Nation of skeptics

Neither rhymes nor eloquent speeches are enough | Joel Belz

Illustration by Krieg Barrie

It was an admittedly super-patriotic parody that someone slipped into my childish repertoire more than half a century ago. Of course, I knew the traditional lines from Mother Goose:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall; Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. / All the king's horses, and all the king's men, couldn't put Humpty together again.

But to that sad account, I also learned somewhere along the line to add:

But an American doctor, with patience and glue,
Put Humpty together, as good as new.

In the process, it wasn't just my boyish memory that got altered. My whole sense of optimism was enhanced, my trust in my country, my confidence in the competence of all those gifted people around me, and my expectation that even shattered dreams could be put back together. The little ditty wasn't much, and it certainly wasn't Christian—but like the doctor's glue, it helped cement my worldview into place.