Bleeding Fiction

My family has a long and intimate history with the Boy Scouts and I have an old personal association with the organization. Broadly speaking, I approve of Scouting's mission. I mention this as a preface to demonstrate my reverence for the ideals of Scouting, because I'm about to poke fun of them and I wouldn't want you to think I was being wholly unkind.

When I was a Scout, the organization provided the finest paramilitary training for young people that money could buy. At least in the later half of the 20th century. We learned to build fires, to survive long hikes, to fire rifles and make watch towers. We were tough, rugged, manly boys, mostly involved in Scouting because of the excuse it gave us for playing with sharp objects and our penchant for starting fires.

Our leaders, too, were a rough and tumble sort. They were community leaders, fathers, brave and noble veterans of foreign wars and, occasionally, pedophiles.

I'd like to know what happened to Scouting since my day. I'd like to know when, exactly, the organization became a haven for the sort of people you'd read about in the Darwin Awards. It seems that four Scout Leaders were trying to pitch a tent during the Scout's national Jamboree yesterday. They were standing too close to a power line. hilarity ensued.

Needless to say we mourn for these four men. Scouting mourns, a nation mourns. President Bush was due to speak to the assembled Scouts today. I wonder why, since he was only ever a Cub Scout. Anyway, due to the weather he wasn't able to make it. However, while waiting out in the sun for the President to arrive, about three hundred people had some sort of heat stroke.

Scouting, like any group designed to brainwash people, is big on memorized phrases. One of them is the Scout Oath. It goes (from memory, mind you, and emphasis mine): "On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people at all times and to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight." As an American pubescent male, maybe I didn't take that whole thing seriously all of the time, but I always knew it was a pretty good way to live my life. I leapt across my fair share of camp fires, but I kept my wits about me enough to come in from under the sun on a hot day and not to camp near power lines.