pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- FIEFDOMS Another director said to me at the coffee machine this morning that, "if we divided into fiefdoms, you would own one-fifth of the world and I would own only onesmall field." (I fear he wants me to be on his steering committee.) An odd way to think about your work, really, and I'm still not sure if he was talking about power and influence or about actual real estate, but I guess he based his conclusion on how much space our departments take up in the building or how much money we bring in. Strange conversation. (Please don't make me serve on another steering committee.) So someone has started putting Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes magazine in our employee lounge and, every time I see it, I am tempted to put a queer magazine on top of it. Instead, I take it to my office and actually read the crazy stuff. Confession. I also watch the crazy preachers sometimes and pore over my mother's Baptist mission magazines when I visit her—they want to convert Mormons—because religion, particularly religious extremism, fascinates me. In fact, since I was paying my own way, I decided to go for all the practical degrees—major in English, minor in studio art, humanities focus in women's studies, MFA in poetry—and, for my humanities focus project, compared the second-wave feminist movement to the religious new right movement from 1962 (or whenever Betty Freidan's book came out) to the late eighties. This covers the period when Orrin Hatch attempted to legislate female submission with his Family Rights Act (which legally defined men as the heads of households); when religious groups attempted to overturn domestic violence laws because men, or so they said, can do what they will with their, er, property; when Jerry Falwell and busloads of his lemmings protested at the trial of a minister who put his toddlers on an iron heating grate because, he claimed God told him to send them back to the fires of Hell. (One child died and another was severely burned). Unfuckingbelievable. So anyway, I'll probably read the latest magazine tonight and have lots to report tomorrow, but, in the meantime, here's a peek at the back ad: One of the Most Threatening Dangers to Evangelical Christian Churches Today Is Freemasonry! (Gee. I thought it was queers. Quick! Somebody call Fred Phelps] The urgency of this subject lies in the fact that many governing positions in today's evangelical churches are being filled by those who practice Freemasonry—quite possibly including the pastor of your church! Since we are in the midst of March Madness, this got me thinking. Perhaps the Dean Dome is a modern basketball temple and those Gatorade baths that winning coaches receive are baptisms. And my basketball-watching pals certainly observe specific rituals (rubbing a particular cup when their team is losing because they were drinking from it the night of an unlikely win; wearing the sweat shirt they were wearing when Christian Laettner made his miracle shot) and so on. Do ya think maybe basketball is a religion? If it is, I wanna be a deacon. I wanna write our pledge of alliegiance too! 11:35 a.m. - 2005-03-28 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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