Marjorie,
How about if I stop talking about who’s going to run the New Yorker and start talking about what’s IN the New Yorker this week?
As it happens, there’s a very gripping piece in the new issue by…David Remnick, about the Amish drug dealers. I love this story, and applaud Remnick’s decision to jump on it. (That isn’t too blatently ass-kissy, is it?) Remnick’s piece does an excellent job of explaining the ways in which Amish society has and has not joined the mainstream.
Do you know about the Amish drug dealers? I remember telling you to read Hanna Rosin’s very good article on this in the Washington Post a week or so ago, but I can’t recall whether you did. (That was before we were getting paid to read stories that we recommend to each other.) Anyway, the deal is that on July 2 two Amish boys in their 20s from Lancaster County, Pa.–this is real Pennsylvania Dutch noodle country–were indicted for distributing cocaine and methamphetamine. The two boys’ names (this creates some confusion, but also heightens the story’s Monty Python-esque weirdness) are Abner Stoltzfus and Abner King Stoltzfus. “They are not related,” Remnick writes with nice understatement. (Later in the piece Remnick informs us that Stolzfus is to Lancaster County Amish what Smith or Jones is to the rest of the country.)
So how could people who aren’t even allowed to have toasters end up dealing drugs? Well, life, as usual, is more complicated than we figured. There’s an Amish tradition of youths whooping it up for awhile before they’re rebaptized as adults (after which time they really aren’t allowed to have any fun). It’s called rumpspringa. The kids join youth groups whose activities (depending on how fast the particular youth group is) range from hymn-singing to car-driving to drinking to what John Pyfer, a Pennsylvania attorney, calls the occasional “drunken buggy-driving incident out on the highway.” At the extreme wild end is drug consumption; there’s been enough of it that Philadelphia magazine ran a story last summer called “Party On, Amos.”
So the question is, How are the Amish to cope with all this? My response is similar to my answer to the question, How are the British going to update the monarchy for the 21st century? They aren’t! They can’t! It’s over! Stop living in a theme park!
But in both instances, having any opinion seems kind of a waste of time for people like me, who don’t belong to the cult. (As Earl Butz, in one of the less-offensive remarks that got him fired as Agriculture secretary under Gerald Ford, once said about the Pope’s protestations concerning U.S. policy on birth control: “He no play-a the game, he no make-a the rules.”)
Intolerantly,
Tim
