Eddie Izzard -- Unwitting Advocate For Obama's Educational Proposals

I was at the Union Square theatre Thursday night watching Eddie Izzard open his 10-day run in New York. He's the most intelligent and funniest standup comedian/philosopher/historian working. Izzard is also unwittingly an Obama proponent.

Senator Obama makes a big point of telling us that we not only need to revamp our "basics" in education, but expand those basics to once more include "art, music, history, all those things that make life worthwhile..." or something like that.

Watching Izzard I felt lucky that my parents had put me in a British boarding school. In 1962, I was an American ten-year-old living in the weird religious commune in Switzerland that was founded by my parents. I was someone who today would be thought of as learning disabled, a dyslexic (before anyone knew the word) and could barely read.

Other than reading to me at bedtime, my parents left me to my own devices in a way that most parents couldn't imagine and that would be considered neglect today. I had gone wild. I knew my Bible, how to start fires in the woods, kill chickens and gut them, where the farmer down the road kept the hammer he brained his pigs with but little else.

My parents hadn't put me in school lest I be corrupted by "unbelievers." Home "schooling" (when it happened) consisted of my (usually resentful) older sisters or some stray young person at my parents' mission, being asked to try and teach me something. Months would go by with no schooling at all. By the time I was seven or eight I could have been missing for a week and no one would have noticed. (They were too busy doing endless Bible studies and prayer meetings.) Then one day in a rare fit of normality my parents realized that somehow they had to address the reading, writing and arithmetic issue and they packed me off to Great Walstead, a boys' boarding school in England.

Lucky me! At last I was plugged into a self-confident more or less sane (if somewhat jingoistic) culture. So I learned all about the Battle of Hastings and Hannibal, I learned about the Second World War. The point is: I wasn't in some multicultural nightmare, where you studied Brazilian basket weaving in the morning and a bit if French in the afternoon. I was plugged into one culture and that gave me a cultural vocabulary.

Thursday night, everyone in the Union Square theatre was laughing. But none of us would have been if we hadn't read or been taught the Bible somewhere along the line-Izzard's detailed theological/biological riff on the Garden of Eden is pants-pissing funny--knew what and who Eve was, not to mention who the Romans were, and had enough of a smattering of French and Latin to get the allusions.

When Obama calls for history, art, music, languages and the rest essentials, instead of just studying to a test, he's also calling for future Eddie Izzards (and hopefully the present Izzard too!) to be able to entertain us with a humor that has a depth as boundless as a whole culture.

Even humor goes away if we're all in our little corners living in a divided and tribalized society. And if all education is, is enough math and reading skills to "compete with the Chinese" then forget comedy.

Sure, all cultures and peoples have value. But you can't make fun of the fundamentalist's false certainties of biblical interpretation, unless you read the Bible first. You can't laugh about the Romans, or Russia's new "managed democracy" unless you're plugged into a little world history.

So go see Izzard! Vote for Obama! Fund education properly! Hire better teachers! Forget a relativistic view of culture! Read your Bible! Then let Izzard deconstruct your faith, your learning and all you thought you knew and laugh hard!

Frank Schaeffer's new book is, CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back