Choirs are used ubiquitously to communicate a sense of reverence, awe, and transcendent splendor, and they speak to the traditions of our faith. They’re used regularly in film scores, important civic events, memorials, and celebrations, and we revel in the angelic tones a group of rehearsed musicians can produce. Mixing this in with our other corporate worship elements adds a new dimension of transcendence, joy, and unity.

You speak of ‘the curriculum [you] impose,’ but I deny that you have the right to impose anything. I am passing through this place, headed for the next stage of my life — possibly graduate education in some form or another, more probably a job — and I am paying you to prepare me for that next stage. In short, we have a business contract in which I am your client, and it is your job to serve what I perceive my needs to be, not what you may happen to think they are. It’s not as though we’re living in that long-ago age when universities were considered repositories of timeless wisdom and professors custodians of that wisdom. You faculty are employees of an ideological state apparatus in a neoliberal regime that constitutes itself by a series of implied or explicit contracts in which goods are exchanged for fees. Please stop acting like this is the University of Paris in the age of Aquinas and we’re all seeking transcendent wisdom. I control my own values and am not even interested in yours, much less willing to be subservient to them. So do the job I am paying you to do and shut up about all that other crap.

Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them could operate the tractor and, in a pinch, drive the truck with a load of logs. They split firewood alongside us, swinging their mauls with remarkable accuracy. They are both licensed hunters and own .22 rifles and 20-gauge shotguns. They wear belt knives almost everywhere, oblivious to the stares of the adults around them, some concerned, some perplexed, and some, it often seems to me, nostalgic.

Our sons are not entirely self-taught; we understand the limits of the young mind and its still-developing capacity for judgment. None of these responsibilities were granted at an arbitrary, age-based marker, but rather as the natural outgrowth of their evolving skills and maturity. We have noticed, however, that the more responsibility we give our sons, the more they assume. The more we trust them, the more trustworthy they become. This may sound patronizingly obvious, yet I cannot help but notice the starring role that institutionalized education—with its inherent risk aversion—plays in expunging these qualities.

The new regime is not totalitarian, fascist, socialist, capitalist, conservative, or liberal, according to the accepted and common definitions of those terms. It is not even adequately described as corporatist, although corporatism is very much at home within it. The “pink police state” is not a police state in the sense that George Orwell would be familiar with, but one in which a militarized, national policing apparatus is woven into the fabric of trillions of transactions online and off. Nor is it a “pinko commie” regime in the sense of enforcing “political correctness” out of total allegiance to Party; rather, it enforces the restrictions and permissions doled out by its sense of “clean living.” To invoke Michel Foucault again, ours is an age when governance is inseparable from hygiene in the minds of the elite that rules over both the private and public sector. To them, everything is theoretically a health issue.

Son, there’s a reason they call it a ‘dream job’. It’s because it’s a dream!