Rhetoric & Religion (3/90)

Returning to the church my parents have attended since we moved to Texas, almost 20 years ago, is an interesting experience. The congregation has changed since I was last involved four years ago. The people I know have grown older, their lives have changed. So many of the families there I don't know, strangers. Today, the church 'honored the graduates'. So I put a picture on a table and stood on the stage while everyone clapped. Nice, but I feel extremely guilty, because some of the cards left on my table are from people I don't know.

Sitting through the services always make me wonder about religion as an institution and how it operates. I know that they believe that rhetoric has the power to influence people. You hear it when they discuss politics, violent tv, or the outside culture in general. However, scratch similar examinations of the sermon, I somehow felt disloyal. 

When we were discussing gender and the issues that complicate it last semester, Dr. P explicitly stated that she was not questioning the student's belief systems. However, there were certain assumptions behind each belief and she felt it was important (as do I) to acknowledge those assumptions and understand how they operate to reinforce our beliefs. 

This morning I was stretching this awareness. Not only are there assumptions behind a belief but holding a belief produces certain actions. My thoughts about the specifics need a little more work before the make it here, but I'll work on that and post them soon. 

It's your mother; drunk or sober (2/90)

My parent's subscribe to Glenn Beck, watch Fox news, and every time we hop in the car, one of the conservative talk show hosts is on. Thus far, I've done a fantastic job of ignoring all of it, but I think that will work no more. I've been home for a week and have heard some things that make me angry (I'm sorry, did you really just claim that a homosexual family privileges the adults more than a heterosexual?), and annoyed, (Do you have to say socialism every other word?), and others that have made me think. 

This is too large for this post, but one issue I've been working over is morality without religion. A few months ago, I heard a lecture about the U.S. law system and how it's based on a Christian morality. This gentleman's argument was that if you take religion out of the law system (as law schools are doing today), then you have no moral foundation for the law. I don't think this is true, but I have to do a little more research and thought into the issue. 

Today, one of those talk shows was discussing Mexico's president's criticisms of the Arizona immigration law and American pundits who agreed. This became a discussion of loyalty. Their view was that it's your country, right or wrong, and you shouldn't be agreeing with foreign presidents. She's still your mother- drunk or sober, they say. Yet the conversation blurred the lines between agreeing with the criticisms and agreeing with the Mexican president. If we believe something are we to ignore those views when someone else, an outsider, states them in a public forum? If the Pastor said your drunk mother needed help, would you disagree with him? I don't know the comments that preceded this show and can't even remember who's show it was. The comments could have been extremely anti-American and perhaps the comments agreed with the President, simply because he was an 'outsider'; however, this situation can't be reduced to loyalty. Maintaining and voicing a critical thought process is not disloyal.

One out of Ninety

After a hectic weekend of hugs and congratulations, my parents house has emptied. Soon, my dad flies back to his overseas job leaving just my mom, my sisters, and I. The free time stretching before me is both refreshing and frightening. One of the many reasons I enjoyed school was that ideas were thrown at you from every direction and you found connections in the most likely places. At first, I thought I would just have to do without that for a few months. I realize now that it's been so long since I've had a lot of time to read that I'd forgotten that the same web of ideas is simply waiting in books, waiting for me to discover them. God, I sound like a poster in an elementary school library.  

I like goals. So, this summer. No matter what happens, I have a goal to achieve. 5 posts a week. 14 weeks. 90 posts for the summer. Starting today. 

There's No Place Like Home

We've finished our first book (House Made of Dawn by Momaday) for Life and Lit of the Southwest. Our discussion of this book has encompassed what my proffesor calls the Native American Plot. Friday, he stated something to the effec that no Native American can wrtie about Native America without a critque of Anglo America in the background. My notes question whether the two cultures are really as exteremly oppisite as that statement suggests. Now I must question myself. If he meant it literally, my question has valdiity. However, if it's more of a matter of perception then my question should change. Perhaps, he meant that the authors see the cultures as opposites and thus cannot keep out a critique of the other world. This meaning I have no problems with. I wonder what brought me to the point where a broad, yet vauge statement of a people's perceptions easier to believe than any statement of fact- hen really both are unproven suppositions.

Taken as such, the idea of opposing cultures is an interesting one. Dr. C gave examples such as the Anglo's disreagard for the land and its resources. In keeping with Momaday, who critcizes the lack of any sort of community in a city such as L.A., Dr C asked how a culture could turn pregnant immigrants away from hospitals because they don't have health insurance. Of course, I've never really thought about these things outside of the political arena, so I'm trying to grasp my mind around the idea that there is another way. How would these things funtion in the Native American world?

Hello new ideas about... oh, sex?

Recently I finished our first reading outside the textbook for the woman's studies class is the introduction from a book written by (I really don't want to get out of my warm bed to find the article so *Insert Name Here*). The class is entitled Language and Gender. The first point Dr. P made our first day of class, this is not a class about how women and men talk to each other- and I breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing I wanted was another person (or an entire semester) how relationships are "supposed" to work. Of course, I have high respect for scholars in the field who study interpersonal communication, but it's really not for me. Instead, this class is about how we communicate the ideas of gender/sex as a society. Wait... that sounds like, it just might be rhetorical! So, the point is, I'm really excited about this class. I consider myself a feminist, but I obviously do not agree with some ideas out there under the banner of feminism. Getting a clearer idea of the theories out there and from a communication perspective, should be extremely beneficial.

So, back to the reading. The first few pages talk about this argument during the Enlightenment that concluded that the female orgasm is not necessary for conception. To today's post-enlightenment, scientifically advance world, that seems to be self-evident. So much so that I'm having problems with the idea that this was a discovery. Must revisit this when I'm not so tired, because surely I'm just missing something. But wouldn't they have figured this out long before this?

Perhaps the end comes too soon?

In three months, I'll be parading around with a degree in hand- one of the few in my family to reach this level of education, yet just as deeply in debt. I'll be able to conjugate any Italian verb, describe the five pillars of Islam, and articulate the origin/consequences of the western myth. Those are just the skills I'm perfecting this semester. Add these to my ability to kick out a paper- it seems almost an instant A, probably due more to the standard of writing here than any latent or learned skill on my part. Yet without a particular letter, from any one of the many graduate schools I've applied to, my future becomes precarious. All my illusions of security shall vanish. My presumed skills might be rendered useless, at the very least they'll have to be melded to fit a new occupation. Trying to wrap my mind around the grad school applications was quite a task. Sometimes, I felt paralyzed. Fear held me captive, or so I thought. That idea was later discarded because it was too dramatic. Still, I knew somewhere in my mind that no matter how hard I worked on those applications, it would never be enough to satisfy my inner perfectionist (who speaks in a voice eerily like my mum's at times...). I treated that as an excuse to expend less energy and less thought. Now, I'm deathly afraid it's going to bite me in the ass. If I had issues piecing together pieces of paper and writing prose- tasks I usually find easy- how can I ever hope to renovate my mind and my work ethic?

Discussions such as these, open-ended and hopeless, seem to fill my hours. As much as I want to write about the wonderful and interesting classes I'm taking this semester, my self-doubt claws its way to the forefront of my mind. I can't ignore it. So, I've acknowledged it. In a space neither boldly public or serenely private, I admit that I'm so tripped up with worry that I can't seem to find that optimist that started college three years ago or the confident, albeit new, scholar that launched an ambitious academic plan. However, maybe with this acknowledgment, I'm discovering I still have a smidgen of gumption left.

And that shall be last pathetic self-centered prose I shall write for this semester. Now, it has been outlawed and I shall move on to happier topics, like how Lone Ranger would have been a murderer and how western religions have intolerance built into their belief. Not new topics, but new to me and I'm eager to explore more in later posts.