SOURCE: "Writing a Contemporary Column in 'The Spirit of Will Rogers': An Exercise in Practical Criticism," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1991, pp. 59-68.

Will Rogers had an enormous impact on the people of his time, but sometimes I wonder if he realized the tyranny he would have over the lives of a small group of scholars long after his death. The Will Rogers writing habit can become a sickness leading to otherwise unaccountable behavior! For example, in 1935, Tulsa lawyer David Milsten published a book entitled An Appreciation of Will Rogers, a volume which took a regional slant on the national humorist. Lacking anything new to say, but still infected by Will Rogers enthusiasm, Milsten brought out the same book under the title The Cherokee Kid: Life of Will Rogers in the 1970s, a volume timed to reach the bookstores at the moment Mr. Milsten was being considered for the Will Rogers State Commission. Scholars like Fred Roach—a fellow speaker—and I have been guilty of glutting the Will Rogers market. Professor Roach's dissertation is entitled Lariat in the Sun: The Story of Will Rogers; it is an analytical biography of the great Oklahoman. Since completing his dissertation in 1972, Roach has gone on to write a number of excellent interpretive articles. He has contacted the illness, carrying it as far East as Marrietta, Georgia.

I, too, suffer from Rogers fever. When I first appeared on the campus of Oklahoma State University, I was assigned for a quarter of my allotted "time" as a teacher to the Will Rogers Publication Project. From 1972 until a few months ago, the project edited and published The Writings of Will Rogers (22 volumes), a massive collection of previously published and unpublished works spanning Rogers career in print, radio, and film. Just last week, the bound copies of a comprehensive index to the series went on sale, officially bringing the project to a close. While with the project, I wrote a number of interpretive introductions to the volumes we printed: little did I know that I was contracting a lasting ailment. My first signs of Will Rogers fever occurred at national Popular Cultural Association meetings during the 1970s where I assembled films for evening screenings and chaired panels about Will Rogers. From 1972 to 1981, I plead guilty to publishing seven journal articles on the Oklahoman; in addition, I was the producer/director of a motion picture about Rogers which was entitled Will Rogers' 1920s: A Cowboy's Guide to the Times (1976). For a week or two, I thought about radio programs, but the fever subsided.

Strangers can only catch a glimpse of the etiology of the sickness. After watching my film one evening at a professional meeting in Boston, a scholar came up to me and very nearly identified the problem when she asked: "You call that work?" Professor Roach and I know what she was talking about: working with the Will Rogers materials is simply too much fun, an activity as difficult to avoid as the Braum's ice cream shops in Texas and Oklahoma towns. Not only are the materials a delight in themselves for the interdisciplinary scholar, the plenitude and organization of papers at the Will Rogers memorial invite the lazy researcher who likes to have all his documents in place—dated, labeled, filed, and indexed. This fever can be enervating.

In 1982, I devised what I thought would be an antidote for the sickness: I was invited by editor and scholar Thomas Inge to write one of the Greenwood Press books in popular culture and I became determined to pack everything I knew into the study. It would be my way of purging the system of the Will Rogers bug—or so I thought. Unfortunately, as interlibrary loans began pouring in, I could feel my fever rise. As I went back into the Will Rogers materials themselves, the thermometer continued to climb. Like all Will Rogers scholars when they are overtaken by the malady, I began to bring home the best of the bonmots encountered during the day: I was sure my wife could not resist hearing lesser known Rogersisms. Although my motives were healthy, I was passing on the sickness.

A FIRST ATTEMPT: "THE WILL ROGERS TIME MACHINE"

At some point, my wife suggested that the public might like to hear Will Rogers comment on issues of the 1980s. We talked about a series called "Will Roger Says," articles which were syndicated for three or four years during the 1970s. "Will Rogers Says" consisted of short paragraphs edited by Bryan Sterling, a New Yorker who has managed to live with Will Rogers fever by commercially exploiting the Rogers heritage in every conceivable way. The Bryan Sterling articles were very brief, direct quotes from Rogers. Local Newspapers subscribing to the series received a week's supply at a time and were asked to insert the short statements in coordination with daily headlines. In that way, the dated Rogers pieces would appear to address recent events.

We felt that the Sterling attempts were too short; they did not allow Rogers to do much more than mention a topic. Our alternative was based on a past vs present approach in a series called The Will Rogers Time Machine. Articles featured two vertical columns: on the left was historical and narrative material supplied by us to provide background for current issues; this column also described historical parallels. The right column contained an extended quotation form Will Rogers taken from his writings; obviously, the observations by Rogers were selected to bridge the gap between the "Then and Now" of the left column. Here are a few examples of the series we initially envisioned. The first installment addresses the issue of fast foods, a topic which seems to be of constant concern to Americans.

The Will Rogers Time Machine Turns to Fast Foods

Now:

In 1982, there is an increasing awareness of the deficiencies of fast foods. Not only are they poor sources of nutrition, their connection with the automobile links them to a pervasive rootlessness in our society.

Then:

During the 1920s, an era of infatuation with technological progress, Will Rogers observed that the fast food craze—then focused on the hamburger—and dependence on the automobile were developments which would not be entirely good for American culture.

Rogers:

Give an American a one piece bathing suit, a hamburger, and five gallons of gas, and they are just as tickled as a movie star with a new divorce.

As with all other articles in the series, there are three components: "Now," "Then," and "Rogers." Our thought was that the reader—once adapted to the layout of the series—could let his eye travel to any of these items in a sequence of his choice. Some might plod through the offering from "now" to "then" to "Rogers" in the obvious sequence; on the other hand, the Rogers fan might reverse the order and go immediately to Rogers and then trail back to either or both of the historical framing elements. He could glean as much entertainment and information as wanted on any particular day. Serious readers could muse over the full triad. We felt that the plan was clearly a substantive improvement over the Brian Sterling snippets.

The recent resignation of Secretary of the Interior James Watt made a second example especially pertinent:

The Will Rogers Time Machine Turns to Conservation

Now:

The fate of wilderness areas has been endangered by a combination of forces to include our dependence on foreign oil, and some observers would add, our dependence upon Secretary Watt for Conservation administration.

Then:

Will Rogers regretted the onrush of a civilization which quickly boxed up the open plains of Oklahoma during his youth. For him, the passing of frontier life and values was a fact, not a metaphor.

Rogers:

We are going at top speed, because we are using all our natural resources as fast as we can. If we want to build something out of wood, all we got to do is go cut down a tree and build it. We didn't have to plant the tree. Nature did that before we come. Suppose we couldn't build something out of wood till we found a tree that we had purposely planted for the use. Say, we never would get it built … We are certainly setting pretty right now. But when our resources run out, if we can still be ahead of other nations then will be the time to brag; then we can show whether we are really superior.

Like other clusters in our series, this evocation of national concern for the environment does justice to the need for historical perspective on Rogers' work while allowing him to speak at length. Not everything Will Rogers said rang with profundity, but the combined poetry and prophesy of this quotation gives focus to both the contemporary and the historical dimensions of a headline issue.

You are wondering: "What happened to their first experiment in Will Rogers journalism?" We prepared and submitted a series of articles for consideration by local editors and their syndicate. Unfortunately we chose the wrong editor at the Stillwater News Press to be our contact: We later learned that he was a family member who was brought on staff because he could perform no useful work elsewhere! After fifteen months, we are still waiting for a response to our experiment with the Will Rogers Time Machine. When our slow-moving Stillwater newspaperman finally replies, I suspect we will be told that the The Will Rogers Time Machine takes up too much space and is didactic. He and the syndicate will find the quick-and-dirty approach of Bryan Sterling sufficient. Naturally, we feel that such low standards will be an insult to the readers of his paper and to the Will Rogers tradition.

A SECOND ATTEMPT: "THE SPIRIT OF WILL ROGERS"

From our point of view, the Time Machine project had a very specific deficiency: producing the article was too much like work; the creative process lacked spontaneity and verve, the spirit of Will Rogers. As we talked about alternative strategies, we discovered that we were not so much interested in celebrating the great Oklahoman as tapping the sense of play and transcendence radiated by a typical Rogers article or radio program or film. Driven by the Will Rogers fever, we devised a more cheerful approach: we would ignore the actual words of Will Rogers; we would not attempt to put current issues into historical perspective. Instead, we would isolate some of the devices of American humor which Rogers employed and then apply them ourselves to recent events, issues, and people in the news. The notion combined the fever's delirium and delight: we would satirize our own times through the persona of Will Rogers! We would vicariously participate in The Spirit of Will Rogers rather than attempt to exhume it from a dead past.

Our first step toward entering The Spirit of Will Rogers was to agree upon appropriate rhetorical devices. There is an entire library of books on American humor to which interested readers can turn for a detailed itemization of comic devices characteristically employed by American humorists from Benjamin Franklin to Art Buchwald. As practitioners, we singled out a limited number of devices for our use. (The fact that our articles were written during the cocktail hour further encouraged a certain lack of academic rigor.) First, we planned to use the staple Will Rogers device of the naive innocent who claims to "know" only what he reads in the papers. What Rogers meant by the famous introductory line was that he had difficulty—as an innocent—deciphering the goodness and purpose of much in the news. So many of Will Rogers' articles explore the stupidity of public actions in the light of common sense. The humor of his observations was the result of pondering the distance between his unaffected outlook and the arcane values of men and women in the public view. For the Rogers persona, making sense out of the news was no easy feat. Supporting the naive innocent perspective would be a reference in every article to an actual event in Will Rogers' life: not only would such an allusion add authenticity to our fabricated observations, it would also underscore the "then and now" theme we had attempted in our previous venture, The Will Rogers Time Machine. Within this new context, the old would be identified as being healthy, useful, appropriate while the new was misled, distorted, deviating from the norm. Just as Will Rogers accentuated his Oklahoma heritage to call developments of an urbanizing and industrializing America into question, we would constantly use a nostalgic view of the past to satirize the present.

Whenever possible, we would attempt to discuss abstract issues through particular images. Looking back at the representative Will Rogers Time Machine article … , notice how Rogers, in discussing American rootlessness, does not invoke high level abstractions. Instead, he concentrates on particular images: the one piece bathing suit, the hamburger, the gasoline, the movie star with a divorce. These particular images collide to evoke abstractions in the mind of the reader. Through them Will Rogers turns a serious comment about American society into a fast-paced comic montage. Whenever possible, we vowed to follow the same poetic technique. Like Rogers, we would not always go for the obvious particular image: note in the example already cited that Rogers does not mention the automobile or a nation on wheels—two obvious connections; instead, he selects images which are on the periphery of the subject and then moves them toward the center. The effect is to confuse and to tickle the reader with just a bit of irrelevance. We, too, would seek particulars off the beaten track. (For examples of this technique, see the discussions of "Washington hair-splitting"… and the article on "vipertuperation" … [that follow].)

Word play would be as important for us as for the Oklahoman. Although Rogers could write perfectly grammatical letters to family and friends, he was prone to illiterate usage whenever such ignorance had rhetorical value; it seemed silly for us to not exploit the device. Whenever useful, the Rogers persona speaks ungrammatically. In addition, puns were a constant part of the Will Rogers' written and oral humor—not to mention their revered place in the stock-and-trade of all American folk humorists. The pun could help us in a number of ways: the innocent persona could emphasize his confusion with modern ways through his inability to comprehend modern usage; and from our point of view, the pun could serve as a valuable tool for quick transitions from one subject to another. Finally, for those of us who get into the spirit of Will Rogers, there is a special use for the pun: it gives a sense of power in which words become more important than the things they signify. To manipulate the words gives a brief sense of superiority over the terrors of modern life which they describe. It seems clear that one of the rewards for the Jazz Age and Depression era reader of Will Rogers was the way in which Rogers could rope and tackle even the biggest issue with his verbal lasso. If insight was not always the reward of a Will Rogers article, relaxation of tension was an inevitable by-product. People could go back to the news with some sense that the national spirit—as articulated by Will Rogers—was sturdy enough to laugh off difficulties. Writing The Spirit of Will Rogers columns gave us, the writers, a sense of relief; we hoped that in using the mask of the wise innocent and by word manipulations we could pass that sense of delight and laughter along to readers.

Our final goal was to be challenging with allusions. We hoped to make readers think; if possible, we wanted them to leave the articles with a question or two about historical references. This goal ran directly counter to the strategy of the previous didactic series The Will Rogers Time Machine. Somehow, the notion of focusing on particulars, shifting from one topic to another quickly by means of puns encouraged a dimension of mystery. The voice of our persona would be the voice of a rural clown set loose in an urban world, but the clown would be a wise innocent. There would be knowledge hidden in the hayseed, and this sense of wisdom is as important as play for those who know the true "Spirit of Will Rogers."

The format of the articles reinforced the themes we wanted to stress. At the upper-left, a small graphic depicts Will Rogers dressed in chaps, wearing a cowboy hat, and seated at a portable typewriter—presumably churning out a daily article (like the one below) between scenes on a Hollywood set or between shows at Ziegfeld's Follies. Each article was surrounded with a border which resembled rope, emphasizing the cowboy tradition and adding to the frontier flavor. Finally, each article would be given a closing which would emphasize the point of view of the particular piece: in speaking of taxes, the Rogers persona closes for the consumer; when the subject is campaign slogans, he calls himself a "Country Chairman," alluding to a very funny film made by Rogers in 1935. Each detail added to the message of the body of the article.

Some specific examples from The Spirit of Will Rogers series will clarify the generalizations. Here is an article which we wrote during the White House battle of the barbers in 1982:

ON WASHINGTON HAIR-SPLITTING

All I know is what I read in the papers and this White House barber business beats academics at splitting hairs. Now I don't mind getting myself shorn 'til my ears start itchin', and the ole boy they had there did my kind of cut.

Of course, nowadays, there's this unisects stuff, which confuses me. Is it a new religion or somethin'? Is it a tire company? Does it mean that everyone will do his own part?

If Mr. Stockman spent more time with his calculator and less time with the blow dryer, he probably wouldn't have ended up in The Atlantic. The President never comes in for personal business—he always asks for budget cuts. The armed services look mighty ragged lately: they seem to have gone to the shag.

Yours from the heir apparent, The Spirit of Will Rogers

Following a device of Will Rogers, the article focuses upon a trend in style, but trips over a number of significant political and economic matters—seemingly by accident. The imagery unifying the article relates to a controversy which had recently come to a "head" in the White House: the proprietor of the barber shop had fired a husband/wife styling team. Newspapers carried the story and more than one network aired indepth, investigative reports, to include comments from White House advisors and—of course—from the disgruntled couple as they carried their blow dryers off the White House grounds. It was the kind of squabble which Will Rogers loved to exploit.

Paragraph one of our article begins with the standard opening, a statement which propels the persona into events which he cannot quite understand. Since the immediate audience for the articles consisted of academics, we introduced a pun about "splitting hairs" and let the jibe fall on intellectuals. Rogers then talks of being "shorn" the way animals would be cropped and speaks in the diction of country bumpkin. He sides—humorously—with the proprietor of the shop and makes it clear that he has no sympathy for new trends in not-so-masculine coiffeur.

In paragraph two, confusion continues. Poor Rogers does not know how to spell "unisex." In a desperate attempt at phonetics, he writes "unisects" and then stumbles over possible meanings. As he struggles for clarity, he indirectly plays with such notions as the Unification Church, and the Uniroyal Tire Company. He then injects the idea of social responsibility, wondering if everybody is doing "his part."

David Stockman was one of the White House advisors interviewed for a network story on the hair affair. Rogers pounces on this controversial figure to ridicule a near-fatal attraction to media. Focusing on the particular image of a blow dryer, rather than uttering an abstraction such as "conceit" or "vanity," Rogers asserts that internal weakness invited the infamous expose of Stockman in The Atlantic Monthly. The negative aspect of the scandal is emphasized by wording the description so that "the Atlantic" is a pun: we mean both that he almost got thrown in the ocean and that the story appeared in a Boston-based magazine. Naturally, the idea of the Reagan Administration's budget director led to a consideration of the budget cuts that are at the heart of Reaganomics.

Ronald Reagan's budgetary policies are introduced by particular images. The president is described as so busy that he only has time for the barber to work on "budget cuts." Many people feel that President Reagan's emphasis on military spending is in hypocritical contradiction with his promise to heal the economy. The military—who should be interested in close-cropped hair—are at first shown in a negative light: they are ragged; their hair is too long. Rogers then explains this anomaly in a particular image—the shag—to stress that it is unnatural for the military not to exercise the same fiscal responsibility while others get their "cuts." The hair images serve as a braid threading together a number of topics, all of which focus on the absurdities of life inside the Washington beltway.

By signing the article from the "heir apparent," Rogers indicates that he is the American spirit of common sense ready to take over if things get too unbalanced next to the Potomac. However silly our elected officials become, Rogers assures us that there is always a reservoir of good sense and decency in the nation to counterbalance mistakes made in Washington. In the days of Will Rogers, such a message inspired confidence as well as laughter; in our own time of centralized government and instant communications, we hoped to convey a similar sense of transcendent play.

Perhaps because we wrote the articles in the evening just before dinner, one of our favorite efforts deals with the novelty of microwave ovens. In this case, the Oklahoma cowboy shows his perplexity and confusion in connection with a technological revolution.

The first paragraph follows Rogers' practice of twisting the lead "all I know is what I read in the papers" to suit each novel situation—in this case, the appearance of microwave ovens as a standard offering of appliance stores.

In paragraph two, the old days are pictured in a poetic way. The home kitchen and smokehouse are depicted as being in Oologah—Rogers' actual birth place—rather than in Claremore—which he usually cited as his hometown. The Indian name gives a frontier flavor, as do references to ribs and spices—the Westerner's favorite fare. The reference to the fire at Will Rogers' sister's home is a factual one, lending authority to the persona; however, the remark about aroma is more geared to nostalgia than factual accuracy. Obviously, sister Maud never considered such compensations at the time of the accident!

The third paragraph brings the innocent into conflict with change. He mourns the passing of real cooking, the slow way: food colors and textures are often lost in the electronic era; the name "TV dinner" frustrates him, but there is wisdom in describing them as products of a machine-oriented society; finally, he is right in guessing that the ritual of family meals has been further disrupted by the ease with which leftovers can be recycled for individual consumption. Our persona's confusion about clock mechanisms on microwaves further underscores novelty. Is the machine a clock or is it an oven? The closing for the article comes back to primary ingredients of cooking which a cowboy could recognize: fire and smoke. There may be discomfort in such an arrangement, but an open fire is closer to the real things in life.

This article resembles a great number of pieces which Rogers produced—especially during the 1920s. As a social observer interested in values as well as politics and economics, Rogers felt compelled to count the potential loss associated with every new gadget. When the Depression increased in severity during the 1930s, Rogers reminded Americans that they had too blithely accepted technological innovations without exploring their human impact.

ON MICROWAVE OVENS

All I know is what I see in appliance stores and these microwave ovens have me stumped.

In our kitchen back in Oolagah, nothing was more memorable than the aroma of dinner cooking through the day—beans, ribs and sauces. My sister's smokehouse once set fire to her home, but the aroma almost made up for the damages.

Nowadays, people have these microwaves, but what have they lost? It will cook your roast, but no one will eat it because it's not brown. The only square meal will be a TV dinner, and who eats TVs for dinner? It makes leftovers so good, people have gone for years without a second meal! In the old days, people said: "Where there's smoke, there's fire." Nowadays, they say: "Where there's a skittish pacemaker, there's a microwave."

Golly, I don't know if I'm resetting my clock or cooking leftover chili.

Yours by the campfire, smoke and all, In the Spirit of Will Rogers

Some of the articles, like the one dealing with campaign slogans, are examples of pure word play:

ON CAMPAIGN SLOGANS

All I know is that there is an election coming up next year and everybody is working on slogans.

Back in the 1920s, President Coolidge said he did not choose to run. He knew the flavor would run out after 1928. So "Life Magazine" put me up as the "bunkless candidate"—by which they meant I told the truth, not that I didn't have a place to sleep.

Politicians today have a tough job. Those who got caught in the Abscam scandle better ask for a fair sheik.

Gay congressmen will have to take a lesson from the old organist, don't turn to the wrong page.

If a congressman orders a coke, it better be from a vending machine.

Now that we've all had a long class on supply-side economics, we can go on to other matters; it won't be necessary to "stay the course."

I am for slogans with a down-home flavor. My kind of politician would say, "If I do any dipping while in office, it will be skinny dipping."

Your County Chairman, The Spirit of Will Rogers

After a standard twist of the "all I know … lead, the article refers to a 1928 campaign in which Life Magazine—then a publication specializing in satire—supported Will Rogers for president. "Bunk" was a popular word in the 1920s—perhaps because it was in such abundance—and Rogers was proclaimed as a "bunkless" candidate who would speak his mind on major issues. The whole effort resulted in some of the most delightful writing in the Will Rogers canon. The remainder of our article is a survey of the early 1983 political scene, stressing embarrassing revelations which politicians will have to cover over with flowery rhetoric. Surveyed are "abscam" defendants; congressmen with kinky sexual histories—alas, we did not know at the time that one was Congressman Studs—or drug records; finally, there is word play in connection with the then pro-Reagan motto about "staying the course."

As it opens, so the article closes with references to earlier, simpler behavior patterns. Cowboys live in bunkhouses where there is no need to be concerned with duplicity. Even country politicians—as Will Rogers and Steppin' Fetchit demonstrate in their film County Chairman (1935)—cannot go too far from the straight and narrow. Their efforts at political manipulation are harmless because power is not centralized and there is no treasury to rob. For such office holders, skinny dipping is the only kind of dipping. Framed by rural values, the article tries to take some of the sting out of recent examples of public corruption, offering the consolation that these examples of malfeasance are exceptions to, not the norm of, congressional behavior.

CONCLUSION

The articles in our 1982-1983 series addressed a number of national issues, always with the Will Rogers touch. The president's unsuccessful attempt to boycott the Siberian pipeline was explored, stressing the shameful haste with which our NATO allies rushed to aid the Soviets. The impact of a new gas tax on truckers was considered against the background of concurrent Congressional pay raises. Will Rogers proposed his own "Cowboy Diet" to compete with the veritable feast of offerings to overweight Americans, satirizing along the way the Beverly Hills Plan, the Richard Simmons Diet, and the near-fatal Scarsdale approach. The crisis of Social Security was discussed, with Rogers suggesting a quick measure to help the old: he proposed that the federal government nationalize McDonald's and launch a "mac attack" on hunger among the elderly. The influence of motion pictures—always a concern of Will Rogers—was assayed in connection with the impact of Ghandi on an impressionable sailor who refused to wear her uniform after seeing the cinematic epic. Local and regional matters recognizable to national readers were also exploited for humor and insight.

Our series The Spirit of Will Rogers came to a close when The Daily O'Collegian (our student newspaper) ceased publication for the spring of 1983. We mailed out bound copies of our articles to at least twelve syndicates in the Middle West, the East, and the West. Over the summer, rejections trickled back, flooding the plains with disappointment. No one seemed to share our interest in communing with The Spirit of Will Rogers. The rejections forced us to reconsider the project, why we enjoyed it while others found so little savor.

Personal factors account for our special attraction to the Will Rogers project. Both of us are from Republican families once dominant in our home towns, but now politically inactive. As Richard Hofstadter has pointed out in The Age of Reform (1955), victims of status revolutions often exaggerate past virtues as a result of unhappiness with present realities. During his own time, Will Rogers' social commentary may have had such an appeal for white, middle-class Americans who typically subscribed to the Saturday Evening Post, and who typically suspected that unfriendly changes were in motion. In any case, it was certainly one of our delights in The Spirit of Will Rogers to reject the present in preference for an idealized past. Even if that past was a product of our creation, we needed it as a standard to measure a fallen present. In the era of The Preppy Handbook, the ploy did not help us with distribution and syndication. I suspect that there are very few editors nowadays who long for the decades when WASPS were in flower!

Certainly one of the pleasures of a typical Will Rogers article—and we hoped of our Spirit of Will Rogers series—was the delight in word play, but audiences seemed unwilling to be entertained by our verbal wit. We consciously imitated the Rogers technique of addressing problems through verbal manipulation—either through puns or some other form of linguistic misunderstanding which might require a series of verbal manipulations to attain clarification. Our article on the Washington snake incident of April, 1983 highlights both the joys of word play for us and the difficulties in reaching a contemporary audience:

ON RECENT HISTORY

All I know is what I read in The Washington Post and I hear two snakes got out of the zoo the other night.

Slithered into a trash bag and went for a bus ride. When the kid who took them was bit, they had to send back to my home state, Oklahoma, for antivenum syrum.

Back in the 1920s that was my job, to take the poison out of the political system, to turn congressional vipers into wet noodles. You know a laugh can neutralize lots of hissing.

This kid in Washington had the right idea. Maybe congressmen would understand the current recession better if they got out of their cages and rode in buses like ordinary folk. Maybe they'd stop snapping at the president so much. Let him send through programs without sharpening their fangs on 'em. In these tough times, we need cooperation in our system, not all this snake oil business.

Yours for common sense instead of vipertuperation The Spirit of Will Rogers

The stolen snake story was given special attention in Oklahoma because our state supplied the anti-venom vaccine used to save the young Washington boy. From our point of view, the occasion served as a basis for an extended metaphor, with hints of the Garden of Eden, the devil, and opportunities for puns.

In the third paragraph, Rogers compares himself to the vaccine in that he took upon himself the job of neutralizing venomous national debates. There are a host of testimonials by contemporaries of Will Rogers to substantiate such a claim: his humor did ridicule excesses without provoking anger; his daily and weekly articles on current events boosted national morale, encouraging Americans to work together in spite of differences.

The fourth paragraph continues the snake metaphor, but twists and turns to subjects such as the recession, the distance between our representatives and real Americans who use mass transit, and the unnecessary fractiousness which inhibits important government action in hard times. The overall effect of the final paragraph is to ridicule myopic officials who use their natural reflex to substitute debate for action.

The article closes with a meaningful pun. Throughout, we condemn the vituperation of Washington, but Rogers confuses the word with the word for snakes. We were especially pleased with the overall scheme of the article because it took peripheral news and made it a basis for general statements. Summing up the issues in the pun "vipertuperation" seemed to us to be a masterstroke. We had given the article all of the Rogers touches: a depth of historical awareness, contemporary insight, and a sense of play.

We were disappointed that sample audiences could not concur with our judgment. Our undergraduates claimed that they could not understand the references, even when they had seen and heard the snake story previously on the nightly news. Always wary of the printed word, colleagues in the English Department studiously ignored the articles; for them, they did not exist. The only genuine response came from the English building's janitor and his wife who came by our offices after working hours. And then there was the fourth grade child of our medievalist: he enjoyed the articles. As a result of indifference by our readers, we have temporarily ceased our efforts.

We are now trying to cure ourselves of Will Rogers fever. We make an effort not to mention his name or to invoke his gift of laughter during the evening news, no matter how depressing or absurd the reports. We have also vowed not to attempt any new Will Rogers projects—that is, after we finish our long-planned radio series and after we complete the film project which came to mind just the other day.