Of Amish gangstas and imperiled paradise
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"I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers." -- Woody Allen as Miles Monroe in "Sleeper."
Quakers aren't a part of the American Anabaptist tradition. They're not Mennonites. Other than a shared predisposition toward nonviolence, they have nothing in common with the Amish. Still, Woody Allen's quip helps us think in realistic ways about groups with reputations for fierce peacefulness.
Recently, seven members of a breakaway Amish sect were arrested in Ohio for chopping off the beards of fellow religionists for refusing to tolerate their bad behavior. Five of the men arrested last month were returning from a horse auction when they decided to do a home invasion on an Amish bishop who had excommunicated them earlier in the year.
The Amish outlaws kicked down the door, cut off the beards of every male in the house and shaved every woman and girl bald. It was humiliation on an unprecedented scale for that community. Even as the news broke, I found myself mentally calculating the odds that a footloose tribe of Negro Amish wandering the buggy trails of Appalachia would somehow be involved. Satisfied that no such group has ever existed, I was finally relaxed enough to feel sorry for the victims.
It also got me thinking about the Amish in new ways. In 1996 when Weird Al Yankovic satirized rapper Coolio's 1995 hit video "Gangsta's Paradise," he used the most incongruous image he could come up with at the time -- an Amish man bragging about how uneventful his life was:
"As I walk through the valley where I harvest my grain / I take a look at my wife and realize she's very plain / But that's just perfect for a Amish like me / You know I shun fancy things like electricity."
Today, most comics would think twice before performing a satire as broad as "Amish Paradise" because of heightened audience sensitivities when it comes to generalizing about ethnic groups of any kind.
In contrast to the famous stare down between Coolio and Michelle Pfeiffer in the iconic "Gangsta's Paradise" video, Mr. Yankovic, dressed in Amish clothing and a fake beard that makes him look vaguely Hasidic, used former Brady Bunch mom Florence Henderson as his dramatic foil. "There's no time for sin and vice living in an Amish paradise
First Published November 29, 2011 12:00 am
