Date: Sun, 3 Mar 1996 07:56:19 -0800
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.apc.org>
Subject: Re: RAHUL: CLUTCHING YOUR PEARLS


Yes, this is a beautiful medium, indeed.  I have lost more friends
since I started cybercommunication than I have in a whole previous
lifetime.  There's nothing like not being able to gauge the other
person's mood and intent and assuming the worst that drives one to
undreamed of heights of paranoic vitriol.  O Brave New World that
has such pixels in it.

Rahul, dearest, I regret that we never completed our little
seminar on physics.  Whatever happened to it?  Did Juan come
between us?  Well, I am so overwhelmed I'll just leave the topic
lay down until the intellectual group sex in which I am now
engaged wears itself out.

Rahul, your anti-artistic bias is now naked and spread wide before
us.  However tempted I may be to play in your box, I just don't
have the time for a thorough explanation of Blake, let alone the
role of Jesus as Universal Humanity the only God in his cosmology.


And speaking of Pandora's nasty box, my prodding into the
forbidden zone has popped up two new scandalous topics: my
maleficent frottage of Malcolm X and Native American spirituality.


Kevin Cabral has answered his own question about Malcolm.  There
is not much for me to add.  Just one note: though indeed Malcolm
was a great communicator, his allegiance to the Dishonorable
Elijah only made him look like a fool in all those debates with
real activists like James Forman.  He had zero to offer in such
circumstances.  I have more to say about Malcolm but I think I've
crunched enough toes already.  Though I detest Harold Cruse, I
think he was on the mark about a lot of things.  And, after
studying the trajectory that leads from Richard Wright and Paul
Robeson, I find Malcolm very small political potatoes, indeed.

I do enjoy harassing priests, but now that Sister Burns has
evacuated the premises, I have nobody to pick on save the
parishioners of Shining Pathology.  The Native Americans were no
dummies.  If you read their denunciations of missionaries and
dismissal of Christianity, you realize they were perfectly capable
and willing to use rational thought.  Did you ever read what Red
Jacket had to say to the missionaries?  He read their beads.  He's
buried in Buffalo, and I've visited his grave many times since
early childhood.  The point is, I have had it with this au courant
stereotype of Indians living their whole lives wrapped in mystical
communion with the earth, guiding every poop and fart by spirit
visions rather than by thinking the way the rest of us do.  And
many Indians, compensating for their historical defeat, have
bought into this romanticized crap too.  And I once studied Navajo
mythology, which is so complex it requires several lifetimes of
study.  So I don't think our pre-modern ancestors are any less
intelligent or cultured.  But guess what: I'm into modernity.  I
like modern, secular, scientific and technical society.  It has
expanded our view of the universe and unleashed enormous human
potential while wreaking havoc on the peoples of the earth.  It is
an enormous contradiction, to be sure.  But I'm interested in the
modern, and I don't want to go back.

And now I must take a break.  I've gotten so addicted to this
back-and-forth it's taken over my life.


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