I don’t usually pass along book reviews, but since our pal Bernard sent me this, and I found it really fascinating and now want to get the book (or some grateful reader could send me one as a gift) I figured I’d make an exception. And also the temperature in LA is rising, and soon even Finn the cat will be walking slow.
“We can put it like this: the Christian Right has diabolically fused biblical storylines, which are generally socially retrograde in the first place, with an updated, inspired jingoism, laced it with an extract from the conservative beliefs of Puritans and Southern slaveholders, and secreted it as a poison into the bloodstream of the American polity. Such at least is the thesis of a recent book by Christopher Collins, called Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture, which can be usefully paired with the Revs of the Morrow: New Poems by Ed Sanders, which prepares something of an antidote to this toxin by drawing on alternate sources of historical tradition and offering down-home guides to living.” (Click for the whole thing)
The secret word is Toxin
“We can put it like this: the Christian Right has diabolically fused biblical storylines, which are generally socially retrograde in the first place, with an updated, inspired jingoism, laced it with an extract from the conservative beliefs of Puritans and Southern slaveholders, and secreted it as a poison into the bloodstream of the American polity. Such at least is the thesis of a recent book by Christopher Collins, called Homeland Mythology: Biblical Narratives in American Culture, which can be usefully paired with the Revs of the Morrow: New Poems by Ed Sanders, which prepares something of an antidote to this toxin by drawing on alternate sources of historical tradition and offering down-home guides to living.” (Click for the whole thing)
The secret word is Toxin
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4 comments:
jumping jesus on a pogo stick...I actually met a hallucinating inuit crackpot the last time I was in LA who launched into a disturbingly-erudite-biblical-diatribe on the divine history of the "mud-races" dealing with (as they often are) something about the twelve tribes of israel or some such. Of course, this was after listening to him for hours as he described what was clearly a lifetime beset by seizures and schizophrenia that he (of course) had experienced rather as a lifetime of prophecy and illumination. Still, way more rational a person that the nuts I met in Salt Lake City. I eventually excused myself, figuring I had disrupted his panhandling long enough. Nice guy.
Well, as Philip K. Dick once said, the only difference between a mystic and a schizophrenic is that mystics get better while schizophrenics get worse.
As a Christian in the lineage of William Blake, Gerrard Winstanley and The Munster Anabaptists I can say that loony theology does not improve with close study. I mean, there's no real reason to learn more about the bizarre beliefs of the Christian right. They are exactly what they appear to be. Unless you are regularly dealing with them, and I am, your time would be better spent in other ways.
I would suggest reading "A People's History of Christianity" by Diana Butler Bass. It's a history of the counter tradition within Christianity.
As a great admirer of Ed Sanders I would also recommend the book of poetry that is also discussed in the review.
one of the problems with these fanatics (my bro being one)is the more stupid,illogical,& just wrong these statements are the more they become a `test of faith`& so more ardently followed.you want to give them a good kicking-well i do -but they would probably think they were being martyrs,come to think of it..
i guess we've all seen "mississippi burning"...and,thanks jon, i'll check out diana butler bass's book when opportunity affords. keep on mick, but don't waste your time wallowing in an analysis of shit when you already recognise it by it's stench. love always, z
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