LETTERS FROM HOME: MIRACLES ALL OVER THE TOWN

Dec. 8, 1994

Miracles

all over

the town

Dear Leslie,

Cape Girardeau is all dolled up for the holidays. We drove through one of the county parks filled with Christmas displays on the night it opened and hit an L.A.-style traffic jam. A bus tour of the best house decorations in the city begins this weekend. Some are stupendous, a few ostentatious, but most simply touch you with their yearning to make Christmas magical.

Grumbling as he worked on the hundredth assembly-required Christmas gift of his life, this one for a granddaughter, my dad reminded me of a Robin Hood castle I'd received for Christmas as a boy. There were so many parts -- all magically vanished now -- that the job took him nearly all night. Half an hour after he finished and went to bed, I was up playing with it. In the dark.

I remember being overwhelmed by the castle's intricacy, the archers and the catapults, the working draw bridge and the turrets with their flags. It created its own little world, and I was God. Unless it was time for breakfast.

It's easy to remember but hard to reclaim that kind of excitement. We do our best with decorations and "Miracle on 34th Street," when what we want is miracles all over town.

DC and I have different approaches to Christmas. She does her best to give people what they want, and I presume to give them what they need. Especially if it's frivolous.

Her way attempts to eliminate disappointment, mine courts it in the belief that the magic of Christmas is hidden in the unknown, in the inexplicability of miracles.

We don't know what God is, hard as we try to name it and frame it in stained glass and give it a gender. We don't know if joy or sorrow are on tomorrow's menu. Most of the time it's just something in between, like ham and beans. But we need to believe, even if it's in the illusion that we do know all the answers.

Which brings to mind the subject of a current controversy in Cape Girardeau -- Rush Limbaugh. You know he's a native. So the Convention and Visitors Bureau has decided to put billboards outside town proclaiming the fact. A bus will take tourists past the hospital where he was born and the radio station where he got his start.

At the end of the 20th century, we mythologize and deify our saints on the spot, and market them before they evaporate.

Conservatives who love Rush Limbaugh think this should have been done years ago. The people who loath him are pained that the city is spending $18,000 to promote its connection to the man.

And the small group of people who are neutral look at the whole thing pragmatically. As in, "Why shouldn't we promote him if it'll bring in tourists?"

By that logic, of course, Milwaukee has a gold mine in Jeffrey Dahmer. I like my examples extreme.

Truth is, Rush Limbaugh's fans venerate him, and not just here. At the tourist information office in Garberville, I'd ask visitors where they were from, and some asked me back. Invariably, they'd heard of Cape Girardeau because it's Rush Limbaugh's hometown. They know all about it, and especially about his beloved mother and grandfather.

I'm touched by that, too.

It's the old question of whose ox is or isn't being gored. Conservatives would be screaming if Limbaugh were some liberal icon getting the billboard treatment. Trouble is, there are no liberal icons left.

See, he told you so.

Love, Sam