Barbara Kingsolver has, I think, a beautiful essay/rallying cry about this very point in [i]Small Wonder[/i], which I've practically been sleeping with since Tuesday night. She even makes the same point about WWII--and how no leader took advantage of that moment to ask us to reflect on our lives and make any voluntary material sacrifice. She says that for her parents, wartime was very obviously, both as lived and in memory, a time of sadness--something you submitted to, something you regretted even as you were doing it (which is something that drives me crazy about the "mixed messages" gobbledygook--I don't see why we can't acknowledge at minimum regretting the need for warfare).
Instead, we got a VP who says conservation is only a "personal value" (i.e., totally inapplicable to national policy) and a massive push for buying flags, which is nice, I guess, but is that the best (or maybe I mean) place that money could have gone?
Your point about fundamentalism was interesting to me, because I come from a denomination and a congregation that makes a pretty big deal out of pastors being able to read at least one Biblical language. For me, that's the biggest stumbling block with fundamentalists, especially because as far as I can see, it's completely proven there have been errors in transmission of Scripture. For a chunk of the middle ages, Moses had horns, and up into the twentieth century, the passage in Corinthians about "homosexual offenders" was translated as "masturbators." At some point, if you have two pretty different versions, doesn't that have to suggest that someone got something wrong? I tend to stick with the idea that I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally (or, as a seminarian friend of mine puts it, the Bible contains the word of God--but also a lot of static). I know I may be a hoity-toity ivory tower former English major, but dammit, words mean things! And deep down, I feel like there's a definite anti-intellectual, anti-elitist trend that devalues language and that scares me, because without language, what alternative is there to war?
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Date: 2004-11-06 08:20 pm (UTC)Instead, we got a VP who says conservation is only a "personal value" (i.e., totally inapplicable to national policy) and a massive push for buying flags, which is nice, I guess, but is that the best (or maybe I mean) place that money could have gone?
Your point about fundamentalism was interesting to me, because I come from a denomination and a congregation that makes a pretty big deal out of pastors being able to read at least one Biblical language. For me, that's the biggest stumbling block with fundamentalists, especially because as far as I can see, it's completely proven there have been errors in transmission of Scripture. For a chunk of the middle ages, Moses had horns, and up into the twentieth century, the passage in Corinthians about "homosexual offenders" was translated as "masturbators." At some point, if you have two pretty different versions, doesn't that have to suggest that someone got something wrong? I tend to stick with the idea that I take the Bible too seriously to take it literally (or, as a seminarian friend of mine puts it, the Bible contains the word of God--but also a lot of static). I know I may be a hoity-toity ivory tower former English major, but dammit, words mean things! And deep down, I feel like there's a definite anti-intellectual, anti-elitist trend that devalues language and that scares me, because without language, what alternative is there to war?