Dear visionaries,
First, lest there be any more misunderstanding, I will do my level best to have this post be simple and straight, no goofing around.
Humor works by means of startling incongruity (although there are mysteries beyond even this). Thus, when I and Christ Church were accused of racism, I undertook to defend our good name. I set it up by indicating that I was about to show our racial diversity, and went on to do just that (formally). But the races I mentioned were Scots, Irish, English, all from the British Isles. This was a joke at our expense. I was pretending to look like an oblivious racist, of just the type we are accused of being. Samuel took the joke at face value, thus missing it.
Duane did not get my reference to replacing the Nazis with the Israeli Likkud party. There is a difference between an ethnic joke (“Three rabbis went into a bar . . .”) and a joke that involves ethnicity. The point I was making is that history happened the way it actually did, and not some other way. If we can start erasing Trotsky from the photos, and Confederates from the Southern armies, then why stop there? Thus I put Hispanic representation into the hordes of Attila the Hun, and proposed replacing the Nazis with the Israeli Likkud party. This was done for the sake of the startling incongruity. The first was done on the basis of an anachronistic incongruity, the latter on the basis of ideological incongruity. The Nazis and the Likkud are mortal enemies, and switching them would make hash out of history.
Making hash out of history this way is absurd to me, but not, apparently, to everyone.
Cordially,
“Apologetics in the Void” are repostings from an on-going electronic discussion and debate I had some time ago with members of our local community, whose names I have changed. The list serve is called Vision 20/20, and hence the name “visionaries.” Reading just these posts probably feels like listening to one half of a phone conversation, but I don’t feel at liberty to publish what others have written. But I have been editing these posts (lightly) with intelligibility in mind.