“On Faith” (an online joint venture by the Washington Post and Newsweek magazine) published an essay called “Witness to Separation of Church and State,” by Joel P. Engardiom, on June 5, 2007. Joel was the director, writer and narrator of “Knocking,” the documentary about Jehovah’s Witnesses that ran on the PBS series Independent Lens.
Yet as otherwise law-abiding, taxpaying citizens, they remind us that the America worth fighting for is an America that does not force people to follow a single ideology with patriotic fervor. And as a group with fundamental religious beliefs, they remind us that it is possible to stand firm in your faith without feeling threatened by those who choose a different path.
Right. Although I agreed with his larger point about not trying to hijack the country, that’s the bit that encouraged me to comment.
The supreme irony to me is that their contributions to the history of civil liberties legislation in the U.S. are not honored in any way in their own congregations. There is no discussion or debate, expressions of individual spiritual calling or questioning or research are forbidden.
The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society has created a free sales force, using fears about a killer God and the end of the world. I am in contact with many recovering Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I help people with JW relatives and friends to navigate the minefield of potential problems in dealing with them.
I applaud the results of the JW legal team on civil rights, but they didn’t do it for the sake of America, which to them is simply part of the Satan-controlled “system of things.” The most recent accomplishment of their legal team was to pay off a cluster of child abuse cases – with a gag order.
I agree with the sentiment about ideological fervor, but it’s just blatantly false that JWs do not feel “threatened by those who choose a different path.” Ask their non-JW family members about that.
JWs don’t even vote, and they are forbidden to run for office. Not exactly the banner group for the Constitution…
I am totally in love with my new green 4G iPod nano. I love it, totally love it.
I only wish that I had gotten the one with more capacity. I am very close to crossing the limit already, and I’m only about halfway through my CD collection. I’ve had to redo a couple of the songs – some of my favorite CDs are a little beat up.
Of course, I can keep more on my computer, and just check the songs I want to synch to my iPod. In fact I’m thinking of slaving an old hard drive specifically for this purpose.
4 gigs is still a decent selection – about a 1000 songs, or a little less because I want to display the cover art too.
It took me about three minutes to familiarize myself with how to change the volume and so on. The mouse-like wheel makes things very easy.
If I’m a little quiet here, it’s because I’ve discovered (and rediscovered) so much music – even in my own collection. I’m totally immersed. I was out dancing on the deck again last night. This will make housework a lot more bearable, I can tell you that right now.
I’ve already got my complete Kate Bush, Tori Amos, and Zombies collections synched, with their own playlists. Ahhhh.
Did you know that Smashmouth did a version of “I’m a Believer” (Monkees)? Yeah, ok, it dates me and it’s not cool or anything like that, but I’ve never been cool anyway and I love this song.
I wonder if there is a WordPress plugin to display what’s playing? Hmm. I’ll look into that.
“Lullaby” (The Cure) just finished.
Now “Itsy Bitsy Spider/Coming Around Again” (Carly Simon) is playing.
“P**s on the Wall” (J.Geils) is up next.
After that, the next ten on random play are:
I am the Walrus (Jim Carey) – This is a bit of a find, I think.
Undertow (Suzanne Vega) – Ethereal trancey pop
Smokey Day (Zombies) – I love the Zombies, still. This is one of the best.
Black Horse and the Cherry Tree (KT Tunstall) – This is a terrific song! (thank you, Bonbon)
In the Summertime (Roger Miller) – Childhood memories – good ones.
Armageddon Days Are Here Again (The The) – Oh, that voice.
Sister Moon (Sting) – I would love to sing this myself
Feelin’ Way Too Da*n Good (Nickelback) – Love, love, love – and more love
Candy-O (The Cars) – I died the first time I heard this described as an “oldie”
Sad Lisa (Cat Stevens) – Plays my heartstrings every time
Two pleasantly plump Jehovah’s Witness women have just departed, their undelivered invitation to the upcoming District Convention in hand.
They were still huffing and puffing a bit from the exertion required to climb the driveway when they rang the bell. For a moment, I was tempted to pretend not to be home. Sigh. Nah. I instructed Ben to go play elsewhere in the house so that I could talk to them.
Follow the Christ. Sigh. I let them go through their opening remarks, and observed them closely. They were black women, a little bit younger than me – in their thirties, I’d guess. They both wore clingy dresses of artificial fabric – uncomfortable clothing for a muggy day like this. One wore glasses. They had kind, somewhat keen, expressions, and by their manner of speaking I would guess that they both had some amount of higher education – a bit unusual.
I found myself feeling sorry for them, and so my self-presentation was, I think, somewhat muted – even sad.
I told them that I was aware of the convention, although I hadn’t known where the local one was being held. I’d even blogged on the topic. That surprised them, and one exclaimed, “You blogged on it?!? Were you ever a baptized Jehovah’s Witness?” Interesting question – I wonder if they ask that now to establish whether they might be talking to an apostate. But no, I was never baptized. I told them that my father had been an elder and I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness.
I asked them in what way they thought they were following the Christ. They looked at the invitation for clues, but it was really very general. “Well, we go out in service, like he told us to, and we oppose Satan.”
Wow. I’ve never heard the “opposing Satan” thing before. Yikes. When you consider that JWs believe that this entire “system of things” is ruled by Satan (including schools, police, government…) that’s a pretty wide-open sort of statement. They used to confine Satan remarks to insiders.
Hmmm. Where to begin.. “But there are a lot of things that Jesus instructed people to do that Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t do, and a lot of teachings he gave that JWs don’t really follow, right? Forgiveness, compassion, caring for the poor, sharing bread and wine together….” My words kind of faded off. There was so much to say, but…
They looked utterly dismayed, even stupefied. I don’t think they were ready for that kind of response.
Before they decided to start quoting, I tried once more. “If you’re Christian, and you have love and spirit amongst yourselves, wouldn’t it better to follow the Christ than to follow the governing body and the Watchtower? Look at how many times they have been wrong, how many times they have changed their guidance to you.”
Oh, they had a response to that, all right. “We are all imperfect, but the light gets stronger and they have more understanding…” They started to smile again, almost like mirror reflections of one another. There is reflective strength in the buddy-system.
“Why would you be salespeople for a very wealthy, very worldly corporation in New York, especially when – as you say – they are only imperfect men? Why would you hand your lives over to this group of men, just because they claim to be God’s channel? Don’t JWs always criticize other religions for putting priests and bishops and holy men between the congregation and God? Why would you need another mediator than the Christ? I think there are many good Jehovah’s Witnesses. I just believe that Jehovah’s Witnesses are being misled.”
Their smiles had frozen at the first sentence. Now they were expressionless. Totally blank.
“I’m sorry. I know you do what you think you are supposed to do, but I think that you are being misled. I truly believe that you are Watchtowerites, not Christians.”
I looked at them miserably, hands open. Then I handed back the invitation, and they turned, without a word, and – slowly – stiffly – started walking back down the driveway. They went directly to their vehicle, got in, and drove off.
Yea, sisters, time for a coffee break.
They will label me, they may even put that “X” over my house on the territory map at last. There wasn’t really very much in what I said to vilify me, but in another way, I said the worst possible thing: I spoke against God’s supposed channel on earth. And it may have scared them, because they are trained over and over to think that anyone who could do that is demonic, controlled, a slave of Satan.
I wonder if either one, maybe years from now, will ever read the scriptures and start thinking about the wider message that Jesus tried to deliver. They looked like strong women. What if they somehow found themselves able and willing to intervene when they saw cruelty – what if they were able to say “this is not a loving thing that we are doing.” Maybe they could allow themselves other kinds of service to others than simply preaching the end of the world. Maybe they could spread kindness. You never know.
Language is a virus. Maybe one small idea may turn out to have been contagious, mutating, incubating, ready to re-emerge later in changed form. Someday. Maybe.
“We had as our goal to capture, brain wash and establish thousands of Kingdom Publishers, making them all think alike, like robots. When in 1938 the Theocracy was decreed, all these fell down in abject submission before this newly erected ‘Image of the Beast’ of the Watchtower religion of ‘buying and selling’ (Rev. 13). All the companies of Jehovah’s Witnesses at that time voted in a resolution declaring that henceforth and always that would accept all instructions and appointments handed down by the Watchtower Society. All shreds of congregational independence was thus given up, together with every semblence of a personal Christian religion. A new world organization based on the concept of robot-like obedience and performance had now been realized and would now expand to become a New World Society. It is described by Jehovah’s Witnesses as God’s Organization or Kingdom. It is in actuality nothing more than a dictatorship of the Faithful and Wise Servant Class in Brooklyn” – William J. Schnell, Thirty Years A Watchtower Slave, p.130.
Rorty had an uncanny ability to stare into the post-modern abyss, in which nothing is grounded in the divine or universal, and yet somehow, some way, find a kind of practical empathy that could serve as a beacon in the face of nihilism, authoritarianism and cruelty.
Yes.
Richard Rorty helped me to understand that an ethics based on universals might be neither kind nor accurate to human experience. He offered some possible alternative methods. I had minor quarrels with some of his ideas, but he was an important figure in my education. It turns out that he was a staunch progressive Democrat, too. That follows.
I wrote my Ph.D. twice. I tried to write in academic language, but I never found my academic voice. Instead, I wrote in my own voice, and then translated it over. I tried to avoid becoming completely opaque, while maintaining the level of technically-precise terminology (or jargon) that seemed to be required.
Straight to you from the University of Chicago’s Writing Program Toybox, here is my randomly-generated sentence, and its review. Heh-heh.
Randomly generated Academic Sentence
Pootwattle the Virtual Academic(TM) says:
The discourse of the unspoken (re)embodies the legitimation of civil society.
Smedley Smedley the Virtual Critic(TM) responds:
Pootwattle’s hastily published paper on the relationship between the discourse of the unspoken and the legitimation of civil society is exceptionally resistant to summary, as befits its project.
Exceptionally resistant to summary. Ha-ha- hah! Perfect! They had fun putting that together.
In my dissertation, it rarely got that bad. However, here are a few real sentences that drifted into that kind of territory:
In the thriller genre’s move from nuclear fears to viral fears, the virus functions as a figure that generates effects of horror and terror – and allows for the mobilization of contemporary discourses to simulate the real – but it also allows for the reinscription of imperialist methods of control.
The confluence of biological and technological viral language at the end of the twentieth century interacts with articulations of health and sickness, literal or metaphorical, already active in other discourses. The viral, in turn, amplifies the concept of the “virus” from the biological into the imaginary realm, drawing on beliefs and fears from the ancient to the ultra-contemporary, assimilating fragments of the rejected, and reinfusing mutated versions of itself into new communication networks.
One strand invests the virus with all our fears and the dynamics of otherness and is a function of paranoia and control, the other figures the virus as a protean bricoleur, a postmodern figure that reflects different standpoints about inherent ambiguities, contradictions, and reversals and picks up different aspects of these to create new assemblages.
There was a kind of strange rhythm – mess, bits, bits, twisted, bits, bits, new stuff. Lots of passive verbs.
I could probably rewrite the whole thing now and it would be great book. I’m probably at the point where I could stand to read it again.
It’s difficult to remember the mind-space I inhabited while writing all this. I really was a “VirusHead.”
Once it became clear that I wouldn’t be allowed to become a comparative mythologist as I had planned, maybe I should have stayed at my second university and written on “Friendship in Aquinas.” Or even “Kierkegaardian Mutations.”
Would you like to see your name written in beautiful Arabic letters? The author of My Name in Arabic is offering framed tags for free. I’ve reduced them 50% for display here, but I’ve got the originals for email signatures.
PLEASE stop requesting me to do these for you! I don’t know Arabic – click on the above link for requests.
Here is the simple image for “Heidi”:
Heidi has no equivalent I know of in Arabic. However, it’s funny how it sounds like some other words. In Lebanese Arabic, ‘Heidi’ means ‘this’ or ‘that’. In Berber, like Tashelhit spoken in North Africa, ‘Heidi’ means ‘here is the dog’, ‘aydi’ meaning a ‘dog, and ‘ha’ used as a demonstrative pronoun. I thought it would be funny for you to know about that.
Yeah, funny. Makes me think of all the German Shepherds I have met who shared my name.*
Here is the transliteration of my first (and last name) in a beautiful frame.
About my last name:
G has no equivalent in Arabic, so we use a close letter to it, that sounds like French R.
He (or she?) was very generous, and also translated VirusHead. This wasn’t transliterated by sound, because it’s not really a name but rather two translatable words mushed together.
‘Virus” is the same, and “head” is “ra’as.” In Arabic, “head” comes first, so it would be “the head of the virus.”
“Head of the virus” evokes very different meanings for me than “VirusHead.”
I’m thinking of some structure not unlike …um …. let’s say a tadpole.
Or maybe a being with superpowers over viral colonies – the Virus Queen? Heh-heh
Actually, when I was thinking about viruses day and night, I sometimes felt that they resisted – as though the abyss began to stare back at me. There were enough coincidences and even synchronicities to make me toy with magical thinking. When you’re thinking about one kind of thing most of the time, I think it’s natural to start seeing all kinds of connections – even to start projecting them. We are creatures of pattern recognition. I never thought of myself as controlling viruses, but rather felt at times as though they were playing with me. I tended to anthropomorphize, as did many of the authors. I had to keep reminding myself, especially when I was states of information overload, that viruses have no agency. They don’t intend anything. They don’t have a brain, and they don’t think. We’re not even sure about whether or not they are technically alive – at the very least, we’ve had to rethink the definitions of life.
This kind of gonzoscholarship produced insights, though – especially for the AIDS chapter and the chapter on vampires and communion. If the Ph.D. is meant to celebrate mastery over one very small specialization, I guess I could claim to be the “head” of the virus. However, it also reminds me of some of the biblical interpretations of headship, such as the husband’s power over the wife. Sometimes people forget that even in the most literal interpretations, the individual man is given power over his wife only on the condition that he love her as himself.
(Dominion. If I remember correctly, the meaning of the Hebrew word (rdh or radah) is better translated as something like “stewardship” or “guardianship” – which puts a man in the position of guardianship and care – the responsibility to care for and protect. Even in strong instances of its use, the implication is that of a benevolent rule where the ability to direct is linked to the requirement of the ruler to care for his subjects. Adam was put into the Garden to serve it and till it (‘abad) and to guard and preserve it (shamar). There is also a pun between the meanings of Adam and ground – humans are made from and part of the earth, not lords over it. Our “radah” relationship to creation is to represent God back to it, to develop and refine and beautify it. Our ‘radah’ is to be, not for our own sake, but for the sake of the other. In that sense, it is a form of service, not mastery. It reverses the harm done by exploitation, and models righteousness.
A steward is someone who looks after property, farm – crops and animals – you know, husbandry – while the lord is away. All very evocative. The steward does not own the land, you know, just as we do not own the earth. When the lord returns, there is an accounting of how well the steward cared for the lord’s interests… I guess if we destroy the planet, the cockroaches shall then have “dominion.”)
In any case, I have no dominion over actual viruses (the -es form is incorrect, but customary and much less awkward in English), nor do I have mastery over the complex bio-chemical transactions of the virus. But perhaps I could imagine myself as an emissary of the mute and mostly invisible virus, a representative to the court of human imaginaries. Something like that. I do not see a crown/head of power in that – nor the phallus/head of domination. But I do hold in stewardship a set of ideas and connections regarding viral forms, figures, associations, and family resemblances. More like the poet, translator, word-painter – or the one who arranges family picnics. Did you know that matrix is Latin for womb? I am alert to, let’s say, pregnant viral moments of replication/mutation, contagion, interconnection, networked lines of association – tracing out the emergent discourse of the viral, seeing that the discourse itself shows viral characteristics and tendencies. I think of the shimmering stories of Jorge Luis Borges – and I always felt as though I were softly, tentatively exploring the garden of forking paths – or the library of Babel.
* from above: In personality, I’m not so much like a German Shepherd myself, but am closer to a Canaan or Bernese Mountain Dog – at least according to these blog quizzes.
Bernese Mountain Dog (Bernese Sennenhund) – No bones about it, you’re a good-hearted, people-loving Bernese Mountain Dog. Down-to-earth and loyal, no one works or plays harder than you do. You put your nose to the grindstone when it really counts, but you never neglect your social calendar. Simultaneously strong and sweet, you’re very tuned-in to the feelings and needs of the other dogs you run with. Without having to be asked, you always have a helping paw to lend and a sympathetic shoulder to lean on. “Communication” is your middle name, and when that’s paired with your unswerving devotion, you get a breed that everyone respects and trusts. Woof!
About my last name:
