Texas Gov. Rick Perry is 58 years old today. He is a real Boy Scout. He wants everyone to know it. And that is scary. It is primary election day too. And good old Rick is nothing if not available (he sure isn't much of anything as a governor; Texas wouldn't miss him). He wants people to know that too, just in case they might need someone to run for vice president, someone to troll for that true believer vote now that Huckabee is gone.
Perry has written a book extolling the values of the Boy Scouts (to be trustworthy, loyal, brave, clean and reverent, mentally awake and morally straight, obnoxious, self-righteous etc.), and running down the ACLU for making the Scouts look inside their own closet and deal with the stuff they found there (Perry personally redefined the word "homosexual" in an interview to mean "focused on sex" -- and declared it has no place in Scouting). I was a Boy Scout, too (Troop 225 down at the Presbyterian Church, if I remember the number correctly); but I was an ACLU sort of Scout. Rick Perry would have hated me.
Being a Scout combined two things I did not enjoy as a boy and actually grew to hate as I grew older: 1) guys in bunches, and 2) uniforms. I remain suspicious of anything involving those two things (I was a crappy little-leaguer too), but I am sure it started with the Boy Scouts. I loved camping and I could tie knots with the best of them, but I was a bad Boy Scout. I liked to do the things Boy Scouts did, but I did 
not like doing them with other Boy Scouts. It always involved too many guys all dressed alike for my taste (and guys in bunches can be uniformly mean; for instance, an overly well-coiffed, scrubbed and tidy fellow like Gov. Perry would have been labeled "queer-bait" in the cruel confines of my troop). I never rose very far in the ranks and I was the only guy in my troop to win the reading merit badge. I have to wonder why there was any such thing as a reading merit badge. Reading and Scouting don't mix well. Scouts live in a smallish closet of oaths, rules, expectations, adventures in wholesome living and denial of certain realities (Gov. Perry no doubt earned the closet building merit badge). I was looking for something bigger than that and reading can lead a curious boy like me off in what the Scouts would see as unwholesome directions often better pursued without a uniform; eventually I ended up in the loving arms of a beautiful curly haired woman I could not wait to introduce to my parents. She was love at first sight for me and I figured my parents would naturally feel the same way. They didn't.
The problem was that my shirt got in the way. It was a Boy Scout shirt complete with shoulder patches, chest patches, a patrol patch, troop numbers and an Order of the Arrow patch on the flap of the right front pocket. I bought it for 25-cents at a Goodwill store. It wasn't the first oddball shirt I had bought at Goodwill. I had bowling shirts, repairmen's shirts, baseball shirts, shirts with names over the pockets and company names on the back, lots of shirts I figured were once worn by long-dead guys whose widows finally decided to get on with their lives, clean out the drawers and closets and donate their stuff to Goodwill (for years I shopped for suits among the same racks of dead-guy clothes). I hated new stuff (I hated suits). I loved other people's clothes. Goodwill worked for me. The Boy Scout shirt had badges for stuff on it that I never came close to achieving as a Boy Scout (Order of the Arrow! No way!). That was part of the fun. Besides, I never wanted to be confused with a Boy Scout. And I never intended to be. And that shirt said so. It was a defiant and defining shirt; it was witty, subversive (irony was still cheap and easy in those days). Besides, it looked good with jeans.
By that time I had spent years stuffing myself with other people's sentences and trying to build a man out of them (reading merit badge winner that I was, and Scouting builds men, right?). And I looked like a man when I was naked. But the truth is that I was a 40-ish ex-hippie-beatnik-bookworm in a Boy Scout shirt, a divorced guy with a cute kid; I was teaching English (non-tenure track, but I didn't care) to the mostly mediocre middle children of Midwestern Catholics at a sternly tidy, stone-faced Catholic college in Minnesota. I had parlayed that old reading merit badge into pretty good jobs in several states for nearly 20 years and the teaching job was only the most recent. But I didn't have a savings account or a retirement plan. I had never even thought about owning a house. So whether the Boy Scout shirt was perceived as defiant or pathetic by that time in my life was debatable. But I didn't care. It isn't easy building a man out of other people's sentences. It is easier to wear other people's clothes.
I am sure the Boy Scout shirt came from a novel I read in the 1960s. The main character is a beatnik proto-hippie named Gnossos Pappadopoulis, who defiantly and subversively wears a Boy Scout shirt. But 
Gnossos was no Boy Scout. That appealed to me. Gnossos and his shirt lodged somewhere among all the other names and sentences accummulating in my brain (I wasn't brave enought to take them out of storage for a long time). Twenty years later I resurrected the book and taught it to the muddling-middling young Catholics. Sometimes I wore the Boy Scout shirt to class for effect. They didn't get it. They didn't laugh at the funny parts of the book (even the turd funeral).They didn't get Gnossos. They wondered why Gnossos didn't get a job. They did not understand how fiction could become a fact of life. But it can. Gnossos Pappadopoulis, a man who never existed, made me buy that shirt and ran me slam up against the Boy Scouts.
The problem of course is that my parents believed in the Boy Scouts and the shirt was an affront to everything they claimed to stand for (it took years for me to understand how offensive the shirt was to them). It turned out that my parents had the same faith in the power of Scouting that Gov. Rick Perry does. They believed in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They worked with Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They organized Pinewood derbies for Cub Scouts. The organized Girl Scout cookie sales. They had God and country and Order of the Arrow faith. Oaths, laws and closets faith. Eagle Scout faith. Faith in uniforms and ceremonies involving flags. Blind faith. Maybe they believed that if I had been a better Scout, I would never have found my way to the woman with the naturally curly hair. Whatever it was, my Boy Scout shirt set them off. The problem is that generally I have no more faith in the Boy Scouts than I do in anything else. My parents looked at me in that shirt and finally saw the anti-Scout I had become.
After that the weekend did not go well. My mother swung between being rude, confrontational and non-communicative. My father backed her up (they always backed each other up, a habit among the long-married) and never hinted she might be drinking a bit on the sly. My sister turned overly polite, but it was a grim and accusatory politeness and she wasn't nice about it. Nobody mentioned that shirt to me the whole weekend. They took it out on the curly haired woman of my dreams instead. Perhaps they blamed her for turning me into the anti-Boy Scout (she didn't). Perhaps they blamed her for the fact that they finally saw me for what I had grown up to be. But that shirt was so powerful it even made my mother believe the woman of my dreams' naturally curly hair was really unnaturally curly (something she pointed out to me with a purse-lipped puff of distinctly southern thoroughgoing womanly disdain that Yankee women cannot even approximate much less fathom; in fact, my mother took advantage of my love's Yankee-ness; the South is a game with more rules than any Yankee girl can ever learn -- and my curly haired love didn't even know she was playing). The hair in question was and is naturally curly, of course, and I have never yet figured out where my mother's accusation came from or why it was so important. My only guess is that my mother thought I was being deceived by unnaturally curly hair and if I would fall for that, no telling how this woman was deceiving me otherwise and what sort of ruin I was in for. It was a sort of fake curls = real danger equation that I never figured out (my mother had an irrational and unexplained hatred of country singer Loretta Lynn that I never understood either), but that I have sometimes witnessed in bars. And it could be that my mother's secret relationship with the beer in my brother-in-law's well-stocked refrigerator for several days contributed to the problem. The problem of the offending shirt came up much later, years later, when they all thought everything had been forgiven and forgotten. It never really was. I am not much of a forgiver or forgetter. I never laughed about it and none of them came to my wedding to the curly haired woman of my dreams. I considered it a fair trade.
Gov. Rick Perry is a 58-year-old Boy Scout. A grownup Boy Scout is a frightening thing. A boy is a terrible thing to waste.
The Boy Scout monument in Washington, D.C. What were they thinking? The Boy Scouts say. "Be prepared." Good advice. But Satchel Paige said: "Don't look back. Something may be gaining on you." Even better advice. What Texas Gov. Rick Perry says doesn't really matter.
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