Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema:
> I had in mind the SotM's quick appeal to those who want to see Christianity as an
> ideology of sympathy, kindness, and love, in particular, of the poor and
> oppressed. And who like to think of people like Ashcroft as people who just got
> the sublime message wrong. As I tried to suggest, Christianity expresses a
> chronic, unresolved ambivalence about domination and submission. Hence the
> liberative potential of Christian faith, which has had many manifestations,
> carries its own limitations.
While I'd agree that the SotM has many good hooks -- the purveyor was, after all, trying to attract attention -- and that the message could be read as containing unresolved ambivalences about domination-submission (and a lot of other things) I thought the term "meretricious" was odd, since it means "pertaining to prostitutes; cheap, vulgar, easy, insincere". Besides the word itself being a patriarchal slander on the erotic arts and their practitioners, it doesn't suggest itself at all to me as appropriate to a text which I find by turns poetic, mysterious, and repulsive. I think that it is only long, hypnotic familiarity and many thicknesses of ideological coating which enable it to be taken as merely a philosophy of sympathy and love (or of righteousness or conformity or whatever). It is my strong suspicion that Ashcroft and company do not actually _read_ the Bible, although they may pass their eyes over carefully selected and processed parts of it. As Ortega y Gasset remarked, those who go to the scriptures will be surprised, and I don't think Ashcroft and company want to be surprised.