not become less common as the worldwide standard of living has increased. I have also seen wars attributed to “religion.” There are a number of logical problems with this as well. To test this theory, you’d need a control group of humans who had either no religion, or no war. Since both war and religion are things that humans universally do, such a control group does not exist. To say that because both are universal, means one causes the other, is the post hoc fallacy.

So in general, I think the stubborn persistence of war is adequately explained by the Seven Deadly Sins: Envy, Greed, Lust, Sloth, Gluttony, Anger, and Pride. Especially Pride and Envy.

Say somebody hates you and wants to go to war with you because they are prideful and think their way of life is better, but also, at the same time, they envy some things about, tacitly acknowledging that in those respects, you are better than they are. Is such a person going to put down their weapons because you fold your hands and say, “Look. None of us like war. Let’s all mind our own business and disarm”? No, unfortunately, your enemy may not like war, but they hate you a lot more than they hate war. If they even recognize that you are taking the moral high ground, that is only going to exacerbate the wounded-pride-and-envy problem.

This is why fifty years of “anti-war” protests have done nothing but make the protestors look silly.

But it recently came to my attention that there may be an additional cause besides human sin that keeps stirring up wars in the world.

We need to expand our understanding of spiritual warfare to include the larger social and political structures of our world. Why does war bring ruin to the world? Why do we feel constantly on the verge of a new world war? … Why is peace, specifically the peace the permeates through the spread of the gospel, such a threat to world powers? The answer to these questions falls under the larger context of the unseen battle, a battle that has in mind the final unification of the nations of the world under the banner of Christ.

–Joel Muddamalle, The Unseen Battle, p. 120

Muddamalle is suggesting that the gods of the nations, who would prefer to go on ruling them, feel threatened by the spread of the Gospel and use geopolitical instability as one of their tools to slow this spread. (For more about these entities, see my review of Michael Heiser’s book.)

The idea is that human beings, while plenty fight-y on our own, would sometimes like to rest. But these spiritual entities will not let their people rest. They are hard at work, with demonic delight, stirring up, prolonging, and accelerating generations-long conflicts, to keep the Gospel of Christ out and also perhaps, as a side benefit, because they enjoy human suffering.

This certainly matches the picture of “the gods” that we get in, say, Greek mythology. People are bad enough on their own, but even when you have a majority of people who want to do the right thing, you will see that Fate, or the gods, or whatever, intervene so that exactly the wrong thing happens at exactly the wrong moment. The result: ten years of war.

Peace, it turns out, is not a passive, waterlike thing that flows in wherever a space is opened for it. It has to be established, like a fortress. It is the result of someone coming in, taking names, and routing the false gods. That someone is the Lord Jesus.

Sunshine Blogger Again

On By Jennifer Mugrage22 Comments

Just as the sun must come up every day, rain or shine, so I am cursed to plod forever through an endless treadmill of answering questions. The questions are ever the same, but on the plus side, my answers keep changing.

I wasn’t exactly “awarded” this tag, but I did see it on the blog of one Bookstooge, who closed his post with “You aren’t hardcore enough!”

I am so hardcore. But, as usual, Bookstooge, thanks for doing everything exactly like Puddleglum. Or Trumpkin.

Here’s the participation rules

  1. Display the award’s official logo somewhere on your blog
  2. Thank the person who nominated you
  3. Provide a link to your nominator’s blog
  4. Answer your nominator’s questions
  5. Nominate up to eleven bloggers
  6. Ask your nominees eleven questions
  7. Notify your nominees by commenting on their blogs

What’s your favorite book and why?

The Bible, because so many reasons, but among others, it’s got some really wild ancient history that you won’t find anywhere else. At least, you can find stuff elsewhere that’s sort of similar, but you won’t know which parts of it are true.

Can you share some obscure/unusual words you like to use when writing?

I like “interlocutor.” It means whoever the person in focus is speaking to. I also like “salient” and “equivocation.” But obviously, which fancy words are the most salient changes depending on the context of the writing.

When I’m writing narrative, I prefer to describe the action and people’s thoughts as simply as possible and let the actual events deliver the emotional impact.

Do you have pets (if yes, photos!)

Not anymore, sadly. Our last remaining rabbit passed just a few weeks ago. We (my son and I) hope to get another batch of chickens this summer, but standing between us and them is a large run-and-coop building project that, to me at the moment anyway, seems as intimidating as the Tower of Babel.

What brings you joy?

Beauty.

Landscapes, especially if I can paint them; beautiful folk clothing from around the world; beautiful items knitted or crocheted by myself or others; the simple, unforced beauty when your favorite mug is sitting on your favorite coaster and they match. The beauty of a plant: hens & chicks filling a planter, a Boston fern spilling towards the floor. Sunshine on my dining room walls. I love beautiful music, even though I’m not very gifted at it, which is no doubt a trial to the people around me.

I also love things that are beautiful even though they are ugly. “Brutalist” jewelry, that looks weathered, like it came through the apocalypse. Things that are painted, knitted, or sewn in unexpected colors, like browns and greys, or colors that you’d think would clash but then don’t. Stuff that looks worn or pieced together, like an old farm quilt. Well-told tragedies, like the recently reviewed story of Jason and Medea.

Here’s an example of a “brutalist” ring.

“All things counter, original, spare, strange;/Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)/With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;/He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change/Praise Him.”

–Gerard Manley Hopkins

If there’s anything that can make you look forward to tomorrow, what would that be?

My husband and children.

Best vacation destination from your experience?

I have a whole bucket list of ancient sites I want to see, but that’s not what you’re asking about.

I have fond memories of a little cabin hut bungalow on a small island called Gili Air, off the coast of Lombok. Go out and snorkel in the morning, come back in the afternoon and sit on the porch and read. Look across the bay at sunset, and see the mountains of Bali looming out of the sea. Beach is not even my favorite setting, but boy that was one relaxing vacation.

Do you count steps?

What?

Favorite meal?

Fish and chips and coleslaw.

The last song you listened on repeat?

Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen.

I realize you all have been aware of this song for years, but I just heard it in its entirety a few months ago. Like probably every listener, I found it to be a stunning work of art and also kind of a puzzle, and I listened to it a couple of times in a row for several days until I felt I understood it. I’ll spare you my analysis, as I think volumes have already been written.

How many blogs do you have?

Just this one. I used to have a recipe blog and a book review blog, both on Blogger. I haven’t checked them in years and am not even sure if I could find them anymore.

But don’t forget to buy my books! And for goodness’ sake, please don’t return them. My publisher charges me when you do that. If you buy a hard copy and hate it, just burn it or send it to Goodwill or something.

What’s your favorite quote?

There are so many good ones, I can’t really pick a favorite. It goes in seasons with me. But for today, I’ll leave you with this one:

This is what the LORD says:
"Cursed is the one who trusts in man,/who depends on flesh for his strength/and whose heart turns away from the LORD./He will be like a bush in the wastelands;/he will not see prosperity when it comes./He will dwell in the parched places of the desert,/in a salt land where no one lives.
"But blessed is the man who trusts in the LORD,/whose confidence is in Him./He will be like a tree planted by the water/that sends out its roots by the stream./It does not fear when heat comes;/its leaves are always green./It has no worries in a year of drought/and never fails to bear fruit."
The heart is deceitful above all things/and beyond cure./Who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:5 - 9

Now, my questions for you, Gentle Reader. These are inspired by our experience in grade school, where you were sure that you had to have a quick, permanent answer about your favorite color, animal, and favorite everything else ready to go. This is important! You never know when you might need to know this stuff! Answer with your first instinct and no cheating!

  1. What is your favorite brand of tractor?
  2. What is your favorite kind of cow?
  3. What is your favorite kind of chicken?
  4. Country or city?
  5. Ford or VW?
  6. Pickup truck or motor scooter?
  7. Star Wars or Star Trek?
  8. Beach or mountains?
  9. Sweet or savory?
  10. Sci-fi or fantasy?
  11. Favorite animal, domestic or wild, in your region or any other.