Enterprise Square, U.S.A.

When I was in my early teenage years one of my favorite activities was going to Enterprise Square, U.S.A.  It was located on the campus of Oklahoma Christian University and was a monument to anti-government extreme capitalism.  It was kind of a museum, kind of video games place.  For $3 it wasn't at all a bad day for a 13-year old to spend a fall afternoon.  Mom would drop me off, I'd quickly make my way through the museum portions to play the video games, and several hours later I'd finally get sick of going bust on the Oklahoma oil fields and have my mom come and get me.  I'm guessing the combination of growing up in Oklahoma to conservative parents and visiting ESUSA probably 20 times in two years (remember, this is the time of my life of video game obsession before girls were on the radar) made me the supply-side Republican that I became throughout my early 20s.

Enterprise Square opened in 1982, and even then I thought the museum portion a bit cheesy.  Singing presidents made to be Reagan-era capitalists, Bob Hope reading off of cue cards, aliens crash-landing on earth to examine our way of life...yeah.  That's why I would usually go straight to the video games.  There was always something wonderful about mowing yards and fighting off government regulations and being a truck driver that was something appealing.  It was, after all, the very, very best way to live. the American way.  Even now I still have within me the suspicions of government...though I'm probably more suspicious of large multi-national corporations whose only interest is profit and owe no allegiance to anybody but their biggest shareholders.

Sadly, the thousand visitors a day never really materialized.  Even in the mid-1980s the place already had a kind of run-down feel to it.  Nothing was ever updated, and the building has set mostly empty since it closed down over a decade ago.  Mocked and now mostly unloved, it's a living reminder that capitalism is a dangerous proposition.  When it fails, it fails miserably.

One final side note...only in recent years have I found great irony in the fact that a Christian institution, which Biblically speaks to the nature of fellowship and helping out the poor, allowed such a monument to be built on its campus.  As I remember it now, Enterprise Square loved the individual and spoke to the glories of unfettered capitalism...but where was God in all this?  What about the poor?  Do we just let them get crushed by the overwhelming world economy?  What about those who have been in jail and have no real future?  Do we say sorry, you don't fit into the model of supply and demand?  Nowhere in my memory do I remember anything about God at Enterprise Square.  Reading the prophets of the Old Testament as much as I have for the last few years I have been struck by its call for economic justice and its warnings about the rich growing richer while the poor get left behind.  This, more than anything, has pushed me away from the extreme conservatism of my youth.

Landmarks on the journey

It was 10 years ago last week that the Dixie Chicks made their now-infamous statement in a London concert that they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George W. Bush.  Conservatives went nuts.  They started burning the Dixie Chicks album, the group never fully recovered, and now likely will never produce another album.

In retrospect I suppose that this was about the time that I was starting to wake up after my years of conservatism.  I had been a Rush Limbaugh-listening member of that group for a number of years.  While I don't ever remember feeling quite the vitriol that some felt about liberalism, Bill Clinton, and the rest of the world, I can remember thinking Clinton ought to be impeached, liberals weren't quite patriotic enough, and that we as America had the right to rule the world, since we, of course, were better and more moral than anybody else.

Yet at some point, about the time I was also starting to pay attention to soccer (some would say the two were related, that moral degeneracy comes due to that wicked sport), I began to see that there were a lot problems with conservatism.  I began to see the hypocrisy of it all...they demanded freedom for people to do all sorts of things, yet denied people other kinds of freedoms that they didn't approve of.  "Compassionate conservatism" could only be pushed so far as it got to the wealthy's pockets, and then it came to an laughable end.  I became amazed with their continual griping that their views were not being reflected in the 'lamestream media', but then they would quote anything Fox News or Glenn Beck said as gospel truth.  And maybe most of all, I began to see that the things they thought were vitally important as American values were not necessarily (and usually not at all) Christian or Biblical values.

Who knows how many things pushed me along the road to suspicion.  But I do remember that the whole hullabaloo of the Dixie Chicks contributed to it.  I was amazed that people who decried the totalitarianism of other nations couldn't stand any free speech or dissent from popular opinion here.  Remember, W was still riding high here.  Not only had he looked like the big man standing at ground zero a year and a half earlier, but his two wars were extremely popular: we wanted some Muslim blood, and we wanted it now.  It was still unpopular to say that he was wrong, even if the rest of the world believed it.  It began to dawn on me that people who can't handle hearing criticism need to be criticized all the more: what were they really hiding?  More reflection and thought over the years since made me feel as I continue to do now, that conservatism as it has become is full of crap.  It's a tightly controlled ideology of the wealth class with no real concern for genuine Christian values.

Someday I'll look back on other landmarks which took me in other directions.  But it's interesting to look back and see where I've come from.