felis_ultharus

Margaret Atwood celebrates 100 years of Anne of Green Gables in a Guardian article here:

"In my sourer moments, I confess to having imagined yet another Anne sequel, to be called Anne Goes on the Town. This would be a grim, Zolaesque epic that would chronicle the poor girl's enticement by means of puffed sleeves, then her sexual downfall and her subsequent brutal treatment at the hands of harsh male clients. Then would follow the pilfering of her ill-got though hard-earned gains by an evil madam, her dull despair self-medicated by alcohol and opium-smoking, and her sufferings from the ravages of an incurable STD. The final chapter would contain some Traviata-like coughing, her early and ugly death, and her burial in an unmarked grave, with nothing to mark the passing of this waif with a heart of gold but a volley of coarse jokes from her former customers.

However, the presiding genius of Anne is not the gritty grey Angel of Realism, but the rainbow-coloured, dove-winged Godlet of the Heart's Desire. As Oscar Wilde said about second marriages, Anne is the triumph of hope over experience: it tells us not the truth about life, but the truth about wish fulfilment. And the main truth about wish fulfilment is that most people vastly prefer it to the alternative."

I tried writing a long entry about an epiphany I've had around the concepts of morality and moral relativism -- how being exposed constantly to moral relativism during grad school made me realize that there is such a thing as good and evil after all, even if Western Civilization has gotten morality completely wrong for the past 2000 years.

I couldn't find a way to get my ideas out, though, except to say that the desire to do good is a basic human drive, not a mere overlay of civilization, and that progressives have a moral obligation to speak up in favour of basic principles of equality and human rights, and fundamental human dignity.

I wanted to say, too, that moral relativism has made us hesitant and overcareful when it comes to asserting that right, and made us doubt ourselves. But all societies have a moral centre, and by abandoning it, we've left the ground wide open for the religious right to assert their brand of morality in its place. It's permitted them to have a monopoly on the language of good and evil.

I tried to develop that, but I couldn't get it out right.

So, yeah. This is all really heavy, so here's the funniest article I've found in a long time in The Onion. Though maybe I just find it hilarious because I was preached to by fundamentalists a lot in high school.