reality tv meets jesus

my friends cliff and mary (and Jack!) are visiting right now. I just love them, and wish y'all could know them, too.

Back in the day Cliff and I used to tell stories to each other over frenchfries in the student union at BGSU, and Mary and I brewed exotic coffees in a decrepit pit of a Teaching Assistant Office while wrestling with rhetoric, interpretation & the politics of highered...

So anyway Cliff is brilliant culture critic who recently wrote about (mark your calendars!): Gifted an astonishing swirl of American Dreams, Reality TV & Christianbookstormerica.

once. when i was a fundamentalist. I participated in a a pageant called: Most Christian Teen. or Outstanding Christian Teen.

or something like that.

I found it absurd, but there were scholarships available, and goshdarnit, I was a prize Christian Teen if ever I knew one. And if I wasn't going to get any beer or sex or even movies or dancing, for that matter, than goshdarnit (oops...with that much profanity i wouldn't have stood a chance...i've become quite a pottymouth since then...) why not get some college tuition for it.

One of the things that cracks me up about what we used to say to condemn Catholics was that -- "everybody knows that their faith is just 'cultural'." As if that was a bad thing. As if ours wasn't.

Indeed the *culture* of evangelicals is beautifully satired in the movie -- SAVED. (if you missed it, you'll have to wait for video, as distribution is waning.) and Cliff closes his piece on GIFTED -- essentially an "american idol" for the TBN set -- with a quote:

“That’s our ultimate goal,” said McIntyre, “to put attention on the Christian world.”

his technique:

God gives us so many gifts, but we reach for the one with the prettiest wrapping. In a world where MTV dictates trends and pop-stars become idols, Christianity seems to be wrapped in conditions and judgments. It is our goal to wrap God’s message—His love—in acceptance, and in a way that blends seamlessly into ‘pop’ culture while still upholding the values we, as Christians, value most. When presented with this gift, wrapped tightly in respect, we hope that today’s youth will open the trendy packaging to release God’s love—and realize in doing so that we are all truly ‘Gifted.’

So you should expect that America's next "Gift" will be a 300-something pound somebody with acne, right? but the show's great production values will make us realize that God's gifts of love and acceptance blends seamlessly with pop culture's gifts? right?

You know that I love the gifts of pop culture, right? And am all for featuring the immanence of Christ and the Gospel in the cultural milieu -- but the thing is --

the "christian world" that McIntyre wants to feature is a cultural hybrid where every consumer trend is hastily baptized, blessed & pressed into the service of evangelism -- without considering how good or ill the fit may be...

everytime Jesusness becomes a product you can buy -- somebody, somewhere, is trying to serve God & mammon at the same time. i know that Mammon happily accepts their fruity sacrifice...

a lighter political note...

short downloadable film, This Land by JibJab, provides some very effective skewering of exactly the sloganeering and bumpersticking that i find so deplorable.

only here -- (hurrah!) we get it through a comic frame -- not the angsty overpassionate rant that Rudd posted last...

democracy

okay. I'm coming out.

*clears throat*

no, not that coming out. not in today's blog....

I'm making it a matter of record that i am a democrat.

no surprise to most readers...shocking to...? nope, nobody, *but* hailing from the ronald-reagan-republican-christians that I do, I'm aware that politics is sticky point for a number of my readers today.

the point of today's revelation is to:

1. commend the democratic party for choosing to highligh / engage Howard Dean's rhetoric that what's *important* about being a democrat is *commitment to democracy*.

-- and that this commitment to democracy means that educational reform is rooted in DEVELOPING people's sense of agency, voice and participation, instead of punishing those who do not already have these privileges (eg. "failing" schools in the "no" [rich] child left behind policy...)

-- that this commitment to democracy means participating in the kind of foreign policy that puts constraints on multinational corporations and multinational political organizations and the industrial-military-complex in favor of DEVELOPING the rights, privileges and opportunities of workers and underpriveleged people around the world

-- and that this commitent to democracy means protecting the rights of marginal populations so that they have the ability to DEVELOP their sense of agency, opportunities and contribution to society instead of *targetting* them to preserve the safety and security of the already-privileged (eg. Bush vs. Affirmative Action, Bush-tries-to-make-gays-constitutionally-inferior)

2. excoriate the democratic party -- as well as the rest of the politico-industrial-complex -- for failing to adopt *real* campaign reform which would allow for choice and heterogeneity to flourish *throughout* a political campaign -- instead of foreclosing the pool of candidates as early as possible (for both parties) in order to divorce the political process from grass roots deliberation and transform it into even more sloganeering and bumpersticking.

i *do* blame the media-indusrial-complex largely for this quandary, and i *do* (perhaps naievely) register *hope* for decentralization, dialogic media with the advent of digital / wireless / and networked media...

status and solidarity

Lynn turned me on to this book that we’ve both been loving this summer – James Paul Gee – writes about social linguistics and literacies which is situated exactly at the intersection of our interests (she researches / teaches about adolescent literacy). So anyway he has these great labels for concepts that have circling in this blog (and in my discourse) for a long time. He talks about that language use is always rooted in motivations of STATUS and SOLIDARITY:

Status and solidarity are the competing, conflicting and yet intimately related fields of attraction and repulsion within which all uses of language are situated.

And then he goes on to probe how indicative your use of the oral –in’ or –ing demonstrates which of these dialectical poles you’re featuring more in that particular speech episode. If you’re endin your words with the “n” – than you’re seeking solidarity – with the “g” – you’re positioning yourself for status. Now use of this code (or any other linguistic criteria) is dependent upon your social circle, because there are many circles where the use of the “g” is a bid for SOLIDARITY and STATUS.

But these two poles do again mark out the powerful opposing urges to be a part of something (to be “in”) and the urge to be unique (“be yourself, no matter what they say…”)

And this feels like a particularly keen truth when it comes to the point that Nathan makes in his blog:

Can one really affect the world one person at a time? That is just not good math. […]In order to change the world, you must be able to affect systems. In order to affect systems you must have the backing of institutions. In order to get backing you have to sell yourself to something. I dabbled in everything in college; track, choir, drama, residence life, debate etc...but I liked everything so i did not sell myself to anything. Consequently I have not affected any systems.

To have cache you have to (as Mandy puts it) “sell out” , but to make real change – to subvert the rottenness of existing status – you have to be able to maintain a sense of seperateness…

so many implications...

turtle shells and suffocation

We were walking home from the plastic green playground at our neighorhood school last night. It was a cloudy cool perfect night to be pushing our now-too-heavy-to-push stroller through the streets of suburbia…

And I noticed that someone was sitting in her parked car in her driveway.

I cycled through the possibilities: she’s a stalker. She’s crying because she doesn’t want to go in. She’s crying because she’ll never go back in again. She’s numb and exhausted and can’t believe that her life has been reduced to sitting here. In this car. In this driveway.

And I realized that this image -- A person sitting in a parked car -- has a powerful iconicity.

Dr. Don Enholm used to tell us in Graduate Seminars On Classical Rhetorical Theory about his weekends. His wife perused antique malls all over the state of Ohio while he sat alone in the car reading the latest treatise on the Nuremburg Trials. Sometimes when I found myself sitting in a parking lot, waiting, I wondered what it would be like for your life to eventually simmer down to a quiet read in an obscure back parking lot.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman just sat through most of love liza in his car while I watched it last week.

Wasn’t it Julieanne Moore's character who was sitting in her car singing in Magnolia?

I tell my kids that the “evil robots, programmed to destroy us” from Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (one of their all-time favorites songs / albums) are probably cars. Cars are robots I tell them. And I hate car culture especially as I snake North on Cleveland Avenue for three miles of strip malls, car mechanics and fast food on the way home every day from work.

But I also get what it is to just feel okay about sitting. Staying. For a while at least…in your car.

When we take long trips with the fam in (the cleverly named) “Minnie” the minivan, we call it our “Shell.” And I like that metaphor for how cars offer us a bit of shelter. We need it sometimes, don’t we? Our human skin is so soft? A bit of armour in a weary driveway or parking lot or metered spot is like a quiet breath of (slightly polluted) air.

Once -- before kids got kidnapped in Malls and before stalkers hid under the cars of wary shoppers in urban mythic parking lots -- my mom would leave eleven-year-old me and my two brothers in the car, sitting in the parking lots of malls.

On one of these days, I finally had had enough of waiting. My two year old brother was crying and whining so I buckled him into the stroller and the three of us made our way carefully into Sears. We were all crying or red eyed by the time we were inside and we announced to a store clerk that we had lost our mother.

But I think we had just lost our sense of being. People can only sit in parked cars for so long. No matter how much we need them to survive

May all of your parked cars be purged of suffocation and fill you back up with –

Peace~

back from treasure island...

my grandmother Linda named our family cottage Treasure Island. She was well-read, and so, I'm sure intended to make allusions to the novel of the same name, but I'm thinking that the name was primarily rhetorical in nature.

Rhetorical mostly because Treasure Island isn't. An island, that is. The cottage itself is located on a peninsula of land that juts out from a vast woods and is surrounded by a marshy lagoon and a labyrinthian creek. So why name a non-island, "treasure island?"

My paternal grandmother grew up (as did my paternal grandfather) on an Island. Drummond Island, more specifically -- the largest fresh water Island in the North America. She was the daughter of two Finnish emigrees, but grew up in a house full of siblings, no mother in the deepest woods of drummond. She not only survived two house fires, the death of her mother at a young age, the loss of twin sibling sisters (who were adopted by other families on the island), a difficult stepmother (because of whom, she and her five siblings went to live in a seperate house where they would await visits from their over-worked father visiting his two families), but then went on to earn a high-school and college education by housecleaning and babysitting for mainlanders.

I didn't find out how difficult my grandmother's life was until late in adolesence. She was a master-story-teller who described in great detail the idyllic childhood she re-membered on Drummond Island. Running barefoot through vast open meadows, chasing cows with strange exotic finnish names, rolling in the snow after sitting in the Sauna, laughing garrulously with her siblings and father as they sat next to a cozy warm woodburner.

She may be one of the first bloggers to influence me. Even though she never once "connected" to the internet. Her weekly "Dearly Beloved" letters circulated to family, extended family, family friends, and missionaries around the world. They chronicled daily life, philosophical musings, aesthetic contemplation, and memorializing yesteryear.

But the greatest memorializing she did was the careful crafting of Treasure Island. More than just the name, the presence of she and my grandfather benevolently haunts every square inch of the land and cottage. Everything we did and do while we're there have been passed on to us by them and by my parents who learned it from them.

Building Fires,
Roasting Marshmellows,
Fishing from the boat,
Fishing from the dock,
Wading in the shallows,
Swimming through the bullrushes,
Building minnow traps out of huge stones,
Hunting for Geode treasures,
Discovering Crayfish and Clams
Hiking through woods,
Climbing rocks,
Building forts,
Climbing trees,
Reading in Hammocks...

All the time for stillness, meditation, reflection helps open me up to the psychogeography of the place....

And I always hope that as I return to my work and the rhythms and cycles of everyday that I can retain some of that wonder, that curiousity, that nostalgia, that hope that reverberate around being at Treasure Island...

peace~