Posted by RE on 1/6/2002, 7:34 pm

You all know how Don’s moustache-aversion originated, don’t you? — Part 1 Posted by Dan S. Lovelace on 12/22/2001, 3:04 am , in reply to "Re: Is it okay if I keep my moustache??? " Sometimes Don’s brother Bob has had a few very revealing things to tell us (once even to the Seattle Times). In the eighties—back in the days when it seemed so unimaginable to any of us—Bob Barnett once mentioned to the Times about Don’s lifelong problem with pride, which he always kept so skillfully hidden beneath the surface (though in that article I wished Carol Ostrom would have quoted him more extensively on what he was saying about it). Bob and his younger brother Joe are probably the two people in the world who know Don better than anybody else—even more closely than Barbara, because by the time he married her he had already learned to put on his life-façade—and kept it up even in their marriage. And his brothers probably know him better than his parents, who he grew up learning to deceive since his childhood. But siblings who grow up side-by-side usually have a keener ability to understand each other’s intentions and inner thoughts than anybody else. And between the things Bob has revealed and the things Barbara has revealed, sometimes a few interesting facts have emerged from underneath that clever camouflage of Don’s. He was always a girl-chaser around church, ever since his youth. He was one of the pastor’s sons in a church that, like Chapel, tended to have a royalty mentality about their pastor and his family—and likewise, for the young ladies in the church, the pastor’s sons were thought of as the most desirable men to get together with, for no other reason than that they were the pastor’s sons. Once when the youth group wanted him to sing in the choir, Don explained, decades later, “I sang like a crow, but they wanted me in it because I was the pastor’s son.” Barbara many years later confessed that shortly after their marriage, when he was teaching judo at a gym he ran—and I mean only shortly after they had been married—another young woman there asked her, “What relation are you to Don?” She replied, “I’m his wife.” The young woman asked her suspiciously, “Are you SURE you’re his wife?” probably leaving Barbara to wonder what any spouse would wonder when asked a question like that: ‘How could anybody be married to somebody and not be sure they were married?’ Barbara learned the hard way that even in such a short time after they were married, he was already philandering around with other young women from church. If it had been something that only happened later on in their marriage, perhaps we could write it off to the same strains and pressure-buckling that many marriages go through, after the marriage has had lots of time for the initial enjoyment and novelty of it to wear off. But with it happening (or being caught happening, that is!) in the first month or so after they had tied the knot, this can only have meant that there had been a long-standing behavioral pattern already in place. Being a Pentecostal church that had the spiritual power to reach the wilder and further-lost people of the world than the traditional denominations usually had, it was able to reach some of the world’s young women whose old lives had been a little more permissive than was the norm of the day. They, like so many of the other girls in the church, were after young Don, who they thought of as the pastor’s dashing, desirable son. These were days when young ladies in churches, after having improper advances made at them, usually didn’t go around talking about it to people. They kept silence. Here was young Don at church learning how to mind the music and the steps, so to speak, “and let the girls be handy.” By the time Barbara came along, he had already had quite a bit of experience in the maneuvering of the young women in the church. Don grew up a palace child. He grew up accustomed to being fawned over. And he liked it. At an early age he got used to being able to have the things (and later even the girls) he wanted. His words had clout with the congregation’s thinking. Whether formally or informally, he taught sometimes, and when he taught principles about how behavior should and shouldn’t be and why and why not, church members took his words seriously. This gave him power with influencing people, and he grew up used to having it. On the issue of dating, his viewpoint was that the young men had the right to compete for the affections of the young women (fair enough so far), that any young man who had the ability to capture the affections of any young woman had the right to her company (fair also—IF the playing field happens to be level to start with), and he, he believed, just happened to be better at this technique than most of the other young men in the church, the technique of capturing the hearts of young women. “If she doesn’t have a ring on her finger,” his teaching came to be, “she’s available.” (Barbara, we find, was only one of his many conquests at church. Only trouble was, Don’s mother, probably unaware of all the others, just happened to catch the two of them, and then pressured them into getting married. Otherwise, they may never have married.) In some kingdoms that have existed in this world (and some that still do), sometimes young princes have taken advantage of their authorization to dip into the nation’s treasury and use the money to invest in businesses for themselves just for the fun of it, or maybe even for some of the extra profits. Sometimes poor peons who have been competitors in the same industries have been put out of business by the enterprises of the princes, and understandably have resented it, and sometimes the princes have responded with, “Well, huh. If I have the ability to win the customers from you, then I have the right to the profits I gain from them. It’s a free-market economy. Who do you think YOU are to complain about it, little peon?” Yes, the kingdoms may have had free-market economies, or some semblances of the idea, but when so many of the customers bought the prince’s brand only because they wanted to see if they could get in with the royal family that way, and when the prince knew the technique of using his royal clout to publicly slander his competition to the point where the public boycotted them and prefered his brand because of all the bad things they’d heard about the competition, it makes us start wondering just how free the economy’s market really was, in some cases. The prince wouldn’t have understood what it was like to be the peon struggling with his one chance at scratching out a meager living. The prince had a zest for enjoying life and all the material rewards that came with it. And he was within his rights—wasn’t he? After all, it was a free-market economy, so he pointed out. So it was with our young prince and his competition for the young ladies in the church where his father was the pastor. He had a little advantage most of the other young men in the church didn’t have. He could teach, and it was not beyond him to find things to criticize in the lives of some people, as spiritually inferior or evil, that just happened to correspond with the lives of the young men who competed with him for the young ladies in the church, and in some cases get them ostracized from acceptance by the others in the church, thus eliminating his competition for whichever young lady he happened to be after at the moment. As the czar’s young son, yes, Don had his “zest for enjoying life and all the [feminine] rewards that came with it.” When other young men in the church expressed resentment of him taking away a girl they were interested in, his response was, “Well, huh. If I have the ability to win her attention, then I have the right to her company. All’s fair in love and war.” He didn’t seem to understand about the feelings of the young men who didn’t find it so easy to capture the attentions of a young woman. Continued