Book Review: Cool It or Lose It

Title: Cool It or Lose It

Author: Dale Evans Rogers

Publisher: Revell

Date: 1972

ISBN: 0-8007-0551-3

Length: 96 pages

Quote: “All right—if you can buy this—let’s rap. But let’s make it an intelligent rap. Let’s keep it cool, lest we lose everything.”

What is so quaint as last year’s slang? Around 1970, when many churches were desperately bidding for the interest of hippies, to rap meant to discuss, debate, express opinions. Dale Evans Rogers guessed that this use of “rap” was derived from “rapport.” So here was America’s favorite grandmother, “rapping” with student groups across the United States, completely unaware that by the time this book reached the public libraries kids were going to be sharing, levelling, shooting the breeze, while “rap” returned to meaning, basically, “talking in a fast emphatic aggressive way that sounds like rapping on a door,” like an officer or judge reading a list of criminal charges (the rap sheet) or a musician chanting more than singing fast-paced, often protest-type words against a rhythmic musical background.

At this point in time I was on a mailing list for “rap sheets,” like Sunday School lessons by correspondence course, and kids already understood “rap sheet” to mean a list of criminal charges. But reasonably cool kids empathized with the clueless older generation, recognized their good intentions, and met them halfway.

That was apparently the reception Dale Evans and Roy Rogers got at most schools, though in one chapter of this book Evans describes one of her less courteous encounters with a student interviewer who started out with a long harangue about how she didn’t agree with any of Evans’ views or admire anything the retired actress had stood for. In fact, as Evans had already said in this book, she could relate to rebellious young people, because she’d been one, but there she stood to testify that most of the genuinely rebellious things young people had done, and were doing, had been and were still bad ideas.

Which makes this book relevant today. I don’t know whether Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and her fans are capable of understanding archaic slang, and doubt they’d sit still long enough to read 96 smallish pages of largish print. You might have to summarize key ideas into a modern-style rap and use the book to beat time while holding them over your knee. But they soooo need these thoughts.

Each of the fourteen short chapters in this book would take about ten minutes to read to an audience, allowing time for a small group to discuss and debate, and some of the chapters are specifically written to invite audience responses. At schools with the now traditional system of three four-month “semesters,” that makes this book perfectly formatted for use in weekly chapel talks.

Chapter one is a general self-introduction in which Evans recalled her career just in case any kids had grown up in TV-free zones and didn’t remember (don’t laugh, my town was a TV-free zone); affirms her age, jokes about the then-current use of the word “Establishment,” and states that “GOD IS THE ESTABLISHMENT—for God is unchanging.”

Chapter two expounds further on the title. Concerned about the level of anti-U.S.-government feeling in the United States in 1972, church types were starting to remind the war protest types that in the totalitarian countries these protesters claimed to admire they might be shot for treason for some of their “demonstrations.” There are still countries where firing squads would be mustered to deal with some of the “protest” activities observed in recent Antifa, BLM, and election-doubting demonstrations.The same troublemakers make trouble at demonstrations for all sides, and though I have reservations about the firing squads I think a few years on a chain gang might do them good.

Chapter three further develops this theme. Nearly all of the demonstrations in 1972 were leftist, though Evans recalls one that started out with a celebration after a football game; at least back then the troublemakers weren’t misrepresenting both political parties impartially because right-wingers weren’t demonstrating—much. However, protests were often cast as a youth thing, and Evans called her young audiences’ attention to the age of the troublemakers, “hardened professionals who will never see thirty again…men who would destroy our national defense system as a first step toward abolishing the American government.” “They are deceiving you into destroying the government,” or trying to, “and when you lose, they’ll skedaddle for Algiers and leave you holding the bag.” Evans saw more radical change, at least for the short term, taking place where young people joined “the Jesus Movement.”

In chapter four, Evans described her own encounter with “Jesus Freaks” and explained why the established churches mostly refused to denounce this…It was a grassroots movement that formed around a well documented, though not terribly harmful, personality cult. At the song and study service Evans attended, she didn’t observe the more controversial efforts of hippies to “witness” to one another by sleeping around and sharing drugs. She just felt that churches could stand to incorporate more of this type of service into their programs, to attract students who liked folk-gospel music. Most did. Yes, in 1972 it was controversial.

By 1982, the songs Evans specifically mentions liking and singing in 1972 (in chapter five) were accepted Sunday School classics. New songs of every kind are composed in every year. Some are bad; some are good. I remember, and still occasionally sing at least part of, a 1970s gospel song called “He Sees It All” as an example of the worst of the folk-gospel genre, a dragging, droning, dissonant downer. But Evans’ own record sales were telling her that actually many adults liked the good folk-gospel songs, though a few churchgoers were still trying to claim that they weren’t formal enough to express reverence, that “the banjo has never been baptized.”

In chapter six she discusses what it means to say that Jesus was a revolutionary.

In chapter seven she discusses “soul pollution” (sex, drugs, and violence). I think the chapter would have been much stronger if Evans had been able to support the supposed “youth” position on air and water pollution. In 1972 my parents were well part thirty, Dad was past forty, Herbert W. Armstrong was a grandfather, and they were the ones teaching me about pollution. Because I’d learned to read more precociously than I’d learned to understand, and my brother was obviously at least as clever as I was, Dad was always pressing books and articles upon us, often things that were over the heads of his grown-up acquaintances. In 1972 I remember an Armstrong article on crop rotation as one of the ecological articles I did understand. But I did not, could not, think of it as a youth thing when the information was coming from older people.) This was, however, the decade when Dixy Lee Ray, then one of America’s most influential women politicians, wrote a book full of anti-Green misinformation and, just because Governor Ray was a Republican, quite a few Republicans kept repeating her mistakes on into the present century. Rush Limbaugh’s anti-Green rants, for example, quoted Ray’s errors as facts. Evans stayed out of that whole dispute. As an actress she hadn’t studied enough science to care to challenge many of her friends and fellow believers. Pity.

In chapter eight she talks about discipline, mentioning that one of her children once felt that a nanny didn’t like him because she didn’t “holler at” him. More than “hollering,” her target was the “affluenza” of the mid-twentieth century. While British baby-boomers grew up in hard times and became known as the generation most likely to bore the young with stories of “the good old days when times were bad,” American baby-boomers grew up in an economic boom. Everyone had been told to “buy, buy, buy” because “buy days mean pay days.” Children, especially, were seen—by one advertiser who talked to author Vance Packard—as “happy little dollar signs” for whom parents were exhorted to buy all the luxuries the parents hadn’t had. Evans’ description of the kind of situations that resulted, even in movie stars’ homes, was funny, and sad, and right on. (Believe it or not…in 1972 I could usually think of things I wanted to have, or earn more pocket money to buy, but by and large I was on her side. At least I thought some kids I knew ought at least to have packed up their surplus trinkets and handed them down, or sold them, instead of just breaking them, leaving them out in the rain, and throwing them away. Well, some toys manufactured in the mid-twentieth century might have been junky enough to deserve to be broken or thrown away. I am talking about bicycles here. Schwinn bicycles. I was a poor relation and had to take care of my bike. I knew kids who left Schwinn bicycles lying on the ground.)

In chapter nine Evans discusses the epidemic of emotional problems that were blamed on working mothers not spending enough time with children. 

In theory we as a nation agreed to accept as a fact that children don’t need to spend all or most of every day at home with a full-time parent, that “early childhood education” can substitute for parental attention to toddlers all day because toddlers can accept “early childhood teachers” as “secondary parent-figures.” In practice…I dunno, the epidemic of emotional problems has gone on and on and got worse and worse. 

Dale Evans and Roy Rogers tried being “working parents” who left children with nannies first, and then being full-time parents later. They were in a position to know what a difference it made. 

Obviously women weren’t satisfied with the idea that having a baby, or even being willing to consider having a baby, doomed them to a lifetime of domestic drudgery. Being a full-time parent was never meant to last a lifetime. Five or even ten short years, and away the children go! See how they run! We as a culture needed to focus more attention on the idea of recognizing women as qualified either to pick up their careers where they left off, or to be promoted, after five or ten years of full-time motherhood, along with the equally important idea of recognizing veterans as qualified to pick up their careers or be promoted after two or seven years of military service. Either experience takes a young person off the job, but when it’s over it leaves the person with additional skills and life lessons, so it should be seen as an asset. 

But babies do vociferously prefer that their “primary parent-figure” be equipped for lactation, actively lactating if possible. Toddlers do demand gender identities, even if they don’t conform to every detail of a gender stereotype until someone has told them about it. Babies scream for Mama, and toddlers need their same-sex parents, and there’s no doing anything about it. Equality of opportunities to climb the corporate ladder is the sort of thing children understand when they’re ready for school, around age ten or twelve. I think more feminists (and Evans was a feminist, make no mistake) need to affirm the choice of full-time motherhood…and preparing early for a career that has room for it. 

Yes, throughout most of history, a lot of people not only didn’t have full-time parents, but didn’t have a chance to know their parents; it’s possible for a baby to be born after both of its parents are dead, and historically what was done about this was that people sent for the next of kin and named the baby Posthumus. They had emotional problems then, too. They just didn’t have our names for them. A man like Chief Benge could act out his feelings, about being rejected by his father’s ethnic group, by declaring his own private war on that ethnic group and killing dozens of them, and though his contemporaries had plenty of names for this—“evil” and “cruel” and “the man who killed him is a public benefactor”—those names did not refer to the obvious emotional problems. Maybe society was better off not seeing such emotional problems as obvious. In any case, we have evolved to the point where we are, and at this point in time I’d like to see more feminists dare to affirm full-time parenting.

In chapter ten she mentions drugs, including alcohol, as “hang-ups” (which, as Tom Wolfe later summarized, might prevent “hooking up”). Another word usage the young may want to note is that, for Evans and her audiences, “straight” could mean primarily sober. “Straight” took over for what had been the good slang meanings of “square,” after “square” came to mean unhip. It meant honest, forthright, reliable, and among people who used drugs or knew people who did, it meant more specifically that someone was able to be those things because person didn’t use drugs. (In the 1980s I remember raising some eyebrows…the “straightest” person I knew, in the slang with which I grew up, happened to be bisexual. I still prefer the older meaning for “straight” but I suppose, by now, it’s another word that’s past reclaiming in any but its dictionary sense.)

In chapter eleven Evans states that “Jesus can bridge the generation gap,” or that Christians of different ages can work together with due respect for one another. In 1972 this was controversial. Not that, in 1972, many of my generation hadn’t noticed that some older people did indeed Get It. If not blessed with parents or grandparents in that category, there were always our favorite rock stars, nearly all of whom belonged to the Greatest Generation. But, in 1972, at most schools it probably took a fair bit of courage for a teenager to stand up and say that. The fact that we’ve become older and wiser now in no way implies that we were born with a single lick of sense.

In chapter twelve, Evans reports the snappy answers she gave the hostile interviewer.

In chapter thirteen, she affirms that many older people wanted most of the same things most young people were claiming to want, and suggests that unity through spirituality would get more of those things than quarrelling about a Marxist revolution was likely to do.

In chapter fourteen, she invites the young to “drop in” (to church) rather than “drop out” (of school, the corrupt corporate economy, the capitalist system, life in general—in 1972 a lot of people were “dropping out” in a final way, often unintentionally, by experimenting with drugs). She mentions several of the reasons why people weren’t going to church in 1972. She does not happen to mention several reasons why people aren’t going to church today, but her time was limited and presumably, at most schools, the audience would raise the questions she’d overlooked.

I’ve given this outline because I think it’s relevant to the ideal audience for this book. You might buy it, and I’ll admit I bought it, as part of a collection; Dale Evans would probably have been a collectible author if she’d only ever written about her adopted children, but her having been a movie star first made all of her books ultra-collectible. There’s nothing wrong with buying books for a collection but I’d like to see a well-known lecturer update this book.