The Coonridge Digest: World Tour of the American Family

Greetings from the Ridge.

It’s the best idea that’ll never work. It’s the perfect solution that’ll never fly.

We’ll call it "The World Tour of the American Family."

The participants are Mary and Todd Smith, and they have two children, Ricky and Deborah. Substitute any name you wish. Chances are you know these folks – a whole lot of these folks – and they go by various names.

Todd works a full-time job and has been threatened with down-sizing. Mary is a substitute teacher or accountant or hair stylist who tries to pay the bills that Todd can’t manage. Ricky and Deborah are frightfully and delightfully average teenagers who are pretty much bored with life but carry with them the values of their hard-working parents. Some day they will become Todd and Mary.

The World Tour works like this: We pack up the Smiths and send them to Iraq, and to Lebanon and to Israel and Afghanistan, Mexico, Iran, France, and anywhere else where we can guarantee at least a small degree of safety. Once they hit the foreign soil we’ll put out the announcement. "Here they are. Americans. Not diplomats, not corporate chieftains, and none of them are running for any political office. Come and ask them anything."

Invite the BBC, Al-Jazeera, CNN’s International Bureau, the Afghani News Network, and anyone else who’d like to come chat. No appointment necessary, the questions need no pre-screening, and you can photograph them from any angle and we hope Deborah keeps her shirt pulled down and Ricky pulls his pants up. They’ll be wearing no T.V. makeup and they won’t come with a flock of handlers and spin-meisters.

Todd gets tired around 9 p.m. and Mary gets nervous in a roomful of people, but if you catch them at a decent hour, they are yours. The American Family on Tour.

Here’s my hunch: our fellow citizens in Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Italy will see folks who are pretty much like themselves. Condoleezza Rice does not represent the typical U.S. citizen. Todd and Mary do. Not the interests – political, economic, and military – but the United States. And the same could be said of representatives of a Democrat in the White House. In terms of what we feel, what we fear, and what we want, Todd and Mary will come a great deal closer than George, Bill, Old George, or Ron.

If we’re lucky and Todd is still awake at the end of the plane trip, they’ll find out that we are not demons, that we have no particular ambitions on the rest of the world, that we hate war, we’re frightened by terrorists of any sort, and that we love peace as much as the next yodeler on a Swiss hillside. They’ll find that the hopes for our children are as pure as the cheese seller on the streets of Kabul, and that when they sit in their pew at the local Methodist church they are as humble and pious as the businessmen entering the Masjid Boorasa mosque on the way to Baghdad.

Dick Cheney might be the most humble, honest, and peace-loving little monk on the face of the planet, but because of his position in life he cannot represent me. Todd and Mary can. Todd has no agenda and Mary is in no danger of losing any power. Don Rumsfeld may be Mother Teresa in disguise, but he no more represents the typical American family than plastic cabbage makes a salad.

John Bolton can sneak into the office of U.N. representative under the dark of a Congressional recess, and although he sits behind the blue and white "United States" placard at the United Nations, he doesn’t have the heart for the world that Todd and Mary do.

I wish they could hear Todd and Mary’s conversations as they listen to the nightly news – some confusion, some fear, and on good nights, some hope. I wish they could hear Deborah’s prayers as she meets with her youth group on Sunday evenings. I wish they could see the look in

Ricky’s eyes when he sees soldiers only a few years his senior crawling in the dirt of Iraq. I wish… I wish…

And of course to make this World Tour a real success, it would be followed up by return tours of Nawal and Ali who run the clothing shop in Basrah. On the next plane would come Abel and Fadi, a couple from Beirut who had planned on vacationing in Disney World this summer until their home was destroyed. And following the Lebanese couple would be Amin and Chalipa who run the best coffee shop in Islamabad. We’d find that we know these folks and they are us.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.