Mythology

If you are a woman my age, from América Latina and with izquierdista tendencies there is just no way in hell that you would have said, "Fidel is so sexy".

Nope.

It's just not possible.

With el Ché?

LOOK AT THE MAN!

Who wouldn't have that man lead a full fledge invasion of her beaches and a guerilla movement between her loins!

So Ed Morrissey, just back off my piece of revolutionary man-meat, ¿me oistes!

While I understand the importance of mourning, dignity, and paying respect to the dead, I believe that if you died on Decemeber 26th, then your-not- wishing-to-be-President-but-Speaker-of-the-House- soul has already risen up to that great rotunda in the sky. And as such, your body should already be buried or cremated.

The money wasted on these burials slays me. The United States contains so many people that are hungry, homeless, and uninsured that the money spent seems like a slap in the face to the living who suffer these indignities. Our governemnt tells us they can't afford to feed everybody, but they sure can afford to bury the hell outta someone.

Even James Brown's solid gold casket offends me. Who the fuck needs a solid gold casket?
He's the Godfather of Soul! He should be keepin' it real, even in the afterlife. (I am also not one for mythologizing the dead so I just have to mention the fact that James Baby shot up an insurance seminar because he thought someone used his office bathroom. Also, he endorsed Richard Nixon for President. I guess Nixon's resignation was "Payback! Hey hey hey!")

Of course, you are not suppose to point out that the money could be better spent or that the dead might have done some awful things because it is "disrespectful".

And I agree. The truth almost always disrespects those who benefit from the waste and the lies.

I don't know about you, but I am damned sick of the right wing nuts exploiting 9/11 for their own benefit. This year they plan to do it again and ABC is hosting it. From Truthout:

Clinton, 9/11 and the Facts
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Wednesday 30 August 2006

The fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks is less than two weeks away...ABC intends to mark the occasion in far more grand a fashion. Starting September 10th and ending September 11th, the network will show a miniseries titled "The Path to 9/11." According to reports from early screenings, the writer/producer of the miniseries, Cyrus Nowrasteh, has crafted a television polemic intended to blame the entire event on President Clinton.

Nowrasteh, an outspoken conservative...spoke last year at the Liberty Film Festival, described by its founders as Hollywood's first conservative film festival. Govindini Murty, actress, writer, and co-director of the Liberty Film Festival, wrote a review of "The Path to 9/11" for the right-wing online news page FrontPageMag.com.

In the review, Murty states, "'The Path to 9/11' is one of the best, most intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible. This is the first Hollywood production I've seen that honestly depicts how the Clinton administration repeatedly bungled the capture of Osama bin Laden."

There are a whole host of folks on this site who are better at talking about fundamentalism than I am, but it's a topic I return to frequently. I see it all around me. And while I cannot always articulate just how freaked out I am by the ways of thinking that define fundamentalism, to paraphrase a Supreme Court Justice: "I know it when I see it."



So, imagine my delight when I came across this article today. "The four fundamentalisms and the threat to sustainable democracy" by  Robert Jensen presents a provocative argument that it is not just religious fundamentalism, but a variety of fundamentalisms that create a threat to sustainable democracy here in the United States.

Let's start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement to promote "The Fundamentals"), but I want to use it in a more general fashion to describe any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for wisdom.

It's funny that Jensen uses the term hubris. I tend to reserve the term as that which applies to people I consider tragic heroes, the classical sense of the term, where the one flaw (and it's always fatal) is to have pride great enough that one thinks one is better than the gods. For that, people are made to suffer, To be struck down.