Imagine That!

Was reading Mathew Fox's Creativity and want to pass on here an
anecdote he related. Well two actually but it is the juxtaposing of
them that makes his point. Somewhere in New Hampshire in the
1990's a school board commandeered by religious
Fundamentalists banished the word 'imagination' from the entire
curriculum, pronouncing it a tool of the devil. And somewhere on the
west coast at a prominent Liberal Arts school, a Ph. D. thesis
committee overseeing a doctoral candidate's thesis on D. H.
Lawrence, forbid the use of the word 'imagination' because it was
considered a 'romantic' idea--as in 'of the romantic era of literature'
and thus supposedly not relevant to D. H. Lawrence's era.

Does it matter that one committee considered imagination a poison
corrupting our culture, while the other thought it passé and beneath
a cultured person's contempt? Keeping in mind, Orwell's warning
in his novel, 1984, that the removal of words from our vocabulary is
the first step in removing the concepts from our consciousness, let's
get this straight: A cadre of religious Fundamentalists on the east
coast and a committee of 'liberal' lit-crit profs on the west
coast--supposedly sworn ideological enemies--are in agreement
that the word imagination must be struck from our vocabulary.

Imagine that!