I have an old friend who once joked that anytime he visited the lodgings of a new buddy for the first time, there were three ‘inspections’ he would always try to carry out surreptitiously. He would find some plausible excuse for having a peek through his host’s wardrobe, book collection and refrigerator or food cupboard. The contents, he said, would more or less sum up the character and lifetime habits of his new acquaintance, and would tell him if they could bond well. What we eat, what we wear
– like this American burka, and what we read, all shape us and signal to others what shape we’re in, on multiple levels.
While some cultures wear undress as routine daily attire, something that would hardly raise an eyelid from either male or females of such communities, in Western societies, garment scarcity is done in the provocative way of the sex-starved, or sex-greedy traders in copulation as emancipation and high culture.
I suppose my friend did not want to invest the time, money, emotions and other precious bits of one’s self that it takes to cultivate a relationship, especially if from the outset, the friendship appeared to have little prospect of being a mutually rewarding ride. If only prospective spouses would carry out the same kind of preliminary assessments before melding and multiplying. Perhaps children, relatives, taxpayers and society would be spared a lot of grief, the kind that provides fodder for modern media.
Anyway, I was remembering my friend’s words this morning when reading Britain’s Daily Mail online. I had something of a revelatory moment when the old adage, you are what you read, sprang to mind. The American writer Mark Twain, he of Huckleberry Finn authorship, is reputed to have said: ”The man who does not read good books, has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
Scan the print media in any advanced Western country, and you have to wonder if the Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical (disclosure: I have not read it) could have found extra pages to focus more on pleas and programs to lift Europe out of spiritual poverty and less on more debilitating aid to Africa. For one to consume a daily diet of this 90% effective garbage that the (print) media industry spews out can only result in a very (spiritually) malnourished people, inching closer to their deathbed.
I scan the media (disclosure 2: in part because my sojourn through North America is a sort of educational mission in some sort of media studies) and see the anxiety mixed with disdain by many a journalist, blogger, pundit etc. about their countries risk of becoming “banana republics.” I often wonder, as many insinuate or state openly, if this state of affairs arises from the unchecked mass of unwashed immigrants from “banana republics” overrunning the shores of once great lands, or if it comes from a once (Christian) God-fearing people opting to subsist on a daily, nutrient-bleached diet from a media that has gone bananas.
You know, instead of things like reading the Bible, we gouge on our daily fix of calumny and gossip, no longer seen in the context of sin but what can be packaged for profit. Of course, our parishes may have shares in the newspaper industry, and the editors have to keep pushing the envelope to boost returns for shareholders in economic environments (methinks) that facilitate these baser impulses more on account of the growing godless liberalism and less as a result of inherent weaknesses in the market model – which is not to say the latter is not problematic.
Nevertheless, as explained in this previous post, the Daily Mail is one of my favourite U.K. reads. It is not quite gutter, like many North American money makers around me, but not pretentiously high brow as this blogger noted about another U.K. paper. Is Britain – and by extension Western society — unravelling on account of the reading habits of the people?
Having grown up in a colonial corner of the Caribbean, I have more thanks for the British for what they gave me, versus pseudo outrage for taking me out of Africa and enslaving away my cultural heritage (as the professional activists line usually goes). In a society stratified by colour and class, with no statist culture of government handouts it is often the habit of the upwardly aspiring to absorb the ways of the social layer one rung up. I remember with fondness my father’s ‘bookcase,’ he a voracious reader. In those days, the bookshelf was a conspicuous ‘cultural’ symbol in every Caribbean home where people knew they could be more.
His was in a corner next to my parents’ bed and doubled up as his desk and workstation. As a rule, the children of the house did not hang out there. But I have an early memory of sneaking up to it whenever opportunity presented itself. Maybe I was between 3 and 5 years, because I am remembering somethings about being in pre-school at the time. There was one book I kept going back to leaf through. It is possible I am confusing this memory of pictures with something else but my favourite book had (spot) colour illustrations that fascinated me. I recall an orange(ish) hue. That book, Paradise Lost, by John Milton seems to be the only title I remember from browsing my father’s collection as I grew older.
Despite many promises to myself, I am yet to read this classic. Maybe it is because I spend too much time reading the Daily Mail and such like, while musing over the fact that the British are a people who once exported God and Christianity to me. Now, leave it to Tony Blair types and I suppose the chief export will soon become gay “culture.” I am watching the crumbling of a once revered colossus. It is so sad.
Now having read the Daily Mail this morning, I swear I am going to hunker down this weekend and try to get through my first read of Pope Benedict’s latest encyclical, Caritas in veritate. Given the planed range of my reading choice today, I hope the Pope’s writing can help answer the all-important identity question of who am I, really?
