Context
Two articles caught my eye today and caused me to consider the place of context in the search for understanding.
Kevin Drum at Political Animal wrote about Lawrence Summers, Harvard president addressing the lack of women in the hard sciences and then Avedon Carol of the Sideshow wrote about rebirth of Bush.
The comments that Summers made have to be viewed in the context of being the head of an organization that has long been accused of discrimination against women. What he said would not be considered as bad if it didn’t resemble an attempt to weasel out of responsibility for the perceived problems at Harvard and to demonstrate the lack of attention he seems to have paid to it.
Bush, on the other hand, has been consciously removing the context of his entire life. He continuously claims that everything that happened before he was “reborn” as a Christian is now irrelevant, because everything he did before was washed away. It would appear Bush is attempting to claim the “resurrection” without ever suffering the required death. I doubt that Joseph Campbell would agree that this tact is sufficient for the classification as hero in a myth cycle. I would also note that Bush denied this exemption to Karla Faye Tucker, who was executed in spite of being reborn.
