Good Friday 2004
This may be one of the few places in the world that still honours Good Friday by closing down shops, businesses and almost everything so that worshippers can worship. I never thought this was a good thing in earlier years but I do now, realising with horror that our ancestors' ways of life are all fast disappearing. Or if not disappearing, they're certainly fragmenting. Around the globe, multi-culturalism and mass media are feeding into a new hybrid mass-culture that sweeps away national and community identities and champions individuals and cul-de-sac minorities. The result is a maelstrom of differences but shared heroes without any shared morality or philosophy. This is a kind of structured anarchy: I don't have to like you or agree with you or even have anything in common with you, but we must respect each other's right to be entirely different. If you want to set fire to your dog in your yard, then that's your affair--as long as you keep out of my yard and away from my dog. No, that's not it; I forgot, dogs also have rights now. Well, anyway, you get the drift. You're a Muslim and I'm a Buddhist but we both listen to Nirvana 'cos Kurt's our joint hero and we both want to be like him even though we both know he's dead. It's Good Friday, and it's good 'cos we don't have to go to school or work; we don't have to do anything in fact, so we watch the worshippers on their way to church or to the top of the hill if they're Zionists, and we say, 'Wow, how cute,' or 'how quaint' and we appreciate their smart dressing-up and their bibles and their sticks--all the colour and variety of them--but we say no thanks, that's not for us, and we drive instead through town blasting Kurt from the big speakers we purposely placed in our cars just so we could blast Kurt out of them.
Oh, if the whole world would just listen to Kurt! But wait... if the whole world listened to Kurt... that would mean... that would mean... gasp! that would mean that Kurt would be official! It would mean that Kurt would be mainstream and not a rebel! That Kurt would be a culture god! No, no, that would never do. The whole world loving Kurt? Then we'd have to find another hero, somebody else who also wanted to be different, just like us.
But wait up. You and I are the same, aren't we? We're the same because we both want to be different.
This may be one of the few places in the world that still honours Good Friday by closing down shops, businesses and almost everything so that worshippers can worship. I never thought this was a good thing in earlier years but I do now, realising with horror that our ancestors' ways of life are all fast disappearing. Or if not disappearing, they're certainly fragmenting. Around the globe, multi-culturalism and mass media are feeding into a new hybrid mass-culture that sweeps away national and community identities and champions individuals and cul-de-sac minorities. The result is a maelstrom of differences but shared heroes without any shared morality or philosophy. This is a kind of structured anarchy: I don't have to like you or agree with you or even have anything in common with you, but we must respect each other's right to be entirely different. If you want to set fire to your dog in your yard, then that's your affair--as long as you keep out of my yard and away from my dog. No, that's not it; I forgot, dogs also have rights now. Well, anyway, you get the drift. You're a Muslim and I'm a Buddhist but we both listen to Nirvana 'cos Kurt's our joint hero and we both want to be like him even though we both know he's dead. It's Good Friday, and it's good 'cos we don't have to go to school or work; we don't have to do anything in fact, so we watch the worshippers on their way to church or to the top of the hill if they're Zionists, and we say, 'Wow, how cute,' or 'how quaint' and we appreciate their smart dressing-up and their bibles and their sticks--all the colour and variety of them--but we say no thanks, that's not for us, and we drive instead through town blasting Kurt from the big speakers we purposely placed in our cars just so we could blast Kurt out of them.
Oh, if the whole world would just listen to Kurt! But wait... if the whole world listened to Kurt... that would mean... that would mean... gasp! that would mean that Kurt would be official! It would mean that Kurt would be mainstream and not a rebel! That Kurt would be a culture god! No, no, that would never do. The whole world loving Kurt? Then we'd have to find another hero, somebody else who also wanted to be different, just like us.
But wait up. You and I are the same, aren't we? We're the same because we both want to be different.
