The Jesus Blob

Let us now take an incisive look at Superman. Not only does he have warts. But
he is an African Hindu tribal leader with AIDS. He is a Catholic bigamist priest.
He is a Hispanic Nigerian who prays to Mecca thrice daily. He is, in fact, a She.

According to Bruno Latour, Professor at the Ecole Nationale Superieure de

Mines de Paris and Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, the
upheaval that is occurring right now is the displacement of the political ego from
the center to the periphery. As he puts it, "In the march of civilization, the
Whites have only met the specter of the irrational and the archaic". In other
words, we in the West no longer bestride the world from a peak of scientific and
technological superiority. We are not a colossus. We are equals among many equals.

What I call the peripheralization of political and economic imperialism -

(what a mouthful! we just ain't the good guys any more) - means that Westerners
are simply one of many equally valid experiments in social adaptation.

But beware: for if you accept this premise you must acknowledge that there is
no true "other". To put it bluntly, no one to Lord it over. No oddballs, no
outsiders, no eccentrics, no nonbelievers. All are equal. And all are equally able
to prevail.

The slow but inevitable grasp of that new paradigm accounts for some (but not
all) of the dis-ease that currently afflicts the imperialist white world. For it
is no longer certain that Jesus rules the religious realm or that Science and its
facts (as designed by Westerners) have the final say. Jesus and Science may be our
modern-day fairy tales, intellectual panaceas for existential malaise. Government
statistics, works of art, altars, icons, beliefs and nationalities are revealed as
acts of creative fantasy. (For more on the fiction of truth, see
http://www.giraffe.com/gr_fiction.html)

Superman is dead, my friends. The entire universe as we know it is up for

grabs. The old metaphors of dominance have disintegrated into what Lawrence Lessig
calls the Creative Commons. The upper caps of empire are giving way to the lower
case of dialogue. The new battlefield is the Internet, and white men no longer
write the rules.

I was told recently that my blobs do not really exist, that they are all edge
and surface with no true volume. "But I see them. I know them", I protest. In the
language of today they do not exist, I am told. They are imaginative
constructions, unable to be realized. Such are the Blobs of white western
assumptions, be they Science, Jesus, Economics, or Democracy. New fairy tales
remain to be fabricated, for we are apparently unable to exist without them. Whose
vision will they reflect? I don't know, and neither does anyone else.

What I do know is that we had better teach our children how to think, rather
than what to think, if they are to survive the Blobs of the future, their future.

c. Corinne Whitaker 2006 http://www.giraffe.com