“To live ‘elsewhere’ means to continually find yourself involved in a
conversation in which different identities are recognized, exchanged, and
mixed, but do not vanish. […] Our sense of belonging, our language, and the
myths we carry in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of
‘authenticity’ capable of guaranteeing the sense of our lives. They now linger
on as traces, voices, and memories that are mixed in with the other encounters,
histories, episodes, experiences.” Ian Chambers (1994) Migrancy, Culture,
Identity.
“He is not here.” But we are, here, in the real world with Pontius Pilate. It is a world of little things — tradeoffs, compromises, and accommodations. There is a mortgage to be paid — “the yuppie Nuremberg defense,” Christopher Buckley calls that — and debts to be serviced, work to be done, doctors to be visited, lawyers to be paid, IRS agents to be satisfied, and, overseeing it all, the American God, the one who helps those who help themselves. That is our truth. We would be the Good Samaritan, but we know that guy will just use the money to buy a bottle of wine. (Maybe MD 20/20, from Mogen David.) Everyone knows no good can come of that.