Amish Adventure

HERE IN THE United States of Appliances, I have long been fascinated by the survival of the plain-living and puritanical Amish subculture, where simplicity maintains a higher value than in what they consider to be our juggernaut of decadence. There have been two recent mentions of the Amish subculture in syndicated comic strips.

In Get Fuzzy, Rob Wilco, playing with a new toy, says to his cat Bucky, "Did you see my new Ball-on-a-String thingy?" Bucky responds, "What are you, Amish all of a sudden?" Wilco: "Dude, don't make fun of people you don't even know." Bucky: "Oh, what are the Amish gonna do to me? Send me an angry e-mail? Drive here and beat me up?" Wilco: "You're such an idiot sometimes." Bucky: "And the Amish can't do a thing about it."

In Zits, parents give their teenage son Jeremy a cellphone. His mother says, "I bet your friends are going to be surprised!" Jeremy replies, "No doubt. Since I'm the only person in school who didn't have one, everybody has been assuming we're Amish."

To shield themselves from the temptations of the modern world, the Amish shun ownership of electricity, motorized vehicles and contemporary clothing, but members of the Christian sect do use power tools at construction sites and factories, and they hire people to drive them to stores.

In order to prosper, the Amish have learned to intertwine compromise with restriction. They allow technology that will further growth—modern medicine, for example—while prohibiting those inventions which they believe tear their community apart, such as television, radios and telephones.

Most telephones, that is. Use of the telephone would seem to be in conflict with their society, but Amish families have had pay phones in their settlements for decades. Only the most conservative Amish leaders prohibit phone booths, or "phone shacks," as they're known. Rural phone shacks have ranged from old, unused outhouses to neatly built sheds with doors and a large blackboard for leaving messages.

These community phone booths are generally used by Amish families to report a medical, fire or other emergency; to arrange for a van driver to take them to work or a doctor's appointment; or to receive customer orders or to purchase supplies for their businesses. Many Amish settlements now allow workers on construction crews to use cellphones.

In rural Holmes-Wayne County, OH, home of the world's largest Amish population, a driver fired a shotgun blindly into a cornfield and killed a man after being tormented by a group of young Amish pranksters who had pelted his car with tomatoes. About a dozen members of the Amish community, ranging in age from 15 to 23, had been hiding in the field, throwing tomatoes and firing paintball guns at passing cars. After driving past several times and being pelted on each occasion, the driver stopped and challenged the group to throw more tomatoes, then fired several shots into the field of cornstalks. He has been charged with murder.

In Adams County, IN, a drag race between two horse-drawn buggies ended with one of the drivers losing control and running into another buggy, seriously injuring a passenger. The two buggies were racing on a Sunday night on a county road about 20 miles south of Fort Wayne when the wreck occurred. While northeastern Indiana has a large Amish community, a state trooper said that he didn't know of any other recent problems with drag-racing buggies.

(One Amish man, aware that his horse's studded shoes were gouging paved roads, decided to make a donation to help pay for the damage. He and other members of his Amish sect believe it's only fair that they chip in to fix roads torn up by their horse-drawn carriages.)

In Lancaster County, PA, a couple of Amish men were arrested for distributing cocaine that they had purchased from a biker gang, the Pagans, one of whose members was a police informer. The two men were from a particularly conservative Amish sect where not only electricity and tractors are forbidden, but even zippers. I wonder if it had been those tempting zippers on the Pagans' leather motorcycle jackets that served as a gateway to cocaine?

Such incidents are the risk of rumspringa—the Amish tradition of "running around time"—when teenagers and young adult members of the plain-living Christian sect are allowed to act like their debauched non-Amish counterparts. After a few months or even years of this sowing of wild oats, an Amish individual can then decide whether to be baptized and join the Amish church or opt out of the religious community for the American consumer paradise.

In fact, UPN (sister network of CBS) has announced plans for a new reality series tentatively titled Amish in the City, based on rumspringa, "in which Amish teens leave the fold and intentionally subject themselves to temptation to test their religious convictions, before deciding whether to join the Amish church." Fortunately for this production, the Amish prohibition against being photographed is relaxed during rumspringa.

CBS CEO Leslie Moonves (who oversees UPN) told critics, "We couldn't do The Real Beverly Hillbillies," which was dropped when protestors complained that it denigrated the rural poor. "But," he joked—sounding very much like Bucky the cat—"the Amish don't have as good a lobbying group."

In Independence, IA, four Amish men who had been imprisoned for vandalism found themselves growing too comfortable with television, electricity, telephone and running water, so Russell West, the Buchanan County jail administrator, wanted their release as soon as possible.

"I thought we'd better get them out of here," he said, "because they were getting too used to it."

Then there are those Amish porn sites on the internet.

Take AmishBondage.com, where Sarah Reinhart explains: "My elders have taught me since birth that we seek a simpler life, one guided by our faith, which dictates that we forgo ownership of modern amenities such as electricity, automobiles and telephones, where sex is solely for procreation. The modern world is fraught with sin and temptation to be avoided and shunned. My feelings about this? Fuck that!"

This is an adult site "depicting images of bondage, sado-mashochism, lust, pride, and at least half of the cardinal sins," says Sarah. "God, I hope the elders don't spot this Web site. But how could they? They don't have electricity! Hee hee!"

There are photos of "blowjobs, facials, hard-core fucking, public flashing, and my first girl/girl experience." Twisted role playing is a specialty: "I just love to dress up in unique and interesting ways to make things fun." There's "Babycake the $10 Whore" and "Princess Leia" as well as "Sarah the Amish Girl."

Okay, so she's not actually Amish. But, back in real life, according to an item in Newsweek about Viagra wannabes, the maker of pills named the Power of Nature & Love Powder says "the pills are a hit with the Amish. If this buggy's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'."

Who's your Amish daddy now? o