I'm all about the hypocrisy.

So, I was looking at my well-worn copy of The Annotated Pride and Prejudice and thinking about how much I love Regency stories and how problematic that is. Basically, I grew up on Austen and romance novels, in which no one ever talks about where the money is coming from. No one ever says, "and then I slaughtered a hundred people in India so I could come home to you, my darling."

The hypocrisy of my position was really brought home to me when my sister-in-law told me that her favorite movie is Gone With the Wind. My initial reaction was, "Really? You live in a house full of black people, how does that work for you?" But then I thought about how I couldn't exactly be bothered by her love of a romanticized story of a society built on torture and oppression when one of my favorite hobbies is reading romanticized stories of a society built on torture and oppression. So I bought her the movie for Christmas and then went back to reading Julia Quinn and Jo Beverley.

1 comments:

Leonor Monreal said...

I think we (as Americans or Westerners) have got to operate under hypocrisy and oblivion. How else would we be able to live with ourselves?
You are exactly right about the way we romanticize various times in history (i.e. Gone with the Wind). But I would add to this that we pretend everything is ok when our military is doing terrible things in the middle east. For what? for oil? for progress? to protect our interest? It's easier to sleep at night with a dose of hypocrisy.

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