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[title]In her fifth book, The Wordy Shipmates, longtime This American Life contributor Sarah Vowell holds forth on the Puritans—more specifically, the feverishly upright men and women who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Mixing obsessive research with her usual drollness, the 38-year-old essayist and commentator soberly addresses how Puritanism relates to Abu Ghraib, yet also delves into the wacky portrayal of colonists in sitcoms. Vowell spoke to us by phone from her Manhattan apartment.
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Time Out New York:You're a noted atheist. Why are you interested in a group as superreligious as the Puritans?
Sarah Vowell: Well, there is a kind of rebelliousness to Protestantism, in that it's about stripping away all the extra stuff of Catholicism to try and get closer and closer to God. And that's why I like the two-minute punk song. Like, let's not have seven-minute guitar solos—let's have two minutes and just get to the gist of what the song is.
TONY: While working on the book, did you ever you wish to go back in time to do hands-on research?
Sarah Vowell: I'm interested in the past, but I certainly don't romanticize it. Especially being a woman who likes her job. I mean, it's really only within the past 100 years I could even remotely live the life that I have. Now, motherhood is a choice, and not getting a job, I guess, is a choice. But those aren't choices I'm particularly interested in making. I certainly don't want them imposed on me.
TONY: So you wouldn't have lasted long in the Massachusetts Bay Colony?
Sarah Vowell: I'm not a hardy person, so I don't think I would even have been one of those people who left England to go live in some hut in the woods. I'm not a very physically brave person.
TONY: Yours is probably the first book to use the short-lived 1999 CBS sitcom Thanks as fodder.
Sarah Vowell: I'm not really big into sitcoms, but you know those things where you feel like, This was made for me? I definitely felt that way about a sitcom set in the first winter of a Puritan settlement and everyone's starving and freezing. It was a really great show! If I were a network programmer, there would be all sorts of shows dealing in the grim humor of history.
TONY: There should totally be a Law & Order: The Pequod.
Sarah Vowell: Oh, yeah. There just aren't enough whaling shows, in my opinion.
TONY: You are also brave enough to admit that classic TV shows like The Brady Bunch shaped your view of American history.
Sarah Vowell: It's not particularly dignified, but for a lot of people of a certain age, that's how we think about the founders. But earlier generations got their first lunkheaded ideas of the founders of New England from Longfellow poems that are just as full of factual inaccuracies as The Brady Bunch. So maybe it's particularly American that most of us get our earliest and most vivid exposure to American history through some kind of slightly embarrassing and wrongheaded popular art.
TONY: You mean like the episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie, as a Pilgrim, says, "Greeteth-amundo"?
Sarah Vowell: That Happy Days episode was an epiphany for me. At the time I saw that, the education I was receiving about the history of this country was definitely old-fashioned. Like, I was taught America never lost a war—and I started kindergarten in 1975, as the helicopters are pulling out of Saigon. There was no "Jefferson raping his slaves" talk back then. So when Richie complains that Joanie just left the house with her ankle showing, that was the first time that I'd heard anyone express any kind of sarcastic judgment about figures in history.
TONY: Speaking of which, Lindsay Lohan recently wrote on her MySpace page that Sarah Palin "can suck it!" Do you agree with that sentiment?
Sarah Vowell: I actually don't like the degradation of public discourse. Although I pretty much loathe the current President as much as the next person, I really don't like when people refer to him by his middle initial or any other name. There's probably a better way to discuss things than using such colloquialisms. I would rather our young women take a look at the governor's record and air their disagreements in a more orderly fashion.
TONY: But isn't one "She can suck it!" from Lindsay Lohan worth a hundred rational anti-Palin arguments by random bloggers?
Sarah Vowell: I'm sure that's true.
The Wordy Shipmates is out now.
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