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Three Point Oh

Pat Dixon

(for Barb)

    Years from now, historians may try to piece together the causes for the Great Academic Burnings of the early Twenty-first Century. I doubt that any of them will get the true origin right: a beer-inspired practical joke played by Betty and Veronica Wright on Sheldon Drescher, a math professor who insulted one of them by e-mail rather than return three overdue mystery novels.
    Since you’ve asked me for a tour, let me tell you a little bit about it as we stroll around the rubble of my own university—totally off the record, of course.
    Betty and Veronica are a pair of twins—identical twins whom none of us has ever been able to tell apart. Their natural hair color is auburn, I think, though the one called Betty wore a long blonde wig to work in the library of our little university, while the one called Veronica wore a long black wig to work in the Music Department. On any given day we never knew which one was wearing which wig since they both had master’s degrees in Library Science and Music Education. Only in the evenings after work did any of us ever think we knew who was really who as we hoisted our pints with them at our favorite local tavern.
    Last February 28th, Sheldon (“Don’t call me Shelley!”) Drescher was informed by Betty, whichever was working as a librarian then, that the Josephine Tey mysteries he’d checked out the previous summer were almost eight months late in getting back in circulation and that another “patron” has requested one of them, the one about the supposed innocence of Richard the Third, for use in a Shakespeare class. According to Betty, it was his fifth notice, and Drescher had e-mailed her an obscene reply. She showed us all his message, which read something like “Why don’t you stop pressuring me with your demands, Goldielocks! We men with Ph.D.s have real work to do, and I’ll read these goddamn mystery books at my own pace and bring ‘em back when I’m done with ‘em. Till then, why don’t you just sneak down to the Rare Books Room and fondle the spines of a few good authors—male and female! Or maybe sneak ten or twelve of ‘em home for you and your sister, so you girls can curl up together in your bed with ‘em for a really great time tonight!”
    I swear, two or three of us thought Drescher’s note was moderately funny, though we knew better than to let on such to the Wright twins. Veronica, or whichever was wearing the black wig, read that note aloud and joined her sister in expressing outrage, reinforcing that feeling and probably increasing its intensity to about the fifth power. ‘Twas then that the need for a counter-attack was seen by the Sisters Wright, and I confess now that I was partly instrumental in the devising of that plan. At the time it truly seemed like a funny thing to me and everyone else who was there.
    For convenience here I’ll just refer to the one wearing the blonde wig as Betty and the one in the black wig as Veronica, whatever the reality may be. In any case, they were never known to disagree on any topic, and they were often known to complete each other’s sentences—or even to say the same thing at the same moment.
    So, after Veronica stated that Sheldon had been insulting to her on several occasions when she had reminded him of overdue books, Betty and she turned to the six of us men who were drinking with them and asked what we would do to get back at a guy like him. This demanded serious consideration, so we called the waitress over and asked for a couple of full pitchers, and we all refilled our mugs and gave it some thought.
    Kenny Calabrese, a philosophy professor with a weight problem, was the first to make a suggestion: “Hit Drescher where he lives—somehow. If he has a pet, petnap it and hold it for ransom—or somethin’.”
    Roger Ludgrin, our track coach, picked up on this and said, “Or kill it as a lesson to him.” And then he laughed so much he spilled some suds on himself—and me.
    Chester Vonk, an English prof who was vying for the title of most despised college teacher in all of Kansas, laughed and said that Drescher didn’t have any pets—or even any family anymore, since Mrs. Drescher had run off to Louisiana with a chemistry professor four years ago.
    Alex Hendricks, a chemistry professor who had known of the affair in its early stages, nodded and said nothing.
    I, with my big mouth, said, “Why not discredit him somehow concerning math? That would really hurt him where his living comes from, even if it don’t hurt him where he lives!”
    And then Charlie Malfitano, our token math buddy, said that would be hard to do but would be well worth the effort.
    One hour and four more pitchers later, we determined by process of elimination that we’d have to use a tried and true political technique: an outright lie about something Sheldon Drescher had said or done pertaining to math—something that would really piss off people who mattered, who had great influence with the powers that run the university, and who were dumb as hell. Since we were living in Kansas, that wasn’t going to be difficult at all, we decided as we ordered yet another couple of pitchers.
    “What,” said Veronica, looking at me I thought, “was the dumbest thing you’ve known Kansans to get worked up about in recent memory?”
    As I opened my mouth to begin thinking as I talked, Alex jumped in and shouted, “Evolution! They got really pissed about people teaching evolution instead of the Bible account—Creationism or Cretinism or something.” He began to snicker and was joined by nearly all of us.
    Kenny, the oldest of us, added his perspective: “Back in the late ‘60s when the state first made plans to join the rest of the country with Daylight Saving Time, the papers and TV and radio shows here were full of folks who were scared spitless about their crops failing and livestock losing weight or not producing milk—or whatever. It seems that nearly everyone in Kansas back then thought the government was going to somehow speed up the world at night and slow it down during the day so we’d have an extra hour of daylight, which meant we’d have an hour less of night!”
    Kenny, who was the only one of us actually born and raised in Kansas, could speak with more authority about what had taken place back then. We’d heard him tell this story at least seven times before, usually in practically the same words, but it was one we all liked, and nobody could tell it better than Kenny. Because he’d lived it.
    “The Lawrence Journal-World,” he said, “carried a letter from my own seventh-grade teacher, I remember, saying that we’d all have to go to bed an hour earlier so that we wouldn’t be gypped out of our sleep by the government. This was an ‘educated’ woman, mind you. She taught us math and geography and history, along with every other thing we needed to succeed in life. She had a master’s degree plus forty or fifty hours of additional graduate credits that put her at the top of the school’s pay scale!”
    Holding up his left palm to indicate he still had the floor, Kenny filled his mug again, as did those of us who were not in the process of emptying our mugs during his pause.
    “The funniest thing to me as a kid back then,” he continued, “was when my local church minister preached a sermon against us changing our clocks called ‘Daylight Saving Time? What About the Lord’s Creatures?’ It was announced a week in advance and was headlined on a big banner outside our church. I think we had more people in church that Sunday than we’d ever had before or since. Anyhow, ol’ Reverend Bobby Joe Jump spoke of the arrogance of modern science, which he was against. An’ he asked us all to consider the lilies of the field, which would not be able to grow properly with too much sunshine—properly according to the Lord’s plan, that is. An’ how the sparrows and hawks and groundhogs wouldn’t know when to get up, etcetera, as in ‘There’s a time to do X, and a time to do Y, and a time . . . .’ Well, you get picture. ‘A time to do Z’ or whatever the critters all do. That’s the Lord’s critters, o’ course.”
    Kenny drank his mug down and reached for the closest pitcher again.
    So I said, “Why not tie ol’ Don’t-Call-Me-Shelley in with dissing the Lord or the Lord’s plan somehow? It should be as easy as pie to think up some way.”
    And that’s when Betty—or Veronica, for they both began to speak at once—said, “As easy as three point one four one five nine etcetera, etcetera, etcetera pi!”
    And her sister added, “‘Cause God’s pi is three. Three point oh. Even. No loose ends. As in the three-point-oh Trinity. No arrogant secular Satan-derived raggedly unrepeating decimal. None. Just three point oh oh oh oh.”
    And so it began. In the next hour and the next five pitchers or so, despite “down time” in the rest rooms, we drafted up a letter that would be sent to our local Strong City Gazette and to all of the local preachers for twenty-five miles around. If that didn’t roast ol’ Shell’s nuts, then we didn’t know our neighbors!
    The outcome was as we predicted. The letter appeared, denouncing Shell as a “Godless Atheist” Ph.D. from “back East” who taught anti-Bible material about the value of pi being other than an even, Godly three point oh in his university math courses, thus endangering the immortal souls of “all our innocent, God-fearing sons and daughters.” Which was partly a joke because most of ‘em went away to college just to have a chance to party at their folks’ expense—or that of the taxpayers.
    Reaction was swift. Thousands of indignant phone calls and letters reached our university president’s office during that next week, and hundreds of people, most of them with no kids in college, made a pilgrimage to campus to protest the employment of this “Godless Atheist” by the taxpayers of Kansas—the God-Fearing taxpayers of Kansas. And ol’ Shell found his office blockaded by them. And his classrooms. And his car was “keyed” and spray-painted with crosses and swastikas and obscenities, and his home was similarly decorated, and both had their windows smashed and their sides and roofs dented in with bricks and/or cinderblocks. And a cross was burned on his front lawn while the police and fire department stood by and looked on.
    Our peerless president cluelessly issued a statement that pi had nothing to do with the Bible or God, per se, and he soon found himself being denounced in the press, the pulpit, and in person. His own office and home and car came under attack, and his ol’ hound dog somehow vanished and was suspected to be the one that was found burned on a cross in the center of campus the following Sunday.
    Well, the rest, as they will say, is history. Everyone pretty much knows it. Papers and TV stations in Kansas City, Kansas, picked up the story and ran with it—quickly followed by those in Lebo, Topeka, Emporia, Wichita, Goodland, and Fort Hays.
    For ol’ Strong City U, it was too late—just as it was, within a couple of weeks, for a half dozen of our other private institutions of higher learning. Our library, which is now those twisted girders with the melted glass that you can see behind those four scorched cottonwoods, our recently renovated red-brick classrooms and department buildings there and there and there, our sixty-three-year-old admin building over here, our student rec center, and even our new gymnasium with an indoor pool—all were burned to ironic “shells” (no pun intended) which we’ll never repair or replace.
    I admit I was freaked out the night it happened. It was like a scene from an old Frankenstein movie when a couple thousand men, women, and children drove onto campus in vans, SUVs, and pickups and then, with torches and cans of gasoline, walked from building to building chanting, “Vengeance is mine! I am His instrument!”
    Ol’ Dean Hazelwood, who’s been retired for over twenty years, came out of his house over on the next block there to watch it all. Just before some young woman with a baseball bat whacked him across his head, he was telling me and his wife that the closest thing to this was the violence he’d seen during the Vietnam War.
    He said that way back in ‘66 a small bunch of about forty anti-war gals and guys, chiefly our students, announced that they were going to picket the weekly ROTC parades at our football stadium. He said they no sooner got lined up for their first “protest,” wearing little black armbands and holding “Stop the Killing” signs, than fifty or sixty pickups from the town and nearby parts plowed through their ranks. About a hundred and fifty righteous men and women, all bearing witness with axe handles and mattock handles issued to them by Phelps Hardware Store, got out of the trucks and laid into those “Godless Un-American Pinkos” with a joyful will an’ put ‘em all in the hospital. Of course, as Hazelwood himself said just before he got smacked, that was as nothin’ compared to the current uproar.
    As you can see on that brick wall over there, one of the happy torch-bearers spray-painted a quote from The Old Farmer’s Almanac or somewhere—”Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap.” Notice it’s a sexist remark? When I see Veronica and/or Betty again, I think I’ll point that out. And beside it another one of ‘em with a paint brush and a more meteorological mindset has picked up on that sowing theme, correcting it to show that the ante has been raised a bit—“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”
    Anyway, our three state universities that tried using reality-based secular explanations to defend pi as an unending number all sustained extensive incendiary impairment, while the three that defended it as “unending, the same way that God Himself is eternal” were spared or suffered just minimal damage. Most private colleges and universities prudently took the position that they now realized pi is exactly three point oh and that this is how they will teach it from now till Judgment Day.
    Of course, this witch-hunt rapidly spread to all of the other forty-nine states, though less seriously so on either coast. By the end of the second week, the U.S. Attorney General fully supported the new value of pi, as did our national president. The Congressional Record shows that on April 1st the party in power passed new legislation making three point oh the official U.S. standard for pi in all schools and businesses. Thankfully, this law defused the problem, and, for the most part, life across the nation returned to its normal violence and craziness.
    Well, of course we had succeeded, and Sheldon Drescher did lose his job because of what we did—but then so did we. And with academic jobs being so scarce these days, we’re lucky we can find plenty of aluminum beer cans along the highways.



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