Somebody Does It Better
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Somebody Does It Better
I don't think there's any question that the Sichuan earthquake is a worse catastrophe than Hurricane Katrina: as many as 70,000 dead in Sichuan vs. 3,000 in New Orleans and the Gulf. So why then has the response of the Chinese government been so much faster and more efficient than that of our own government in 2005? Case in point: the speed with which army engineers dug channels to drain a temporary lake that threatened to inundate the city of Chengdu.
Is this an unanticipated benefit of dictatorship?
Judging by the recent example of Myanmar, apparently not.
Is Wen Jiabao just more competent than George W. Bush?
Speculation welcome.
The salient difference, I think, has to do with the reverends' use of language and the underlying thought their language reveals. Jeremiah Wright speaks metaphorically. A lot of his rhetoric derives specifically from that of his prophetic namesake, Jeremiah, which is metaphoric. So is most of the Bible's rhetoric.
John Hagee uses language literally. His explanation of the Holocaust is as literal as an instruction manual for a microwave. The hunter is not a metaphor, but a real man, with a real gun-- or, in Hitler's case, guns, plus tanks, bombs, and gas chambers. Israel must be reestablished because the Bible predicts it will be, and its final, catastrophic clash with its neighbors must be hastened for the same reason.
Hagee and other fundamentalists-- that is, other literalists-- see a one-to-one correspondence between those prophecies and contemporary referents.
Gog and Magog have to be Iran and Syria (or Russia and China). The Great Beast has to be Islam; the Whore has to be the Catholic Church. The Antichrist has to be the Secretary General of the U.N. (at least according to Tim LaHaye, though another school is now equating him with Obama and a lady who used to give massages up here thought he was the United States government).
Each dot in the Bible must be connected to a point on the contemporary horizon. Never mind if there seem to more points on one side than there are on the other, or that the lines connecting them are dotted or tangled or broken.
That kind of literal-mindedness is the thing that characterizes all fundamentalism. It's what gives it its jabbing, argumentative character. My own feeling is that all spirituality is metaphorical, has to be metaphorical.
It speaks of things that are not of this earth. When the Old Testament calls Jesus the Lamb, it doesn't mean a sweet, dullwitted creature that gambols and bleats and shits on the grass.
When the Buddha (in the Fire Sermon) says that "the eyes are ablaze," he is saying something about the volatility of the senses and the desires that arise from them and not talking about a Fire-Starter. (Hagee might use this as evidence that Buddha was an incarnation of Satan and offering his followers the power to barbecue their enemies with a strong look.)
The power of metaphor is that one word or image can be used to evoke a multiplicity of things and ideas. A metaphor, to use a metaphor, is like Jesus' mustard seed. Hagee's language-- or Osama bin Laden's-- is like a foil packet of ketchup with a picture of a tomato on it.
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