Just recently, I decided to be a little more flexible about being obstinate. When I was growing up, we were taught that it was not such a good thing to be obstinate. In fact, I first heard the word “obstinate” from a nun who was telling me that I was obstinate, and for a while I thought it was something like being a Methodist. I gradually came to learn that what Sister was talking about was that I wasn't being flexible enough in my thinking to accept unreservedly every word of rigid dogma that was being spooned into me. This made me even more confused than the doctrine of transubstantiation did -- and I spent a lot of years as completely baffled, which I might have been anyway, but surely the nun didn't help matters at all.
Anyway, I was in college before I realized that being a bit less inflexible on certain important personal issues not only made me more relaxed but also guaranteed I'd never have to stay in on Saturday night. At that point, I decided that I was going to be stubborn about being flexible. Now certain important Christian thinkers, beloved in the motels that dot that lovely New Orleans neighborhood known as Out By The Airport, might term me a “moral relativist” for having lived my life this way. I might even well be called a “pagan,” though I'm not, largely because I look stupid in antlers. To hell -- you should pardon the expression -- with the hot-sheet parsons, I figured. I was happy.
Then George W. Bush changed my life.
He showed me at last that the nun had been wrong, that being obstinate was all that really matters in this life. No more sifting of endless options. No more of that exhausting reflection. Decide what you're going to do and, evidence and common sense be damned, just go do it. Who are you going to believe, yourself or your own lying eyes? It was not a good thing to be stubborn about being flexible. Far better to loosen up and get really obstinate.
(I took the president quite seriously as a role model because, well into adulthood, he apparently was quite stubborn in his flexibility toward the healing properties of strong drink and toward the relative necessity of actually working for a living. Of course, he was most stubborn in his flexibility toward the state of Alabama in 1972 -- which he evidently regarded as a noncorporeal state, much like the state of grace in that you didn't have to be there to actually be there.)
Now, I do not have a large military and a compliant Congress, so I am unable to start a war and then obstinately insist that the country I have invaded is rapidly turning into Rhode Island when all the available evidence indicates that it actually is turning into the Land of Mordor. However, it's an approach easily adapted to the small but surmountable problems of daily living.
Like the oil light, for example.
For a week or so, the oil light on my dashboard was blinking red. Then it went red and stayed that way. Many of my friends pointed out that this could not be a good thing. I kept driving the car until, one afternoon, there was a loud pinging sound and a rod came flying through the hood and killed a pigeon about 10 feet above my car. We towed it into the shop (the car, not the pigeon, which had fallen on the hood and stayed there), where the mechanic clucked at me.
“How long had the light been on?” he asked.
“Well,” I told him, “the light isn't the important thing. The thrown rod isn't the important thing. Not even the pigeon is the important thing. The important thing is that I had gotten where I was going all those days. Until I couldn't, of course.”
He was dubious. He pointed to the hole in the hood. He pointed to the corpse of the pigeon.
“Your car,” he said, “cannot move any more.”
“Nonsense,” I told him. “My car is on the march and it isn't going back.”
“It isn't going anywhere,” he carped.
This went on for about half an hour. Ordinarily I'd have been concerned about not having a car, and about how much the repairs would cost, and I might've even spared a moment to regret the loss of the pigeon, which really was a mess. But this was much better. I simply insisted that there was no problem here, over and over again, and then I walked home.
A neighbor greeted me on my front lawn.
“Thank God you're back,” he said. “There is a huge snapping turtle in your backyard.”
I looked over the fence, and he was right. The thing was big and lumpy and unsightly enough to be governor of California. I came back around the front.
“It's OK,” I told my neighbor. “It's gone.”
There was a loud champing sound behind me.
“My lord,” said my neighbor, “it's eating the picnic table.”
“No, it isn't,” I told him. “The picnic table is on the march and it isn't going back.”
“It's a pile of splinters,” said my neighbor, “and now the thing is after the fence.”
“It's doing no such thing,” I told him. “Look, there's a new section of fence right there.”
My neighbor had started backing away at this point.
“No,” I told him, “look: It's a great new section of fence, fresh paint and everything.”
The champing sound got louder. I think my neighbor was running now.
I went in the house and luxuriated in my newfound peace. It is liberating only to make one decision a day, and to stick to it, no matter what evidence arises to the contrary, no matter how many pigeons die or how many turtles attack. I felt great moral clarity about myself. I felt at one with the American people -- at least those American people who don't fix my car or live on either side of me. A couple of more days and this just might be a foreign policy or something. Then I can find someone to deal with the turtle, which is starting up on the gazebo out back.
Colin Powell's number is around here someplace.
Charles P. Pierce is a Boston Globe Magazine staff writer and a contributing writer for Esquire. He also appears regularly on National Public Radio.
