Brenda Starr is a name that evokes much nostalgia for me. Dale Messick, the creator of the comic strip died not long ago at age 98. She told The Associated Press in a 2002 interview “Most comics, the main characters are heroes, guys, and they don’t write for women. I was a woman so I was writing for women and I think that’s what put her over.”

But despite my being a boy devoted to heroes like Superman and playing cowboy with cap pistols and BB gun pretending to be the Lone Ranger or Red Ryder like any normal boy and I considered girls alien creatures, fascinating but suspect at best, when the strip began to appear in 1940 I was an avid fan from the very first. During WW II Brenda as with many cartoon and comic strip characters of the time was fully involved in the effort against the Axis Powers, and she proved to be as adventurous, brave and courageous as any man.

While Wonder Woman was also doing her part in like manner with her marvelous invisible airplane and magic powers making me a fan from her first appearance as well, I was entranced by Brenda’s ongoing relationship with the mysterious Basil St. John with his eye patch like that of a pirate, and his mysterious illness treated with a serum made from black orchids growing in the Amazon jungle. And Brenda Starr with her Rita Hayworth gloriously abundant, radiantly red hair and sparkling emerald green eyes was breathtakingly beautiful, something not lost on me even as a young boy.

Perhaps my earliest readings as a child of Scott, Cooper, Stratton-Porter and others together with WWII and the films of the time made for the romantic in me. Whatever the reason, I was drawn to this ongoing relationship between Brenda and her mysterious lover with the black eye patch and his black orchids. It would thrill me every time Brenda would discover a black orchid left her by the mysterious St. John, and I would keep hoping for a happy outcome between Brenda and him.

It is the nostalgic longing for the mystery of love and romance Brenda Starr and Basil St. John represented I miss most of all, the nostalgia for what those black orchids represented to me as a boy that has been lost to this generation I find so tragic. Of the sources of wonder to the writer of Proverbs in the Old Testament was “… the way of a man with a maid.”

I believe the wonder of the mystery of love and romance between Brenda Starr and Basil St. John has been betrayed by an age that leaves nothing to the imagination of such things, and in this betrayal so has this generation of young people been betrayed, and lost to the young people of today the wonder of “… the way of a man with a maid.”

But as I continue to point out romance requires a national Ethos given to the best impulses, speech and behavior of which we are capable, one exemplified by the great musicals when poets worked in America.

However, if one were to look for the best remaining virtue and character of America today in my opinion it would be found in the rural churches across our nation. A glance at the church listings here in the Kern River Valley tells anyone we are a community of believers, and one of a diversity of Christian beliefs. However, our churches are for the most part comprised of small congregations typical of most rural communities. Even before the lake went in here in the valley, we had a number of churches sometimes serving only about a dozen people in attendance on any given Sunday. And though larger churches have sprung up, for the better part these still reflect a community, something often lost in metropolitan churches.

But here in the past there would be the occasional “traveling evangelist” or other itinerant preacher that would show up. These were a real treat for us in those days because the meetings often had the aura of the old “Brush Arbor” meetings with which so many Southerners like my grandfather were acquainted.

For those of us who have had the pleasure of traveling throughout the rural communities of the Real South in places like Georgia and Alabama, we understand the character of community churches throughout America so well represented by my own maternal grandparent’s small church in Little Oklahoma in Southeast Bakersfield on the corner of Cottonwood and Padre. Grandad built the small church himself and served as its pastor, while my grandmother played the piano for the singing that was such a prominent part of both worship and fellowship.

They won’t find it in great cathedrals, but if those in Congress, the universities and schools, the media, and Hollywood sincerely wanted to know the Real America, they would spend time in the small rural churches throughout our nation. Despite the crude and failed stereotyping of those like Sinclair Lewis and Hollywood, in no other institutions of America is the genuine and best character of our nation so well expressed as it is in the small community churches scattered throughout our nation. Nowhere else will you find the real morality, the hopes and dreams of real Americans, such genuine faith, such genuine belief in actual virtue and in our nation than among the small churches like those right here in the Kern River Valley.

To have been born into and raised among the true believers of the Bible in the small rural churches of America, to sing the hymns “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again” and “In the Garden” with such real devotion and faith among other believers, though small in number characteristic of these rural churches, is to experience something that cannot be made known or understood by the greatest genius of literary or film artistry.

Notwithstanding the human weaknesses and failures we all share in common, the hypocrisy and ignorance, the prejudices, all of which are to be found throughout the institutions of America low and high, it is in the rural churches of America you find the people so transparently honest in these weaknesses and failures together with the best of what we are as human beings in genuine sacrificial love and caring for others, of caring about America.

No matter the manifold and legitimate criticism, such believers also believe in an America “One nation under God,” have not forgotten our Founding Fathers and all that America used to represent and used to be taught in both schools and churches, all that America should still represent in virtue, in hopes and dreams of a future for our nation. And while in the wisdom of the Founding Fathers no state church was to be established, one cannot legitimately separate the Bible and Christianity from the intent of our Founding Fathers nor the reflection of this when it comes to the genuine character of the Real America so well represented in the rural churches of America.

Religious kooks continue to abound, many of them “wearing soft clothing and living in king’s palaces,” those like this latest one arrested in Las Vegas whose only obvious interest in religion is sex and money. But in this he differs nothing from many “respectable” people like politicians and a host of others. No truly good person wants power and authority over others, no truly good person is greedy and avaricious whether cloaked in religion or politics.

It is patently obvious the President of Iran is an example of Hitler, and there is no appeasing a bully or despotic tyrant whether of religion or politics. But what is it that motivates those in America lusting for power and authority over others if not evil. The lesser of evils remains evil. But the civilized nations of the world must win this war against the barbaric threat of Islam. The question is whether we have a “lesser evil” in the leadership of America willing and capable of prosecuting such a war to win? Not if our porous borders for the sake of slave labor to benefit the wealthy is the standard of “concern” for America on the part of Bush and others.

Both Clinton and Bush took the oath of office with hand on Bible. Both have ostentatiously displayed their Bibles while entering churches. But if the book is no more than a talisman or lucky rabbit’s foot to them, if they refuse to live according to the precepts of Jesus they clearly proclaim their hypocrisy. And it is this hypocrisy on the part of our leaders that has not only cost America its standing before all the nations of the world, but is inviting the very disasters to which these leaders pay only lip service all the while refusing to do what is best and right for America like securing our borders and doing away with ruinous trade agreements designed to bankrupt our nation to benefit only the few in power, the lesser of evils compared to those like the President of Iran and all other Islamofascists but evil nevertheless.