It is Finished

Do you remember this advertisement?
Of course you don't. If you were old enough to remember it you would be yelling at kids to stay off your lawn, mailing your great-grandchildren five dollar checks, or going to Honeybears for their early bird dinner special one last time before embracing death's sweet release. Or maybe you remember it from a history class. I suppose that's possible. In any case- offensive isn't it? Not the way Carl's Jr. (Hardee's for you fly-over staters) ads are offensive in their targeting the Bro demographic. I mean offensive in its blatant use of racist and imperial imagery and markers to sell something as banal as soap.

Isn't that something? This ad pulls all kinds of strings we would easily identify as wrong or problematic to sell soap. Soap of all things? Interesting tangent- this bathing every day "bit" most of us do is the result of a large ad campaign pushing "personal" and "toilet" soaps at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, much like the tradition of diamond engagement rings is a consequence of diamond interests creating the custom from scratch during the middle of the 20th. These "normal" behaviors are the product of expanding markets. Anyhoo- I hope this gives us a sense of how mainstream these sentiments were. The savage, subhuman status of other cultures, the divine civilizing responsibility of white people, the righteousness of domination, the call to make "them" like "us"- were all good things. They were all virtuous. If you read the poem on which the slogan is based, (The White Man's Burden) you get a sense of imperial domination as self-sacrificing virtue rather than economic or political exploitation. It tows a "We give you railroads, sewers, and medicine and all you do is complain" line. "We give and we give..." That was normal- so normal and good it could push soap.

Thankfully, we live in a much more enlightened time, other than GM, Pepsi, Taco Bell, Nationwide, politicians and all what else, who still thinks it's okay to make these moves to sell something? Oh that was a bit hacky and obtuse. I should just come right out with it. What we find good and normal today is just as susceptible to that moral ugliness. I've made that point in my blog droppings before. But listening to some of the coverage of... what to call it... King's murder commemoration, his death-iversary? I don't know. Whatever these things are meant to celebrate, there's a lot of "We did this," "We did that," and "America learned such and such," throughout it. I suppose "we" are some place that can see what King did as moving towards some "us". The life he lived and gave was for the possibility of a wholeness or community that could see what he did as a good. It has become normal to see him as good though our own Yearly Meeting, like many other "mainstream" bodies, looked askance at the methods and actors of "the Civil Rights movement". He's now "a good" for us. I suppose that's nice... well it's something anyway.

I wonder how much that memory serves an ideology of completion. Maybe it lets us see the present as good and worth something more than it is. And I mean "lets" as in "gets us off the hook" whatever that hook might be. Why, just yesterday I had to listen to my close white friends wonder aloud why Glendora kids should get a day off for Cesar Chavez. Why should they, indeed?

Instead of remembering King as a a revolutionary of the gospel, his story is tamed and used to serve some sense of normal that we should really see as deadly- at least deadly to some community worthy of the name "church".

I know it must get tiresome to read stuff like this. It feels like I'm a bit of a one trick pony through these posts- the trick being complain, complain, complain. Sure, but I'm less and less able to not, it seems necessary to being something called the church that we build and maintain this type of perspective- especially if we take seriously the possibility of sin and the hope of something we might call the Kingdom of God. Unless of course we're willing to leave a discussion of sin for the nominally real and preach a gospel that's good news to no one but those who have an interest in keeping things the way they are. Those being the big fat bad guys.

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Nice Home Opener
The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust