The Jesus Blob

The Jesus Blob Let us now take an incisive look at Superman. Not only does he have warts. But he is an African Hindu tribal leader with AIDS. He is a Catholic bigamist priest. He is a Hispanic Nigerian who prays to Mecca thrice daily. He is, in fact, a She. According to Bruno Latour, Professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de Mines de Paris and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, the upheaval that is occurring right now is the displacement of the political ego from the center to the periphery. As he puts it, "In the march of civilization, the Whites have only met the specter of the irrational and the archaic". In other words, we in the West no longer bestride the world from a peak of scientific and technological superiority. We are not a colossus. We are equals among many equals. What I call the peripheralization of political and economic imperialism (what a mouthful! we just ain't the good guys any more) - means that Westerners are simply one of many equally valid experiments in social adaptation. But beware: for if you accept this premise you must acknowledge that there is no true "other". To put it bluntly, no one to Lord it over. No oddballs, no outsiders, no eccentrics, no nonbelievers. All are equal. And all are equally able to prevail. The slow but inevitable grasp of that new paradigm accounts for some (but not all) of the dis-ease that currently afflicts the imperialist white world. For it is no longer certain that Jesus rules the religious realm or that Science and its facts (as designed by Westerners) have the final say. Jesus and Science may be our modern-day fairy tales, intellectual panaceas for existential malaise. Government statistics, works of art, altars, icons, beliefs and nationalities are revealed as acts of creative fantasy. (For more on the fiction of truth, see http://www.giraffe.com/gr_fiction.html) Superman is dead, my friends. The grabs. The old metaphors of dominance calls the Creative Commons. The upper case of dialogue. The new battlefield write the rules.

entire universe as we know it is up for have disintegrated into what Lawrence Lessig caps of empire are giving way to the lower is the Internet, and white men no longer

I was told recently that my blobs do not really exist, that they are all edge and surface with no true volume. "But I see them. I know them", I protest. In the language of today they do not exist, I am told. They are imaginative constructions, unable to be realized. Such are the Blobs of white western assumptions, be they Science, Jesus, Economics, or Democracy. New fairy tales remain to be fabricated, for we are apparently unable to exist without them. Whose vision will they reflect? I don't know, and neither does anyone else. What I do know is that we had better teach our children how to think, rather than what to think, if they are to survive the Blobs of the future, their future. c. Corinne Whitaker 2006

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