« Spirituality of Place | Blog Home | Sacrifice »
This parable, called "A Modest Disposal" appears in the autobiography of John Dominic Crossan, entitled "It's a Long Way from Tipperary".
Once upon a time there was a group called the Southern Baptist Convention, which locked horns (possibly an unfortunate metaphor) every year with another group called Walt Disney Incorporated. The mdeia reported that the issue was the sexual content of movies made by Disney subsidiaries or the equal respect it showed to both gay and straight employees at its theme parks. The Southern Baptist Convention held that gays should repent, change, and go straight. Gays responded that such was not possible, that they had never met such transformed individuals, but they had often met fundamentalists who had repented, changed, and become Christian. Be that as it may, the media got it completely wrong. The debate was not over morality or even the differing views of morality. It was not over the Bible, the New Testament, or the Gospels, over where they were permanently valid ("Love your enemies") and where they were socially relative ("Slaves, obey your masteres"). It was actually over the global control of fantasy.
The contest was between two giant corporations over the worldwide missionary expansion of illusional entertainment. Both were, at least in large doses, equally if differently dangerous. With Walt Disney Incorporated it was sometimes difficult to tell reality from fantasy as cartoon characters, literary figures, historical events, geographical places, and evetually religious traditions disappeared into animated illusion. With the Southern Baptist Convention it was difficult to distinguish between religion and Prozac, Christianity and chloroform, baptism and lobotomy. But, locked together, the object of the battle was obvious. Who, for the next century or even the next millennium, would control the transmutation of reality into fantasy, of religious reality into religious fantasy, and of secular reality into secular fantasy?
The only solution was to bring in a conflict-management arbitrator to negotiate a final solution before the parties destroyed one another. She spoke about the dangers of giant corporations fighting to the death rather than arranging sensible compromise. She said she wished that Apple and IBM had combined forces to make the original personal computer and that Microsoft had died aborning. (She admitted that the last comment might have been unfair because she realised the difficulty or reinventing the wheel without infringing on its first patent. It did, however, make the final product more complicated than the original.)
After only a few weeks, the deal was concluded. Walt Disney Incorporated and the Southern Baptist Convention amalgamated freely and evenly - not a hostile takeover or even a friendly buy-out, but an absolutely equal combination. It was like, as the arbitrator had said, Harper and Collins becoming HarperCollins-Publishers. Two erstwhile enemies became BaptistDisney-Entertainments.
They started immediately to plan for the future. There would be a new giant theme park, wiping out any recent gains made by Universal Studios' Escape and taking up all of the rest of Central Florida, from sea to shining sea. It would have an attractive Garden of Eden, where visitors could create different original sins and divergent histories of the world, and an interactive Rapture Ride and Millennial Slaughter, where visitors could invent alternative atrocities to exterminate the ungodly. The possibilities were endless.
There was only one cloud on the horizon. The U.S. Justice Department moved immediately to forbid the merger and to prevent BaptistDisney-Entertainments from obtaining a monopoly on world fantasy. But a good legal defense was able to overturn that prohibition. Clearly, there were still other major contenders in the market. There were Hollywood's special effects wizards, England's Royal Family, Rome's Vatican City, and Israel's National Parks Authority, which, according to Time Magazine for February 22m 1999, "has approved a 262-ft.-long transparent bridge to be built just below the surface of the Sea of Galilee so visitors can follow in the footsteps of Christ... After it opens in August, [the contractor Ron Major] expects up to 800,000 people a year to pay a minimum fee to walk on water. And, yes, lifeguards will be on hand in case anyone strays from the true path. That issue was actually introduced as an exhibit for the defense.
Eventually, the Justice Department agreed: BaptistDisney-Entertainments would not be a monopoloy, just number one. Everything was now perfect, although an op-ed in the New York Times warned, from somewhere in William Butler Yeats's poetry, that when a heart grows up on fantasy, it often grows old on brutality.
Posted by gary at March 20, 2006 05:39 PM
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 |