Poetry
Shea, John
torical need: "The urgency of confuting heretics made it nec- MEDIA essary to find new words to express the ancient faith about God." Finally, he exhorted his readers to value these new...
...And the and wise...
...The assumption behind most Origin and Destiny of this stuff, after all, is that the vast majority of the nonacaof every concrescing actuality demic public doesn't know it's getting its chain pulled: that Joe whose Primordial Nature Six-Pack and his wife Marge are too benighted to get it that cannot chance Lexus and Coca-Cola and Adidas are all creating metaphors and whose Consequent Nature that identify the consumption of their product with sex, power, cannot sit still...
...Smith Goes to Washington for pol s; But the living God and the vitality of the faith community re- but has anybody ever told a story about a (giggle and snort) quire that a more inclusive way of speaking about and to di- noble adman...
...has been generally regarded as one of the more venal, ephemerNo language will ever adequately encompass the unquenchable al, and sleazebag professions...
...In light of the longevity and pervasiveness of sexism in culture Every spring, the nation's big advertising firms get and religion, it is imperative to find more adequate ways of ex- together and have a ceremony where they hand out pressing the ancient good news...
...contemporary manifestation of the fact that, as in every epoch Clio is the classical muse of history, or, more propbefore us, we as a faith community are involved in an open- erly, of historiography...
...ing, or maybe even the divine daughter ("In the beginning was the label...
...Advertising, at least since the Industrial Revolution, ished...
...The present ferment about imag- awards for the best radio and television commering, naming, and conceptualizing God in female symbols is a cials for that year: they're called the "Clio"Awards...
...Now the problem is John Sea that once you seal a lot of clay caskets, you're apt to forget A Theologian at Prayer what's in any given one (ever put an important letter where you were sure it wouldn't get lost...
...Barnum is long to his final rest...
...Aquinas's arguments provide a useful framework for evaluating new patterns of speaking about God in female symbols...
...Things are more Transcendent Third complicated: P.T...
...Exosomatic Memory...
...When the Sumerians and their Mesopotamian pals began to depend on big intercity tradethat is, when they became recognizably like us-they took to shipping their goods in large clay caskets...
...two-bit moralism sociologists and other popular culture-slumAbsolute Future ming academics who like to natter about the "hidden persuaders" who masters every present...
...That may have been true once...
...an I t, Actually, Clio is born as a label...
...Writing...
...since it is by no TRULY DISHONEST means profane, for it does not lead us astray from the sense of AND JOE SIX-PACK KNOWS IT Scripture...
...Mason" for lawyers and Mr...
...ended history of faith seeking understanding that is not yet fin- Say what...
...religious language and symbols that bear the ancient responsi- Well, maybe not...
...We've got myths like "Perry mystery toward which we make limited but necessary gestures...
...God-She can breathe new life into & Brackman, and sue for damages...
...Finally, he exhorted his readers to value these new expressions: "Nor is such a kind of novelty to be shunned...
...its symbols to articulate its sense of life...
...Shouldn't the goddess contact, say MacKenzie vine mystery be developed...
...and that a given culture's advertising is in fact its From The God Who Fe11 from Hen 'en...
...Not for nothing did Joyce make Leopold Bloom in Ulysses an advertising canvasser, 14: 29 January 1993 Commonweal...
...Bingo...
...Being in whom So, just for the hell of it, let's forget for the nonce all the all beings participate...
...and joy, metaphors that translate elemental human needs into Unknowable Mystery artificially targeted wants...
...larval poetry, the clearest indication of the way it manipulates Reprinted by permission of The Thomas More Press...
...Oc 1992, by John Shea...
...History Begins who cannot become at Sumer, Samuel Noah Kramer's great 1956 book, declares...
...George Orwell observed that all art is propbility of conveying what is most holy, loving, merciful, just, aganda, though all propaganda is not necessarily art...
...but who knows us, not, I think, in the memory of any living soul...
...So what the priests-who were 0 also quartermasters-did was devise some simple, universal(that is the vocative ly-agreed-upon signs they could punch into the top of a casket of a cosmic disclosure) before the clay hardened: "Wheat," "Grapes," "Ox-Jerky," and Thou like that...
...in every duo...
...Let's assume that Clio-history-is the muse of advertisplease help me get tenure...
...evidence is strong that writing itself developed as the most rudimentary sort of advertising...
...and "subliminal enticement" in ads...
Vol. 120 • January 1993 • No. 2
