My co-interns and I played rock, paper, scissors for the media tickets to this year’s Giller Prize readings at the International Festival of Authors. I lost. So I went to the Rock, Paper, Scissors Championships instead. Then the next day, I went to watch Sarah Vowell discuss her new book, The Wordy Shipmates, and how the founding of America was influenced by Calvinist ideas of predestination. Coincidence?
“Rock, Paper, Scissors is not a game of chance,” one of the Founding Fathers of the World RPS Society, Graham Walker, tells me, in the cavernous back room of the brewery where the championships are being held. Mathematically speaking, he’s right. In a coin-toss, the results are random: there is a fifty-fifty chance of heads or tails, and each flip of the quarter is an independent event. Even if the last hundred times you flipped the coin, it came up tails, on the hundred-and-first flip the odds are still fifty-fifty. It’s senseless. Meaningless. Non-narrative.
RPS, on the other hand, is a system governed by choices. Human beings, as anyone who studies probability knows, are incapable of generating random sequences. Our deepest brain structure won’t allow it. Like the decision to gather up the family and sail to the New World, the decision to throw “Rock” is not a random event. It’s all in accordance with a Plan.
In the case of The Street Champ and The King of Rock, who are finalizing their strategy before the event begins, the Plan is the result of hours of work in their basement thinktank. The Street Champ won last year’s Street RPS competition at this event, the no-referee, no-holds-barred battle. He’s a big guy in a white Adidas tracksuit who leaves most of the talking up to The King. The King is wearing a purple tracksuit, shades, and an Elvis wig. They work as a team, and they’ve brainstormed, discussed the history of the game, tracked which throws have won in the past, and come up with a new series of throws, their signature for this year.
“Rock Rock Scissors Paper, which we’re calling the Freedom 55.” The King of Rock looks at me gleefully, smoothing his plastic wig with one hand. I bite.
“Why Freedom 55?” I ask.
“RRSP!” he chortles. “Much like people are worried about their portfolio they should be worried about this move.”
I ask the King to lead me through it, and he does.
“The Rock sets up an obvious aggressive beginning, which is usually followed up by something less aggressive. But in this case, we go again back to Rock. And just when they think they’re out of the woods we throw a Scissors at them, the sneakier of the throws. A weasel of a throw. Yanis actually won the title last year on a Scissor. It’s a bit of a trademark. And then? We come out with a little bit of vulnerability at the end.”
The Street Champ nods gently. He met his girlfriend at this competition last year. Paper seems to work for him.
“What happens if you two play against each other?” I ask. “Without pre-planning, I mean. Do you still end up throwing the same things all the time?”
“It’s uncanny,” the Street Champ says. “It’s like playing with a mirror.”
“E pluribus unum,” the King of Rock tells me. “That’s Latin for something.”
* * *
“Since God decides everything,” Sarah Vowell says, “God decides whether a person goes to Heaven or Hell before he is even born.” She looks down into the audience with one eyebrow raised. She is about knee-high to an undernourished Puritan settler, and has a tiny cupid’s bow of a mouth.
Her book, Wordy Shipmates, is about a group of people who, when England threw them scissors, folded themselves a paper boat and landed on Plymouth Rock. E pluribus unum, as they could have told you, means “Out of Many, One.” It’s a phrase Americans have reason to be familiar with: it appears on the US seal, the President’s seal, the Vice President’s seal, the seal of the US Congress, the US House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. It’s also on most of the money.
Sarah Vowell’s writings and radio work are fundamentally concerned with the thorny question of what it is to be American. America is many, an ethnically, religiously, and ideologically diverse population. Vowell reflects a certain kind of American’s preoccupation with America as it was conceived, back when it was a bookish gleam in a parson’s eye. At the IFOA event, her reading was followed up by a discussion with CBC’s Talking Books host Ian Brown, and the main thing she emphasized in their discussion was the scholarliness of America’s early settlers. They sent each other letters densely woven with Biblical allusions. They carried on endless theological debate about what God most wanted them to do in the new society they were creating. The very contradictions inherent in their philosophy demanded an intellectual engagement beyond what most of us might have credited them with. While God determines your fate before you are born, this does not relieve you of moral responsibility for your actions. At the same time, your moral actions can never propel you closer to Heaven. Salvation is not through good works, but through grace. God rewards whom he pleases.
* * *
The Street Champ throws Rock. His opponent, a kid with ginger hair and a green T-shirt that says Shear Genius, throws Scissors. The next throw is Paper/Paper, a tie. The Kid throws Paper again and yelps in frustration when he sees the Street Champ’s Scissors. The paper money that gets wagered in street games is heaped on the floor between them where it was thrown down when the Kid challenged his idol to a match. A crowd forms a ring around the players; the King is there, and the Kid’s backers. Everyone is jostling, elbowing, leaning over each other and screaming at the top of their lungs. The fourth throw: Paper covers Rock. The Champ leans over and scoops in the thick wad of cash. The King pounds the air with his fist and bounds after the Champ, leaving the circle, where the Kid’s friends stagger with the weight of his defeat.
“But I studied him!” the Kid moans, raking back his curls back with useless hand. “I studied him in advance! How could I lose?”
* * *
“I mean, why can’t you maintain a separation between church and state?” Ian Brown asks, almost irritably.
“You have to get it together down there.” Compared with Vowell’s tidy smallness, Brown seems too tall for his chair, lolling backwards like a garter snake as he turns to include the audience in the conversation.
“Well,” Vowell says, taken aback, “We basically do. I mean, they are separate.”
“Don’t you find all of this—” Brown waves his hand to indicate the McCain/Palin religious conservatism that has been the topic of discussion for the past few minutes, “don’t you find it distracting? Do you not want to move to Canada?”
The audience laughs, as Brown means them to.
“Of course it’s distracting,” Vowell says. “It’s very distracting. I mean, I open the newspaper in the mornings and—I’ve been doing this thing recently where I’ve been trying not to swear, but I open the newspaper in the morning and it’s like suddenly I’m a gansta rapper who’s stubbed her toe.”
Vowell has a famously tiny voice, which, as she says, makes her sound 35 years younger than she actually is. Which would make her about five, too young to be charged with the task of keeping church and state at arm’s length from each other, spitting and hissing from facing corners.
As I learned recently while listening to the NPR show This American Life, to which Sarah Vowell has been a frequent contributor, the phrase “separation between church and state” doesn’t actually appear in the US Constitution. Freedom of religion is constitutionally guaranteed, but this idea that church and state are separate, clearly delineated entities is far firmer in the minds of present-day Americans than it was in the thoughts of those who first wrote America into being. But at the time, “church” and “state” were both in malleable new forms. The rules hadn’t been set; no one knew yet how hard they would be to follow, or how they would know when they had crossed the line.
* * *
For the last round of the night’s battle, the head ref takes the stage and stands with the finalists under the golden lights. There are sixteen finalists; through luck or skill or God’s grace they have Scissored when their opponents Papered, Rocked when they Scissored, and Papered when they Rocked. The beauty of the game is that the rules are very clear; the ref is only there to shout out what we all already know.
The Champ lopes over to stand in front of the referee. He takes up his position on the left. A figure detaches itself from the knot of contestants at the back of the stage and comes forward to stand opposite him. She is short and blond, with black-framed glasses and a springy stance.
Her Paper is catlike, all spread fingers and pointed nails. The Champ’s Rock is sturdy, determined—too sturdy.
“Paper covers Rock!” the ref calls out.
Monica Martinez takes the match. Their only tie is two Rocks, two solid assertions of faith. Certitude, unabashed and unshakable.
* * *
Ian Brown has been reminiscing about how long they’ve known each other, since Vowell was just starting out as a writer. “You used to be a Goth,” he remembers, “didn’t you?”
“I do like a group,” Sarah Vowell says. “I’ve always written about groups, even when I was an Art History student. I like unruly groups of individuals who come together—be it for wearing too much mascara or practicing Protestantism in America.”
The unruly group which is America gives rise, in turn, to a multitude of writers whose job it is to explore what unites Americans, and what keeps them apart. An audience member asks Sarah Vowell what her favourite historical site is, and she chooses the Gettysburg Memorial. “Because, you know,” she says, “both sides prayed to the same God.”
Even Calvinist theologians differ on one point: does God plan all outcomes? Or, as a being who exists outside time and therefore sees all of eternity in one sweeping glance, does he merely know them? The hand that guides the hand that throws the Rock may not let the best competitor win. At least, maybe not this time. Which is why we try our luck again, and again. “We’re a future oriented people,” Vowell says. Then adds, a little sadly, “At least, we used to be.”
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Legong: I know I am replying to this pathetic, racist statement a little late and the whole ignorant rant probably doesn’t even deserve a reply. Wanhenglo, if we were all to generalise about...
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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Seenloitering: The “gender analysis” in this article is upside down. Marie Calloway is a threat to the status quo because she threatens the myth that women are morally superior, above...
Jefry: I do not really like to read a story like a novel or a real story but I think this is very interesting and need to be read
Guest: I didn’t want babies or a period any more. I KNEW without a doubt I did not want children so I had been asking for a hysterectomy since I was 19. I finally got it at 39. My...
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