If you haven’t heard Snap Judgement yet, you probably should.
This public radio show/podcast with all manner of interesting stories being narrated in the most addictive of fashions is great company, especially on days when you have to get down to boringly necessary tasks like cleaning up your room or re-organizing your book collection. Connect that Bluetooth speaker and listen on.
This public radio show/podcast with all manner of interesting stories being narrated in the most addictive of fashions is great company, especially on days when you have to get down to boringly necessary tasks like cleaning up your room or re-organizing your book collection. Connect that Bluetooth speaker and listen on.
A particular story, A Wives’ Tale,
left an impact stronger than most, even among those choice selections. An
exploration of how strange and how strong the world of fundamentalist religion
is, it offers up a new set of heroes for whom even a minor act of ‘dressing up’/’dolling
up’, depending on which side of the fundamentalist divide you are on, becomes a
major rebellion. At the centre of it is a man and his five wives, members of a
polygamist religious organization in Utah, USA and their definition of when time
honoured tradition transitions into rigid control.
The story seemed remarkable to me in two ways. One is the ‘normal’
that the five wives take for granted before remarkably tearing themselves out
of that comfort of familiarity and family, the only things they had known in
their lives thus far, to take a very minor but for them life-altering step. The
second, much more morally ambiguous, is how to look at the male protagonist of
the story – as a liberator to which he can make a partial claim or as a patriarchy
perpetuator who, after all, is still a polygamist in 2019 overseeing his ‘flock’
of five wives and twenty-five children.
Like any good story, it left me thinking long after the
credits music had faded away.
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