Mercy and Revisionism:from the sublime to the ridiculous

Well, today, the unthinkable happened--my employer gave all of us a bonus, and since I am a relative old-timer in the Middle School, I got a relatively nice check. Before these checks were handed to us, a decently executed CCM song with an overly long drum break on the theme of mercy was played. Although sometimes I cringe at the cheesiness of music my coworkers deem appropriate devotional material, somehow this song got it right. It's easy to think about how all of our hard work has earned a record enrollment for next year, but it really does belong to the big (wo)man. It is also amazing to think that we have signed up a record number of kids for a chance at next year in a year in which two alumni (one fighting in Fallujah) and several parents and grandparents died, a disproportionate number of staff members were diagnosed with cancer, we had an unusually lively group of 7th graders, and two of our students ended the year cooling their heals in the Albemarle County Jail. The cash giveaway following on the heels of an extremely offensive but quite hilarious Shiflett impersonation by one elementary school teacher at the faculty appreciation dinner set the tone for this post.

Also, I have made an appointment in August, at my primary health provider's earliest convenience, at which I intend to be certified as insane in the membrane (not just maladjusted to society). Jessbob assures me that depression is the epidemic of our times, which, along with AIDS, probably takes a lot of people out. However, it did not help matters any to go to Barnes y Noble this past week. I was just overwhelmed by the amount of baloney that is floating around in the universary masquerading as art or scholarship. I mean, just think of all the BTUs we could get from all the Sean Hannity books if we used them as a bio-mass (pile of feces) energy source.
Moving past the well-groomed half-wits, I picked up a fine piece of scholarship in the History section which purported to be a "politically incorrect" version of American History. I believe nothing would have been lost by dropping the word "politically" from the cover. However, the book did have the keen insight on the cover that the American revolutionaries were actually conservatives--hmmm...let's throw meaningless labels around. The bullet point that caught my eye, though, was the contention that the Puritans did not steal any land from the red man, but merely purchased it at the fair market price in worthless trinkets. (I added that second clause myself). Always one eager to find out that my Calvinist ancestors were a little less evil than I previously thought, I turned to page 62. The iron-clad arguments this author put forward were thus.

The Puritans actually tried to teach the Indians about Jesus, which means that they liked them a lot.

Also, Roger Williams (although the book makes no mention of his somewhat extreme break from Puritanism) held the quite advanced view for his day that the Indians were born white, but turned red because of all their dirty sinning in the forest. This was the solitary proof given that, no, not as only a small number of us have been actually taught, the Puritans weren't genocidally racist, but merely benightedly ignorant.

Of course the author then goes on to defend their apparently non-existent racism by suggesting the obvious superiority of the European technology must have served as proof to the Puritans and to us in the modern era of European moral superiority.

Well, I may have been a little unfair, but it is this kind of soft-pedaling of hard-core racism that makes conservative ideologues look (in some cases) as stupid as they are.

So, I turn to the internet, that last bastion of lunacy and democracy, for hope. Phil Christman's latest superlative post reaffirmed my faith in humanity (or at least the fallen goodness of the creation order) in a thoughtful response to another thoughtful and hilarious blog, that of Meg Jenista, who has demonstrated that God does suffer fools far more patiently than the rest of us might want to.
Finally, for all of you who received an invitation to join me at Bebo, I only thought I'd be part of the digital revolution that everyone else is experiencing. Please know that you'll still be my friend if you decline to post your personal information on the web.
pax Christi, mysterium mundi