Thursday, August 06, 2009

Things that make you go HMMMM…….

I recently saw one of those bumper stickers that I’ve seen for years and always wondered what kind of person would put it on their car, or in this case on their pick’em up truck. The sticker reads:

If you ain’t country, you ain’t shit.

I suppose it would be rather English teacherly of me to point out that a double negative results in a positive. Thus the translation: If you identify yourself as “country” you are telling the world that you are fecal matter. Somehow I’m guessing that’s not what the driver intended to convey.

It reminds me of the rather ironic essay opening I got from one of my students recently. It was an essay on the medieval universitas and how it has devolved in post-modernity into a provider of consumer goods and services in the minds of many today. The student began his essay response to a series of readings on this topic with the following:

Education is a term we here daily and come in to contact constantly, but the term is beginning to lose it’s true meaning.

As I said in the post in which I sent this out to my colleagues, fortunately, this one is still a freshman. But the irony of a statement which embodies the very truth it is decrying was, no doubt, lost on its author. Of course, that presumes that the author actually knows what irony is.

HMMMMM…..

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.

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