1968--Sphere Soverignty

Another sketch from a loosely assembled collection of images I remembered a few years later, but haven't looked at for years, all of them portraits from Spring Break, 1968. 
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No one believed him, of course, but a guy who rooms down the hall in the dorm once heard of a kid who actually liked Theology 201. The rest of us think it a bore--not only the class, but the prune-faced Dominie we call Magoo, the aging old-guard stalwart whose three weekly lectures usually conclude with a forceful denouncement of American culture's excesses--how what's happening all around these days is turning us all into humanists and worse, even here in Iowa.

"Animalism," he growls, shaking his sagging cheeks. "We're sinking to animalism."

"On Friday next we will be having a test which will cover pages 235 to 287. Know all the terms therein, and each of the sub-points underlined twice in my syllabus, the last test before finals: true/false, multiple choice, and fill-in-blanks."

He hasn't much of a voice, so he carries a homemade p.a., with a built-in squeak in the speaker. And the only kid he knows in the class is the one who shakes wires when the darn thing quits--which happens daily at last--and is, in itself, the only part of the show worth watching: this little old man, grumbling and gurgling, his voice carrying through the cloth-covered speaker in short, ugly bursts till the anointed one runs to his aid, kicks it around, and bang!--it works once again.

"We come today to a tenet that's central to the ideals of  Calvin--'sphere sovereignty. Its basic assumptions are that the church and the home and the school and the government each have their own spheres of influence. Now, just as the school should not try to exert any influence over the church--"

Just like that, pop!--out goes the speaker. Those students not sleeping watch his lips jerk like a puppet's as he rambles along, oblivious, his prominent forehead poking just over the edge of the podium. His favorite student comes up, wiggles a wire, the speaker cracks like a rifle, and his voice starts up once again.

Students drift back into sleep, except one, a dark-haired sophomore, Youngsma's girl, who writes him a letter each day of Theology 201A. Over her shoulder, I see only "Dearest." But I know what it says because Youngsma's in Nam. In May of 1968, my whole world has changed into something it wasn't in March.

"Sphere sovereignty's claim is binding on all institutions. It follows that the church has no business meddling in politics. That is to say, and let me make this quite clear, that preachers especially should stay in their pulpits. Those secular humanist crusaders who call themselves "preachers" and march on the streets for the colored down there in the South--"

"Bullshit!" I say, and Youngsma's girlfriend stops writing, but most students keep sleeping, some with their eyes wide open. The Dominie, notoriously deaf, never hears me at all.

And it strikes me today that even if I'd screamed it out loud in his own portable speaker, he'd never have heard it. He'd just call up the chosen to fix the p.a.

It was, after all, 1968.