pantoum's Diaryland Diary

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WILLFUL IGNORANCE, REVISITED

Late-night insight about Buzzcut: she liked being topped but didn't like liking it.

A shame really—we could have had so many more passionate nights grappling with those power issues . . . but enough about that tired old topic already.

I told Poetgrrl that the climate on campus has changed considerably in the last several years and that I can encapsulate this change by stating that the conservative Christians have become defiantly vocal and are proud of their ignorant speciousness.

(Can I even use that word that way?)

I'm not sure that adequately conveys the anti-intellectual climate so prevalent in the classroom, at the university—and really, in our nation—right now though.

First, there was a huge flap over the frosh reading assignment, which some folks saw as marginalizing Christianity because it exposed the budding adults of our fair state to Islamic culture at a time when the um patriots among us are killing the so-called infidels. Then a male student enrolled in a seminar course in which students explore feminist issues in popular culture, then complained to a senator that this state-funded course required him to read an offensive text in which Baptist women do not submit graciously to men (natch) and which empathizes with homosexuals.

The professor, to his way of thinking, then prohibited his right to free speech because she would not let him monopolize classroom discussion with the same endless tirade against queers (providing a handy example of the patriarchal assumption of privilege for the other students, but this probably never occurred to McBoy).

Said professor was reprimanded and very nearly fired over this complaint, and a climate in which professors are afraid to introduce new and controversial ideas now prevails on campus.

(Perhaps they should assign Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale this fall. I think the students need its insight.

For the past three years, my co-instructor and I have used the God's Country episode of Peter Jennings's In Search of Americafor a series of intentional communication exercises. This episode was filmed in Aiken, South Carolina—a town that has the distinction of having more churches per person than any other town in the country.

The mayor posted "character banners" on downtown light poles—you know, because public material about character à la William Bennett is the substitute of choice for Christians in places where religious material has been prohibited by law.

(This also plants the not-so-subtle idea in impressionable people's heads that only Christians have character.)

Town water bills include character quotes. City officials meet weekly to pray and hold character-building workshops. And the mayor himself insists that creationism should be taught in the public schools.

Listening to some students depict the town as a backwoods place filled with backwards hicks as other students bristle at these regional insults has been instructive to me and to the class, and has prompted many good discussions about tolerance and public officials' obligation to understand the issues of the day and to at least attempt to represent the many disparate voices in their jurisdictions.

University professors in the town do "missionary work" to try to educate the public even as the creationists battle it out with the board of education over the teaching of the theory of evolution.

•

The Southern Poverty Law Center's most recent Intelligence Report includes a map designating the 762 active hate groups in our nation by state. Sadly, my tiny home state of South Carolina tops the list with a whopping forty-seven organized hate groups.

(Florida is second with forty-three and California is third with forty-two. And, since my BFF is temporarily exiled in Montana, let me just point out that only two active hate groups are organized in that whole big-ass tax-free state.)

I grew up a free thinker in that uniform state and have had a fascination with and severe allergic reaction to organized religion ever since.

I keep my Jebus allergy to myself in the classroom, but have had several lively one-on-one conversations with students over the years when they asked outside of the classroom what it was like to grow up in small-town South Carolina.

Anyway. Last semester, my co-instructor and I noted that more students than normal bristled at the predictable stereotyping of my homeys but, for the first time, this did not result in healthy dialogue. Instead, several conservative students used the exact same phrase to describe why they objected to completing assignments that required them to take opposing viewpoints on public-policy issues such as teaching creationism in the schools, same-sex/spousal-equivalent benefits, and other ripped-from-the-headlines topics.

These students "have an internal moral compass that does not waver" à la Rick Warren and so do not need to explore both sides of an issue or entertain opinions that do not align with scripture—or, I would say, the version of scripture that is being spoon fed to them by religious actors.

I guess, to their way of thinking, such closed-mindedness shows character.

And, while I say that with a smart-ass tone in my voice, I also understand this very different way of moving in the world. It is familiar to me, as are the collective chips on their fundamentalists' collective shoulders.

This is how most of the disenfranchised people in my hometown move through the world, how many people in my extended family move through the world, how my hyper-religious mother moves through the world.

My younger sister is threatened by new ideas. I am thinking in particular about a Thanksgiving conversation about feminism that she and my father and best friend Filmgrrl and I had exactly one year before my father died unexpectedly.

Our conversation about gender equality disturbed my Glittergrrl greatly and she became noticeably agitated as our conversation continued. Then she started defending patriarchy and yelling at Filmgrrl and me. And then she went into a sort of trancelike state and began stringing together random Bible verses and prayers and praying on her rosary beads in what I can only describe as stream-of-consciousness Jebus channeling.

Was imagining herself as Other, as powerful, so threatening to her that she disassociated from the world and became delusional right in front of us?

I know the easy route for intellectuals is to make fun of fundamentalists and their superstitions—especially if they are southern and especially if they are uneducated. I am guilty of doing this myself sometimes. And I am an impatient person who values logic, which makes it even harder not to be put off by closed-mindedness and bigotry.

I almost got kicked out of a family holiday gathering once because I countered my Uncle Henry's assertion that Gawd hates queers and that's why he gave us all AIDS by pointing out that his gawd must favor lesbians then, since we are the group least likely to acquire the disease.

(wink wink)

My mother's religious sledgehammer frustrates me. And the fact that one cannot argue logically with people who embrace specious reasoning does too. But I understand that flinging around easy labels can shut down dialogue while failing to acknowledge that one's experiences in the world can encourage people to find comfort in prescribed existences and neatly packaged mythologies and strictured movement, can create a chasm that makes it even harder for us to understand where someone with such different experiences is coming from.

Some of my students were just not reachable last semester, were just not able to entertain other points of view, and this troubles me.

I think of them in terms of Plato's Parable of the Cave. There they stood, staring intently at the back of the cave and insisting that the world is comprised of undifferentiated darkness, their Rick Warren moral compasses and so-called character lessons holding them in a vise-like grip that informed them that that they must not turn their heads and must not see the light shining in through the cave's opening.

For the first time in my teaching experience, a few of my students still stared at that dark wall at the end of the semester. And this bothers me.

I know, at some level, that willful ignorance is willful ignorance, that a dogged insistence on one particular mythology as truth is often based in deep-rooted fear of the randomness of the universe, of anything unknown, that some people need black-and-white answers in order to maintain some illusion of safety in their lives.

•

Philosopher David Hume's birthday was this week and I've been thinking about him. In early 1700s Edinburgh, religious groups known as the seizers grabbed people who skipped church and forcibly dragged them to mass.

Hume lost his faith as a teenager and was present when a nearby college student was convicted of blasphemy and hung after he announced that Christianity is nonsense.

Hume wrote, "I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority. I was forced to seek out some new medium by which truth might be established."

In Treatise of Human Nature, he argues that it may be impossible for us to know the truth about anything, that we humans can experience the world but never fully understand it.

The Church of England tried, but failed, to prosecute him for his skepticism, but he continued to openly question the existence of their God.

I worry that in a country that may already be a theocracy, the jihadists of the fundamentalist religious right are defining the conversation, are attempting to dismantle our legal system, and are demonizing difference as dangerous, which creates a landscape in which seizers with Borglike moral compasses might bully the rest of us into at least the appearance of assimilation.

Did you notice that, when legal decision after legal decision in the Schiavo case failed to align with the faithful's insisted-upon outcomes, they simply announced that something is wrong with our judicial system rather than with their way of thinking? That the speaker of the house, that criminal Tom DeLay, waged war on our legal system at a time when Falwell's Heritage University is already offering legal degrees to so-called Christian activist judges to counter what they see as a liberal judicial system?

This scares the living shit out of me.

SINGING IN THE SHOWER: I'm having an eclectic sort of day musically. Sang I'm gonna tell you how it's gonna be [insert happy thrashing about in a mosh-pit–like fashion to the guitar's driving "duh-duh-DUH-duh-duh" beat here] soon you're gonna be fucking me. I'm gonna tell you what your mama won't say. She's ashamed her daughter is gay.... [skipping to chorus now] I'm gonna take you to queer bars [more mosh-pit–like thrashing to duh-duh-DUHs] I'm gonna drive you in queer cars...You're gonna meet all my queer friends. Our queer, queer fun it never ends.... I believe Two Nice Girls sang this back in the early 90s but can't remember for sure. It certainly sounds like something Gretchen would write though.

(OKAY, OKAY. WE DO RECRUIT!)

9:08 a.m. - 2005-05-12

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