Pot pourri

2004-06-23 - 8:53 a.m.

A few things...

I disrupted French class yesterday, because we were going over some "fact sheets" for the new French line my employer is opening this summer and someone had forgotten to translate "chat line", so I started giggling, thinking about some poor Montrealer calling into our line and getting a bunch of screaming cats (for the francophonally deprived, chat means cat in French. You ought to know that already, silly reader. I'm ashamed of you). I tried to explain what was so funny, but my humour, like so many French phrases, doesn't quite translate.

There's apparently a huge humanitarian crisis going on in Sudan right now, and all I want to know is a brief explanation as to how things got that way. All the news I've seen is focusing on the dire conditions now but giving very little background. I suppose I could do the research myself, but that would take far too much effort for a poor little Western consumer like me...

I read an article on Popmatters (a site I've been reading less often, unfortunately, since they started getting a lot of advertising, even though most of the advertising seems somewhat benign) about how "voting with your dollar" isn't really voting, because to a large corporation it doesn't matter what you buy, so long as you buy something, and that voting with your dollar is really a vote for the existing market system. It also talked about how the implicit assumption in the title "consumer" is that people ultimately destroy what they purchase, that all of the resources and creativity that go into a product vanish once the product is purchased. The assumption is that we are inherently wasteful and destructive and that we produce nothing. The article suggested the word "User" instead. Not sure if I'll be changing my vocabulary, but it was something that made me think.

And lastly, Pookie and I had a bit of a debate about Dark Age Ahead, mainly because I mentioned that it didn't seem to be dealing with theology at all (the book focuses on "5 pillars of society" that are crucial for preventing a Dark Age, and religion isn't one of them). He believes that theology is an integral part of all human endeavor and that anything that tries to answer a human question without theology will be found wanting.

I agree with him that theology is important, and in the 5-plus years that we've known each other, he's caused me to reconsider, many times, the place theology has in my world view, BUT I don't think theology is the most important thing, and I think it's perfectly fine to look at humanity without even mentioning religion. I won't deny that religion has played a critical and influencial role in our species' history, but I'm not prepared to dismiss anything that doesn't include religion or theology in its thesis.

I'm just discovering now that I think I'm still irritated that Pookie has so rarely read a non-fiction book that I've recommended. We discuss his books, because I've read some of them, and I've edited his essays, and so I have a grounding (however superficial) in his field, but I can't think of a non-fiction book that I've recommended to him that he's actually tried to read. Granted, he's been busy with school, but he better start branching out this summer or there will be some Magus-style Heck to pay.

This was a lot more than I had planned to write about. I have an interesting short story "hook", but I don't have a plot idea yet, so I'm playing the role of frustrated auteur today.

Cheers,

The Magus

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