Jim Culleny’s Monday Poem for Monday, August 28, 2017, is called “Ghost Dancing”. He prefaces it with this brief statement:
Wovoka (named Jack Wilson in English), a Northern Paiute, dreamed he was taken to the spirit world and saw all Native Americans being taken up into the sky and the Earth opening up to swallow all Whites and to revert back to its natural state. He claimed that he was shown that by dancing the round-dance continuously, the dream would become a reality and the participants would enjoy the new Earth. This was also called Ghost Dance.
My post for last week, Monday, August 21, 2017, is called Ghost Dancing in the USA. I too open with Wovoka’s story. But in my third paragraph I return to the political present:
The Ghost Dancing that concerns me is not that of Stone Age people displaced and conquered by iron-mongering and coal-burning industrialists. My concern is the Ghost Dancing that has become a major force in contemporary American cultural and political life. Widespread belief in the impending Rapture – when all good Christians will be taken to heaven and all unbelievers consigned to hell – is the most obvious manifestation of the contemporary Ghost Dance. But it is hardly the only manifestation. Refusal to accept evidence of global warning is another symptom, as was the refusal to attend to ground intelligence in conducting the war and reconstruction in Iraq.
No comments:
Post a Comment