The Ten Commandments

Here I am with Rob Walker yesterday outside the Texas State Capitol. We were walking back from our panel at the Texas Book Festival and I took us through a side exit so we could say hello to The Ten Commandments. I suggested a photo and someone suggested we point to our favorite commandment. (Mine was easy, Rob couldn’t decide.)

It might seem blasphemous to goof on the Ten Commandments on a Sunday, but the monument has a less-than-pious history: It was one of a series erected in a nationwide program cooked up mid-century by The Fraternal Order of Eagles and aided by director Cecil B. DeMille. Yes, that Cecil B. DeMille, the director of The Ten Commandments. He thought the monuments would make excellent publicity for the film, and several actors from the movie were present at the unveilings (that’s Yul Brynner on the left, Martha Scott, who played Moses’s mother, on the right):

(The second photo comes from a comic book the Eagles put out called On Eagles Wings, about a delinquent boy who goes on a camping trip to learn about God.)

The monuments have inspired many: some to legal action, some to website development, some to vandalism via automobile. (A deranged Arkansas man drove his Dodge Dart into at least two of the monuments.)

“Here’s my problem: Why are there ten?” George Carlin asked in his special, Complaints and Grievances. “You don’t need ten! I think the list of commandments was deliberately and artificially inflated to get it up to ten. It’s a padded list.”

“Ten sounds official,” he joked. “Having ten commandments was really a marketing decision.”

He then boiled down the list to two. (I won’t spoil it, just watch. Or listen.)

Shel Silverstein went the opposite direction in “The 20 Commandments,” and showed Moses chiseling off the second half of the list so it was light enough that he could carry it down the mountain. (You can read the whole thing in Different Dances.)

Sometimes people will ask me why I’m so fond of the list of 10 format.

“Well, it was good enough for Moses,” I say. “And it’s good enough for me.”