Hey Jack,
    You may have something there when you think about it. The Bible has as
many crudities in it as the Cantos, but people don't stop reading it. Maybe
it's the Oz-like authority behind all those "thee's" and "thou's".
    If you like a good rant, and I do too, look at Phillip Roth's on the
"tyranny of propriety" on p.153 of his latest, "The Human Stain".
    Oh well, since we can't pry that sonnet out of the boney fingers of
Columbia U. Law Schole, and it's 5:30 AM and I can't sleep with a sprained
ankle, here it goes for fun:

 p.153   "...the coercions of propriety. The tyranny of propriety. It was
hard, halfway through 1998, for even him to believe in American propriety's
enduring power, and he was the one who considered himself tyrannized: the
bridle it still is on public rhetoric, the inspiration it provides for
personal posturing, the persistence just about everywhere of this
de-virilizing pulpit virtue-mongering that H. L. Mencken identified with
boobism, that Philip Wylie thought of as Momism, that the Europeans
unhistorically call American puritanism, that the likes of a Ronald Reagan
call America's core values, and that maintains widespread jurisdiction by
masquerading itself as something else - as everything else. As a force,
propriety is protean, a dominatrix in a thousand disguises, infiltrating,
if need be, as civic responsibility, WASP dignity, women's rights, black
pride, ethnic allegiance, or emotion-laden Jewish ethical sensitivity. It's
not as though Marx or Freud or Darwin or Stalin or Hitler or Mao had never
happened - it's as though Sinclair Lewis had not happened. It's, he
thought, as though "Babbitt" had never been written. It's as though not
even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into
consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance.

Happy New Year,
Chas



----------
>From: Jack Savage <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Mr. Davis Once More
>Date: Mon, Dec 31, 2001, 6:44 PM
>

> ... and I have listened to groups of Xtians endlessly discuss
> the Bible.... what the good Lord might have intended;
> which preacher has the "real skinny" on the Book of
> Revelations (sic); ,,, but I have noticed they never seem
> to actually open the Book and read what's written in
> the damned thing.
>
> Too often, the Joycean or the Poundian seems none too
> different with his sacred texts.
>
> At any rate, Politics is not the only milieu in which we
> find the Reactionary.
>