I took a rummage through my “Diary Drafts” file this evening and found a few pieces I began and never finished. Each one is a decent start, but somewhere along the line I got distracted, or I felt that I had waited to long and the piece’s moment of relevance had passed. I should probably delete some of them, but something in me insists that I can’t just obliterate them without noting their passing. And there are a couple that just might be worth re-visiting.
First, from 2013: Let’s Get Levitical — I think I might have started this one as a piece for The Elders of Zion’s D’var Torah series. Or perhaps it happened to be a scripture lesson read in our church one Sunday that I felt like expanding on. It’s about a passage from Leviticus that deals with neither homosexuality nor shellfish, and which therefore tends to get overlooked. Instead, it deals with a lot of what might be called Social Justice issues.
Occupy Shalloit: A Madwoman Takes On the 1% — Also from 2013. An examination of a play by the French writer Jean Giraudoux titled “The Madwoman of Challiot”, about an impoverished eccentric old lady who fights to save her friends, the street people of Paris, from the Plutocrats who would destroy the city. It’s a story worth sharing, although the similarities I saw at the time between the Madwoman’s crusade and the Occupy Movement are probably dated now and the piece will require some re-writing.
About Thor — From 2014: a piece about how Marvel was bringing in a new female Thor. It generated a lot of hoo-hah in the fan community at the time, but since I’ve never been a big reader of THOR, I had trouble working up a lot of interest in the piece. I’m not sure what Thor’s status in the comics is these days, so there’s no point in finishing it.
Let Their Heads Explode: Vatican Refines Position On the Jews and Jesus — At the time (2015) this seemed interesting. A Vatican commission devoted to seeking ways to improve relations between the Church and the Jewish Community declared that it was not necessary for Jews to accept Christ in order to be saved and that the Church should not actively seek to convert them. I started getting into the doctrinal issues about why this is a Big Deal, but quickly realized that I was probably getting more theological than would interest people. And once again, I’m not sure what (if anything) the Catholic Church has done with this report, so I’m not sure how relevant it would be to resurrect this one.
Stories of Her People’s Heroines — From 2016; another comics-related piece. For a while, DC was doing a series titled BOMBSHELLS based on a series of promotional pics the company did of some of their female characters re-imagined as 1940’s-era pin-ups. I didn’t follow the series, but did read one issue where the characters encounter a girl in a Berlin Jewish ghetto taking care of a group of orphaned children, who turns out to be this alternate universe’s version of Mary Marvel from the comic book SHAZAM! I thought the story was moving, and the way the story re-imagined the character was clever. But I’m not sure if a two-year-old comic book story is worth reviving. I’ll put this in the “Maybe” pile.
Fake News and the Merchants of Umbrage — This one I think I do want to revisit. Back during the 2016 campaign I was bothered by Our Side’s use of the expression “Fake News”. For one thing, I feared, (correctly, as it turned out), that the Trumpites would seize upon the phrase as their own; but mostly I wanted to define what we meant by “Fake News”. As I see it, there are many different flavors of stories which can bear that name, but the most dangerous ones are the ones which are calculated to generate Outrage, and are spewed out by people who don’t care about informing others, or even persuading them, but only about Making Others Angry. I still think this is something important we need to be aware of and to fight against; but I think I’ll probably have to ditch the beginning I wrote and re-start it from scratch.
Will I return to any of these pieces? Who knows. Stranger things have happened.