pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A CONCOMITANT RELIANCE ON OBLIVION (No. 262 � 10.7.2005 � 10:30 AM) Sorry for my long absence. I�ve been working on this entry for nearly a week now, but had to escape to the mountains to find enough uninterrupted time to finish it.. I try not to write too much about my whatever-it-is with Pottergrrl here, but have to say that, after not seeing her for two weeks and longing for her throughout that time, and then falling asleep exhausted after making love, wrapped around and between and on top of and beneath each other, well being here felt unbelievably wonderful. � So. Scientists have determined that the 1918 flu pandemic was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans and also speculate that AIDS is a monkey virus that jumped directly to humans. Now bear with me �cause I�ll come back to that. Meanwhile, anthropologists argue that humans have survived as a species, in part, because our ability to communicate allows us to weed out, through ostracism or physical elimination, the bloodthirsty bullies who would destroy our communities. Unlike chimpanzees, we homo sapiens manage to silence our bullies in an effort to sustain our species. Yet homo sapiens engineered the Holocaust. The Crusades. Destroyed priceless cultural artifacts�destroyed thought�during the Dark Ages. Introduced untold atrocities in the twentieth century. The disasppeared. Rwanda. Auschwitz. And now the Christianists are attempting to silence alternative viewpoints, to silence diversity, to force their straitjacket of mythology onto the rest of us. And they have become arrogant, aggressive iron-fisted bullies. In our time, the Donald Trumps of present America�the people who say, with glee, �You�re fired!� as Americans sit on their couches eating popcorn and celebrating such meanness�not the Gandhis or the MLK Jr.s or the Mother Teresas of the world�are revered. Some photogenic asshole on Survivor who stabs a teammate in the back is deemed an American hero. A president who uses Daddy�s connections to weasel his way out of being drafted and then dons war gear during a speech tries to pass himself off as a hero, and Americans kowtow to him, call him heroic. A heartless preacher who shows up at a gay child�s funeral waving a �God Hates Fags� placard at the boy�s mourning parents is celebrated as a moral hero by people who consider hatred moral. We worship the business school detritis of suburban America�glamorous, consumer-branded offspring of corporate CEOs and the idle rich who will do anything and screw anyone to be on The Boardroom or in those Enron offices, to retain their position among the economic elite. So I guess it makes sense that the Christianists would follow suit, would recognize that the American mainstream wants a slick, mean Jerry Falwell and not some kind-hearted country bumpkin who wants to fulfill Christ�s directive that we love one another. Modernity, twentieth-century German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno argue, is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force (and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion, as poet Carolyn Forch� would add). We want Martha Stewart to be a hard ass ... at least until she�s on trial. The evangelists who once proclaimed Jebus�s message of love and inclusiveness now strut their power on stage and their hatred over the radio waves, garner control from their tax-protected pulpits and rake in millions spreading hatred as Gawd�s unerring �truth.� (You know, truth�that thing you see encased in the shape of a fish on car bumpers, eating up the Darwin fish.) I fear people who are convinced that they know the only version of truth, grew up surrounded by too dang many fundamentalists who wanted to control me and everyone else mind, body, and soul. I fear people like Eric Rudolph who are convinced that their gawd gives them the right to silence all other interpretations of the so-called truth, who justify walking into a gay bar and spraying nails into fellow Americans by calling himself �moral.� And I fear the neighborhood Eric Rudolphs who lean across the table and say "Well, you know that she ..." and shake their heads knowingly. Today, American universities, like universities in Tehran and other theocracies, are teeming with students who �have an unwavering moral compass that is not swayed by public opinion� (as several of my grad. students informed me after refusing to complete a writing assignment that required them to argue both sides of an issue). It�s no longer considered paranoid to imagine American students reporting a professor who doesn�t espouse the president�s iron-fisted philosophies to some thought gestapo that can legally monitor our library books and e-mail, can hold us without cause for indeterminate periods of time without ever pressing charges, for students to call for outspoken professors' heads on a proveberbial silver platter. Professors who dare discuss a controversial topic�or, in one southern university�s case, who insist that students stick to the topic rather than monopolizing everyone�s discussion time with their repeated bigotry�are dragged through the mud in newspapers and picket lines and punished for preaching reason. A university degree is something to be purchased, a piece of paper that suburban parents buy for their children like expensive licorice rather than a ticket to Enlightenment and knowledge. What about knowledge for the sake of knowledge? That�s what kept me working to pay my tuition even when I was exhausted, what keeps my artist friends and me up nights reveling in new ideas and exploring new ways of thinking and seeing and interpreting the world and our place in it. My mother used to threaten to send me to Bob Jones University when I was derisive of her Baptist doctrines and I count my blessings every day that religious school vouchers were not available back then, remember to recognize how fortunate I am that I was able to attend public schools where�at least in some cases�such narrow beliefs were challenged. But today Christianists are in a position to keep children prisoner to their ignorant views, to define the conversation within the parameters of their own narrow world-view. And, since Reagan did away with balanced reporting, Christianists can purchase television shows (on, say, the National Geographic channel) that assert so-called Intelligent Design or whatever philosophy they�re currently espousing as scientific truth. Did you know that there are two different rafting tours down the Grand Canyon�one for people who "believe" in science and one for people who espouse the theory of so-called intelligent design. Ponder that. And even the once-credible New York Times furthers the president�s agenda instead of presenting objective news ... but that�s a topic for another day. What comes to us via our TV screens and the radio and in our newspapers today may not be factual, may instead be whatever message a sponsor paid for us to hear. Yes, our reality is increasingly determined by the market. Christianists would argue that science is nothing but an advertisement either, but some of them have never even taken a science course. Should they then be allowed to censor scientific experts who lecture about their field of expertise? So many Americans�people like Bush�s Supreme Court nominee and crony extraordinaire�base their world view solely on what they define as the perfect word of Gawd, insist that patterns found in our natural world are immaterial. Carolyn Forch� notes, in her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, that the gap between self and other opens up the problem of relativism that has bedeviled modern philosophy, politics, and poetry. Respect for otherness seems always to release the specter of an infinite regress. The language of religion therefore becomes quite important in this supposedly secular century, for religion traditionally makes claims for universality and unimpeachable truth. Some of the �most flagrant forms of institutionalized violence in our era,� she says, �have been directed toward specific religions (during the Holocaust) or against religion in general (as in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe).� Religion in our age of atrocity bears substantial responsibility for human suffering. I try to believe that most of us are reasonable people who are appalled by the fact that our society seems to be worshipping Donald Trump. That must appall people at some level. I try to believe these people are grasping for morals in a world that feels increasingly out of control and meaningless. The Christian church is an easy answer in such a world. It provides a social outlet for your children, the Golden Rule, the Ten Commandments, the promise of salvation, clear boundaries. Problem is, the modern evangelical movement, the fundamentalists, are also attempting to introduce a new dark ages. What happens if the Religious New Right succeeds? Anne, a progressive lawyer friend, and I have long philosophical conversations as often as we can manage it. Her husband was very nearly a Supreme Court justice nominee and said, after the Meiers nomination, We�ve gotten it all wrong. We thought it was abortion, but it�s religion. The ultimate goal is not to overturn Roe v. Wade, but to force their religious beliefs onto the rest of us.Anne is re-reading Margaret Atwood�s Handmaid�s Tale and says it is scaring the living shit out of her, says she still can�t believe that we�re actually in a place where the possibility of waking up to discover that her bank account has been closed and her money placed in her husband�s account does not seem so far outside the realm of possibility anymore. I think of the homeschooled Christianist children, the ones who never even get a chance to experience Enlightenment, in terms of Plato�s Parable of the Cave. They�re indoctrinated now, afraid, unable to turn their heads and acknowledge the light at the opening of the cave, and so they continue to insist that the world is black and white, without nuance. They�re rigid with fear and ignorance, yet determined and will insist that everyone else see only black and white too. There�s a reason Hitler went after the artists, the free-thinkers, first, a reason the Hungarian poet Mikl�s Radn�ti was sent to forced-labor camp where his words were silenced. Carolyn Forch� notes that, as North Americans, we have been fortunate: wars for us (provided we are not combatants) are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people�s cities. The houses destroyed are other people�s houses. We are also fortunate in that we do not live under martial law [yet]. So�finally getting back to those scientists and the bird flu that jumped to the human �let's make a huge leap here and ask ourselves, could the cowboy Christianist mindset that now dominates our land be rogue chimpanzee behavior that broke on through to the other side? 7:36 p.m. - 2005-10-10 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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