Promise Keepers

I'm enjoying the hypocrisy hoedown over the blowdried prince of Vegas, Senator John Ensign, as much as anybody, but I do want to use the occasion for say a good word for an institution too much derided: Promise Keepers.

Remember Promise Keepers? That's the outfit, founded by a former football coach under the motive power of evangelical Christianity, devoted to helping men learn to straighten up and fly right. If you remember anything about them at all, chances are it is the mass rally they put together on the Washington Mall on October 4, 1997, under the weirdly unintelligible slogan, "Stand in the Gap" (obviously, whoever put it together had never ridden on the London Underground).

Senator Ensign is said to be a Promise Keeper--one who has difficulties, it would appear, with items 3 and 4 on the list of "Seven Promises." Given Ensign's own pious meanness about Bill Clinton and Larry Craig (and his deafening silence about, say, David Vitter), I wish him all the humiliation he can bear, and then some (though granted, these guys are almost impossible to humiliate).

But as to Promise Keepers itself--I have to confess to a certain soft spot. Oh, nonononono, I'm not my bag for the great Folsom Field rally rally on July 31-August 1--I'd rather donate a kidney. I can think of so many reasons why this would be so, but without going into details, let's just settle on the idea that the whole thing is just so appallingly tacky.

Yet the core idea--trying to help men makes sense out of their lives--is not an unworthy goal. Let's face it, men are clueless idiots most of the time; generally, the best you can say about them is that they are well-intentioned clueless idiots, but still. Anything--(well, maybe almost anything) that tries to push back the frontiers of cluefulness is due at least passing respect.

I know that PK in its heydey (more on that infra) ran into a whole spitstorm of hostility from the likes of the National Organization for Women, who see PK as just one more damn fandango--and a crude one at that--to put men back into the (figurative?) saddle. Well, I can hardly blame the ladies on this one: a thousand times burned, a thousand and one times shy. And I wouldn't be surprised to find that PK does embrace a doctrine of male superiority (I'm not well enough informed to say for sure). But still, but still.

But still one truth is that PK apparently never really amounted to much. I really hadn't noticed, but in "researching" (ahem) this piece, I glommed onto the insight that the '97 march was really their finest hour. Granted that they still have a website and they are planning a conference. As I say, I won't be there. But I wish them well. And if John Ensign shows up, he'd better be looking very sheepish indeed.