Crazy Old Menard

I knew that the world had turned upside-down when my parents sent me the Menard News Paper. I go through the paper, and it's a regular Menard paper--filled with birthdays, high school awards, community disputes, and the normal horticulture article. It was pretty dull. But then I turned to the last page and see this headline:

WMD Training Set In Menard

I thought, "Surely, that doesn't mean what I think it means." It did.

"A six-hour training session on Weapons of Mass Destruction Awareness will be held in Menard on Saturday, April 9th. The training session, sponsored locally by the Menard Sheriff's Department, will be held at the Fire Station from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m." It's intended to help "prevent, prepare for, respond to, and recover from incidents of domestic terrorism involving WMD such as chemical and biological agents and nuclear, radioactive and explosive devises."

I'm sure old bin Ladin is sitting in a cave wondering how to attack Menard. I'm betting that's the first target.

We've all gone mad.

"A people who have been bred to shop then can quickly become some of the most violent people in the world, exactly because they’re dying to have something worth dying for." --Stanley Hauerwas

http://www.natcath.com/NCR_Online/archives/062102/062102a.htm

I'll blog on this later.

Alas.

It's those last three weeks of the semester. When everything is due, and I have little idea what I'm doing. And I can't get motivated to get this all over with. I would just like to wake up in three weeks and these three weeks be done with. Going through all this writing and researching and thinking is actually physically painful. I wonder how many years will be shaved off of my life in the next three weeks? Oh well, here goes nothing...

What Grad School Does to You...

This afternoon, I was waiting for my class to start, and I listened in on the conversation between a student and the professor. This class was my early American literature course, and we were discussing a novel by a guy named Charles Brockden Brown, so the professor was this early American lit person. The student was a girl who's kind of the smart ditz.

Anyway, she was being really sociable, and she told him that she was excited because she was going caving this weekend. He asked her what exactly she was going to do, and she (very chipperly) launched into a description of being lowered by a rope down fifty feet into a cave. And then she talked about going diving in caves. They were some really adventuresome and exciting stories, especially in her telling of them. But then the professor said a thing that only a person who had gone through graduate school in an English department would have said: "Since you like caving, and if you like Charles Brockden Brown, you should read his novel from 1799, Edgar Huntly. It's about a killer, and he sometimes goes in caves."

This professor's a pretty nice guy, but that was the worst conversation killer I've ever heard. I recommend a lot of books to people, but I hope I never do it like that.

A Revealing Day

Yesterday, I blogged on the greatness of John Paul II. Today, my opinion of him grew because of the contrast between him and the self-serving U.S. politicians I saw praising him today in the media. It seems as if each politician had to get in on the act of paying tribute to the deceased Pope. That's fine; he deserves tribute. My problem, however, is that so many of these politicians' comments were so shallow and solely intended to help themselves politically. I saw republicans out to talk about how the Pope was such a great leader because of his pro-life stance. Their intent was clear; they wanted to say "This guy was on my side." They conveniently forgot that he rebuked them about the death penalty they support, the wars they started, the stem-cell plan they supported, the third-world debt they will not forgive, the massive poverty in this country that they won't relieve, and the western materialism they support. I saw Democrats doing the same thing. They were out to claim this guy as one of their own. He didn't deserve such an insult. He especially didn't deserve the implication so many of them made that he was on America's side. Kay Bailey Hutchison wrote that he "championed the cause of peace, democracy, and hope." It irks me to no end that she listed democracy with peace and hope. I personally think he championed he championed the cause of peace, hope, and love. Even if he did help to bring down the iron curtain, his cause wasn't for the same reasons as the U.S. politicians. He wasn't there to champion democracy, and he didn't care a thing for unbridled capitalism. Those were biproducts of something greater he was striving for. He was there to expand God's kingdom. And he was there to spread the love of God. And he sought for those things in the right way, not with violence, but with redemptive love. He was a champion for something far greater than democracy and capitalism. It would be nice if our politicians, our spiritual Christian politicians, could understand that.

Thinking About the Pope...

I remember sitting in one of my bible classes at ACU when the professor posed "the Gandhi question." I think that most Christians would know what that refers to--the question of whether a man like Gandhi, who lived such a good life but who rejected the Christian faith, is saved. The debate surrounding Gandhi, however, isn't what I'm interested about today. The reason I remembered that class period today was because one of the students (who certainly didn't think Gandhi was on his way to heaven) made the statement that Mother Teresa and John Paul II were clearly not going to heaven. They weren't Christians; they were Catholics. Needless to say, I was horrified (as I was a lot of times that day). If Mother Teresa and John Paul II weren't Christians, I can't think of anybody who is.

I'm not Catholic, but I'm not anti-Catholic as so many of the other protestants are. I have a few doctrinal problems with Catholicism, but not many more than I have with the churches I've attended. I like to think of myself as a member of the (little "c") catholic church that recognizes no separation between Catholics and Protestants. We're all united. We've all been raised together in Christ.

Tonight, I'm praying for all Catholics. For all of those who loved John Paul II. He was a good man. I really only got to see him at the end of his days, though I've heard and read about the things he did during his earlier days. I wish I could have seen him more in those earlier days. I did see him as he was dying though. And I think he did it well. If you've seen the picture of him trying to speak at the last Easter service of his life, trying to offer one last blessing to the people he loved, you know that he died loving people as passionately as he ever had. He was a good pope. I'm praying that the next pope is as good.

A Bunch of Words

Kind of. I was up at the office today, and I ran into my friend Kevin. I hardly see him this semester, so I stopped in his office to talk for a while. He had just been to a conference up in San Francisco giving a paper, and he told me that it was "an experience." It kind of depressed him. He said that the conference was held in this swanky (I've never used that word in my life) hotel, and the professors all wore their suits and spent their days trying to be smarter than one another and trying to prove to the others that they were smarter than everyone. And they talked about talking (a conference on rhetoric). And then, Kevin said, they would walk outside the hotel, and sitting in the streets would be the homeless people. And Kevin said that it kept hitting him the entire week how we English major people are mainly just a bunch of talk.

He's right. We sit around talking about talking. And you know we English majors--we're a bunch of wacko liberals who talk largely about how horrible capitalism is and how powerful people use rhetoric to sustain a system that keeps the powerful on top and the homeless in the streets. We talk about marginalization and ethics and we can pretty much demonize everyone. And we do...gleefully. And a lot of times we're correct in the things we say. But we're such damn hypocrites. All of that Ivory Tower stuff they say about academia is so true. We gripe and complain about the way things are, and then we walk out of our fancy hotel and refuse to see the people living in the streets. We do it over and over again. And we write papers that nobody but us will read or care about, and we read books that nobody will ever read. And we teach classes so that we can make our students part of the elite like us...It's kind of depressing...It's really depressing...

I like words. But they scare me (the very reason I'm an English major). They're so powerful. They have that tendency to get out too far ahead of us and get away from us. And that's were the real test comes in for we people who love our words so much. We've got to have the guts to follow them.

The problem the English departments have is the same problem the churches (that the English departments detest so much) so often have. We've got some good words. Particularly the church...we in the church have got some really good words. And we sit in our pretty buildings and our pretty clothes and say them over and over again. And we all look and sound awfully silly doing it.

We need to keep that ability to keep telling those words to ourselves. But we need some courage, so that we may have the humility, to live them out.