It may sound like just so much posturing, the snooty braggartry of a person who reads books with words like "epistemological" or "problematic" or "evolution" in their titles, but I haven't ever, so far as I can be certain, worshipped another thing. This is not for lack of trying--my prurient allegiance to all media featuring variously, and embarrasingly, Johnny Depp or Kate Winslet, conceivably borders on worship, though is perhaps more accurately described as a pair of idle and uncharacteristic obsessions. We could go the freshman composition class route and define "worship," talk about its connections to honor and adoration then stretch into the seedy and shabbier versions of granite bodies on bedspreads and magazine covers, which, in the latter case, render themselves actual idols like so many statues of Ra or the Virgin Mary piled up on altars. I do not have magazine cut-outs on my wall, is all I'm saying.
The problem with worship is that you're expected to do it. [NB: DFW wouldn't do this, go to the most obvious subject to cover, unless he were going to rip it apart with some mad intellectual gymnastics, but this is what I got in the time I have before the brake handle on this sluggish locomotive is pulled.] Atheists--those mythical creatures defying the core beliefs humdrum Americans hold dear--are our nation's least trusted group in the country. Worse than that borderline-feral cousin at family gatherings who always steals a little something from your dresser. More untrustworthy, it seems, though one wonders whether the option was given, than Wall Street bankers. Whether this stems from a kind of patriotic pseudo-induction process ("you are with us or against us" being the usual protest-sign dual sentiment) or a resistance to those who are not clearly definable through slogan or watered down academic-ism, it is the dark side of a malignant little colony's idealism eternal.
I'm not talking about judgments on the relative values or lack thereof of certain segments of the patria...
The problem with worship is that you're expected to do it. [NB: DFW wouldn't do this, go to the most obvious subject to cover, unless he were going to rip it apart with some mad intellectual gymnastics, but this is what I got in the time I have before the brake handle on this sluggish locomotive is pulled.] Atheists--those mythical creatures defying the core beliefs humdrum Americans hold dear--are our nation's least trusted group in the country. Worse than that borderline-feral cousin at family gatherings who always steals a little something from your dresser. More untrustworthy, it seems, though one wonders whether the option was given, than Wall Street bankers. Whether this stems from a kind of patriotic pseudo-induction process ("you are with us or against us" being the usual protest-sign dual sentiment) or a resistance to those who are not clearly definable through slogan or watered down academic-ism, it is the dark side of a malignant little colony's idealism eternal.
I'm not talking about judgments on the relative values or lack thereof of certain segments of the patria...
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